Category Archives: CreateSpace

Differences Between Your Kindle Books and Your Paperbacks, and What the Heck is Kindle Unlimited?

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There have been a few questions from people I’ve spoken with lately about the difference between ebooks and paperbacks with regards to Amazon and their Kindle Select Program.

Amazon is the number one ebook seller in the United States. Everybody who has published books will sell their book on Amazon, and they offer some benefits for authors who publish exclusively with them.

Let’s go back to basics first.

What is Kindle Direct Publishing?

KDP is the publishing arm of Amazon. This is confusing because Kindle Direct Publishing supports more than just the Kindle version of your book now. Since CreateSpace, the old platform for paperback creation, closed, KDP is where you publish both Kindle and paperback version of your book. Some refer to this part of KDP as KDP Print.

What is CreateSpace?

CreateSpace used to be the self-publishing arm of Amazon for paperback books. If an author used the free CreateSpace ISBN their book would be listed as published by CreateSpace in the product information of the book. Using CreateSpace is no longer an option.

createspace product info

What is Kindle Unlimited?

Kindle Unlimited is a reader subscription service Amazon offers readers. Readers pay $9.99 a month to read as many books as they like. They are able to borrow ten books at a time. Readers can use a Kindle e-reader like a PaperWhite, a tablet like a Kindle Fire, or the Kindle App on their smartphone or iPad. If you like reading on a device and read several books a month, this is a good deal. Independent and traditionally published books are available.

What is Kindle Select?

Kindle Select is a program Amazon offers authors if they want their books available in Kindle Unlimited.

Amazon will let readers know if a book is available in Kindle Unlimited. I suppose it’s not a surprise that the top ten books in Contemporary Romance are in KU. (But let’s not get me started on that again.)

top ten contemporary romances on amazon

When you enroll your book in Kindle Select, you are giving Amazon exclusivity of your titles that you enroll.

What does that mean?

It means your ebooks cannot be available anywhere else. Once your book is available through Kindle Unlimited, your ebook cannot be sold on other platforms like Apple Books, Kobo, or Nook. You cannot sell your ebooks on your website. You cannot blog huge portions of your book to build buzz. You cannot list your book on review services like Booksprout or Netgalley. You cannot give away your book on places like Bookfunnel as a reader magnet for a newsletter sign up.  You cannot give your book away on Instafreebie.

If you want to give away a large amount of copies or list your book on a review site, you need to do that before you enroll your book. So be sure you know what kind of marketing plan you want for your books and how you want to find reviews before you enroll.

But you can take your books out of Select, so don’t think you messed up on any promotional opportunities if you click enroll and want to change your mind. Select enrollment lasts in 90 day increments. Just remember to uncheck the enrollment box or KDP will automatically enroll you for another 90 day period when it runs out. If you really want out before your time is up, you can email them through your Author Central account, and they will take out your books. I asked them to do that for my trilogy, and they did the next day without any problems. I was polite, and so were they. Probably the reps answering your email don’t give a crap what you do–they just wanna go home like everyone else who’s at work.

There is some confusion now about your paperbacks because it used to be paperbacks were separated from your KDP account. Amazon doesn’t care what you do with your paperbacks. You can sell them at book conventions and farmers markets, sell signed copies from your website. You can publish them through IngramSpark to take advantage of expanded distribution. You don’t even have to offer a paperback. Amazon doesn’t care.

How do you get paid if your book is available in Kindle Unlimited?

Authors don’t get paid the same way as if someone buys a copy of your ebook. If your book is in KU, you get paid by the page read, and your page read royalties come out of the Global Fund. This is the banner at the bottom of the Kindle Select information page.

global fund banner

The page read rate can and will fluctuate, but the average is about .0045 cents per page. (If you ever want to know just do a Google search of Kindle Unlimited KENP rate plus the month and and year. For May of 2019 it’s .0046.) You need to do a little math if you want to know how much you make with page reads. You can see on your dashboard how many page reads you get per day/month/year.

For example, if you have 417 page reads like I did in this graph (someone was reading All of Nothing after I pulled it out of KU because they still had in their library) you multiply 417 by .0045 and you get 1.87.  So I made $1.87 for those page reads. page reads ku and koll

There’s a way to calculate how many actual book pages will equal KU page reads, but I can’t find it. Maybe someone reading this blog can post the formula in the comments. Because KU page reads aren’t the same as the actual book pages. There’s also ways to figure out how many page reads will equal one person reading your book all the way through, etc, etc, and if you want to know more and geek out on that data, you’ll have to do a little Googling to see what you can find. Because even thinking about it makes me wanna drink, and knowing how much I’m making is good enough for me.

If you write in a series and want to extrapolate read through and sales, there are ways to do this too, and Michael Cooper explains how to do it in Help! My Facebook Ads Suck!

It makes sense longer books do better (hence the popularity of bookstuffers)–the more pages read, the more you get paid.

But it’s also essential you write a good book–so readers read to the end and you are paid for the entire book. You are not going to make much in KU if your first couple of pages are boring. No matter how many people borrow your book, if they can’t get past the first couple pages, that means no page read royalties for you. That also means you want a good strong first book in a series, otherwise you’ll have no read-through and all the other books in that series will have been written for nothing.

Are there any perks for authors who enroll in KU?

There are perks, and I miss having my free days. I never did do a Kindle Countdown Deal, but those are two great ways to market your books when they are in KU. Every time I used a free day for one of my books, my KU reads always increased because of the exposure.

Anyway, that’s how Kindle Unlimited works for authors. If you read my post about Jami Albright, you can see there is potential to make a lot of money this way. It will always be up to you how you want to run your business. Many authors like Jami have no qualms about going all in with KU and reaping the rewards.  Here’s an article by Hugh Howey who did the same.

If you have a larger backlist, you can even have some books in KU and some out. I may put my Wedding Quartet into KU for the first three to six months to see how that works. I have heard of a few authors who will use KU as part of their launch strategy, and then when the page reads decrease pull their books out and offer them wide.

If you feel overwhelmed with the choices, it never hurts to just stay with Amazon. After all, it’s been proven time and again that you can make good money in KU, and I still struggle with going wide. (Which I have blathered on about enough.) Enroll in KU, enjoy the pages read. Get used to that platform before expanding your business.

As for paperbacks, I publish with KDP Print and let them fulfill to Amazon. Then I publish to IngramSpark and use their expanded distribution. I don’t mind warning you that messing with Ingram takes a little know-how, and you have to buy your own ISBN numbers to publish with them. If you don’t want to fork out for ISBN numbers (in the States) then going with KDP Print will be all that you will want to do anyway. There are days I wish I never would have started publishing with Ingram, and The Years Between Us is still not available there. Which is something I need to fix soon because I didn’t check the expanded distribution box when I published on KDP. You can read about my IngramSpark adventures here.

Indies have a lot of choices and sometimes it’s just nice to stick with one thing that you know so you won’t feel like your books are scattered all over the place like seeds on a dried out dandelion.

I hope this information was helpful to you! If you have any questions, KDP’s customer service is very nice and they are quick to help. You can also shoot me a question, either here in the comments, or my DMs are open on Twitter. Thanks for reading!

Until next time!

My books are wide! Look for them at your favorite digital retailer!

