Ready to Publish--Which Steps to Take?

It's the most exciting time for a writer when she/he gets ready to publish a book. Given that most of us  belong to the self-pub'd variety, the fun and glory besides the work is loaded on our own shoulders.
How many years do we spend on writing it on average? How many years do we go through numerous if not countless revisions? Whether you are a fast writer and keep writing to get the story out of your mind onto paper (computer) or whether you belong to the meticulous type, like me, who corrects every sentence as soon as you see it written down: n'importe quoi! It always seems to take forever until we can launch our baby into the big old world.Ask a big, traditional author how long it took him! Also years, sometimes. Unless you are so well established that their publisher makes them write a book a year.
And a launch is not merely a publication date anymore. While having the book revised and formatted so that it is ready for print, some of us play around with title covers, asking fellow writers and beta readers which cover image they prefer, which font, which sub-title etc. After all, we want to get it just right. At least for our own critical eye if not ideally for all the potential readers. So hours are spent scouting through the allegedly free websites that advertise free pictures ...and always get their hands in your purse and charge. Find a talented cover designer who puts your ideas into print. And I must say, I'm very happy with mine, Tayyaba Bano. Not just creative but also reliable and affordable!
With a little tweaking here and there you soon make it to the launch pad and announce the title cover reveal with much aplomb, send press releases out and maybe organize a launch party; a virtual fest on Facebook. Lucky you if you have a publisher of your choice. For first timers calculate in some days of comparing self-publishing houses to each other. I have my experience with 2 of the big names and could now decide quickly which one to go for. The publisher of my choice at least gives you the illusion that he can get you into bookstore by nature of being on the Ingram distribution list. But buyer beware-- it doesn't often happen, definitely not automatically. So another difficult choice has to be made: Do I spend the extra $60 for my high hopes of making it this time for my paperback version?
First title around I learned how to buy a cheap ISBN and how to register it. Formatting an e-Book is child's play.Well, Amazon converts your manuscript almost automatically. Uploading is simple and it will go live within 24 hours. The learning curve for me this time round is figuring out how to offer the option of pre-publication orders. I wish...!
Still waiting for endorsements and reviews here which should go on the back cover or inside. I guess that could be added later.
Since there is practically no holiday between now that St. Patrick's Day is over and Bloomsday (16 June), I could really go public any day. (Bank holidays don't count!) Who knows about Mr. Blooms Day anyway? Nobody I know ever really read Ulysses. And what has that got to do with an organic Irish farm and its farming life anyway?
So without further ado I now give you my latest baby.

I ONCE HAD A FARM IN IRELAND: LIVING THE ORGANIC LIFESTYLE

If you'd like to review it, contact me and I'll send you a free copy!
Siggy Buckley, the Ex Farmer's Wife
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Detective Visibility and The Mystery of Amazon Categories....

By Terry Tyler

...... I've read a bit recently about getting my books more visible on Amazon, because we all know that "discoverability" is one of the best ways to get people reading your books, right? 

I know that genre charts are massively important, probably THE most

important thing in this. The trick is to find categories that will be searched for by book buyers, but are not too extensively populated already. Both my last two books, Dream On and Full Circle, got to about 2000 in the chart at their highest point, but were not in any genre charts because I'd chosen massively over-used things like contemporary fiction, so I knew I had to sort that out before I did the 77p promotion for them this weekend.

Dream On and Full Circle are both centred around two things: musicians wanting to hit the big time, and love relationship/parenthood tangles. In Dream On my character Janice is a single mother; the book features much about her day to day life. In Full Circle, three of my main characters have small children - the fatherhood thing is one of the central themes. In this book the subject of alcoholism is also prominent, but I couldn't find a fiction category that deals with this...

.... and, furthermore, there is, apparently, no such Amazon genre as 'rock fiction'. I researched the subject of categories quite extensively, and eventually found the perfect one for Dream On: lad lit. Dream On has as many reviews from men as from women, virtually all of whom loved the rock band bits, saying that the banter between the men is so realistic (pssst!! - the two other main characters are women!!). Marvellous, thought I - really relevant to my book, and not highly populated - a real "Eureka!" moment! I emailed Amazon. No, can't put it in lad lit. Why not? Because that category exists for Books but not for Kindle Books. Okay.....

