Tag: Amazon Kindle

What book sales teach us

Published on by JayeLeave a comment

Well, the up side: Love or Lust is selling; yay for me.

In fact, this is the first lesson: contrary to logic, it is easier to sell a $3.99/£2.62 book than it is to give it away. DriveThru and Smashwords report no one has taken a free copy. According to Amazon the paid copies are just traipsing along at a steady clip. I won’t ask. I mean, really folks, I appreciate that people are paying for it but I’m not starving – my day job pays terribly, but it does pay.

Next lesson: approximately 1/3 of Americans don’t know what a sample is for. How do I come to this statistic? Well, it’s the best guess I can make when a full 1/3 of my US sales were very quickly returned, if the person started reading and changed their mind … you know, like in the span that the sample would have covered.

Corollary lesson: Brits don’t have that problem. The sales there are coming slower, but are catching the Americans up and they seem happy with the purchase.

Kobo can’t tell time. 36hrs is, last I checked, greater than 24hr. Greater in this context means more, large. It does not mean better. I’m still pending there, but I don’t know why.

This has been an … educational experience.

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A free copy, as promised

Published on by JayeLeave a comment

smashwordsFor the Smashworders theres this code:  GG53A
That will be valid until 8am PDT 1 July 2013

dt-fiction3dwebFor those with a special place in their hearts for DriveThru Fiction simply click the cute little logo to the left.

Sorry folks, but until I’m in iBookstore that’s it for places I can do any kind of promotions.  Amazon’s program for such things are just a free give away and only if I agree to exclusivity with them.  I can’t, in good conscience, do that to my readers who don’t use Kindle.

When will I be in iBooks?  I don’t know.  Apple, admirably, reviews the books submitted to them by hand.  This means the number of other books on their plate will determine when I’m accepted and released for sale.  Why is this admirable in this day of computers?  Simple:  a computer can’t see if someone puts an erotica up as a children’s book, a human can.  I’m willing to wait for them to protect the customers from incompetents and pranksters.

 

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Happiness and excitement

Published on by JayeLeave a comment

I don’t ever have to use Microsoft Word again.  The reasons for doing so can be accomplished in Apple’s Pages.  It’s even done the way I’d long suspected:  with Sections.  It just never worked for me before.

I can’t take the credit for learning this, though.  My lovely and talented editor figured it out.  She’s even more loathe to touch Office than I am — which is to say she steadfastly will not load it for any reason whatsoever.

In other news I’ve finished my proofread.  I’ll be spending tonight and tomorrow getting the files generated and uploaded.

I’m calling the release date the 29th, though Smashwords will have it the 28th because of their insistence on putting the file up as available the moment it’s uploaded instead of — like everyone else — after you’ve had the chance to make sure everything is correct and waiting for a final, blanket SUBMIT button to be pressed.  Oy.

Continue reading “Happiness and excitement” →

Editing is going well

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Love or Lust is going according to schedule.  I’m actually a little upset about this; I’d hoped I was being pessimistic when I decided on the schedule I gave myself.  Still, could be worse.

I will be updating the sample tomorrow or Wednesday — I hope.  I certainly will have it updated sometime before 4 July.

The pricing for the eBook still isn’t completely decided.  I’m considering us$4.99 (and comparable pricing across other currencies in other countries), us$3.99, or us$1.99.   I’m also seriously considering making it 99¢ for the first couple of weeks or so.

Either way I will do random discount codes, including free vouchers, for the eBook in blog posts during the month of July for the various eBook stores that give such options.

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Difficult decisions, difficult thoughts

Published on by JayeLeave a comment

You’re no doubt tired of hearing about this; I know I’m tired of thinking about it.

I’ve reached a final decision regarding Now & Forever‘s publication: I’m going to just put it out myself.

This really wasn’t an easy decision. By making it I am shutting myself out, completely, from certain sales channels – and things like the Scholastic Book Fair is not something to be set aside lightly if one is trying to write YA fiction. I’m also shutting myself out of some marketing channels – just TRY to find a reviewer willing to touch something self-published.

Still, YA romance readers are unlikely to be reading literary review blogs and mags, so no huge loss. The scholastic thing … well, no guarantee I could convince my publisher or agent to make the fight to carry my book there (unless it’s changed a lot since my days in school, I can’t imagine them happily taking a lesbian romance with a cheery smile).