Don’t Run Away: books2read.com/dont-run-away
Chasing You: books2read.com/Chasing-You
Running Scared: books2read.com/running-scared

Wherever He Goes: books2read.com/whereverhegoes1
All of Nothing: books2read.com/allofnothing1
The Years Between Us: books2read.com/the-years-between-us

Try the Tower City Romance Trilogy Today!

 

Mistakes I See New Authors Making

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Indie books versus traditionally published books

I’ve been reading a little indie lately. I hate splitting up the two — indie vs. traditionally published. Books should be books no matter who has written them or how they were published and printed.

But I have been reading some books I’ve found on Writer Twitter and in some author Facebook groups.

Even though we shouldn’t separate books by who has written them or how they’ve been published, there is still a little issue of what does make them different.

Quality.

Indies say taste is subjective and that quality means different things to different people. I certainly say this when it comes to my own writing. But I’m not blind to the issues my books have–especially Don’t Run Away, my first “real” book I count toward my backlist. I’ve gotten good reviews and bad reviews. The bad reviews have a point. I didn’t know as much about plot as I do now. I didn’t have as much practice in character arc as I do now.

Indie books versus traditionally published books (1)

And that’s too bad because it’s the start of a trilogy, and I’ve said this before. If you don’t have a strong start to a series, no one will read the others because your readers will assume the other books are more of the same.

But I also have positive reviews suggesting the book isn’t a total train wreck and investing a little money in promos and a little time redoing the covers hopefully won’t be a total waste down the road.

I went into this blog post with the information about my own book to let you know I understand. I understand the mistakes new authors make because I have made them myself.

The problem is, we have to move beyond those mistakes if we hope to attract readers. With six books in my backlist, I’m hoping this is something I can start doing. And soon. Attracting readers that is.

What have I noticed in the indie books I’ve been reading? Here’s a short but important list:

Telling, not showing. I’ve seen this in 99% of the indies I’ve read. In fact, I’ve read it so much I’m willing to go out on a limb and say this is probably the biggest thing that sets indies apart from traditionally published authors. No matter how bad you (or I) think a traditionally published book is, it will never be bad because the culprit is telling.

Indie books versus traditionally published books (2)

Telling is 100% an indie problem because a book full of telling will never make it past an agent or an editor at a publishing house.

The book I just ordered has a letter to the reader in the front matter, and she even states she enjoyed being the narrator of her characters’ story. And her book reads exactly like that. Two hundred and fifty pages of her telling us what her characters are doing and feeling.

No thanks.

I’ve worked with some writers in an editing capacity and unfortunately telling is probably the hardest part of writing to stop doing. There are whole books written on showing vs. telling, and I have no interest in writing one. The best way you can stop telling is write a lot, find your voice, listen to feedback, know your telling words, and write more.

  1. Write a lot. Find your voice. James Scott Bell has a lovely book about finding your voice. He explains it so well it will turn your writing around. It really will.
  2. Know who your characters are. Who are they as people? Their likes, dislikes. How they react to certain situations. What are their tragic backstories? Characters are people, not puppets. Part of finding your voice is knowing how your characters sound when they think and talk and being able to translate that onto paper.
  3. Know your telling words. Think, thought, feel, felt, see, saw, know, knew, heard, could hear. Felt is horrible. Search for it. In lots of instances just deleting those words will take the telling away.
    She realized he was lying to her.
    He was lying to her. All this time she’d believed whatever he told her. Now she was paying the price.

    We’re already in her point of view. You don’t need to tell your reader she realized he was lying. Just say he was lying to her. We understand she realized it because we’re in her head and she thought it. When you use these words you slip out of your character’s POV.

  4. If you’re still having a problem, work with an editor or a beta reader. Lots of writers can’t see it in their own work, but they can see telling in other writer’s work. Choose betas and editors who won’t lie to you. The book full of telling I’m reading now? It has 17 4-5 star reviews. That means 17 people lied to her.

Speech tags. I made it to Chapter 4 of a different book. It popped up in my Twitter feed so often I decided to give it a chance. I ordered the paperback, and wow. By Chapter 4, I counted more than 35 speech tags. I couldn’t read any more. I think we’re all victims of speech tags at some point in our careers. I know I was when I wrote Summer Secrets. My editor helped me with a few–but she should have been much, much harder on me. Since I’ve written more and honed my dialogue skills, I rarely use speech tags anymore. If you find you use speech tags, work on stronger actions and better dialogue to evoke emotion. Don’t depend on speech tags for clarity.

Here’s a before and after. Tell me which kind of dialogue you’d like to read for an entire book:

“I did. Just not the way he thought. A couple of goons caught me outside the hospital—” Callie bit off.

“The hospital. Jesus Christ,” Brandon snapped. “Do I have to check myself out and drive up there?”

“No! Just listen to me,” Callie yelped, pulling over in the middle of a residential section. She should’ve driven with Mitch. She had no idea where the police department was and couldn’t use her phone’s GPS while she was talking on it.

“I defended Mitch on the ice a couple days ago,” she stated, “and I dumped one guy on his ass. Tonight he and two of his friends caught me outside the hospital. Mitch happened to be right behind me and stopped them before they could do anything. I’m on the way to the station to give my statement,” she explained.

“Are you hurt?” he asked urgently. “You beating up guys? Callie, you’re supposed to be having tea parties and watching strippers. What the fuck?” he growled.

There are seven speech tags in this little section. They don’t sound terrible, in fact, upon reading this, you might think they actually lend something to the scene. But this is just one small section of a book. When you have a book that’s heavy on dialogue like my books are, reading all those dialogue tags can be tiring.

Look at that section again. These two characters are talking on the phone having a heated discussion. How did the writer make the dialogue sound? Do they sound like real people? A brother and sister who care about each other? Do you need the tags? Most sections of dialogue don’t need tags if you write the characters well enough the readers don’t need to be told who is speaking. Read the same section without tags. Does what they are saying draw you closer in because there’s nothing taking you out of the moment?

“I did. Just not the way he thought. A couple of goons caught me outside the hospital—”

“The hospital. Jesus Christ. Do I have to check myself out and drive up there?”

“No! Just listen to me.” Callie pulled over in the middle of a residential second. She should have driven with Mitch. She had no idea where the police department was and couldn’t use her phone’s GPS while she was talking on it.

“I defended Mitch on the ice a couple days ago, and I dumped one guy on his ass. Tonight he and two of his friends caught me outside the hospital. Mitch happened to be right behind me and stopped them before they could do anything. I’m on the way to the station to give my statement.”

“Are you hurt? You beating up guys? Callie, you’re supposed to be having tea parties and watching strippers. What the fuck?”

Sound better? If not, that’s cool.

Exercise: Take a book you particularly enjoyed. Find a dialogue section (the longer the better) and count how many tags the author used. You might be surprised.

Nothing is happening, or the author tries to make a big deal out of nothing. I did this with Don’t Run Away, much to my sincere regret. I made Dane make a big deal about being married before and how nasty his divorce had been. And now I look back and think, who cares? Everyone goes through a divorce (or it seems like it, anyway), and yes, those divorces can be nasty. Especially when kids are involved. I understand small things can be a big deal, but they should still be only a small piece of the whole puzzle. And readers have called me out on it, calling Dane a weak character for not being able to move past his divorce. That’s what the book was about, but I still should have made him more ready to be in a relationship than I did. Or made Nikki smarter so she steered clear of him.

