Dang! Freebies!

My inner gurlie is squealing in delight! My coloring book is live, the listing on Amazon finally has everything I want to have on it, the sample book is there so you can see more of what is inside of the book, I was able to add a section "From the author" that explains more about how the images in this book came about, and best of all, I have already had 3 sales of the book! 

https://amzn.to/3UBIR4R

I still can't seem to be able to upload images here (grrrr), I'd love to share some examples and freebies, I'm working on it! Anyhoo, check the affiliate link above, if you do buy, I'd love to see some finished colored pages! I figured out the issue was my browser blocking cookies, it's supposed to protect me from privacy problems, but it's not supposed to do that! Anyhoo, I figured it out thanks to a quick Google search. I can now post some pictures and freebies. Here is the cover of the coloring book.

Here are a couple of free pages, feel free to print them, color them, share them, just don't sell them please. These will have a QR Code pointing to the Amazon page, when you order the book from Amazon, there will not be QR Codes on the coloring pages.

I am already starting on my next one, this one will features donkeys, or burros depending on what you want to call them. It would seem that I snapped over 300 pictures of donkeys, jacks and jennies as well as fuzzy babies/foals. I have lots of donkey fodder to choose from. I know those will be popular for my extreme locals, we have lots of donkeys living in our neighborhood.

All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

It's ALIVE

Well, live anyhow LOL. I finally got everything uploaded like I wanted, the coloring book has 40 unique coloring pages, each representing far west Texas, inspired by the photographs I snapped over the years while travelling all over, at the time I was putting 300-500 miles a week on my truck while doing merchandising work in the dollar stores. I am so happy that I was finally able to do something with those!

Here is the book

https://amzn.to/46DdxoT

Enjoy!

I have not been able to add any pictures in my last few posts, not sure why...

All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

Doing the updates on my coloring book!

You know how they say hindsight is always 20-20, well it is. I was in a hurry and published the coloring book before I really should have. It's perfectly fine, but I wanted to make it better, I'm not unpublishing it on Amazon because I don't know how quickly they make those changes. But I am quickly working on adding more pages to it, making it 40 images, I'm close to having that completed. It seems they won't let me make any changes (such as unpublishing) until the latest update is live, which was just making the cover look better in thumbnail.

Depending on how Amazon KDP works, they may make me create a whole new book, either way is fine, I'll let you know when it's live and ready for sale, hopefully by the end of today or tomorrow at the latest. I will say, they got this version published and live rather quickly, especially compared to my other book (which is not a coloring book). I don't know if it is because it's a coloring book, maybe it was quicker to go through, I think they use bots for that purpose anyhow.

I can't wait to get a copy for myself, besides loving to color like this, it will be nice to see MINE, to see my images made from the photographs I took over the years of driving all over west Texas. I knew I would probably do something with all of those images, I just didn't consider making a coloring book out of them until now.

Back to work now!

_______________________________________

A few hours later... after much futzing with the book, it's finally uploaded, without errors. I added 10 more pages/images to make a total of 40 images to be colored. I also updated the cover, and that's one of the places that gave me an error, something I don't understand because I didn't change the size, I just added some text, apparently that was enough to make something move or shrink. OK, no problem, I fixed that. I also noticed that on some of the inner pages, there were some slight changes in the way the images were laid out, again not an issue, I just went through one by one and repaired the changes. 

Now it's uploaded, accepted and is being checked by their bots presumably, possibly by a real person, but I doubt it. Since everything seemed to go through fairly quickly, within a few hours. So I'm hoping that the changes will be live by morning. I'll post a link once it is good to go.

Hope you have a great night!

All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!

September is here, and a new book!

Well, here we are, it's September, fall is (almost) in the air. The days are getting noticeably shorter. I commented just today that it was 8:30 and almost dark, just a few weeks ago it was still light at 9:30! I'm not complaining though, I love getting into fall weather, the nights getting crisp, the days cooling off. Heck, we are even having a sort of second monsoon, we have been having rainy afternoons for a few days and it's supposed to continue that until Saturday or Sunday.

It won't be long and it will be time to clear off (dust off) the wood stove, which is actually a pellet stove now. PB really perfected the pellet stove design over this last winter and it pretty much runs all by itself, it even has a thermostat so that it comes on and goes off, pretty handy!

Last week, a friend of mine asked me to help her with an adult coloring book (a coloring book for grown ups!), it was mostly formatting, she already had the images. In the process of helping her, I got the coloring book bug again. A few years ago I had wanted to create my own coloring books but just didn't get very far with it. In working with my friend's coloring book, I decided that maybe it was time for me to dust off my skills and get to work. 

The last 3 days I have been working on a West Texas coloring book, one that features the landscapes and scenes from the Fort Davis, Davis Mountains, far west Texas area. I went through a bunch of the photos I had snapped over the years while driving around to service the various dollar stores, I had forgotten about how many of these pictures I had! 

I used them as reference material and worked up 30 images that I was happy with. They are pretty detailed, I have seen a ton of those really simple cutesy coloring books that are super popular, I didn't want to hop into that genre, that market seems pretty saturated. I also didn't want to do something that everyone else was doing, so I settled on the west Texas theme.

I managed to get the images completed, the cover (front and back) done, and the inside talkie pages. I then went through the process of uploading them to Amazon KDP, that can be a challenge, and it was. It's not always intuitive trying to figure out why it's not working right. But eventually I got it fixed and uploaded. It said it could take up to 72 hours to be published, the part where they review it actually went pretty quickly, surprisingly!

Now I am just waiting on it to be published, it says it's publishing, but it's not there yet. One thing I noticed once I uploaded it and had it going, the thumbnail wasn't as poppy as I thought it should be. Something that may look good at full size doesn't always translate into "looks good" at thumbnail size.

I fixed the cover to make the thumbnail look better but it will not allow me to make any changes until the book is published. Hopefully sometimes soon (Thursday) I expect it to go live then I can pop into the backroom and update the cover, which should then go live quickly.

I am only offering a physical book, as cool as digital books are, they just don't translate well into coloring books. I considered offering a digital copy for printing purposes, but the risk of people just sharing the file is too great. I may offer single pages either as giveaways or selling cheap, probably would do both if I went there. What do you think? Would you be interested in single pages?

So now it's just a waiting game, hopefully it goes fast (it seems to be hopping along quickly). 

My Amazon author page is here if you would like to check out what I have published so far and see the coloring book once it goes live. Be sure to follow me on Amazon so that you can be alerted when I publish new books.

https://amzn.to/4qVSAz5 (WAIT, don't order the coloring book yet! I'm adding more pages)

All written text from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute without written permission. You may post a portion of this (or any) message from this blog on another site as long as you include a link back to this site and the original message.

Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!