Publishers don’t put forth enough promotion effort to be worth continued headache looking for an agent who then would have to find a publisher and … with some luck, hopefully by being out sooner I will make up for the loss of being on a Barnes & Noble shelf – the only part that really stings in this decision. Well, that and the prospect of an advance – given how my truck’s been behaving of late, that cash in hand would have been nice … though slow to arrive, I suppose.

As a result expect Love or Lust by the end of this month. When? I’ll get you a better estimate as soon as I can. It could stand one more scan for typos. Some rather silly ones slipped through the cracks somehow.

There’ll be a print edition via CreateSpace. I don’t know, yet, if I’ll bother with the expanded distribution at first or not. Feedback on how much people would rather order it from somewhere other than the CreateSpace store and Amazon will help with that – meaning, if you have an opinion, now is a great time to voice it.

There’ll be eBooks for: NOOK, Kindle, iBooks, and Kobo. There’ll also be copies available through Smashwords and a place called DriveThru Fiction. If you have a different preferred source of eBooks now is a great time to name it. These are all the ones I’m familiar with is the reason for their inclusion, I’ve no qualms adding to the list.

Pricing I’m still thinking about. The print edition pretty much has to be us$10, given the length of the book. The eBook, though? Well, I think most retailers make the minimum 99¢. I’ve contemplated this price – certainly keeps it in my budget. There’s much debate over how seriously people take books at that price point. Thus I’m considering as high as us$5.99.

Feedback helps. If you have an opinion on pricing, say. I’m listening. Don’t want to say publicly in the comments? Contact me.

The sample chapters are, and ever will be available. So, give them a look. Given that this is a YA series, feedback on stores and pricing from parents or teens is doubly hoped for.

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Self Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing: The Reader’s Perspective

Published on by Jaye2 Comments

I couldn’t agree with this more.

The major publishing houses are not great boon, but neither is self-publishing and vice versa. To the reader, the matter comes down to: a great book.

That said, there is the question of distribution. Unquestionably your book will be in more physical stores traditionally published than not. For those writing the applicable genres there’re things like the Scholastic Book Fairs to consider, where only select agents or select publishing houses are allowed entry — self-published is barred.

Still, self-published could compensate for that lack of visibility with a lower price … possibly.

It all comes down to luck and talent in proper alchemical proportions, I suppose.

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Jack Woe

The merits of self-publishing vs. traditional-publishing has been discussed at great length in various blogs from the point of view of authors.  Never, or very rarely has this been discussed from the point of view of readers; the people that ultimately buy the books.  This is my attempt to correct that.

This blog is inspired by The Trials of Self-Publishing: Why I Consider It a Last Resort and Eisler on Digital Denial.

Publication Snobbery

When I buy a book, I don’t consider the publisher at all.  Whoever published the book doesn’t matter.  This also means I don’t care if it’s been self-published.  Not one bit.  It does matter how well it’s written and edited — and that there aren’t so glaring grammatical errors I’m not sure what’s being said.

To dispel a myth, traditional publishers offer little protection from any of those points.  True, I can be reasonably sure…

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Further Opinions of eBook services

Published on by Jaye1 Comment

So far, both as reader and as writer I must say I prefer iBooks.

I finally got Google to work.  First off, there’s a sign up you must do, but the instructions are arranged so that it looks like what you do is go to http://books.google.com/partner, and the sign up using a link found there.  No.

Okay, there’s a sign up link below that link in the FAQ that is where you need to start — yes, you read that right.  Where one starts is with the second link in the instructions (sounds stupid yet?).  This takes you to a signup sheet where you fill in your info.  Now, important note:  If you’ve more than one gmail account (as many people do) be sure you’re currently signed into the right one!  It’ll take you to a Google accounts login, but it’s already too late, if it’s got a username filled in for you and is only prompting you for the password?  Yeah, that’s the one it used.

The interface is obtuse.  Most things are pretty straightforward, admittedly, but a few things aren’t.  For example:  say you write and self publish some work under pseudonym (something more than a few self-published folk do, especially ones who write multiple genres), you have to set up imprints.  And it has very poor help on what some of the odder of the fields in that screen mean.

I’m still toying with it, to be fair, but I must say it’s no real surprise to me why so many of the friends I know who have AndroidOS devices use the Kobo, Nook, or Amazon apps for ebooks instead of Google Play.  I wasn’t terribly impressed with the reader app, and have long since deleted it from my iPad, and never bothered with it on my desktop.