In the book where I only reached Chapter 4, all the characters had done up until that point was sit around and talk. And not about anything particularly interesting. Ask for feedback from someone who won’t lie to you. If the beginning of your book is boring, if there’s nothing happening, no one is going to get to the part where it finally does.

If you have a too slow of a start, people will bail before they get to the good stuff. If you want help with your first pages, read Your First Page by Peter Selgin. He walks you through what will make your first pages pop!

Bad formatting. I buy paperbacks because when it’s slow at work, I can read. We’re not allowed tablets, but I prefer paperbacks anyway. That being said, a lot of paperbacks I see are a mess inside, and all I can think is I hope to God they never host a book signing or do a giveaway on Goodreads. Maybe authors don’t put much time into their formatting because they don’t think they’ll sell many books. But the problem is, you will sell some at a convention, or you’ll want them for giveaways, or you may want to stock them at your indie bookstore. If the manager of that bookstore flipped open a poorly formatted book, he’d probably tell you to fix it first. Draft2Digital has a free paperback formatting tool. Or give someone a $25 gift card to Amazon and ask they do it on their Vellum software.

It’s a sad fact that you could have the most entertaining story in the whole world but no one will want to read it if your book doesn’t look like a book inside. I struggled with this too, when I published 1700. I cried, literally, until someone reminded me about the KDP Print template. Back then it was CreateSpace, but they do offer a free interior template. There weren’t the easy and free tools available there are today. (It’s crazy how the industry has changed, even in three years.) Even if you don’t know how, there is no reason why your book should look like a mess. And if you really can’t find the means to format a paperback book, you’d be one step ahead not offering one at all.

These are only four things I’ve found in the latest indie books I did not finish (or DNF in shorthand), but they are doozies and enough to turn away any reader. In the case of the woman whose book is all telling–she’s putting herself in a tough spot. She wants to write a series, but she’s waiting to see if her first book takes off before working on a second. Her book will never take off, but not for the reasons she thinks. It’s too bad.

Reading indie is a valuable experience. I love to support my friends, and of course, there are some fabulous writers out there making a living off their books.

The issues I’ve outlined can be fixed over time by studying craft and writing a lot. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of indie books I find fault with are an author’s first book.

We all mess up our first book. Unfortunately it’s a really important book. You can’t build on a crumbling foundation.

What are some things that you’ve noticed in indie books? Anything that has turned you off?

Let me know!

Thanks for reading!

My books are available everywhere! Check them out!

Don’t Run Away: books2read.com/dont-run-away
Chasing You: books2read.com/Chasing-You
Running Scared: books2read.com/running-scared

Wherever He Goes: books2read.com/whereverhegoes1
All of Nothing: books2read.com/allofnothing1
The Years Between Us: books2read.com/the-years-between-us

Try the Tower City Romance Trilogy Today!

all graphics made in canva. all photos taken from canva except for the horse meme that i don’t feel guilty grabbing online because it’s everywhere.

KDP Select/KU vs. going wide, IngramSpark and other musings

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GOING WIDE VS KDP SELECT

The other day I pulled my books out of KU. For those of you who may not know what that is, Kindle Unlimited is a program through Kindle Direct Publishing that is offered to authors who don’t publish their ebooks anywhere else. They get paid from a giant slush fund for “pages” read.  Some authors think that Amazon is the best, and there isn’t anywhere else to publish. But where is there to go if you decide you don’t want to give Amazon exclusivity? Kobo, Books (aka iBooks), Nook, Google Play, and a few others that can be reached through an aggregator like Draft2Digital or PublishDrive are available for indie authors. Thank goodness indie authors have a choice.

choice street signs

It’s a little scary, since I have been getting a few page reads here and there, mostly since I paid for a FreeBooksy promo not long ago. Usually that will put my book on the radar for a while, but tends to taper off. Like today, I’ve only made $4.81 in page reads, compared to my highest day ten days after my promo, which made me $56.80. That’s just for All of Nothing, when I ran a free promo for it on November 9th. It’s been a pretty long tail, still getting page reads more than a month after my promo, but I’m thinking I can do better.

It is scary, thinking about losing even those meagre page reads, but there is one thing I have to remember: even if my books aren’t in KU anymore, anyone shopping on Amazon who wants to read my books, can still buy them. What I’ve made today in page reads would calculate into 2.5 people buying my book at $2.99. Sometimes I think authors forget about that part of it. Just because you’re not in KU anymore doesn’t mean authors can’t buy your book. That is really a powerful thing for me to remember, and it makes it easier to feel better about the decision I made to go wide.

I’m really excited about the opportunity publish my books on Kobo. Kobo is growing and right now, according to an old 2016 stat, they have 26 million users worldwide. That’s a lot of readers. And with Kobo Writing Life, I’ve heard they are very friendly and want to work with indie authors.

Some indies go wide from the start, but lots more, not knowing how or where to publish, stick with only Amazon. Neither of these paths is wrong. When I first moved into publishing, I was happy to deal with one vendor. I only had to deal with one file to format, and one upload. One price. I stuck my books in KU and mainly forgot about them as I wrote the next.

But as you publish more books, and you start to learn what other successful indies are doing, you have to think about where your want your business to go. You hear about the risks of putting all your eggs into one basket. But then you hear about authors making hundreds of thousands of dollars in KU reads. (And you also hear about how Amazon can, at random, target one of those authors and essentially take all their income away with a single push of a button.)

Joanna Penn continually says you need to think about more than one stream of income. For her that means speaking gigs, writing non-fiction, her podcast, and other things she has going on in her career, but for indies who don’t do as much as she does, it could simply mean not counting on one company for all your income.

I’ll be going direct with Kobo, since that is how you access their promotions tab. But I’ll likely use Draft2Digital to publish my books everywhere else.

If you’re interested in going wide, and you want to learn what Kobo can do you for you, Joanna Penn recently had a guest on her podcast who works at Kobo, Camille Mofidi. You can click here to listen to it. Mark Lefebvre used to work at Kobo, but now has moved to Draft2Digital. I love Mark and used to listen to the Kobo Writing Life podcast where he would frequently talk about what works on Kobo to sell books. He also wrote a book, Killing It On Kobo: Leverage Insights to Optimize Publishing and Marketing Strategies, Grow Your Global Sales and Increase Revenue on Kobo (Stark Publishing Solutions) on how to use Kobo to sell your books. Mark also did a recent interview on The Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast hosted by Lindsay Buroker, Jeff Poole, and Jo Lallo. You can check it out here. 

My books won’t completely drop out of KDP Select until February, so I have to wait. You don’t want to make Amazon mad at you, so if you decide to go wide, please make sure that your books have completed their three months within the program. If you have several books like I do, you’ll need to wait until they have all dropped out before going wide, as their months could overlap. Plus, they don’t do that automatically–you have remember to uncheck the box in your KDP dashboard.

As for my paperbacks, I am changing that up, too. I’ve seen first hand that if you don’t use KDP Print to distribute to Amazon (or CreateSpace before) Amazon can play hardball and sometimes make your book unavailable or out of stock. To me, this would be a pain in the butt because who has time to police their books all day? I’ve published all my books through CreateSpace/KDP print, and I have found no issues with quality as I’ve heard some complain about. But I have moved my books out of Expanded Distribution on KDP Print and only use them to supply to Amazon. Then, after they drop out of their system, I’m going to publish my paperbacks with IngramSpark and use them for Expanded Distribution. The reason I’m doing this is because I want to approach my local bookstores about carrying my books.