Now, this is interesting, and something that might be useful for us all to know: Amazon explained to me that the categories you see books in, on the books' own pages, aren't necessarily their own standard categories from which you can choose to place your book. They are decided by customer search; what the customer put in the search facility, and how often your book is clicked on after such a search. Which explains a lot, I think. Like why my psychological drama You Wish sometimes enters the 'occult' chart.... at no point have I chosen 'occult' as a genre for that book.

You may have read in a certain best-selling book about visibility that all you need to do is identify the category and chain leading to it, and email Amazon to ask for your book to be put in it (eg, Kindle>Fiction>Mystery>Victorian); I don't know if this was ever correct, but it certainly isn't now. Amazon assures me that it doesn't work like this.

After further extensive research I identified two other perfect Kindle fiction categories that would apply to aspects of both books - please note: I made sure they were both for fiction, and specified that the books should be in the FICTION categories first and foremost. Thus: Single Parent for Dream On, and Fatherhood for Full Circle. I emailed Amazon with my requests.

I am happy to say that both books are, this morning, in genre charts.
Dream On is in Non Fiction>Parenting & Families>ParentingFull Circle is in Books>Health,Family & Lifestyle>Families & Parents>Fatherhood

I give up.....

(I just hope that people are intelligent enough to read the blurb before going to purchase a self-help book about parenting and ending up with a philandering wannabe rock star getting hauled onto the Jeremy Kyle show....)

Terry Tyler is author of Full Circle, Dream On, The Other Side, Nobody's Fault and You Wish, and a member of Independent Authors International. Visit Terry Tyler's blog at terrytyler59.blogspot.com.

How I Fought the Amazon Wars and Won

When I wrote my first historical detective mystery, Forevermore, I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to write the best story for my reader to enjoy. This is the goal of every independent author out there, and the reason I want to communicate this fact of indie publishing is that many of the "big publishing houses" are not publishing the best stories for their readers. Please allow me to elucidate.

I have been published by a big publisher. It was called "Harcourt-Brace," and it was the small professional arm of the corporation, "AP Professional Press" that published my book, The Digital Scribe: A Writer's Guide to Electronic Media. Notice the quaint reference to "electronic media." Back in the late nineties, we were still bedazzled by the newness of digital technology and its "multimedia" aspect. Today, digital multimedia is part and parcel of most of the "packaged novels" that get submitted by the big agents out there. They've already looked ahead to all the money to be made on movies, computer games, translations, Chinese edited versions, ads on the walls of urinals, and on and on with the corporate merchandising aspect of business. This was 1996, so publishing had yet to go through the gigantic and tumultuous war with the Amazons (coming soon to a screen near you!), and I was too much of a rookie to see the writing on the Amazon wall, so to speak.  Amazon, after all, was also a "big corporation."

Flash forward to 2013, and I am completely entrenched in the "indie publishing movement." Yes, I am politicizing this because there is a grassroots "political" movement going on that dares to stand-up to the big publishing giants and call them on their intrigues and misrepresentations. I wrote a "little mystery" that I was proud to say was a "big publisher's worst nightmare." Why? First of all, it was short (114 pages in paperback, 12 pt. font); it was not padded with description and useless back story; it was, in short, the best short mystery I had ever written, and it was meant to grab the readers' interest and keep them entertained for the entire 114 real pages and 2415 Kindle pages. I used the simple and straightforward distribution method of Amazon's (there's that creepy name again) Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). This method allowed me (ME, ME, ME, a thousand times ME) to control all of the content, all of the revisions, all of the covers, all of the entire blasted book! Oh my God! It was if I had been re-born! I now had a direct line to my reader! No longer would I have to haggle with an editor about using a drawing of a male monk in the Middle Ages on my book's cover because, she said, "Eighty percent of readers are female, and they would not want to see a male monk."   But, I argued, monks were male in the Middle Ages!  Anyway, I had to "compromise" and use the "hands of the monk" holding a feather pen! With KDP and those lovely Amazon ladies, I was able to make all of these big, "executive decisions" about my own book! What power! All of that concentrated energy infused my body!  (Or perhaps too much caffeine?)

