It’s been a long process, basically because I didn’t want to do this thing half-arsed, but I’ve finally converted all my published novels- and a few more-into Ebooks for the world to buy, download and enjoy… I’m sure you get the idea. Most of my time was spent changing over eight novels in one go and there were a few issues. First, for some of my original manuscripts I didn’t have the final, edited versions of the Word files that ultimately went to the publishers. My first books were published at a time when manuscripts were still sent as hard-copy print-outs to the printers. Hey, before you think any further I’m not that old! We still wrote on computers and word processors, but the layout and printing wasn’t digital yet. Anyway, it proved to be an opportunity to re-edit those original manuscripts and stories. Clean them up a little and add a bit of the writing experience I (hopefully) gathered in the years since. Think of them as the 2011 “digitally remastered” copies of my books like they did with music albums. But it’s important to realise I didn’t update the stories. Don’t expect to see mobile phones and the internet in novels I wrote in the 1990’s. They weren’t around when I wrote those books and that’s the way I wanted to novels to stay.

Another thing that happened was I didn’t have a recent file of “Missing Pieces”, a crime novel that’s been selling really well in Germany. It was published in the US ages ago and that publisher even put out their own Ebook (without my permission I might add), but they couldn’t give me a file either. The crazy solution was to buy my own ebook (!!) and then use an Optical Character Recognition program to scan the pages back into my word processor… yes, it was tricky. Worse, the OCR didn’t recognise lots of things (like italics, believe it or not) and I had to painstakingly go through each page to reformat and re-grammar (if that’s a word) the text.

Next I created my own covers. This was a crash-course in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, but I’m pretty happy with most of the results. In the effort to get all my books done I compromised a little on some, but I can always go back and rework those.

Finally, I had to reformat the manuscripts again, because when you convert these things into a file suitable for an Ebook publication there are a few different rules you need to know. I won’t go into any details here, but if anyone is keen to ask me any questions please use the comment box and I’ll reply as quick as I can.

So now it’s done. I was tempted to offer one of my books for free- free ebooks! Nope, I just can’t do it. How about a cheap ebook? It’s a deal! My book “Ghost Tales, Four Stories of the Dead Among Us” is available for the huge sum of $1.95 and believe me, it’s a bargain because the four ghost stories combined are actually bigger than a normal book.

There is a page on this site dedicated to my ebooks with links to Amazon and Smashwords, where you can buy them.

Wish me luck. Any support anybody offers is greatly appreciated. Feel free to get in touch and I’ll try to reply quickly.

Graeme Hague July 2011