Seeing the benefits of going wide may take a while. But I’m in this for the long haul, and I don’t mind waiting. I need to start thinking about what I want for my business as I grow my backlist, and going wide and using IngramSpark for paperback expanded distribution feels like the right way to go. But only time will tell.

Wish me luck!

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for a little while longer. 🙂 

 

Happy November!

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Happy November

 

November is finally upon us, and that means we only have 61 days until the New Year!

I’ve been moving steadily along with my goals. In fact, I disappeared from social media for a bit while I released my new book, All of Nothing.

Here’s the lovely cover:

All of Nothing Paperback Cover

I did the entire cover in Canva, and I bought the photo on Canstockphoto for seven dollars. It’s not very fancy, but I do take pride in the fact that I did it myself. and it printed just as nicely as it looks online. It’s in KU, and I’m running a free promotion on it November 9th. It will be included in the Freebooksy newsletter that day. Because  I tried a Bargain Booksy on Wherever He Goes that didn’t do too well, I’m also putting that book for free that day to see if I can’t piggyback some downloads from All of Nothing‘s promotion.

As an early birthday present, a dear friend of mine gifted me a Mac and the formatting software Vellum. I was very excited in that since I had been doing all my own formatting, I could replace the interiors of all my books, and that’s what I’ve spent the last three days doing for Summer Secrets, my erotica novella series, and my Tower City Romance Trilogy. Because formatting is so easy with it, I put together a box set of my trilogy, so that is finally being offered on Amazon as well.

Nothing is ever easy though, and since I was doing the covers and insides, I went ahead and moved my trilogy over from CS to KDP Print. I hadn’t done that yet, so I wanted to get it all out of the way.

The second book in my series got lost in the conversion, and it took KDP four days to find it. It was over the weekend, and they did eventually restore it, so I was grateful for that. 🙂 If you haven’t moved your books over yet, I recommend you do so. My book was still for sale on Amazon, so it didn’t completely disappear, but it’s better to get all that taken care of sooner rather than later.

But I did redo the covers for Summer Secrets, being that I’m a bit better at covers now, and I redid the box set I created, inside and out. Though someone pointed out a typo on the first line of the first paragraph, {rolling eyes hard here} I’m still very happy with they turned out:

 

 

It wasn’t a big change, but I think it’s a step in the right direction, nonetheless. I didn’t get so different with my trilogy, so I won’t post them here. But I did redo them in Canva, which gives them a higher quality than when I used to do my covers in Word. A very warm shoutout to my friend Aila Stephens who told me about Canva so long ago. She’s just starting up a blog series about covers herself, so make sure you follow her blog for indie tips and publishing tips!

Anyway, so next up for me is my May/December romance that I’m already 8,000 words into. I’m so excited for this book! I’ve been thinking about a May/December romance for a long time now, and I was delighted when a plot popped into my head. All of Nothing is over 80,000 words long, and I don’t think Matthew and Zia (my book doesn’t have a title yet) will end up being quite so long. But I’m still excited to be mulling subplots and backstory as I get into writing.

 

This kind of sums up the whole story, and as a contemporary romance author, you know I’ll always dish up a nice happily ever after. I just make my characters go through hell to get there first.

In other news, I’m going to submit All of Nothing into the RITAs, a contest sponsored by the Romance Writers of America. The contest is open to both trad-pubbed and indie-pubbed authors, so in reality, I know I don’t stand a chance. But if my book could move on to a second round, or if the judges have some good feedback for me, I’d consider it a success. At any rate, it something I’m going to try, and I think All of Nothing is a solid book. It’s getting good feedback already, and my betas didn’t have anything bad to say about it. So, wish me luck!

Along with entering the contest, you also have to judge books in the first round, so I’ll be needing to dig out my Kindle and settle in for some serious reading coming up. Which suits, because I’m going to have carpal and cubital tunnel surgery on my left hand/elbow in the middle of January. I’m going to try to get Matthew and Zia at least written by then, so while I recover I can do some small edits. It will do me good to rest my hands while I help in the judging of the first round. I’m very much enjoying being part of the romance writing community!

What else is going on? NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow! I won’t play, I haven’t played for a couple years now, but I may meet up with my group. Sometimes it’s nice to see people in person, talk shop. Catch up. I used to work with a couple of the members, so it will be fun to see them, too. But after the colder weather hits (I’m in MN) it gets harder to get out of the house. Even for pie and coffee at the local coffee shop.

I guess that’s all I have to report! I hope you all are doing well, and tell me what your end of the year goals are! Remember, you have 61 days! Do your best!

2019 is right around the corner! What do you have left to do in 2018_

 

Drop me a comment, and have a great weekend!

 

 

 

 

October through the end of the year goals.Whatever.

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Everyone is doing October/end of year goals, so I thought I would, too.

I don’t have many.

  1. Finish All of Nothing. This includes finishing the editing, writing the blurb, doing the full cover for the paperback, formatting for both Kindle and paperback. Sending it out for betas and hopefully publish by Halloween. It was my target goal from the beginning, with Thanksgiving being the ultimate maximum amount of time I wanted to take. It looks like Halloween is more than doable–at least for the Kindle. Using KDP Print for the paperback takes longer, just for the simple fact ordering and waiting for a proof is a lot more time consuming than it used to be through CreateSpace. If you’re launching a paperback by a certain date, be prepared and give yourself plenty of time for the KDP Print hassle.

    Here’s the working cover I made in Canva. We’ll see if I stick with it.

    allofnothing
    Made with a Canva template and a photo I purchased from CanstockPhoto, it’s a simple cover which I hope conveys the darkness of the story.  No chick lit for this author. 😛

  2. I have 2,000 words into my next book (a beautiful May/December romance that will be a counter to the dark romance I’m editing now) already written, and a few pages longhand that I need to type up. I would at least like to get the handwritten stuff typed up this month. I would love to get the whole thing written and published by March of next year. I have a bookselling summit I’m attending in May, and the more in my backlist, the better.
  3. I did a Happy Book Reviews feature for Wherever He Goes that I am not terribly impressed with. I’ll do a full blog post on how it turned out. But for now, it’s safe to say, don’t waste your money. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
  4. In my other blog post about marketing, I said I was writing a non-fiction book on self-editing. I’m going to be working hard on that in the coming months, and hopefully have that ready to go by no later than this summer. My fiction comes first, and I want my new book to be ready by the summit, but depending on my health (see number 5) I’d like to get the editing how-to book done by June.
  5. I have carpal tunnel and I’ll be going for a nerve test this Thursday. My carpal tunnel runs from my elbows into my neck, shoulder blades, and back. Meaning, I’m in a ton of pain a lot of the time. I let it go too long. I know. And I’m paying for it now. But the truth is, I’ll more than likely be having surgery and the recovery time for both arms will set me back. I know voice-to-text can be a life-saver to some, and I may still be able to blog that way for a bit, but chances are, I won’t be able to work on my fiction for a while. The break is much needed, but not that wanted. We’ll see how it goes.
  6. These are lofty goals when I have a new kitty to play with! My husband moved out, and the kids and I replaced him with a new kitten named Blaze. It wasn’t really like that (LOL) but it’s hard to resist playing with her, or snuggling with her when she’s sleeping. She’ll be a good recovery pal. Here’s a pic:

    blaze
    It’s tough not to share pictures of her all the time, so if you follow me over on Instagram, you can see a lot more of her. 🙂

Those are pretty lofty goals for the next few months, but I’m hoping it’s nothing I can’t get accomplished. All of Nothing is the big item on my plate right now, along with keeping this blog going with indie news and writing tips.

