His Given Breath and Encourage My Heart Link Up

Be sure to enter my giveaway for "How To Grow Your Blog" if you haven't already.

My husband's eBook is free on Kindle today (Tuesday and Wednesday).

Don't own a Kindle?  You can download the reading app on your computer for free.

His Given Breath is an expression of faith in contemporary verse. Beyond what you'll find in a greeting card this small collection of poems opens up aspects of the Christian faith in an exciting fresh exposition. 

We'd love for you to leave a review.

There were some fabulous link ups last week.  These were the top three that people visited:

I Was the Other Woman

(This is a fabulous series!)

Our Frugal Monthly Budget

(Great money saving ideas)

God's Blue Print For Marriage

(I loved this post!)

Now it's your turn link up any and all of your encouraging posts.  As a simple thank you be sure to link back.

Will you learn along with me? Let's encourage one another.

I'd love for you to sign up for e-mail updates or follow me on Facebook.
And to see the lovely places where I link click here.  

Honoring A Child Born To Heaven

I've read studies that say nearly 1 in 3 pregnancies will end in miscarriage.  I know this is a pain a lot of women have dealt with.

This wasn't a book I planned on writing.  It just started coming together one day. Faster than anything else I've ever written in fact.

 I will be keeping it free for the month of May for Facebook fans and e-mail subscribers.
It will be available on kindle and in print later this week.

I wrote this book to share hope.  Please consider sharing this post in someway, because all of us know women who've gone through this pain.

Will you learn along with me? Let's encourage one another.

I'd love for you to sign up for e-mail updates or follow me on Facebook.
And to see the lovely places where I link click here.  

How To Be A Successful Mother

Before we get to "How to be a Successful Mother" I have an exciting announcement.

"Devotions For the First Few Days" is officially available in print!  You can buy it from Create Space right now or get it from Amazon  (great way to use those swagbuck's gift cards)

Order it now for Mother's Day, it's only $5.

Today and tomorrow are the last days to get your free ecopy of "Devotion For the First Few Days"  by subscribing, or becoming a Facebook fan (under the free eBooks tab)  But do have another free eBook for fans and subscribers.

If you've already read it if you would leave a review on Amazon for the Kindle or print copy  I would greatly appreciate it.

This devotion today is an excerpt from the book, hope you enjoy.  And please share this post if the book has been a blessing to you.

“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” 2 Peter 3:9

What makes a successful Mother?  Is she the mother whose children become doctors and lawyers?  Or is she the woman who raises future homemakers like herself?  Or is a successful mother simply one whose children will one day contribute to society, and stay out of trouble? 

The most important mission of motherhood has nothing to do with our children’s future success in life and everything to do with their future relationship with God. We can have a thousand dreams for our children, but the most important one is that they one day know Christ as their personal Savior.  Everything else pales in comparison.

Proverbs 22:6 says that if we train up our children in the way they should go, when they are old, they will not depart from it.  This scripture, of course, begs the question: How do I know how to “train up my child”? Rather than make this a needless area of worry, we can rest assured of two things; God promises to give us wisdom if we ask (James 1:5), and it is God’s will that our children will one day come to know Christ as Savior (2 Peter 3:9).

The Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Creator of the Universe, cares about our children’s salvations and wants each and every one of them to know His Son as Savior. The fact that God so desperately wants your children to be His is a huge comfort and can give you extra faith and boldness when you pray for their salvation.  We can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God desires our children’s salvation more than we ever possibly could.

Will you learn along with me? Let's encourage one another.

I'd love for you to sign up for e-mail updates or follow me on Facebook.
And to see the lovely places where I link click here.  

Resources/Freebies and eBook Linkup.

Posts in This Series

• Family Safe eReaders
• Formatting for Dummies Part I: Why I'm Mad at Smashwords
• Formatting for Dummies Part II: Tips I've Learned
• My Book Launch
• Resources and Freebies (And eBook Linkup)

If you are interested in writing an eBook I highly recommend:

Blogging With Amy, has an absolutely FABULOUS series on eBooks.  I love her blog in general by the way, but this is the best series I have found anywhere on the subject of eBooks.  I tried not to reinvent the wheel here with my series because hers has so many fabulous tips.

I also highly recommend Sarah Mae's book "How to Market and Sell Your eBook", and if you don't already you should really subscribe to her new blog "It's the Idea".  And watch this fabulous video if you haven't already.

I also recommend if you're going to write an eBook you should read as many as possible.  Get a feel for what they're like and how they're priced.