Of course, I must give a spoiler alert to all you would-be indie pubbers out there. Unless you know what goes into a really good story, and you've consulted with other indie authors about how to set-up your book, you had better stay away from the wild forest where the Amazons roam. They will capture you, possibly castrate or dismember you, and put you in a pot for Mah Jong hors d'oeuvres later that day. Suffice it to say, get somebody to "have your back" when you go down the indie road into the dark Amazon forest of KDP or even the seemingly "friendlier" places where they Smash Words or read together with Sluggo and Little Lulu. I suggest you check-out places like Indies Unlimited. They have some crusty old buggers who have been down many of the self-publishing roads, and they are really friendly to newbies! Don't, under any circumstances, fall for the scams out there! You thought Amazons were tough? You haven't experienced anything until you've been raped by Author Solutions and its vast minions of corporate goons!

Okay, where was I?  Oh yeah, me (my favorite topic).  So I wrote this tiny little mystery that began to receive some favorable reviews on Amazon (up to 11 so far) from my readers.  These weren't reviews from some paid author who publishes his books at the same big publisher as I do, or some "computer harvested mass of reviewers" who are paid by big publishers to receive some other "reward."  No, these were actual readers of the book (the best kind for reviews, by the way).  I know they are the best kind because I have been hoodwinked by so-called "professional" reviewers who never read my book.  In fact, my favorite short story is "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff.  In this story, the protagonist, Enders, is a professional book reviewer of this ilk, and he receives his just desserts!

The final bullet in my brain came from my hero detective author, Lawrence Block.  He was saying how he recommended all would-be mystery writers to become independent if they want to bypass the "screwing over" that was becoming the norm in big publishing.  This is a gentleman who could practically "name his advance" in the detective mystery genre, so when he barked I sat up.

Are there independent author success stories?  I'll let you be the judge.  This ain't a war for nothin', ya know!

Jim Musgrave is an author, English Professor and business owner who lives in San Diego, CA.  His most recent historical mystery series features Detective Pat O’Malley in Forevermore. 

Cover reveal: One Shade of Red

A stunning cover by David C. Cassidy graces the new book by Scott Bury, author of The Bones of the Earth. Available April 2 on Amazon, iBooks, Smashwords and other e-book retailers, this  sexy spoof will turn Fifty Shades on its head.

Women want the perfect man, so they can change him. But when university student Damian Serr discovers a rich, beautiful woman who’s voracious about sex, he doesn’t try to improve on perfection. It’s all that he can do to hold on for the ride.

Damian has always followed the rules, always tried to please others. At 20, he still dates the girl next door because his parents like her parents. When Nick, his university roommate, asks Damian to take over his pool-cleaning business so he can take an internship in London, Damian can’t say no — especially to Nick’s first and only client, a rich widow.

But widow Alexis Rosse is far from helpless or lonely. This beautiful financial genius is busy turning the markets upside-down, and she revels in sex wherever, whenever and with whomever she wants.

Over the summer, Alexis gives Damian an intense education. Day after day, she pushes him to his sexual limits. The only question he has is: will she break them? 

Scott Bury

What’s Not Up!

Like many authors, we recently reduced our eBook price for the holidays. Our price was 99 cents* until the end of January 2013 or so we thought. It turned out that even after our new price of $2.99 went live on Amazon; the Kindle price remained 99 cents. At first we attributed it to being the weekend, yet it continued. So I asked Amazon why this was happening.

The answer came back that Amazon consulted eBooks connect website and it showed that the Sony version of our book was still at 99 cents. So I checked, sure enough it was at that time. As of the time of this writing, the Sony price is now correct but Amazon still lists it at 99 cents. I suspect that by the time you read this the price will be corrected on Amazon.

What did I learn? First don’t say prices are going to be a certain amount until Amazon updates them on the product page. Second, allow 2 weeks for Sony to process when updating prices through Smashwords. Third, remember lesson for next time we have a Holiday sale and adjust accordingly.

Hope this has been informative to my fellow authors; it certainly was an eye-opener for me.

Lynn Hallbrooks

Co-author of Call Sign: Wrecking Crew (Storm Warning)

Co-owner of Call Sign Wrecking Crew, LLC

*All prices quoted are in United States currency.