Also, since I will be working on my editing book, if there is anything you struggle with when it comes to self-editing LET ME KNOW! I would love love love to include anything and everything indie writers struggle with.

Happy Fall, Everyone!

book and fall leaves

Changing Your Book Over From CreateSpace to KDP Print

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This is the big bad everyone is talking about–moving your books over.

Do you want to move your books from CreateSpace to KDP print? I think, yes. Because if you’ve been following what CreateSpace has been doing (ie, cutting staff, removing services) then you know that Amazon is in the slow process of getting rid of it. Not that anyone from Amazon has admitted it.

If you’ve been avoiding it because you think it’s going to be hard, don’t worry! It will be fine. I did it just to see how it would go, and I ended up doing half my books.

Let me tell you how.

First, you go to your dashboard on KDP. The one you check when you want to see your lack of sales.

Then, what you need to do is find the corresponding book that you have on Kindle, and choose Create Paperback.

blog going from cs to kdpp5

 

After that, there is a place for you to enter the ISBN number you used for CreateSpace. Log into your CreateSpace account and copy and paste the ISBN number from your paperback into the space.  After you type in the number, you have to hit ENTER, and the yellow button will highlight so you can click it. I don’t have a screenshot of that, but just take my word for it. They tell you in pretty green that yes, you are the owner of the title. 🙂 Thanks, KDP Print!

blog going from cs to kdpp

The categories don’t come with your manuscript or your cover, so you need to choose the categories over again. I didn’t, and I got the error message.

blog going from cs to kdpp4

Choose the option “you have published this book on CreateSpace.” That’s the whole point to this exercise.

Also, another good thing to know is you can’t change your trim size and your interior since those things are attached to your ISBN number.

blog going from cs to kdpp2

But after that, you’ll see that everything has ported over:

blog going from cs to kdpp3

After the cover and manuscript are processed, you can take a look at it through the online viewer. I open it just to be sure, because KDP Print is a lot more clear on cover and manuscript requirements.

There is one thing I found out the hard way:

If CreateSpace tweaked your cover in any way to make it passable for publication, those changes do not carry over. 

Apparently, when I did my covers for Summer Secrets, I did them wrong, and the lovely customer service people at CreateSpace fixed them for me. They didn’t bother to tell me I was doing them incorrectly. When I did a cover for one of my books in my trilogy, I called them for something completely unrelated, but the rep I spoke with pointed out that error as well. I thought since they were publishable, I wouldn’t have a problem, but I did.

I wouldn’t bring this up except for the fact that I don’t know how may covers CreateSpace helped along with no notice to the author. Is it bad? No, not at all. But if they tweaked your cover and KDP Print tells you something is wrong now, I hope you have the skills to do what CreateSpace did to fix it in the first place. Or if you hired a designer, you’ll have to ask them to make the changes.

Don’t worry if KDP Print tells you something is wrong–they get very precise when pointing out the errors. They won’t leave you guessing, and they let you know right away–in the information bar on the left-hand side of the online viewer.

It was just a surprise to me that KDP Print didn’t approve my covers when CreateSpace had published them.

You won’t know right away if they pass, even if there aren’t any errors in the online viewer–they do go into review, and you’ll get an email saying if they pass or not. And if they don’t, the email will explain why. But it is faster than the 24 hour time period that CreateSpace used to take. I got my emails back in 12 hours. The online viewer is similar to the one on CreateSpace. Sometimes it seems like it will take forever for the viewer to populate your content, but I just hit REFRESH and that seems to do the trick to get it moving.

Don’t forget to hit SAVE AND PUBLISH.

And that’s all there is to it, really. I messed with the insides of 1700, so I ordered a new proof, just to be sure.

The link to order the proof is small, and it’s on the bottom of the page, so you’ll have to keep an eye out for it if you want to order a new proof.

I didn’t mess with the insides of Summer Secrets, so I didn’t order a proof of either of those. Proofs take a lot longer to come than they did using CreateSpace, and author copies, too. Definitely plan extra time into your publishing schedule.

All in all, I was happy with the experience. It will go smoothly for you if don’t have cover issues and if you don’t change anything with the interior. Although, now is a good time to do those changes, if that’s what you were going to do at some point. All you would have to do is upload the new file and replace the ported file from CreateSpace with the file you made changes to.

Always order a proof if you make interior changes, unless you are prepared to flip through every page with the online viewer.

KDP offers instructions and offers advice, and you can read about that here.

Otherwise, there’s not much else to tell you. I plan to do the trilogy soon. Oh, and if you’re selling paperbacks like hotcakes right now, you probably don’t want to do this until your sales die down because as you switch over, your paperbacks aren’t available for purchase.

If you’re worried, try not to be. I was a new author when I did my covers, but I’m better at it now. If you used a cover designer or in any way were more experienced than me when publishing your book, you’ll be just fine.

Jump, don’t be pushed.

Good luck!

 

buy image for blog

 

I Did an Amazon Giveaway–and It Did Pretty Much Nothing

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THIS POST IS ARCHIVED AS AMAZON DID AWAY WITH GIVEAWAYS IN 2019 AND HAS SINCE NOT REPLACED IT WITH AN ALTERNATIVE. THANKS FOR READING!

I was always curious about the Amazon giveaways–you know the cute little button at the bottom left of your books’ (or any products’ really) page. You have to scroll down pretty far to find it–after reviews and two sets of sponsored product ad strips.

amazon giveaway blog

You can give away paperback or Kindle versions, and it’s obviously cheaper to give away Kindle versions. Amazon makes you pay for your book, so if you gave away paperbacks, you’d be paying the price you set in CreateSpace or KDP Print, plus shipping.  There’s no shipping with Kindle files, but there is tax. So make sure you’re looking at the correct page, and Amazon tells you which version you’re giving away–it’s in the blue to the right of your book’s cover.

Choose your number of prizes:

amazon giveaway blog 2

I’ll give away three Kindle file copies. I did five when I did my giveaway for Wherever He Goes, so I feel like I’ve already spent money on something that probably won’t do anything for me.

amazon giveaway blog 3

Add your photo. I chose a different pose of my author photo that I use everywhere else, but I still look like me.

The next part is where I royally screwed up because I had no idea giveaways ran that quickly, or that people would enter, or maybe I just didn’t understand the stats of a giveaway like this.

amazon giveaway blog 4

I did the recommend Lucky Number Instant Winner, and I chose 100 for the lucky number for the winning entry.

This is what it says if you click on LEARN MORE:

amazon giveaway blog 5

My giveaway lasted fifteen minutes. So When I chose 5 prizes along with the 100 entrants,  500 people entered my giveaway and every 100th entrant won a copy of my book. The fact that it only too 15 minutes for my giveaway to end blows my mind.  So will be going with a higher number next time.

And then, of course, I have them follow me on Amazon.

amazon giveaway blog 6

I made it public of course, because the more the merrier.

