Ken Barnett Books

Late last year I finished and self-published my first novel, "The Eleventh Message," in the thriller/mystery genre. After attending several meetings at the Novel Writers Workshop early in 2014, I have spent some time rewriting it and am almost finished, doing grammar corrections, etc. now.

Good for you, and isn't that a great feeling? I love wrapping up a novel - makes me feel as if I've accomplished something great.

What an intriguing title, Ken. Can you give us a few hints as to the plot?

Hi, Brenda...
Thanks for what you do!
Hi, Victoria,
"The Eleventh Message" is about an ex-Army Ranger who twelve years ago killed one son and captured another of an old Afghan shopkeeper during the war in Afghanistan. The captured son is sent to Guantanamo Bay and the shopkeeper now wants him freed. He devises ten separate daily attacks around the Fourth of July, to be carried out by his three other now full-grown sons, unless his captive son is released. He sends ten "messages" to the Ranger and the American public challenging them to stop him. When those attacks are over and the son is not released, the eleventh message surprisingly surfaces.

Sounds like my kind of book! Looking forward to it's publication.

It's on Amazon now.

Sorry, Victoria,
The paperback copy is available on Amazon now (put up before these grammatical changes). I just looked at the Kindle sample and I had to take it down. Something's wrong with the images being put up. Half of them are cut off.

I just checked, Ken, and they look pretty good to me. Is the version up now the corrected one? If so, that was fast.

No. The old one is still up. I just posted the new one on Create Space this afternoon, so won't get it back 'til tomorrow so I can update it to Amazon.
Question- I'm not familiar with Kindle. When I go on Amazon and sample the interior of the paperback, it looks fine, but on Kindle, the first image I have that shows up in a box with borders, looks like it's cut off at the bottom. Does what appears in the paperback show up the same in the Kindle edition when purchased, or do I need to somehow edit the Kindle version, too?

Paperback, ebook, and Kindle all require different formats to come out perfectly. If you have images, it's a little more complicated, but you should be able to do it. I think Createspace has a package where they'll do both for you, but it's nearly a thousand.

As the rights to my backlisted books returned to me, I went though LCP's pro formatter, and The House on Serpent Lake was the first of my novels to go through the entire LCP process from beginning to end. However, some of the authors on this forum has done both themselves and perhaps they can help you.

Also, I noticed on your paperback version you do not have a copyright nor a rights notice. You should include both in both versions.

Ken, as Brenda mentions, formatting is tricky and requires different formats for Kindle, Nook and Smashwords and Createspace. If you are only listing your book on Amazon/Createspace then, in theory, you can format it in Word. However, even that is no guarantee that one document will appear correctly on a Kindle and in print, especially if you use a MAC as opposed to a PC. Word, for all its usefulness, does tend to 'hide' some of its formatting and even clicking on the option to 'show' all formatting doesn't always work. There is a way to remove all formatting, unfortunately, I'm on my laptop and don't have the link available to share. It is a very time consuming task and sometimes it is worth paying a pro-fomatter to prepare the document for you. Some, such those used by LCP, offer a package - 2 or 3 formats for one fee. Definitely worth considering, especially if you are more of an 'end computer' user rather than technically minded.