Tech warrior: putting a book on Kindle

Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice is now an ebook offered through Amazon. A triumph, for I did it all myself. Years in print publishing had worn deep grooves in my brain, so it took some effort to wrap my mind around the basic ebook concepts:

• No pages.
• No fancy fonts for display type.
• No artful white space before and after chapter titles and subheads (but enough space and sufficient variation in font size so the reader knows that a new section is beginning).
• No index!
• On the bright side, endnote reference numbers are links. Click and jump straight to the note. Click again and jump right back to where you were in the text.
• On the agonizing side, guess who had to format each of 300 notes, one by one?

And since the book was originally published when copyediting was still done on paper, I had no electronic file of the final text and had to have the hard copy scanned. The scanner made mistakes, so the resulting file needed proofreading.

I solved formatting problems thanks to a lot of trial and error, plus the Amazon Kindle support forums—advice there was better than the official Amazon instructions.

Although the book has been out of print for some time, people are still buying it used on Amazon. Every once in a while I hear from someone who’s read it. So I’m really happy that it’s in published form again.

The book answers this question:

• Why do so many women feel obliged to put other people’s needs first, even when they don’t want to?

And it answers:

• The self-sacrificing impulse comes from women’s history, not their nature.

Slaying the Mermaid grew out of an amazing experience I had while working at a shelter for homeless women run by nuns (well-trained in self-sacrifice) while researching my first book, The Women Outside. Slaying the Mermaid traces the historical, cultural and mythic factors that gave women the responsibility to sacrifice and suffer for the benefit of our entire society. Then it tells you how to distinguish self-destructive giving from positive, constructive forms of sacrifice, reclaiming the original meaning of sacrifice as an act that both transforms and empowers.