I have created a new website to handle all information, and announcements connected to the Adventures of Caitlin & Rio series. 

Here is the link to that website. 

Thanks to Amazon, independent publishing (or "self publishing") has never been easier. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) allows you to publish and sell your work through the Amazon marketplace. The hard part is creating the material, designing the book cover, and marketing the finished product. 

I found the website to be very intuitive and packed full of very useful information, informative videos and a forum. Amazon KDP does offer templates - for designing your book cover (or you have a choice of Amazon design selections), for your manuscript for print versions, and an easy platform called "Kindle Create" to create your Kindle version. 

I am really cheap. I didn't want to spend any money on vanity publishers, nor did I want to spend any money on professional designers to design the book cover. My cover and illustrations do look cheesy. I am not a professional designer and illustrator, and I guess it shows. But it least all the content is mine. 

So this is awkward. I published my first book in the Adventures of Caitlin and Rio series, The Lost Colors. Amazon automatically searches for authors of the same name, and assumes that if you have the same name, you must be the same person. It turns out there is another Sally Alexander out there. It is not immediately intuitive but I was able to contact Amazon's Author Central, identify the book by the other Sally Alexander, and request that the book not be associated under my bibliography. I do hope that Amazon can fix this. I feel awkward and uncomfortable having other people's work attributed to me. 

Fingers crossed. 

I was doing my usual web surfing and came across this. The National Write a 50,000 word novel in a month competition.

For history of the competition go here.

For rules and regulations: go here

You have to write 50,000 words from November 1 until midnight on November 30th. The emphasis is quantity and not quality (although I am sure everyone is doing real quality work.)

So how about it?