I’m also hitting a sticking point with Nook.  I contacted B&N’s PubIt help regarding problems I’m having with their service recognising an ISBN on a book I was trying to manage, and for another where the ISBN was recognised to display that or at least have it linked in some fashion for searches … the response was a rather unhelpful thing saying that all books get a 12-digit BNID and are identified by that.  Which is a total lie.  Example: Discount Armageddon.

True, I doubt that was put up via PubIt.  So, it’s possibly true of PubIt titles.  Which points to yet another place where an eBook seller is treating independent authors, publishers, etc. like they’re second class or worse.  That ISBN is important for people who might be looking for the ebook for their favourite device and lots of services for linking to things (e.g. Goodreads.com) use ISBN based APIs for this.

I’ll keep experimenting.  And if my own work goes up via PubIt I’ve some theories on what’s going on that I can play around with.  Still, so far, Nook’s a pretty sharp platform from a reader’s point of view, less impressed now with PubIt from a writer/publisher point of view (and less impressed with their customer support, even Amazon was never that unhelpful).

So to put it another way I have just decided that my first rank goes to Apple, second to Kobo & DriveThru Fiction, third goes to Nook & Smashwords, and dead last goes to Google and Amazon.

At this point I’m starting to wonder, rather much, if I shan’t take up the agent I submitted to if she should respond positively to my books (so far still waiting with bated breath and fingers crossed) in order to save myself money on aspirin.  Self -epublishing isn’t as hard as most people make it out to be, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t work and isn’t annoying.  Still, it’ll all come down to how insulting the terms would be if I went traditional publishing house to decide if I’ll be putting Now & Forever out myself or letting someone else do it.

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My opinions of eBook services

Published on by Jaye3 Comments

There are, these days, nearly as many places online to buy eBooks as there are ads for cheap genital enhancements.  Most are fly-by-night operations; here at breakfast and gone by brunch.  In all there are only a few: Amazon (Kindle), Barnes & Noble (Nook), and Apple (iBooks). Honourable mentions might go to Kobo, Smashwords, and Google Play Books.

On these I’d like to share my experience in dealing with them.

First, the good.  All are free.  All but Google Play Books is perfectly easy to use.  Google loses here because it’s been months and their sign up function to access the seller area to upload your book has been down (in fact I’ve just checked it and it still doesn’t work).

The bad.  Well, Google’s afore mentioned brokenness.  Smashwords’ meatgrinder is a nightmare as are other aspects of their required formatting.  And all but Apple treat you as something lesser than the big publishers (well, I suppose Smashwords, too, is an exception … but it’s hard to say so given certain aspects of their format guidelines).

That’s the point, in the end. All but Apple’s system feels amateurish, even a bit insulting in spots.  A trait I can, sincerely, overlook if I had full option services, but I don’t.

What options?

Well, how about the ability to arrange a pre-order?  Apple, yes.  The others?  No.

Promo codes for give aways?  Apple and Smashwords, yes, the others?  Not a chance.  Now to be fair, a not even big enough for honourable mention, DriveThruFiction.com, is also good for this.  Admittedly, Apple doesn’t give discount codes, it’s a free copy code, but let’s face it … when’re you going to want to give a limited audience sale versus a limited audience freebee?  If you want the book to be half price for a little while why not just lower the price for a few days/weeks?  Still, discount codes exist in some form with these.

Priority professional response to issues: Apple shines here. It took less than three hours to get a reply to a message about a technical issue I was having and it was detailed, and carefully written in the same way you might expect them to respond to the representative for Penguin Books.  Nook and Kobo were helpful, but less prompt.  Smashwords’ support I’ve no basis for sample.  Google is dead last, I’ve never heard back about the login issue and I’ve contacted them more than once.  Amazon … they’re not terribly prompt, except when they are, and while their replies are courteous and clear, they do not always strike me as having carefully read the message to which they’re replying nor do I feel very pleased with some of the rather severely dated shortcomings of their eStore (did you know Amazon doesn’t have a simple method to receive or even know about an update to an eBook you buy from them?  There isn’t.  You have to contact them and request the update be made available for download, then delete the item from your app/device, then redownload it.  Versus everyone else who you can just redownload from to get the update, and the other big boys having in device/app update alert).

All-in-all I find Apple to be the best, though once you get past its very old school look (and ignore that you could ask twenty people in a row and likely not a one will have ever heard of the place) DriveThru is pretty great too.

Nook’s PubIt is next best, it has far better preview functionality than Kobo and is rather more intuitive.

