An Irish writer's lament

For many Northern Irish novelists the 1990's were particularly lean years. The country was in the news so often some wag labelled 'Northern Ireland' the two most boring words in the language.

Literary agents didn't want to know. Many agencies included No IRA Stories in their Submission Guidelines. And who could blame them when the real thing, not fiction, dominated newspaper headlines and TV newscasts?

Lean times indeed.

At the time I was engaged in writing what I believed to be the great Irish novel. Sadly, London agents I queried took a different view. I was not prepared to pay someone to publish my masterpiece and so it was abandoned, but not forgotten. I got on with my life ...

Times changed.

I discovered the internet, only ten years or so behind everybody else. The same with mobile phones. With a sense of near disbelief I read about self-publishing. You mean, I could actually bring out my novels in both print and e-book formats myself? No more long hours agonizing over query letters and synopses. No more long waits for rejection letters This was progress. Progress, too, in my home country. Peace had come to 'Norn Iron' and with it the emergence of much new writing talent. Men and women who had lived through tough times, heard the gunfire and bombs, the sometimes horrific reports. They had a well of experience to draw on.

And suddenly publishers and agents opened their arms in welcome.

Me? In the past year I've published four novels and a few short stories. I'm happy. And I've saved the best for last. Currently I'm polishing the cast-aside-but-not-forgotten masterpiece. Some sections surprise me. After so long, it's like reading a stranger's work.

Wish me luck!

KDP formatting - those troublesome first-line-of-a-chapter indents

Got through the formatting minefield and successfully published your story on CreateSpace? Congratulations!

But the job is only half done. Most authors want an e-book version of their work. What could be simpler? Just click the buttons and follow the steps from CS to Kindle Direct Publishing. The hard work is already done. Right? It's time to uncork the bubbly and celebrate.

Whoa, hold your horses! Don't make the mistake of thinking that because all the kinks were ironed out of the print version, KDP will automatically format as you want it.

Every page must be checked - just as you did after uploading your file to CS.

Having recently published three novels on KDP, I can point to two issues that require careful attention.

• Dialogue that ends in a dash (-) or three dots ( . . .).  After uploading to KDP you may find places where the three dots are split, with only two on one line and the third carried over to the next line. Or a sentence ending in a dash could have the words on one line and the dash appearing on the next line with only the speech mark (") for company.

• First-line-of-chapter indent. You've followed the steps from CS to KDP and are reviewing the content on the on-screen previewer when you notice the first line of each chapter is indented. First line after section breaks too. Huh? This didn't happen with the CS print version, so what's gone wrong? Through reading community threads I learned that KDP indent every paragraph. So it's up to you to amend those first liners.

Corrections must be made to your original file stored in your desktop or laptop.

Fixing the dash and dot issues is simple - just a matter of altering the wording of the offending sentences to change their length. The best way of correcting the indents, I read, is to highlight the paragraph. Then go to 'paragraph' at the top of the Word page and click Special, then from the box 'first line'. Next at By type in 0.01 and then click OK. This command overrules the KDP default. Repeat for each chapter's first paragraph and each section break.

Then upload to KDP - and re-check.

It worked for me.