When a Free of Charge Book Becomes a Sale

There is a saying, “Never count your chickens before they hatch.” One could also say, “Never count your money until it is in your hands.”

As authors, sometimes we forget to pay attention to the business elements of publishing. Whether you are a self-publisher or use a traditional publishing company, you spend most of your time being creative by concentrating on developing your characters, plots and superb endings. In addition, you put your heart and soul into marketing and advertising your work and hoping you will make a nice return on your book(s).

In January of 2012, I enrolled my fourth book, Wicked Intent into Amazon KDP Select and offered the ebook free during the month of January. During the first two weeks of its release, the publisher’s records showed that I had sold over 1200 copies. To my surprise, it almost sounded too good to be true. After all, no major media featured my digital book, and it was not on The New York Times Bestseller List.

Nevertheless, I had big plans as to what I was going to do with my windfall. I needed a few office supplies, and I was going to purchase some books, but a little birdie in my brain said, “Do not charge any items on your credit card until the company wires the money into your account.”

When I saw no money put into my account at the end of March, I sent an email questioning where my royalties were.

To make a long story short, KDP responded. Their records showed that I had no sales during the month of January but sales during other months. Mind you, their records, which I downloaded, showed 835 units sold in US, 55 in other countries and 384 in the UK and four in Denmark.

I replied by attaching their reports of my sales to my email and asked, “Could you please explain to me why the attached three reports indicate that 1280 copies of my ebook were purchased?”

Well, I heard from Kindle Direct Publishing, and this is what they had to say, “I see you’ve enrolled your title, Wicked Intent, in KDP Select and offered it for free during the month of January. All of the copies of your title were sold for free during this period, and therefore you’re not seeing equivalent royalties.”

KDP also went on to say, “We’re making improvements to our reports to help give the clearest picture of your sales. Be sure to check out our Help pages and Community forums to learn about the changes we’re making.”

At first, I was embarrassed for bragging that I actually sold so many copies but at the same time, vindicated when KDP said, “All of the copies were sold for free.”

~*~

About The Author

Born in 1946, Vivienne Diane Neal is a storyteller with a wicked sense of humor. Vivienne has been writing articles for over twenty years and started writing fictional short stories in 2007. She gets her story ideas from observing people, places and things and watching true TV court cases.

Now, semi-retired, she continues to write short stores and articles on love, romance, relationships and other topics of interest on her One World Singles Magazine Blog.

Follow her on Facebook at http://facebook.com/viviennedianeneal and Twitter at http://twitter.com/boomer63

Just what you needed

...another blog post about how to sell your books. I don't want to repeat everything you have seen a hundred times already. Things like "use social media" or "do giveaways".  There's some of that in this post, because those two things are inescapable must do's for anyone who wants to sell more than three books to Aunt Mary and mom and dad. Here is what I do to promote my books. It works well enough that I actually sell some of them.

Use Amazon Kindle Select.

This is number one. Yeah, I know, everyone bitches about Amazon and its policy of exclusivity and so on. But unless you are doing really well on the other platforms and selling a significant number of books, KDP Select is the only way to go. Why? Because you want to take advantage of the many websites that will list your book when it goes free and almost all of them want an Amazon page to link to. You MUST do free promos. You can't list for free on Amazon. Amazon will sometimes match a $0.00 price on another platform, but you can't count on it, you can't plan for it and that means you don't have a plan that includes Amazon. Without Amazon you have eliminated around 80% of your potential market. Therefore, an opinion:

WARNING: OPINION ALERT

You can't reasonably plan a successful free promotion without Amazon.

KDP Select success depends on a lot of things. You need eight or ten or more 4 and 5 star reviews. You plan a promo a month ahead. Many sites want three to four weeks notice of a freebie. Sites change, the requirements change, sites come and go. The whole thing of self promotion is in constant flux. BTW, if you write erotica many sites will not list your promotion, so that might be a consideration for you.

Some sites want three days, some the same day or one day notice. Author Marketing Club  (http://www.authormarketingclub.com) is a good resource, free, and gives an easy way to list promos on many sites.

Plan a 3 day promo Friday-Sunday. Make sure you tweet about it, mention it on facebook (follow the posting rules in various groups) , Goodreads (join), and especially a few select Amazon discussion forums for authors (the only ones that allow self promo and product listing).