Kobo ranks third, it’s awkward to get to the WritingLife service which is their indie/self publishing service, and while not unintuitive is not exactly intuitive either. A mark in its favour is the ability to preschedule your publication, sadly this is an internal autoprocess and in no way a pre-order option.

Next is Smashwords and Amazon, both of whom are usable and have some things to recommend them, but I find them a bit … arrogant?  KDP has a lot of quirky loopholes, like the 35% vs. 70% royalty option and the radical way they differ if/when Amazon does a price match, the unavailability of the 70% at certain prices (for a feel of how really bizarre this is, all others are 60, 65 or 70% depending the store regardless of price).  I also really find the Kindle and its .MOBI to be anything but impressive.  Smashwords has a rather amateur feel, and annoyingly many arbitrary, utterly unnecessary requirements to get the book past their file quality, and admittedly unnecessary thing if you only want to use them and not their premium catalogue option (they act as agent and put your book on other services like iBooks) but it still gives you the error messages.  There’s also the fact that your book is made instantly available upon upload, which doesn’t seem a problem at first … until you realise you’ve selected the wrong file by mistake.  I also think they push their premium catalogue to an unseemly extent which gives them a cut of your sales though OTHER online book sellers, all of whom you could have set up with free and gotten full royalty or.

Last is Google.  I’ve said all I can about them.  I can’t seem to actually use them, and so they quite simply land at the bottom of the pile.

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Decisions, decisions …

Published on by JayeLeave a comment

So the final editing of Love or Lust is well under way.  It probably won’t be done by Valentine’s Day, but it still might.  It is moving at a fair clip, but that doesn’t change that there’s about 140k words and 400-ish pages to get  through.  Too, I have to make a final read through just to make sure that the final buff and polish is done, so that date will likely be missed and was never a very resounding likelihood anyway.

That’s got me to thinking about a few things.

First off, section separators:  Also known as fleurons (and an hundred other things), they do give a certain flair to the page.  They’re also a bloody wretch to figure out how to do.  With Dingbats type fonts they’re a breeze in the PDF, but they start to become an unholy nightmare in the universe of the ePUB and Kindle editions.  Not impossible, mind, but nightmare.  An alternative is to just use a little graphic.  Dear God save me from things that ought to be black on transparent alpha layer but instead are scans complete with random not exactly white artefacts in the white bits!!  Photoshop and I had a lovely row about that.  I did make one.  It was kind of pretty.  Well, that is, until I tried to put it on the page.  That didn’t go too well. Still … I’d appreciate feedback on that.

If you click on the word fleurons above it’ll take you to an example image.  The alternative is good old fashioned asterisks.

The second bit of thinking was just a bit of fun inspired by how another author did a little pre-release promotion.  Seanan McGuire did a Discount Armageddon A–B–Cs thing that seemed kind of cute.  The more I think about it the less I want to do it.  So I probably won’t.  But just in case I do lose my mind and decide to go with this little touch of lunacy … well … you’ve been warned.

Solidly decided things:

  • Publishing, I don’t care if you use a publisher or do it yourself, is a good way to go completely mad with indecision, anxiety, self-doubt, and several other things that suddenly have escaped my vocabulary and are lost in the woods some place.
  • I love my cover art.  I’m, torn between ideas regarding it though.  I’m very much thinking to keep that layout and just change the colour scheme for each book, and then (naturally) the image.  The question is, do I keep finding girl/girl cover art (something I can absolutely do for Ready or Not but is giving me a touch of trouble for later books), or just keep finding pretty images (e.g. the 4th book maybe having a ballet slipper on it or some such).  Ah well, I’m not even done with the second book yet and feel like it needs heavy editing so I’ve plenty of time to consider and reconsider this.
  • The print edition will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of us$10.  Sadly, this is due entirely to length.  It costs more than the retail price of a novel half this size just to print the bloody things.  Which gives me a new found respect for some of the newest Terry Pratchett novels I’ve picked up being about us$10, but doesn’t explain some places charging that much for things like Light Fantastic or Wyrd Sisters!  The eBook, though, will likely be closer to us$4 or us$5.  Compelling enough arguments could see it as low as us$3 (just use the comments or the contact link), but current ‘wisdom’ says the higher price will attract more sales.  We’ll see.