To recap, I’m doing 3 copies of Don’t Run Away. I have the number of entrants set at 200 per prize so 600 people have to enter to win three copies. They all have to follow me on Amazon.

You would think this would be a great thing. But the thing is, most people enter giveaways just to enter giveaways. That is what they do. Just for the rush of winning, I’m assuming.

I don’t think this giveaway is going to go any slower than my other one, but we’ll see.

Click on no for not offering discounts, then click next.

amazon giveaway blog 7

This is the last page, and it’s laughable. It’s probably where my high expectations came in. The giveaway will end in 7 days? Yeah right.

Then you get your shopping cart screen and you purchase your giveaway. I didn’t screenshot that because you don’t need to see my stuff. After you buy it, you get this:

amazon giveaway blog 8

And you’re all set.

You get an email when your giveaway is live, and for me, fifteen minutes later, I got an email saying my giveaway was over.

Amazon doesn’t tell you how many followers you have, but at some point, hopefully when they email your followers when you release a new book, that some of them will buy it.

Don’t turn blue holding your breath.

While I was typing this up, my giveaway went live–I got the email.

We’ll see how long it takes for the giveaway to end . . . . go get something to eat. I’ll wait.

At any rate, did the giveaway for Wherever He Goes do anything for me?

Not really that I could tell. At least with my AMS ads, even with little results, those are still measurable. These giveaways seem like a waste of time and a waste of money.

Maybe I’ll do a Goodreads giveaway when my new book comes out.

It will be something to blog about anyway.

Did you have a good experience with an Amazon Giveaway? Let me know!

Blog book promo for the end of blog posts

 

 

Formatting Your Book for Publication

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If you don’t want to format yourself, yet you don’t want to have to pay too much, then there aren’t many things you can do.

Let’s start with Kindle, since more than likely 100% of you will publish on Amazon through KDP. What are your options if you don’t want to format your file for Kindle?

1. Actually, just format it, FFS. It’s easy. I pulled this out of an old blog post I did last year. Some of the info isn’t correct anymore, but you can still take a look at it here.

First, make a copy of your manuscript (just in case something goes wrong). This one shouldn’t have any headers or footers. If you have page numbers and/or a don’t steal my shit copyright header for your beta readers, remove them all.

The biggest thing with conversion is Tabs will screw everything up. If you use the Tab key to make your indents for your paragraphs, you’re going to have one messed up converted file. Here are the steps to take out your Tabs:

Removing Tabs

Press the Paragraph Show/Hide button in the Paragraph section of the Home tab so you can see the formatting marks.
Highlight (select) your whole document.
At the far right of the Home tab in the Editing section, click on the Replace button.
Click the More/Special button in the bottom left corner of the box.

taking out tabs

Select the Tab Character.

2018-06-25_LI

Leave the Replace with field empty and click Replace All. This removes all the Tabs.

This should have taken them out. If, for some reason, you used the Spacebar to make a tab, go into Replace, and in the Find field hit the number of times you used the Spacebar to make the Tab (maybe five? Six?), leave the Replace line empty and hopefully Word will find all the Spacebar spaces you used for tabs and pull them out.

But now you have a whole book that doesn’t have any indentations. I’ve seen books like this. Don’t do it. You want your book to look as professional as possible so put them back in:

Putting your Tabs Back In

Again, select or highlight your whole document.
Click the little arrow at the bottom right of the Paragraph menu in the Home tab. Or right-click your mouse and select Paragraph from the menu.

tabs

In the Indentation section of the box change Special to First Line and enter 0.25. This is how long your Tab is going to be. If you want it shorter you can do 0.23 or something. I use 0.25.

Click OK.

This puts all the Tabs back into your document, but you don’t want the first paragraph of your Chapters and/or scenes to be indented (traditionally published books usually do not have the first paragraph of Chapters or scenes indented) so you will have to go through your whole novel(la), look for the Chapter starts and scene breaks and take the tab out of the first paragraph. When you find those, put your cursor in front of the first letter of the first word, right click your mouse, select Paragraph and in the Indentation section, change By to 0. This will manually take the one Tab out.

When you start a new document, it’s easier to go into Paragraph, change First Line to 0.25 from the beginning, then you don’t have to go through all this after you’re done. It will take a little getting used to, to not have to hit the Tab button at the beginning of every new paragraph, but it will be worth it in the long run.

KDP Formatting Instructions at a Glance:

Take out all the Tabs, put them back in with the instructions above. Don’t indent Chapter starts. First paragraphs after scene breaks have started to become optional.

If there is any in your document, remove headers, footers, and page numbers.

Use a common font. I use Georgia for my Kindle, Garamond for the paperback.

Drop caps are not e-reader friendly, at least not in my experience, and I don’t have enough patience to make them work. Remove those as they will probably mess up your paragraph during conversion.

Set your margins to .5 all around–top, bottom, left, right.

Set your line spacing to 1.5. Not single, not double.

Select your all your text and set to Full Justified.

Don’t use a bunch of Hard Enters to make new pages. Please insert page breaks to create new pages. Lots of hard enters will not convert well. Insert page breaks after you Title Page, Copyright page, dedication page, acknowledgments, Table of Contents, and after each Chapter End. Use them to separate your back matter from your author page.

insert page break

If you have spaces between your paragraphs, you’ll need to select your file again, go into Paragraph and change After in Spacing to 0 pt. This takes out all the unnecessary spacing between paragraphs. (You will want to do this so you are not accused of making your book longer for the extra KU page reads.)

tabs_LI

To add your website or author page in the back, say, on your author page, use https:// with the rest of the website in the link.

What you’ve done is made your file as simple as possible. If you have graphics or formulas or are publishing a nonfiction book with all the bells and whistles, then I would suggest buying a book or researching how to format a complicated document. These instructions are for a fiction book with the general front matter and back matter only.

If you follow those guidelines for your Word document, you should be good to go conversion-wise. But if you don’t even want to do that then you can:

2. Use Kindle Create to format your file. The file won’t belong to you–you format it and then publish right to KDP. So you wouldn’t be able to use the file for other platforms like Apple Books or Kobo. But if you all want to do is publish to Amazon, download the App, upload your book into it and just fiddle with it until you like what you see. Watch the videos to learn how. I played around with it, and I formatted a 50,000-word book in an hour. Look here for details.

3. Use a template. The templates are already set so all you do is copy and paste your document into it. Most of these cost money, so look at these at your own discretion. You can start here: Beautiful Templates for Book Design Success

4. Draft2Digital says they’ll let you format your book on their site for free, and let you use that file wherever you want. You can even use them just to make a file for Kindle. You don’t have to go wide to use their free services. I haven’t ever tried them simply because once you get down how to format a file for Kindle, you don’t need anyone’s help. But if you just want to upload your document into D2D after you create an account, give it a try.

5. Buy a Mac and buy Vellum. I  hear Vellum is the best at formatting e-books and paperbacks. I don’t have a Mac but I plan to treat myself this summer so I can buy Vellum (although, if it’s as good as I hear, I’ll be tempted to redo all my books). If you don’t have a Mac or Vellum, and can’t afford either one, maybe you can ask someone who does to format for you. Maybe offer to trade for the favor. You never know.

6. I also hear Scrivener has formatting capabilities. I don’t use it–I write in Word. But if you use Scrivener, you can try it and see how you like it.

