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Busy Autumn Saturday

Everybody’s working for the weekend! We’re all quite busy today, so this will be short.

🎼 What’s the Buzz? 🎶

Kelly and Dorothy are hard at work today at the Retreat. Allan is helping out with Troop 624‘s Pork BBQ Dinner at the Masonic Lodge in Orwigsburg. If you live nearby, please stop in and treat yourself to a taste of succulent Barbecued Pork to help out the scouts.

As for me, I’m working on my first print on demand product for Christmas Shopping All The Time with the help of Ken Bluttman’s Puzzle Book Mastery.

Puzzle Book Mastery is a piece of cloudware created by the amazingly prolific Ken Bluttman. Ken is a tireless creator and he likes creating software a whole lot more than I do. Fortunately, he’s kind enough to share his creations with the rest of us.

The basic gist of the service is to take the painful part out of creating word puzzles. You still need to compile your word lists, but rather than trying to format them in MS Word or any other word processor that you prefer (I like Open Office), Ken has provided a mechanism that takes your lists and produces nicely formatted, large-print puzzles for you.

The basic and pro versions of the software produce PDF collections of puzzles and answer pages while the master version exports text documents that you can style with fonts of your choosing. The basic version allows you to use the service 100 times per calendar month while the pro and master versions provide unlimited usage and more types of puzzles.

100 seems like a lot and it’s probably more than enough to create a book or two each month but I felt it was better to have the unlimited access, the extra puzzle types and the branding advantage that the Pro version gives me. I will upgrade to the Master version eventually, but I’m going to get started with the Pro version for the time being.

The training that comes with the service is also quite valuable. Not only does Ken tell you how to use the program, step-by-step, but he also gives a lot of insight on how to publish your puzzle books on Kindle Direct Publishing to maximum effect.

The nice thing is that Ken shows you actual results he achieved on the KDP platform with these simple but engaging puzzle books. The puzzle pages generated by the program meet KDP’s standards for “Large Print”. This automatically gives you a sales hook for your books in addition to whatever configuration of content you incorporate into the books.

Since I’m selling my first one in association with the Christmas All The Time brand, it’s natural that I’ve got the puzzles set up with holiday-themed word sets. That was pretty labor-intensive, but uploading the files to Ken’s server and clicking the button was not. Gotta love magic buttons…

This isn’t the typical make money online type of magic button. This is a time-saving process that rapidly formats your text files into printable puzzle pages and answer pages. It’s still on you to:

• Compile your word lists
• Take the output and merge it into a coherent document
  Ken provides videos giving clear instructions and recommends a site that will help you do this
• Create an eye-catching cover
  Ken provides videos giving clear instructions and recommends a site that will help you do this, too
• List it on KDP and promote it
  Ken provides videos giving clear instructions and recommends strategies to help you sell your books

If you’re looking for a source of passive income that involves a little work and a little creativity on your part, Puzzle Book Mastery is an excellent service to add to your toolkit. I’ll let you know how my book turns out once I get it compiled, covered and published. 👍

🍁 Autumn Leaves 🍂

🍁 Autumn Leaves 🍂
Sorry, but Summer music just isn’t as cool as this…

Cool weather deserves cool jazz. The song’s a little sad but Autumn naturally has a bit of a melancholy vibe, so it’s cool, baby, cool… 🎷

Harmony in Autumn

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been! ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hot weather leads to hot heads. The summer was severely unpleasant for all of us in a variety of ways. The cool breeze of Autumn gets us into a more comfort-oriented frame of mind. The softer weather is more conducive to comfort food and baking. The oven is a friend instead of a necessary evil.

It takes more than a change in the weather to heal the hurts of body, mind and soul but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Kelly was kind enough to change out our Summer clothes for those of Autumn and Wintertime. Even the clothes are a pleasant change. Colder weather clothes are a celebration of style and color and comfort.

Summer clothes are just there because it’s impolite to walk around naked, no matter how desperately the temperatures demand it (and NOBODY wants in on that freak show, believe you me). My ideal summer wear would be that refrigerated suit that Mr. Freeze wears, if I’m being honest.

However, now that the season has finally changed, I’ve got a drawer full of comfy, cozy, fluffy shirts and sweatshirts and sweaters that I don’t have to worry about saturating with perspiration simply sitting still. I can actually enjoy being awake instead of dreading another day of sweltering nonsense. It’s a thing of beauty and it naturally culminates in a holiday dedicated to thankfulness.

A warm oven on a cool Autumn day is one of the many blessings of the season, so I think I’ll bake a cake today just because I can.

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See? I told you. I don’t have time for a long-winded post today. We’re busy, busy, dreadfully busy…