I just got Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR) for the PC this Christmas. I can tell already I’ll be losing a ton of sleep (and work) playing this gem! It took a while to install, but when it was done I settled in with a pizza and a six pack and hit the game hard!

The first thing I noticed was that it brought to the forefront how antiquated my graphics card is. I was using a 7 year old NVidia chip graphics card that was OK for playing older games, but when I loaded SWTOR and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 I knew it was time to upgrade. I bought a 9500GT and it seems to working well. It’s not perfect, but a great budget card that will get you by if your system has trouble keeping up with the load from these newer games.

The second thing I noticed was that I needed help! I never played WoW and it has been a long time since I played Everquest. I had no idea what the terminology was, or even how the leveling system worked. What class should I choose? What Guild? I began searching for some sort of help in getting my SWTOR skills on track. Then I found it.

I took a chance and ordered SWTOR Savior, and man was I thankful. The guide helped me not only better understand the paths and direction, it also clarified the best leveling techniques for my chosen class and abilities.

Check out their sales page and see for yourself. It’s money well spent… that is if you’d rather not spend DAYS trying to figure this stuff out. I highly recommend reading it first, then applying the tactics.

Tactical Web Marketing has revamped their website and added a bunch of cool new features, including a listing of over 500 Internet Marketing, SEO, and reseller eBooks. Their library listing runs the gamut from Affiliate Marketing to creating banner ads. Here’s some samples:

Affiliate Marketing
Article Marketing
Banners
Blogs
Email Marketing
Niche Marketing
SEM and SEO
Social Media

Be sure and check out their new website, especially if your looking for information and training in SEO and Internet Marketing. They also have a FREE book section.

Are you an independent author or publisher and completely frustrated trying to find places to advertise your books? Well, so was I! That’s why over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new website, indiebooklounge.com, that gives Independent authors and publishers a spot to introduce themselves and list their books… For FREE!

I’ve tried marketing my books on other sites but they only seem to allow you to place a link to your book or website, but no details. As we all know from SEO, a link is good, but a link with detailed descriptions of your books, including cover art. are even better!

Authors get the ability to enter a detailed bio about themselves, including links to their website, twitter account, and Facebook page. Once they are registered, which only takes a few seconds and is completely free, they can start entering individual books complete with detailed description, cover art, purchasing links for Kindle, Nook, and more. The first page of the site offers a random display of 10 books, so your cover image and description will show up randomly 24 hours per day. Also, when someone does a search or views your author page, they see a list of all of your books at the bottom.

I’ve also added the ability to allow subscribers to enter articles having to do with publishing, eBook readers, or anything related. If they submit an article and it is approved, they have the added benefit of all of their books being displayed at the bottom of the article. It also adds to their exposure in the menu lists.

The site’s articles and books are all re-indexed twice a day and ping’ed to Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask after each re-index. As the site fills, the exposure in search engines will be pretty solid.

So, if you’re an Independent author or publisher, or just looking for some GREAT books at a great price, check out indiebooklounge.com. I look forward to seeing you there!

After much research and trial and error, we found what appears to be the best format for your eBook that allows cross platform submission… And it was right in front of us all along. It’s HTML! But wait, there’s more.

There are some tags that are exclusive to the Kindle / Nook. One of the biggest problems we had was page breaks and chapter breaks. In MS Word, you use the CTRL-Enter combination to move text to the top of the next page. No matter what the converter, it never fully got converted, so chapter headers began a couple lines below where the previous chapter left off. It’s still very readable, but not very ‘professional’ looking. To fix this, insert the following tag right before the text that is to start on the next page. 

<mbp:pagebreak />

The Kindle uses some built in placeholders for the Table of Contents and the start of the book. These again make the book more readable on these devices by breaking the pages into manageable portions. The Table of Contents tag is is <a name="TOC"/>. Right at the start of your book (Chapter One header or start of paragraph or whatever constitutes the first character of the actual book) place the tag <a name="start"/>.

Because these tags are specific to eBook reader formats, your HTML editor may balk at them and not display them correctly. However, when you upload these and view them on the eBook reader you will see the formatting in action.

Images: Kindle will resize ALL images so that they are between sizes that fit within the screens boundaries and resolution. For Kindle 2, images larger than 520px by 622px are resized to fit within these parameters.

This is a follow-up to this post

The newest eBook we are selling, Storage Unit Auction Riches, is our first attempt at also offering it for the Kindle eBook reader. I thought it would be a snap converting a .docx or .pdf to the Kindle format, but it turns out it was hard than I thought.

First of all, don’t blindly trust the Amazon Kindle conversion routine that kicks off when you upload your book. Even thought they support various formats for upload, it really doesn’t do a good job of converting those.

I downloaded a program called Calibre, a free piece of software that converts .pdf and .docx to multiple other formats like .MOBI, ePub, .RTF,  and .TXT. It worked great and has a great interface, but it still did not fully convert it to a good looking Kindle format. For example, I tried converting the .pdf version of the eBook. The .pdf had page numbers and a header, which looked really bad when converted to .MOBI.

Finally after a full day of trial and error, I decided to convert the book to HTML (one of the dozens of recommended formats, according to Amazon). I removed all graphics and left references in the book that point to a website that houses the images. When the conversion was done, I tried it again.

This time, the conversion looked really good! It still has some minor page break and spacing issues, but nothing major. I’m sure if I spent more time with it, I’ll find the best way to do it.

I did some more research and found another tool called Jutoh. It cost about $30, but man was it worth it. The chapter editing, the conversion and file checking, and the multiple output formats made the conversion job very easy. The next couple of books I did I used this tool and it saved me so much time. The books come out formatted perfectly for Kindle aqnd Nook, as well as web-ready HTML. If you can spend the $30, I highly recommend this tool.

If you would like more information on helpful tools that make publishing your eBooks even easier, check out these links...

UPDATE: Please read this next post for updated information.

Our friends over at tacticalwebmarketing.com have created a really cool eBook called “Storage Unit Auction Riches.” As their development partner, we got to see this book first! I was really excited to read it because I am a fan of those television shows about storage unit auctions.

They give some really good tips and note things I never would have thought of like handling special items like guns or how to effectively place a bid. Like the book says, I’ve been a little apprehensive about attending one of these auctions because I’m just not sure how they work. After reading the book I realized that most everyone else there is in the same situation as me! They’ve got some great tips like visiting a couple auctions first just to observe. They even include a spreadsheet with two forms, one for estimating and tracking unit sales and one for tracking what you bought and it’s subsequent sale. I thought the worksheets were great. They encourage you to follow your test auctions, come up with your own ideas about worth, and then compare what you thought with what actually happened.

So, if your thinking of getting into the storage unit auction game, this book is great. Right now it’s priced at just $9.95 and you get a couple more eBooks thrown in for good measure. You can visit their sales page at: www.storageunitauctionriches.com.