You’ll note that I don’t have the instructions on how to put a Table of Contents in your file. I think they are stupid for fiction. But that’s just my opinion and not a very popular one at that. If you want to know how to make a clickable ToC for your e-reader file, read the instructions I had to hunt down when I made a box-set for Summer Secrets a couple months ago.

Formatting your paperback is a bit harder.

1. I will always recommend using an interior template from CreateSpace or KDP Print. These templates are the same, you just download them from different websites. Choose the formatted template which has all the headers, footers, and end sections in place so your page numbers and your author name and book’s title are on the pages they are supposed to be on. If you take a look at any trad-pubbed book, you’ll see there aren’t headers on Chapter start pages, or headers or footers on front matter or back matter. The interior templates takes care of most of this for you. The only issue I had with them at all is that I usually have more chapters than the template allows, so I have to monkey with the end section breaks myself to create more chapters. Most of the time I just copy and paste the section end break of a previous chapter into the end of the next chapter and that works for me. If you have any working knowledge of Word at all, you should be able to do this without any hassles. The front matter and back matter is all laid out for you as well, so just copy and paste page by page, or chapter by chapter. The template is “chunked” meaning you can’t copy and paste your whole document into the template at one time. The chapters and front and back matter are broken up by section end breaks.

Have patience. If you do 98% of the work, I’m willing to bet you have a friend who would look it over and do the other 2% if you just can’t get it right.

2. If you don’t want to go this route, I’m afraid there isn’t much you can do for free besides get a very good working knowledge of Word and start from scratch to do it all yourself. I took a college class in Word, and I still couldn’t do my formatting without at least getting a good start with the template. But you can always look for a paid template. Most websites that sell e-reader templates sell interiors for paperbacks too.

3. Pay for a formatter. Reedsy has freelance interior design recommendations. They maybe be a bit expensive–that’s my guess just by looking at their qualifications. Fiverr pulled up a lot of options for interior formatting as well, and what I saw were reasonably priced. Of course, always ask for referrals, or other books they’ve done to get an idea of how their books look.

 

As always, I recommend learning how to do this yourself. If you’re going to be a prolific writer, or even if you’re just going to write a book or two a year, you might as well learn how to do it. Hey, you might even get good at it and you can trade services with other people. That’s what the writing community is all about: I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. If you can format for someone, maybe they’ll beta read for you, etc.

I know there’s stuff I’m forgetting. I mentioned Draft2Digital but not Smashwords. If you want to publish through Smashwords, they have their own system, and I’ve read their how-to-format-your-file book so that it will convert through their “meatgrinder” process.  I’ve never published through them, so if you’re interested, here is their STYLEGUIDE that will help you format your file to upload to Smashwords. It’s long, but Mark Coker makes it funny, so there is that.

When I first started formatting, it was a lot of trial and error. Make use of the interior viewer on KDP, KDP Print, and CreateSpace. Trust me when I say what you see is what you’ll get. If you get caught in an upload, fix, upload, fix, upload, fix, upload, fix pattern and you feel like you’re going to go mad, take a step back, go outside and come back later with a clear head. There is nothing worse than trying to format when you are quivering with rage.

Try practicing on short stories or novella. It’s a lot easier to work with few words then build up to a complete MS when you kind of know what’s going on.

I hope this blog post helps you format!

Good luck!

Up next is cover design!

Thanks for reading.

How Free is Self-Publishing?

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It costs absolutely nothing to publish a book. Nothing.

free

There are free word processing programs like Google Docs. You can use a library’s internet and computer. Platforms like Draft2Digital and Amazon’s KDP will provide you with some kind of book identification number so you don’t have to buy ISBNs for your books.

All you need to do is write, make a cover in Canva using their free website, use a free for commercial use picture from Pixabay, Pexels, or Unsplash, and you are a published author. All for free.

But when isn’t that a good idea?

Do you know Amazon has over 7 billion books in their Kindle store? And writers publish more every day.

So not only are you competing with everyone you know on Writer Twitter, you are competing with writers who are not on Twitter, big time indies who don’t have much time for social media. You’re competing with traditionally published authors, and those authors range from anywhere between The Big Five to tiny university presses.

You’re competing with writers from the US, Canada, (do you know how many writers I know who live in London, Ontario? A lot!) the UK, Australia, and many other countries.

Over 7 billion books.

Okay. What what is this blog post really about now that I’ve made you feel like crap?

Spending money.

Self-publishing is free.

Until it isn’t.

I do everything myself. For my trilogy, and Wherever He Goes, I wrote them, edited them. I formatted them and did the covers. The orangy hue on the third is my fault. I didn’t have the skill to fix it. It doesn’t look bad on screen, but the paperback could look better. That’s just the way it is, and I accept that.

What can you pay for when you self-publish?

  • Editing
  • Formatting
  • Cover

Those are the three big ones. But we can go further:

  • Beta Readers/Critique Partners/Book Coaches/Book Doulas
  • Blurb writing
  • Reviews/Arc review services like NetGalley
  • Advertising, ie, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, Promotions
  • ISBNs
  • Paperbacks for giveaways
  • Giveaway fees like on Goodreads

No one is saying you have to pay for all of that–or any of it.

It’s up to your discretion how much money you want to pump into your books.

See, this is the problem. No one wants to admit that they publish their books to sell them. Which leads an author not spending one dime on their books.

They are publishing for themselves. I repeat this over and over again like a broken record:

If you only publish for yourself you have no right to complain if your books do not sell.

But if you can admit you want people to pay to read your work then you have to take a hard look at your book.

Is the cover you made yourself doing the job?

Is your blurb up to snuff or is it confusing and off-putting?

Are there typos in the first few pages of the Look Inside?

If you can’t put out quality work yourself, then you’re going to need help.

It’s that simple.

And that difficult because saying you need help is a lot easier than being able to afford said help.

That being said, you can teach yourself how to do these things.

If you just shut down on me, it’s because you don’t want to take the time to learn. That’s okay. I wear clothes every day. That doesn’t mean I want to learn how to sew.

But what I’m trying to tell you is that you must find a happy medium between doing things for yourself and hiring out the help you need to make your book desirable to readers.

Because remember, readers have 7 billion choices.

Listen, my books aren’t pretty. Use the look Inside Feature for any of my books and you’ll see basic formatting. The embellishments are non-existent.

That’s fine. I taught myself enough to get by, and that’s good enough for me.

Readers aren’t going to care if you have fancy chapter headings if your story sucks.

So, being I’ve published a few things, I can suggest where you should put your money–if you have any, or where you should ask for favors from friends–if you have any. Just kidding!

  1. Editing. If you’re a newbie writer, this means a developmental edit as well as a line edit and proofing. Plot holes, flat characters. Developmental editing can be more of a job for a critique partner or someone from your writing group. Ask someone who reads your genre so they have a handle on the tropes and feel for the type of genre your book is in. Once you have a stellar story and a solid look inside sample, you need a good cover.
  2. Cover. Canva.com offers design classes. You need to train your eye and learn what makes a good cover. It can make or break your book. Plus, if you push your book in any way, ads, promos, giveaways, your cover will be the selling point. Look at your genre on Amazon. Look at templates. Try to duplicate them yourself in Canva. You may need to spring for a photo, but that’s not as expensive as you might think. I buy mine on canstockphoto.com for seven dollars apiece. Photos are even cheaper if you buy a credit package.