I highly recommend Thrifty Homemaker Finds on Facebook, she publishes Free eBook finds everyday day.  I've literally downloaded (not read) over a hundred so far.

Are there any other great resources out there I'm missing?  Also if you've got an eBook, I'd love for you to link it up here, to your website, Amazon, whatever.  Let's see them : )

Will you learn along with me? Let's encourage one another.

I'd love for you to sign up for e-mail updates or follow me on Facebook.

I'm so excited to be able to tell you about my new eBook "The Matthew 6:33 Piano Teacher, How to Teach Piano For the Glory of God"

If you've ever thought about teaching a piano lesson this book is for you. (Subscribers click the link to view the video)

You can buy it on my new website, 633music.net , Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

For only $9.99, that means if you just teach one piano lesson at $15 you've already recouped the cost of the book and you have enough money left over to by yourself a fancy coffee.

And to celebrate, a giveaway, for either a would be music teacher or music student.

The Prizes are either a personal business consultation for a music teacher or would be music teacher

or a performance clinic for two songs, perfect if you have a student with a competition or performance coming up.

You can read the full description of things here, or just enter below. If you have any kids in music lessons this would be a great way to polish spring recital pieces  Good Luck!

The prize is a $50 value : )

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Posts in This Series

• Family Safe eReaders
• Formatting for Dummies Part I: Why I'm Mad at Smashwords
• Formatting for Dummies Part II: Tips I've Learned
• My Book Launch
• Resources and Freebies (And eBook Linkup)

To stay up to date, and have access to my free e-book  Subscribe or  Like Lessons from Ivy 

And to see the lovely places where I link click here.     

eBook Formatting for Dummies: Tips I've Learned

Since my eBook is releasing this Monday (eeeek!) I've decided to do a mini series on ePublishing.  If this is your first day, be sure to read my other posts in the series.

Posts in This Series

• Family Safe eReaders
• Formatting for Dummies Part I: Why I'm Mad at Smashwords
• Formatting for Dummies Part II: Tips I've Learned
• My Book Launch
• Resources and Freebies (And eBook Linkup)

As I posted yesterday, formatting an eBook isn't hard, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't tedious.

The guides for Barnes and Noble's Pubit! program and  Amazon Kindle are very good.  If you're going to format anything yourself, be very familiar with them.  The formatting guidelines are also very similar.  The only thing I had to change between my kindle and pubit documents were how I made the page breaks, and I had to change all of my bullets to numbers for the pubit document.

Follow the guides like a recipe, don't leave out any steps and things will look good, and you want your book to look good.

Here's some tips to get you started:

• Make your book as simple as possible to begin with.  Things like images, bulleted lists, and any auto formatted numbers are a booger to format.  A BOOGER!  The less of these you have in your document, the less time you'll need to spend formatting.
• You don't need, nor should you have page numbers.
• Do not use the tab key.  EVER!  This will cause big empty spaces to show up on some eReaders, not good.
• Type with the paragraph button "on."  You want to be able to see all your spaces and returns.  And hopefully you'll never see any arrows indicating you used a tab.
• If your document is really far gone, copy it all to notepad.  This strips it of ALL formatting.  Then copy and paste back to word.
• Make sure you turn off Word's auto format feature.  It will make your life miserable.
• After you upload your book you will be able to preview it.  Go through and look at every single stinking page.  Do not publish until you love it.  Give yourself ample time before a launch deadline for this reason.  

Monday is launch day, squeal!  You can take a sneak peak at the blog here if you'd like.

Will you learn along with me? Let's encourage one another.

I'd love for you to sign up for e-mail updates or follow me on Facebook.

   

eBook Formatting for Dummies: Part I Why I'm Mad at Smash Words

My eBook Is launching on Monday so this is post 2 on in my mini-series. Yesterday I talked about family safe eReaders, today I'm talking about formatting.

Writing and Formatting an eBook is not hard at all.  If you took a high school computer course you can probably do it easily.  It's like following a recipe really, as long as you don't leave out any steps your book will look good. I'll be spending the next two days sharing what I've learned about formatting.

When I first started flirting with the idea of writing an eBook, I read 2 books: "How to Market and Sell Your eBook" by Sarah Mae (Highly recommended) and "How To Publish An Ebook On A Budget " (also recommended).

