While I am an “indie” author, it doesn’t mean I’m going it 100% alone! Besides the wonderful support from my sweetie and closest friends, I also work with a team of great folks as part of my publication process. As I firmly believe in acknowledging others’ efforts, this page is all about them!
The People
Lauren I. Ruiz (Pure Text) and Jennifer Melzer
Lauren and Jennifer are my editor extraordinairians who take my stories and give them the final spit and polish to make them shine. From pointing out minor inconsistencies that have slipped through my revisions to fixing my grammar and spelling snafus, they maintain my unique authorial voice while making it sound so much better with just a tweak here and there. I’d never dream of releasing a story without one or the other, or sometimes both, giving it a go-over!
Kerry Jesberger, Aero Gallerie
I met Kerry while struggling like crazy to even come up with a concept for Deviations. She took an off-the-cuff suggestion and came up with such an awesome design as a “quick idea” that I knew I had to hire her to do the actual cover. With a few tweaks, Deviations had a gorgeous cover, and I knew I’d be working with Kerry again for my future cover design needs! Seriously, go check out her website and enjoy drooling over her beautiful designs!
The Services
I also make use of several services, beyond the obvious ones like Amazon KDP and CreateSpace, that I wanted to highlight as being important parts of my author presence and publication process.
Ecwid
Ecwid is the host of my online store, making it possible for me to direct sell my print books to readers right through my site. It took me a while to settle on an eCommerce provider, but I’m happy I went with Ecwid. Their store management interface is clean, modern, and easy to use and they handle all that messy stuff like auto-calculating shipping and tax on orders! If you want to sell physical or digital goods online, I’d strongly recommend taking a look at Ecwid. A starting store is free for up to 10 products. Their first paid plan is only $15 a month, you can get a discount for paying a year at a time, and you can have 100 products with that one, more than enough for most folks’ needs.
Covervault
Covervault is an awesome website and service run by Mark Monciardini that provides dozens, if not hundreds, of Photoshop templates at free and low cost. These templates are what I use to make many of my promo images showing my books in various positions and arrangements, versus trying to take actual pictures that would require special gear and a lot of time to make look as perfect.