Publish For Seniors Tutorials

It seems that most Seniors, after retiring, have at least "one book in them", and usually a GOOD book at that!

Prior to 2008 it was virtually impossible, unless your name was Stephen King, to get a Publisher to talk to you. However a huge change has come about thanks to the [Amazon] Kindle system of Publishing E-Books [books able to be read on computers and portable electronic devices], because you no longer NEED a publisher.

In Australia this E-Book facility "Dove-tails" nicely with the Federal Government's Broadband for Seniors Initiative [BFS], with some 2,000 Internet Kiosks having been set up in strategic [for Seniors] locations all over Australia, albeit this Publish for Seniors [PFS] Portal is [presently] a private initiative [by coversareus.com], separate from the BFS program.

To fast-track an explanation, please click on the Front Cover [termed Product Image by Amazon] above to go to the Amazon page for The River Calls by "young" Ron Shepherd [only 66]. There you will see that you can buy the book for $4.99 or download a Free Sample to read on your PC or Kindle Device. At that point [ie Publishing] the Author has written/formatted the book and produced a cover [with or without help from others].

Please click on this second thumbnail to see the additional [optional] Marketing tool unique to coversareus.com, which is a FlipPage Web Site with a Blog below, and you can see Ron has been very busy blogging away to attract Google etc, which all helps to Sell his book.

Before you say "I could never do that", please consider that all of the Authors in the Gallery below are over 80, and most had just graduated from a typewriter [or nothing], in effect the same profile as the Seniors targeted by the Australian Government in the BFS Initiative.

ALL you need is to "have" that story in you, and with most of us old parrots it is hard to stop us talking about "when I was young". The difference is if you "talk" it to a PC you tell the world [and even earn some beer money, which should not affect your pension]. But it seems most Seniors simply want the opportunity to WRITE the book, without thinking too much of the monetary side.

As for the "Partnership" [or dovetail] mentioned above, the BFS PCs enable the Seniors to use the BEST Word Processor of all for Kindle, which is WordPad. The Kindle system detests authors that type out a perfect "print edition" book, because the The #1 Rule in the Kindle Guide [translated for newbies] is "don't format anything, just type". Then the BFS allows access to such as G-Mail and therefore allows access to the Amazon Publishing Platform.

Finally, although work can be saved on the D Drive, it is envisaged by the Government that most Seniors will use the BFS as a learning tool and then graduate to their own PC [which can now be purchased for $200 or less as detailed in News for Seniors]. Therefore it would be preferable to save to a USB Drive and once the Senior has "got the hang of it", probably with help from others, he/she could then do the bulk of the book on their own PC. Obviously this would also help prevent "bottle-necks" at the various BFS Kiosks.

However it must be admitted that, for these books above and below, a certain amount of "expert intervention" has been used. So please look at the "Stock Standard" book below, which is the "Base Level" book we suggest, produced FROM a BFS Kiosk with all the restrictions that apply.

This is a sample from the "BIO" from the author of this page, and it demonstrates the type of content [including a basic cover] that ANY Senior could produce to leave behind a "footprint" of their life. This example is text only but we will be doing some Tutorials to show [as well as doing the basic] how to include images as well.

Kindle is no less International than the G-mail facility which is the initial task of each Senior using a BFS Kiosk. At coversareus.com, so far all our customers have been from America, but the only thing preventing Australian Seniors from Publishing their own books is lack of knowledge that Kindle EXISTS [and perhaps the abovementioned fear of the unknown, and perception that it is "just too hard"].

So come on all you Ozzie Oy Oy Oys. If America can produce Aged Authors as indicated below, then we should be able to do similar in Spades. What other Nation could wind out a story from a sheep jumping into a billabong - or was it the Jolly Swagman? Let's go Kindling Matilda ASAP. Let's face it, at our age there is no time left for consternation.