The Books Have Arrived!

Yesterday I received a box containing the 20 copies of my dad's book which I had ordered from Lightning Source. Now, what to do with them? Ha! I am readying copies to be mailed to one of my kind book reviewers, the Hump pilot from Texas. (My other little Navy reviewer recently lost his wife of 53 years to cancer, and has since relocated. I will let a little time pass and see if I can get a new mailing address for him.) A second book needs to be mailed to the Library of Congress, per their requirements in giving you a Library of Congress Control Number to place in the book. The Library of Congress number helps them maintain their catalog records and assists other libraries with the acquisitions of books. There is no fee charged, but you must supply them with a copy of the book when it is published. I also need to decide if I want to apply for the formal U.S. copyright. I did it with my other book - there is a $35 fee if you file online, and then you must mail them 2 copies of the book when it is printed. You have copyright protection by nature of the fact that you wrote the book, but this makes things more official and, I presume, easier to fight copyright infringement.

Then I think I will donate a book to the Delhi Historical Society and one to the Hamilton County Genealogical Society since those would both offer good exposure for the book. I also need to have some work done on my website so that the book can be purchased there as well.

I spoke with Lightning Source (LSI) about turning this book into an ebook. I did not even realize they handled ebooks until I signed up with them. Smashwords had indicated that they couldn't touch this book due to all of the images, so I was not optimistic that LSI would be able to work with it. Obviously there is no need to have it in a Kindle, Nook or other e-reader format. But it definitely would read well as a PDF on a computer or as an ePub on the iPad. My rep at LSI said that they could sell the ebook version. It is all ready to go as a PDF, though I need to assign a new ISBN number to it. And that would mean changes to the inside front matter as the ISBN is listed there. I haven't tried to do an ePub format yet, so I will have to research that some more. So much to learn!