Page numbers.   I’ve just realised I’ve no idea how I should like to do the page numbers.  Centered and unadorned at the bottom of the page?  Unadorned at the bottom corner of the page (obviously this thought is for the print edition only)?  Unadorned at the top?  If decorated, with tildes or a fleuron/dingbat?  Well, don’t ever let anyone tell you self-publishing is easy, or that it’s the lazy way out or any other such nonsense.  That said, going through a publisher is just as bad or worse — you may not have to decide a lot of this stuff, but then you have to worry that your first edition might have covers in “50 shades of mud” and “kept them out of the shops“, among too many other less amusing anecdotes by far too many other authors to mention.

I’ll always argue with someone who says writing is ‘hard work’ — I take issue with the work part.  The hard … that depends on perspective, writing is challenging in terms of telling a good story well and not losing your mind in the process.  Work it is not.  Publishing, on the other hand, I will doubt the sanity of anyone who claims is anything but work and be suspicious of anyone who claims it to be easy.

In other news Puppy Bowl is tomorrow!!  I’ll, alas, be missing it because a) I’ll be at work and b) I don’t actually have any TV service that doesn’t come via my DVD player.

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Making Kindle friendly files

Published on by Jaye3 Comments

I’ve been working on various options for publishing my books to Amazon.

For a print copy there’s Create Space which looks fairly straightforward and easy to use.  Charges to be distributed outside of Amazon, and gives a horrible royalty at that point (though sadly one not too far from the mark of what every royalty would be if I went traditional publishing.  I won’t say I’m self-publishing for the money, self pub has it’s own drawbacks, but I won’t say the big guys’ under 5% rates weren’t insulting enough to be a factor).

For electronic publishing it looks like I would need an ISBN for Apple iBooks.  Unfortunate as I’d like to be published there, but don’t have us$250 for ISBNs (us$125 singly or us$250 for 10.  I’ve got 4 books I’d like to publish.  And do plan to write more).  So looks like being there is a bit back burner – bummer since that’s my favourite eBook store.  Kobo, which I’d never heard of, and the Nook I can just upload an ePUB generated by Pages ’09 and they’re happy so I’ll be doing that.  Amazon, well, suffice to say Amazon’s a little different.

Amazon has its KDP program.  No big deal, right?  I can upload .doc, .pdf, .epub, or .html to it.  Yes, and it comes out kind of weird.  Okay, so it looks like they use their own thing:  .mobi.  What can make .mobi?  Amazon’s software, KindleGen – not impressive.  A program called Calibre – easy to use though not written with non-computer geeks in mind (luckily I can fake it) as all too much FOSS stuff is these days, and its .mobi output is awful:  Assuming Amazon will let you upload it (frequently gives an error message) you wind up with insane word wrap!  Finally there’s a plugin for Adobe InDesign CS4-6 which allows export to Kindle.  Like many Adobe products it is, just a moment while I consult a thesaurus – I need an antonym, ah looks like non-intuitive will have to do despite lacking poetry, but then again so is InDesign.

Because it was no easy task I’m going to give some simple steps for what to do.

First off, have a .doc or .docx file. And be prepared to make adjustments.

Fire up InDesign, tell it you’re making a Document.  Set it to Digital Publishing, then select Kindle from the appropriate drop down.

Okay, from here it’s easy, just stupid.  Click file, then PLACE.  Not import, gods no, of course not.  Why would it be Import!?  Place is the only sensible term for doing what we’re about to do!  Find your doc file.  PDF works too I imagine, but that was … different and I didn’t like it.

Where’s the document?!  Notice your cursor looks funny?  Click the blank page in front of you.  Don’t worry where, it doesn’t seem to make a lick of difference.

There!  Your document is ready!  Or is it?

It doesn’t import auto-indent settings correctly.  Why?  One word:  Adobe.

You could do all manner of things to fix this, but the easiest is this:

Pray you set separate styles for things that oughtn’t have been auto-indented.  If you didn’t, you just have to add/remove indents by hand.  Luckily there’s the ability to do it via selection tool.

Now for those of us with styles for everything, go to the top and click Type.  Go down to Paragraph Styles.

An ugly little box pops up with a list of all your Styles.  Hurray, now what?  Where’s the edit option?  It’s in a right click menu.  God knows why.

There.  Edit all the styles that should (or shouldn’t.  Two books in a row, one imported with, the other without.  Explain THAT one!) be auto indented and fix the indents.  This will fix it for all the text with that style, which if you remembered to set that when you made the document in the first place means you’re all set.

When finished, click file, click Export for Kindle, enjoy what SHOULD be a good mobi file.

There’re some quirks that can happen with the title page so you might have to adjust some here and there so don’t forget to preview your file.