You know, sometimes the most obvious things are the easiest to miss.  Both Kindle and Smashwords provide the option to post a detailed description and keywords (tags) to help potential buyers discover your eBook.  In the rush to get the eBook text loaded, it’s easy to miss those couple of things that should be an integral part of the production process.

I was reminded of this when I visited one of the Kindle Community boards.  I had already started working on revising my description, as discussed in my last post, but I hadn’t really fleshed out my keywords.  Of course after deciding on the keywords, I had to make sure the keywords were the same on both Amazon and Smashwords.  Something else I did was to look through the Amazon listings and see what other book descriptions look like.  As a result of doing this I changed the format of my description from my last post.  Here’s what it looks like now:

Short Description:

Any Tomorrow: The Calling is the story of an unwilling fellowship compelled by an undeniable destiny who find their ultimate meaning in a world savaged by a nuclear and biological apocalypse. Caught up in a relentless flood whose headwaters formed five thousand years earlier in ancient Mesopotamia, a young Jewish physicist in pre-war Germany unwittingly triggers a series of events that will determine not only the destiny of his world, but of all the worlds that are. Any Tomorrow: The Calling is a story about the destiny of a few and the fate of everything.

Long Description:

Any Tomorrow: The Calling is the first eBook of the Any Tomorrow Trilogy.  It is the beginning of a journey through time and space, from the beginning of the world to its end, as a reticent fellowship is formed and compelled by an unyielding fate to restore order to the world and all the worlds that are.  But before this can be accomplished, before the journey is begun there must be a beginning. 

 Meet the Characters:

Gustav Linder is a brilliant young Jewish theoretical physicist in pre-war Germany, isolated in his own thoughts from dramatic changes in the world that spawn the rise of Nazism.  He has dreams of a past and future inexorably linked and of which he is an essential part.  To understand his role, he travels to the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, where an archeologist has discovered the temple of Ereshkigal, a powerful and sinister deity who longs for the destruction of everything.  While the evil of Ereshkigal is revealed, Gustav is confronted by a more basic terror, the Large Man, SS Sturmbannführer Werner Guderien, who proposes a position for him in a new academic research institute whose unspoken mission shares that of the evil Ereshkigal.  Now Gustav is faced with a terrible choice ― to support the new Reich with his research or to flee to America.  What he doesn’t know is that the decision has already been made for him.

Henry Turner was a boy who had all the advantages, yet at age thirteen hears a voice that fills his empty places and leads him to a life as a sociopath, a murderer without remorse.  Yet he is a sociopath with a purpose, to fulfill the will of Ereshkigal, the same evil that haunts Gustav Linder.  Through his experiences Henry transitions from a simple sociopath to a hit man for a Miami drug cartel, yet through every transition he remains true to the voice of pleasure and pain in his mind.  Finally, his ultimate purpose is revealed to him and he begins his journey southward to rendezvous with his destiny.

 Tyler Nolan is an intelligence analyst, his fragile psyche caught in a struggle between reality and madness, trapped in a secret deep underground facility alone the day a worldwide nuclear-biological holocaust nearly brings everything to an end.  Tyler is alone ― or is he?  Is there someone or something else there with him?  Finally, when the facility’s power fails, he must get out or die.  He must push past his fears and find the escape shaft to the surface.  But the surface holds terrible secrets, and an evil that has been waiting more than five millennia is about to become manifest.

 The lives of these three men seem disparate, yet are woven together by the common bond of an ancient, pervasive evil and lays the groundwork for the succeeding eBooks, Any Tomorrow: The Curse and Any Tomorrow: The Culling.

The new format is available on Smashwords, and should appear on Amazon shortly.  And, oh yeah, my eBook is still pending review for inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog.  Patience, patience.

As far as the keywords are concerned, I wanted to list words that were all related to the eBook, but also a good mix of general and specific terms a potential reader might query against.  Here are the keywords I’ve added: America, archeology, destiny, fellowship, Florida, Germany, goddess, Jewish, Mesopotamia,  Nazi, parallel universes, physics, Reich, sociopath, South Carolina, speculative fiction, Uruk, Africa, drama, Antarctica, Amazon, horror, supernatural.

As I said in the beginning of this post, I really need to work up a quick checklist to remind me of all the steps needed to fulfill the requirements for both Amazon and Smashwords.  The publication process isn’t complicated or require lots of technical expertise, but there are a number of steps to it.  Some of the steps, like formatting, can be done ahead of time, even before you start writing.  Others have to wait until you’re ready to post the eBook to the distribution site.  Either way, something to remind be of what steps to take would be helpful, especially if I customize it for my particular working style.  It might be helpful for you, too.

As always, if you have any comments, questions, or concerns about this post or any of my posts, please let me know.  I would really appreciate your feedback.  Thanks
© Copyright 2011 by Kevin Fraleigh.