Meredith Mansfield, Author

I did it. “Heart of Oak” is now available on Smashwords for $0.99.  I’ve even made my first sale. In the next few days, I’ll have to work on the Amazon edition, too.

This is a 9500-word novelette. Markets for stories of this length are slim, at least for those of us who aren’t established authors. So it seemed like a good choice for this first foray into the world of e-publishing.

I’m glad I started with something short and relatively uncomplicated. There were a lot of things I didn’t have to worry about, like chapter headings and a linked table of contents. Next time, or whenever I do BLOOD WILL TELL, I think I’ll get a little more daring and use a graphic as a page separator, at least between the title/copyright page and the text, as well as between the end of the text and the end material (author bio, where to find me on the web, etc.) We’ll see how that works out. There’s a possiblity I may do another novelette before that, though.

Formatting for Smashwords isn’t difficult. It just takes attention to detail and changing things from standard manuscript format to something more polished looking. Well, actually, the formatted file before upload looks less polished, but once it goes through Smashwords’s Meatgrinder, it comes out looking pretty good.

Heart of Oak:

There’s a large burl on the huge old oak at the heart of the forest that makes the tree appear to be pregnant. What will it give birth to?

Kerica is born from the oak tree knowing nothing of the humans among whom she finds herself. The tree had a reason for making her, but Kerica has to figure out what it was for herself before she can decide where she belongs.