Tag: Nook

Release date selected

Published on by JayeLeave a comment

Love or Lust coverAfter carefully considering my rate of proofreading, the rate I ought to be proofreading, and the amount of work it will take to make the book ready for publication I have decided that the release date for Love or Lust will be 29 June 2013.

I will be making the final uploads on the evening/afternoon of the 28th so it’s possible that some sources (e.g. Smashwords) might have it sooner — and, sadly, a few (e.g. iBooks) might show it a bit later than that.  It can’t be helped, but Amazon, Nook, Kobo, CreateSpace, etc. should all take about 12 – 24 hours to actually make the book available, so we’ll call it the next day.

Keep a careful watch on the blog — the folks reading regularly may get a discount/free copy from one or more of the sources in the form of coupon codes or redemption vouchers.  It might just randomly be at the end of, or in the comments of a post one day.  Just a little gift from me to you.

I will probably, at some point in the year, do both a sale or two or an outright giveaway.  These will be announced as their own post.  I also intend to create a Goodreads give away (in fact I should have done that yesterday, but I kind of forgot about it).

I’m also looking around for reviewers.  Feel free, please, to recommend your favourite ones in the comments below, or here.  I was going to tackle a place I’ve discovered called The Indie View which looks fairly promising.  I don’t believe they actually do reviews, rather they’re more of a portal to fine reviewers more easily in much the same way as QueryTracker acts to help one find an agent or publisher.

I’m so excited I feel ill.  I wonder — did Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, or any other prolific author feel like this on every book?  I assume, naturally, we all feel like this on our earliest works, but after 25?  50?  100?  I guess I shall have to try to attain such a lofty back catalogue to find out.

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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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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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Let there be samples!

Published on by Jaye2 Comments

Cover Official

Well, there’s a sample up for Love or Lust now.

It’s only the first two chapters, and that’s all I intend to have up, for the moment, but I might elect to add the third chapter too.

There is no downloadable ePUB or PDF sample.  That’s too much bother and will be left up to the various eBook retailers to supply.  The launch availability is currently iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Smashwords, Amazon (print), and Createspace.  I’m considering putting up on a little place called DriveThru Fiction as well.  It looks easy enough to use, and I won’t say no to a venue that costs nothing to publish through since all it can mean is more sales.  If you’ve a favourite eBookstore you don’t see listed feel free to contact me or leave a comment naming it.

Ready or Not (concept only)I’ve also decided the cover for Ready or Not.  Mostly because that gave me something to do that felt constructive while I tried to decide what happens next in the story.  I do believe it’s about done as the girls are having an Easter break kickoff party in the part I’m currently working on.  Then it’s off to editing, working out a less placeholdery blurb, and then to the editor (yes, I edit things BEFORE I give them to my editor.  I happen to like the woman and would feel rather bad if she wound up in an asylum by any action of my own).

I’m starting to feel a little better about Book 2, lately.  I’m starting to think that the less cohesive, more anecdotal form it has taken so far might make it a good transitional tale.  Something to give a better feel for the characters and their normal lives.  In short, rather than one big slice of their life looked at from edge to edge as Book 1 is, Book 2 is more like several little slices and glimpses of time.  I don’t know.  I’ll get it typed, give it a few read throughs, then decide if it’s a mess or not.

Suffice to say I’m off my writer’s block and things are moving along well.

P.S.  Those paying attention will notice that Love or Lust‘s cover says “Jaye Edgecliff” while Ready or Not‘s says “Jaye Em Edgecliff”, that’s because the latter is what I’d prefer, but the former is what I have to do because of a quirk to the cover layout and Book 1 has a finalised cover versus Book 2 which has a cover I’m still playing with.

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Progress?

Published on by JayeLeave a comment

Sadly, no, not really.

