I’m feeling rather guilty that I haven’t posted in over a week.  But I have a good excuse, I promise!

Last week I went on hiatus in order to put the finishing touches on my recently released E-Marketing 101 Video Training Course.  Basically the technology needed to be fixed in order to deliver the lessons automatically to each subscriber every week.

And I did it!

Yup, I finished the job, and in celebration, I have posted an amazing offer on the web site.  Until the end of this month, you can get the program for just $47 per month for five months.  It’s a 21-week program that teaches you step by step how to plan and implement a complete e-marketing program for your small business.

The best part is it’s totally risk-free!  If you cancel within 60-days you will get your money back.  You can watch every single video and implement everything you learn and even keep all the handouts that come with it, and we’ll still give you your money back.  You don’t even have to tell us why.  Just cancel your account and ask for a refund and you’ll get it.  It’s that simple.

You can’t lose!

How can we offer you this?  Because we’re convinced that you will see the same amazing results that our other participants have seen who have gone through the program.

Check out the web site at www.LearnEmarketingNow.com.

If you have any questions, post them here and I’ll answer them as quickly as possible.  Or email me directly at lpecunia[at]avarrasolutions[dot]com and I’ll answer them privately.

Happy Groundhog Day!

On Monday I published my new e-book, The Small Business Website Design Guide, on both Amazon and Google. I accomplished this task just under the gun, considering my goal was to get it done by the end of January.

At any rate, it took all day just to do this seemingly simple task of uploading an ebook to these two sites.

Amazon KDP

Amazon requires you to upload your book in a specific format in order for it to look good on the Kindle.  (FYI — KDP stands for, I think, Kindle Development Platform or something.)  They do not recommend PDF, which is just as well because I had formatted my ebook initially in a nice landscape format with a heavy left margin for callouts and photos.  Clearly this was not a Kindle-friendly format.

What the hell was I thinking?

Since I use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Word, the ability to create a “docx” file was clearly out of the question as well.

My only option then was to upload an HTML file.  I thought “Good thing I know HTML!!!  This should be a breeze!”

Being a perfectionist I spent hours (really, it was like four hours) reformatting my book into HTML format, and then uploading it, looking at it in the Kindle simulator, not liking it, and then tweaking it like 38 times.  Really really laborious, but I finally finished at about 6 pm.  Then Amazon informed me my book was in processing which takes up to 24 hours.  Which I was fine with.  I still got it done by the end of the month.  Yay.

Google Books

Google Books, it turns out, is technically just a search engine.  As we Google-philes know, Google’s webmaster tools are not the friendliest creatures.  Being designed by engineers, the user interface leaves a lot to be desired, even in the ones that have been around for a while.

Google Books is relatively new, so it has zero redeeming design value.

Ahem.

They don’t actually tell you that the act of uploading your book to Google Books will put it in their cloud and make it available for purchase.  So after doing the upload I just kind of sat there and scratched my head and thought… “so… like… now what?”

After another hour of searching and reading help forums and slowly putting the pieces together, I finally was able to figure out that you have to go to a specific URL (which they don’t tell you is called “Google Editions” in your Google Books Publishing Partner account dashboard and is staring you right in the face the whole time).  Then on that page you have to accept a special “GE” agreement.  Once you do that, all sorts of other options become available.

AHA!!!!

So… then you can choose all those options like the price and the royalty and all that.  And then you click the Save button and they put your book in pending status.  Which, when you click on the “what’s this?” link next to “pending”, informs you that it could take up to two months for your book to publish.

Jeez Louise.

For all my non-techy friends (of which I have MANY) — please do not attempt this on your own!  I would hate to have to tell your kids why you jumped off a bridge.

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