    A word of warning though. I write romance, and slapping some text onto a smiling couple is a lot different than making a cover for an Urban Fantasy novel. Fantasy, of any kind, requires a certain kind of cover. Negotiating a price with someone on Fiverr is a lot better than publishing a book that does not have an appropriate cover. Your sales will stop before they even start. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

    Sometimes you can find a pre-made template that’s cheap.

    Sometimes you can even find a photo on a photo site that is already doctored to how you need/want it to be. Set aside hours, days, if not weeks, to click through pictures. I’m barely 20,000 words into my next book and I’m already looking at photos.

  3. Formatting. Formatting for Kindle takes five minutes. All you need to do is set the options in Word so when you upload it into KDP it converts correctly. If you go wide and you use Draft2Digital, you don’t even have to do that. (Smashwords is a different story, and your Word file has to be formatted correctly or it won’t convert through their “meatgrinder” and they won’t publish your book.) Draft2Digital seems easier to work with, but I’m in KDP Select and haven’t used either of those services.

 

What is the cost of self-publishing? It can cost as much or as little as you want to put into it.

Someone opening a business always needs to invest. Paying for services is investing in your book business.

I used to think that I didn’t want to invest in my books because I may never get that money back. But that was incorrect thinking.

If my books are well-written, have a nice cover, and are formatted as to not turn anyone off from reading it, eventually, I will see that money returned to me by way of sales.

My books will be sold for years and years.  As I slowly make a name for myself, my sales will increase. It will take time, but I’m in it for the long haul, and I have patience.

I’ve put money toward my books by way of taking the time to learn how to do things for myself. I read lots of editing books. I read tons of blog posts about what makes a good cover. I’ve practiced making covers. I’ve learned to format my files. It took time. But time is money. I’ll eventually see dividends on the time I invested in my books.

time is money

It’s a personal choice.

This blog post begins a self-publishing series about how you can do most of these things by yourself if you want, and where to look if you don’t. I’ll give you the resources I used to learn and you can decide for yourself if it’s easier for you to hire out, or if you can’t afford it, where you can spend time learning things on your own.

Look for my next blog post about editing resources.

Thanks for reading!

 

The Four Kinds of Indie Author

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When I first entered the world of indie writers/publishing, I was dazzled. I thought anyone who published, published good books. I mean, I hadn’t been exposed to anything but traditionally published books, so of course, I was naive and not aware that with self-publishing, there isn’t a gatekeeper, and people can, and did, publish whatever they wanted.

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As I began reading indie, I realized there are four types of indie authors.

  1. The indie who writes poorly in an uncommon genre.
    To me, this is a double-edged sword of bad. And I’m not even talking about poorly written erotica–that’s a different category of writer. No, I’m talking about the poor writer who writes Bigfoot Romance, or anybody having sex with something that is not human, be it squids, dinosaurs, ghosts, aliens. Though alien romance is becoming more popular these days. Or other genres like a romance between a

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    I know, baby. It makes me sick, too.

    kidnapper and a hostage, or a specific kind of mystery/thriller where hamsters solve crimes. Not only is the writing bad, the genre is just as weird, and even if you, as a writer, could find a readership, your poor writing would turn them off. These are the writers who experiment and just throw up (literally and figuratively) anything they want. These are the writers who give indie writers a bad name, and without gatekeepers, they will continue to do so.
    Examples: Let’s not do that to ourselves, shall we?

  2. The indie who writes poorly in a popular genre.
    This isn’t terrible. I’ve heard time and time again that a good story or good pacing can save a book in a popular genre. Readers are willing to overlook a lot if they like your characters or the storyline, or you have a great twist that blows people’s minds. In a popular genre, you can find readers, or at the very least, at some point, someone may bump into you. Readers may not put you on their favorite list, and you may very well lose readers even if elements of your story are fantastic. Life is too short to read crappy books, and readers are realizing this. Too bad these writers

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    One rotten fruit in the whole bunch.

    can’t/won’t give their careers more of a chance and find an editor. Even trade beta reading with some proofreading is better than nothing.

    Examples: Well, EL James is a good one. There’s no disagreeing her writing could have used better editing. But her storyline was good, her characters solid. If someone could have gone and deleted all her adverbs, reading her books would have been a more enjoyable experience.

  3. The indie who writes well in an uncommon genre.
    It makes me sad when I see writers do this. It shouldn’t because they are writing what they like, and that’s the whole point of writing, right? That’s my writing to market side coming out, and far be it from me to judge someone’s genre choice. Being a good writer will give you readership, uncommon genre or not, just

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    Stand out!

    probably not as big if you write mainstream fiction. There’s always going to be someone who gets off reading your story about sex with dogs (pun intended) or your fabulously written story about forbidden sex with your brother. But one would hope that if you have writing chops, you branch out so more people can discover your talent.

    Examples: Let’s Do Butt Stuff. Of course I read this! I’m totally not afraid to admit it. *shifty eyes* Argh. Delilah Dallas has a decent voice. It’s a short story, and I read it all the way through. She could do well if she branched out into longer, maybe less weird, work. And I guess anal isn’t an “uncommon” genre, but it’s very niche and can be limiting.
    There was something else I read on Smashwords that struck me as good writing, and it was about a woman who had sex with her husband’s dog. I can’t find the author now, and after Smashwords went through and started being more strict with their erotica genres, they could have buried it. But the good writing stuck out to me, (no pun intended) and even after a couple years of stumbling upon it, I still remember the writing for what it was. And this story just goes to show that if she had written mainstream romance, perhaps I could have found it, maybe even recommended her writing. After all, I can’t tell someone how much I liked the writing if I can’t find it anymore.

  4. The indie writer who writes well in a popular genre.
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    Being the same can have some advantages.

    You would think this is where every indie would want to be. You stand the most to gain writing well in a genre that has lots of readers. Of course, it’s also difficult to get recognized in a saturated genre, but if you can make a name for yourself, you’ll have readers for the rest of your writing career.

    Examples: Citing examples for this genre is almost unfair because most of these authors have done it for years. Lauren Blakely, Kira Blakely, Mark Dawson. You might mistake Lauren Blakely for a trad-pubbed author, but her paperbacks are published by CreateSpace, as are Kira Blakely’s. Both have made a list. You could almost do a study on what all they are doing, and how that has worked for them in terms of “making it.” Covers, prolific releases, etc. Consistency.  They both write romance.
    Mark Dawson is also prolific, and publishes his paperbacks with CreateSpace, pegging him an indie. But his books have been picked up for a TV series, and, yeah, he’s been able to quit his day job. He writes in the thriller genre.
    I’m sure there are lesser known indies out there who are starting solid careers writing well in a genre well-received.

In conclusion, you have to decide what you want for and from your writing career. You may not want to “make it” and are fine publishing naughty short stories about fish. Maybe you’ll have three or four people read your stuff, and that’s good enough for you. No one can define your idea of success except you. If you’re happy writing books that only your friends and family will buy because you’re not interested in . . . how do I say this without sounding judgmental or derogatory . . . if you’re not interested in putting in the work to do better, then that’s your choice.

There’s no excuse for poor writing. Learning your craft can only help you find more readers, no matter your genre.

Good luck you Butt Stuff writers!