Love or Lust is still being edited.  It’s moving along at a good pace, but apparently I make too many tiny punctuation errors for it to go what, by strict definition, could be called fast.  They might even be small enough most people wouldn’t notice them, but between my knowing how to do some of them right (typo, inattentiveness, or messing up when changing something would be how THOSE wind up wrong) and a certain sense of:   if I’m going to go through this kind of stress I might as well make sure it’s done right, it just wouldn’t do to leave them be.

Ready or Not is stuck in too many way.  Part of it is a long series of migraines.  Creative thought and migraines just don’t happen together, full stop.  Too I keep having life interfering with it, and finally I just can’t quite get a good handle on what happens next.

I should be set for a, relatively, simultaneous release on Kobo, Nook, Kindle, print, iBooks, Smashwords, and DriveThruFiction.  ‘Relatively’ just to account for Murphy’s Law, one of them, I just know, is going to take forever to put the book up in their store in some fashion and possibly require re-upload of the file based on some error it couldn’t have just kicked back when it first scanned the file during the initial upload.

All in all, I look forward to the release.  I hope to see mountains of reviews and lots of comments about it.

I should have some previews up very soon.  I’m really just waiting to decide where to cut it off at and then I’ll put it here (first few chapters are pretty much done, so shouldn’t be too much trouble).

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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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Love or Lust – almost done

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Cover OfficialFinished editing the first book today! Love or Lust is in its, approximately, final form. From here the only thing really on the to-do list is to hand it back to my lovely editor and let her go all Hardcore Grammar Nazi on it, and appease her with chocolate so she won’t send me to a concentration camp or gas chamber for my comma splices and similar.

The cover is almost finalised. It is going to get a small tweak so it says something about being book 1 of Now & Forever, but otherwise will be what is pictured stage right [Update: That IS the final cover there complete with the Now & Forever bit, obviously] (click it to see it bigger). Those who keep track will notice [Update: insert — essentially] this is my fallback cover. This is because my artist got a bad case of the busy real life. His business has him working about an hundred hours a day six days a week, but he’s doing something he loves so, at least that’s something.

The print edition may have a slightly different cover, but that will depend entirely on how hard it is to build my own from scratch. CreateSpace has some clever options in its cover designer that I’ve managed to make a pretty look with. Might even use CreateSpace’s cover for the eBook, but I doubt it [Update: absolutely they will be the same].

Just to list the initial retailers that will be carrying the title, for absolute certain: CreateSpace & Amazon, Kindle, Nook, Kobo. I may do more. Depending how annoying it is, more might even include Smashwords – but don’t hold your breath, that site irritates me.  [Update: As I just discovered that Smashword will accept ePubs directly, they might not be off the list]

All in all, look for the first instalment of this four book series within the coming two months (more likely one month). [Update: I really need to take calendar lessons or something … more like 2 – 4 months from when I’d made this post]

For those not inclined to follow the links and haven’t been keeping up: Now & Forever itself is a slice-of-life romantic comedy about Lauren Conners and Salencia (aka Sally) Constellino, students of the Catholic school named Immaculate Conception, and in true love together. Love or Lust introduces us to the cast and brings the girls together and about the girls learning what it truly means to be in love.

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.

Ah me, but publishing is such a slow process

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I think it’s taking longer to edit the book than it did to write it.  It hasn’t, actually, not yet anyway.  Still Love or Lust is still on track to be out before Christmas, though I don’t think before Halloween.  Thanksgiving, perhaps.

Ready or Not is proving interesting.  Just got done writing a bit I didn’t see coming.  It’s proving an interesting ride to write that one.

To note Love or Lust will absolutely be available in Trade Paperback through Amazon, as well as for Kindle, and from Barnes & Noble for their Nook the day it’s published.  Apple‘s iBookstore with luck will be the same day or shortly after – but depending on various factors could take a month or two.  Same goes for getting a print copy outside of Amazon.

Why?  Going self-publish.  The big boys are impossible, and given the girl-meets-girl nature of Now & Forever, I’d be pretty well relegated to rather niche publishers whose books aren’t normally on store shelves.  Way I figure it, if I’m going to have limited distribution either way, I might as well do it myself and save myself some hassle.