"How to Publish an Ebook on a Budget" recommended using Smashwords as a means of publishing eBooks. On the surface I love Smashwords, I format the book once, then the Smashword's program reformats it for Kindle, epub, PDF, and every other format you can imagine.  If you've done things properly it will go on sale in the Smashword's store, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and the I Pad store.  There's no need to reformat your work 5 times, if you did it right the first time.

Here's the problem, when I initially read the Smashword's terms of service I didn't realize how much license they give their authors.  The terms of service for Kindle and Barnes and Noble contain statements that essentially say, truly offensive material and p***graphy is NOT permitted.

Smashword's on the other hand has no such statements in their terms of service. In fact, I recently recived an e-mail from them (since this was how I published my first book) saying PayPal was getting ready to pull their services unless Smashword's pulled their books containing the most reprehensible material that I'm not even comfortable describing.  (Trust me this list was bad)

In it's e-mail Smashword's asked me to e-mail PayPal and ask them to protect the rights of "Indie Authors."  You want  to protect the rights of indie authors, and deny protection of the most vulnerable of society?  I'm sorry but even when you fictionalize the most graphic of abuses, it makes it more permissible in the minds of the readers, therefore making it more prevalent in society.  That's why Amazon and Barnes and Noble won't publish this type of material!!!

I'm in the process of reformatting my first book so Smash Word's won't make a dime off of it.  Yes formatting for Smashwords was easier, but I do not want my books being sold along with the most vile in society.

I see a lot of Christian books on Smashwords, and I wonder if the authors realize what is also being sold there.  I realize all bookstores will have material that Christians find reprehensible, but Smashword's doesn't just push the envelope it obliterates it.

Tomorrow I'll go over my best tips for formatting.  If you start formatting your eBook as you write it, it will be a breeze : )

By the way, would you mind voting for my cuties?

(Once you log in with Facebook, you can vote 10x's)

 

We have about a 10% chance of making it to the finals. We would LOVE to win the gift card to Babies R' Us (we desperately need new car seats.)

Posts in This Series

• Family Safe eReaders
• Formatting for Dummies Part I: Why I'm Mad at Smashwords
• Formatting for Dummies Part II: Tips I've Learned
• My Book Launch
• Resources and Freebies (And eBook Linkup)

To stay up to date, and have access to my free e-book  Subscribe or  Like Lessons from Ivy 
And to see the lovely places where I link click here. 

eReaders Safe For The Family

eBooks, eBooks, eBooks.  They're everywhere, and I love them!  And if you haven't heard I am launching an eBook next week.  I'll be doing a mini-series on eBooks this week for that reason : )  Starting off today I'd like to talk about parental controls on eReaders, rather the lack thereof.  But I'm so happy that Kindle has finally listened and given some sort of Parental Controls on their Kindle Fire.  (Yay! I can finally buy one!)

But let me say this, you don't need an eReader to read eBooks.  You can download books right to your computer from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and many different websites as well.  But If you're looking for a safe eReader I have two recommendations.  (These are affiliate links)

I got a Sony Reader, the Christmas before last and I absolutely love it.  I download books from the Sony store, and also I've uploaded many PDF's I've bought from other bloggers. I've even taught from my eReader, and my husband has preached from it as well.

The reason why we bought this Sony was it didn't have wireless. (And did you notice you can get it for only $35 from Amazon?!) There is nothing on the ereader that I didn't put there.  I'll never have to worry about giving my eReader to my kids because there is no way they can stumble across anything.  Oh and they can't  buy anything by mistake either.

I'm not a huge fan (if you can't tell) of unrestricted internet access. 94% of all teenagers today will view p**n before the age of 18, this includes teens in Christian homes. And the reason is eReaders, cell phones, game systems, tablets, iPods all have the ability to pick up a wireless signal.  And don't think just because you don't have wireless you're safe, all it takes is leaching off neighbors or a trip to McDonald's to access reprehensible material.

If you wanted something with internet that you could have SOLID parental controls on you were pretty much limited to iPads, but Kindle finally listened to all the parental complaints they were getting and they made a way to turn the wireless OFF and password protect turning it on with their new Kindle Fire.  Which means I can finally get a Kindle!  I'm not sure when, it might have to wait until next Christmas but I'll be getting one : ) (I've been stock piling free Kindle books in my Amazon account for awhile now).  Don't get me wrong I love my Sony, but Amazon's Kindles do have some extra bells and whistles : )

Even if the only internet an eReader has is to the "eStore" I'm still not a fan.  Have you seen some of the covers out there?!  There is enough evil in this world without inviting it into my house.  Maybe I'm being a little too prudent, but quite frankly I don't think this is an area where I can be too overprotective.

