h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've finally taken a bold step - I've loaded the latest draft of my novel - Dreaming in Stone - onto Amazon's Createspace.

Was it difficult? Probably not as hard as coping with GuideML!
The first hurdle was filling in tax form, stating that I'm not a citizen of the United States . Then I had to change the size of my document to fit their recommended size. And their size is a convenient number of inches, but not centimetres. Open Office, which is what I use to write, only gives you a limited choice of sizes in centimetres. Once I'd got the size as close as I could, and turned the document into a pdf file, Createspace announced there were no document issues. Hurray!

Yay! I know what you mean about the margins and stuff - took me a while to get my first NaNoWriMo novel the way I wanted it, too, as the page size isn't A4 or A5 or whatever and you have to be careful about page breaks and things, but it was immense satisfaction once it was done

I wish there could be an easy way of resolving these differences of page size. The Internet was supposed to be a way for people to communicate across the globe. Digitization was supposed to make documents available far beyond the places where they were physically located.

It's partly because these Americans don't understand about centimeters!

Careful with the indents too!

I hate to tell you how long the metric system has been an official system in the U.S. Thomas Jefferson was solidly in favor of it. What I wonder, though, is why Britain still measures gasoline [which it calls petrol] in gallons, but not gallons of the same size that the U.S. uses.

We're totally inconsistent in Britain. You can buy a 2 pint bottle of milk (1.136 litres) or a litre. You can still buy in pints, but fruit juice is usually sold in litres. As for gallons, the authorities probably just don't want to annoy the motorists if they can help it.

Actually, many soft drinks here are sold in 1-liter bottles.

I find kilometers more useful than miles for shorter distances. I use centimeters for measuring the thickness of bread or cake slices. For measures of volume, I almost entirely use cups and quarts and gallons and teaspoons. When I see metric measures in recipes, my eyes glaze over, even though all my measuring cups have been metric and non-metric measures.

You won't find any Petrol (Gas for those over the pond) being sold in gallons over here any more, it's all priced in litres and all the pumps measure in litres but sometimes an equivalent price per Imperial Gallon is given.

The different Pint and Gallon sizes are an interesting history, the UK changed the measures in 1824, Only 48 years after you lot declared independance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units#Volume

(reading postings).

Well done, mvp!! Yay! That's a bold step indeed!

How do I buy a copy?

Hi cc. Sorry I didn't see your post earlier.

Dreaming in Stone is beginning to feel a real thing - rather than a load of documents on a computer.

I've got as far as playing with cover designs and photos. I have to hand it to Amazon that their site is very forgiving. You can put documents on and take them off, you can upload photos and take them off.

They give you a selection of designs to choose from and each design has a choice of possible fonts. They have a selection of images, which I looked through but couldn't find anything that fitted. I think I'm at a disadvantage, being on the wrong side of the Atlantic!

Then I found a picture of our own, cropped it, shrank it and uploaded it. I thought it looked great but I got the message the resolution was too low.

So it's not on sale yet!

Hullo mvp! That sounds like quite a professional process! It's good that you can experiment with the documents, photos and layout. Not like once you've sent them, that's it. That wouldn't be good for the nervous system. heheh.

Well, the reality will be beginning to sink in now! Dreaming In Stone is out there!

Will you let me know when it's on sale? I must have my copy! You can drop me a line on email (Mister D and Elektra have my address) if you don't want to announce it here.

Splendid!!!

Write on, writerlady! You're a published authoress! Autograph please.

I'll let you know!