Welcome to my worlds!

I'm James Maxey, author of fantasy and science fiction. My novels include the science fantasy Bitterwood Saga (4 books) the Dragon Apocalypse Saga (4 books), numerous superhero novels including Nobody Gets the Girl and the Lawless series, the steampunk Oz sequel Bad Wizard, and my short story collections, There is No Wheel and Jagged Gate. This website is focused exclusively on writing. At my second blog, Jawbone of an Ass, I ramble through any random topic that springs to mind, occasionally touching on religion and politics and other subjects polite people are sensible enough not to discuss in public. If you'd like to get monthly updates on new releases, as well as preview chapters and free short stories, join my newsletter!




Sunday, September 5, 2010

My Kindle Journey part whatever, and a winner, maybe...

I thought I had this kindle thing licked. The key was to convert the file to text first, then consitently apply styles in Word to ensure the conversion didn't encounter any gliches, like I'd encountered in my initial attempts at posting Bitterwood. Dragonforge was much more successful... except, for some reason, my chapter titles aren't consistent. The style I applied was 14 point, centered, bold, all caps text for my chapter heads. But, it seems like Kindle can only translate three attributes from a style sheet. All my headings are bold, and all are centered, but some are a mix of uppercase and lowercase letter, but larger than the chapter text, and some are all caps, but the same size as the chapter text. I'm sure there must be some emoticon for throwing one's hands up in the air and shaking one's head in utter bewilderment.

My other frustration this time was that it was a much longer wait for this title to go live than Bitterwood. Maybe they have a lot of people on vacation at Amazon, but this time it took well over a week from my initial upload to the title becoming available. I've decided not to change the file to fix the chapter titles because I don't want to take the book down for another week to fix what's really a issue that I suspect most readers won't notice.

So... Dragonforge is live on Kindle! Next up, Dragonseed, then I'll switch gears and get all three books ready for the Nook.

Finally, some of you may be wondering whatever became of the superpowers context. I had about 20 different superpowers sent in and did my drawing for a winner Thursday morning. I drew an email from someone who signed his submission Korallieam. I emailed to let him know he'd won, but I haven't heard back from him yet with a full name or a mailing address. Hopefully he's just on a Labor Day vacation.