What do you think?  Are you excited that you can "lock down" a Kindle.  Have you been avoiding an eReader for this reason?
 



Posts in This Series

• Family Safe eReaders
• Formatting for Dummies Part I: Why I'm Mad at Smashwords
• Formatting for Dummies Part II: Tips I've Learned
• My Book Launch
• Resources and Freebies (And eBook Linkup)

By the way, would you mind voting for my cuties?

(Once you log in with Facebook, you can vote 10x's)

 

We have about a 10% chance of making it to the finals. We would LOVE to win the gift card to Babies R' Us (we desperately need new car seats.)

To stay up to date, and have access to my free e-book  Subscribe or  Like Lessons from Ivy 
And to see the lovely places where I link click here.    

Frumps to Pumps Book Review

I'm sure the novelty of doing vlogs will wear off eventually but at the moment I'm having fun with them : )

Here's my review of Sarah Mae's new book  Frumps to Pumps. (This is an affiliate link) 

Subscribers click on  the link to see the video.

And great news, she's offering it for free right now : ) So go and get Frumps to Pumps.

 

Note: This is not  KJV only book.  Normally I'm a little persnickity when it comes to this, but it's a book about getting dressed not fundamental doctrine, so I'll let it slide ; )

To stay up to date, and have access to my free e-book  Subscribe or  Like Lessons from Ivy 

And to see the lovely places where I link click here. 

Child Training Bible Winner and Need Book Reviewers!

And the winner of the Child Training Bible Is:

Andrea P!

Congratulations.

For those of you who didn't win, I highly recommend this Bible.

We've been doing our family devotions, and I've been doing my personal devotions out of it.

I just Love it : )
You Can Buy Your Own
Here

Also, I need Christian Musicians to Review my Ebook I'm releasing next month.

Send me an e-mail at lessonsfromivy at gmail dot com.

Be Blessed Today!

To stay up to date, and have access to my free e-book  Subscribe or  Like Lessons from Ivy 

And to see the lovely places where I link click here.

The Matthew 6:33 Piano Teacher Review Copies Available

Have you ever thought about teaching music lessons?  Maybe you're a pianist, violinist, or trained vocalist.  If you need a little extra money in the family budget teaching music lessons can be a great work from home business.

Music lessons have been a cottage industry for a very long time.  And I'd love to help you learn how to not only become a successful music teacher but more importantly, teach for the glory of God.

I'm releasing an eBook at the beginning of April and I need reviewers!  Even if you don't have a blog, I'm looking for reviewers to post to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles too.

If you think you're interested in reviewing this book for me, please e-mail lessonsfromivy at gmail dot com.

I'd love to be a blessing to you and help you earn a little extra income from home.

A Limited number of copies are available so please e-mail now.

To stay up to date, and have access to my free e-book  Subscribe or  Like Lessons from Ivy And to see where I link click here.

Giving an Ebook as A Gift

So for you procrastinators out there who still need a few more gifts, but might not be able to get out to the store, have you considered down-loading some e-books?  (Scroll Down to the bottom for my personal recommendations)

• They're a great gift for someone who has too much stuff, as they take up little to no space.
• They're are very inexpensive compared to print books (and you should buy a new copy for each person on your list)
• And sometimes free, like my book : ) 
• You don't have to load any children in car seats in order to buy them.
• It makes use of the e-reader everyone got for last Christmas.

In order for an un-named person on my list to be able to open something on Christmas I downloaded 7 e-books on CD and Printed off "covers" for each of them, and glued it to pink card stock.  My Master plan is to hole punch these and put them in a mini binder with the CD.

You could also print off the e-books if the copyright allows it.  (Mine does by the way)

The Books I chose were all ones I have read and truly enjoyed.  The un-named recipient (as if she hasn't guessed who she is by now if she's reading this) is a new mom.  Reading all of these books (and writing one) were a HUGE blessing to me, and I selected them with that in mind. Warrior Prayers in particular touched me, because I just had a son.  (Plus it's on sale right now for $.99)  Here are the links for the other books.

The Following Books are Free!!!

(Or Download for your specific e-reader here fore only $.99, Kindle, Nook, Sony, Kobo & others )

Some of these are affiliate links, but I'm not recommending the books because I'm affiliated with them, I'm affiliated with the books because I recommend them (highly).  And do consider using my links, I will make a small commission which of course helps buy a few more stocking stuffers.