Follow up with a thank you to the groups, etc. where you posted. Success means a lot of free downloads. To me, that means at least a few thousand. Giveaways work better if the writer has a series. One book, okay, but the idea is to stimulate sales of all books. In my thriller series, White Jade is the first in the series and gets people interested in the series as a whole. It's priced at .99. The other books are 3.99.

Where else except KDP Select can you instantly get ten or fifteen thousand people to discover your book for free? Plus you get borrows that pay, a shot at being on one or two top 100 lists and if you do okay, promo flyers go out from Amazon. Yes! Amazon promotes you!

I rest my case.

Social Media (okay, have to talk about it)

Facebook: you need an author page. Pay FB to promote likes, it's worth it. Figure $60.00/month. Acknowledge the folks who "like" your page.

Twitter: Get an account. Get as many followers as you can. It's simple and free. Follow everyone back, follow the suggestions Twitter sends, don't worry about it. Tweet as often as you feel like it but don't always push the books. (conventional wisdom). Post stuff that's interesting. Retweet anything you find interesting. Support people. Don't spend a lot of time on it.

Twitter has a lot of members who will retweet your free promo post if you follow them and/or let them know about your promo. You can find them by a search on the web (Google) or by looking for "free" etc on Twitter. Learn about hashtags. There's a lot of info out there, but you have to look for it. I'm not going to attempt to put it here.

Amazon forums: pick one or two and join in. On promo days, look for other Amazon author forums (there are many) to post. Again, don't spend a lot of time...maybe a half hour or so.

Goodreads: same thing as Amazon.

There are a lot of other social media sites like Pinterest. If you like them and use them, fine. Don't get caught up in all the social media whirl or you won't have any energy or time to write.

What else should you do?

Ads: Use discretion and don't spend a lot of money. There are a lot of sites that will advertise your promo for $5 or less. Use them if you like. Ads are hit and miss. I don't know what works and what doesn't. Don't worry about it, use your intuition and do your research.

Make a plan. A budget is good (I'm bad at that). DON'T spend hours a day on self-promotion. Write instead. An hour a day is probably right at most for self promo.

Get a professionally designed website. This is your main portal, your contact point, your key exposure on the web. Do it as well as you can.

Get a professionally designed cover. Everyone who knows anything says this. They're right. Use the money you didn't spend on ads to get the design services you need. It doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars.

Use the author page on Amazon. It's important. Make it interesting but not full of your life history.

Write good descriptions for the sales page and the best blurbs you can. Study how the big guys do it and shamelessly copy their style.

Respond to readers, always. Acknowledge people who help you. Share resources.

Help out other authors when you can. That can be an encouraging word, a retweet, a comment in a blog, a shared article or something on your facebook page. It's not hard.

There is no competition. What, you say? Think about it. There are over 30,000,000 readers in the US alone. Enough for everyone. Just write a good book. If you're not thinking about how the other guy is taking sales from you, you are not immersing yourself in resentment and poverty thinking. No one is taking sales from you. Everyone can succeed.

Keep  writing. Get more than one book out there. DON'T fall into the trap of quantity vs. quality. Write the best book you can. Lately I see and hear a lot of talk about "commodity" writing, the idea being that cheap junk will bring in money because a lot of people don't care about quality, they just want something to read. I hate the whole idea of that and I don't agree.

Don't give up and get discouraged. If your book is well written and it's not selling, you need to find ways to get it out to as many people as possible, which brings us back to KDP Select as the best venue.

Be patient. This process takes time. It took Lee Child ten years to be an "overnight success". Figure a couple of years to start making consistent sales, maybe longer, maybe less. But believe in yourself.

Give up resentment about Amazon. I see a lot of that. It's a waste of time. Without Amazon the Indie Revolution would be almost non-existent. Be grateful. It's okay if they make a lot of money.

Set your intention. This is the most important thing of all. By this I mean that you KNOW you are a.) successful b.) going to make a bunch of bucks someday c.) you can trust the universe to back you up d.) your work is good enough to sell and sell well and e.) you're not worried about it, because you are definitely going to succeed AND you can FEEL it. Try it, you'll see.

Now go out there and sell a lot of books.

Alex Lukeman