publishers

My Storefront

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Yesterday, I listened to a webinar produced by Kathy Meis of Bublish about Ingram’s bookstore initiative, Aerio. An exciting concept that allows an author, or anyone else to set up a bookstore with access to the millions of books in Ingram’s catalogues. No cost to set up although there are some subscriptions available that might be useful down the road.

I spent the afternoon setting mine up and uploading one of my books(print and ebook) as well as a collection of books that I have enjoyed in the past. Most of these are in themystery/suspense genre, although I’ll add others soon.

On the whole, an easy set-up with only one minor glitch.

When I’ve finished re-editing my books, I’ll move the titles over from Create Space to Ingram and add those(print only). Most of my books are in Kindle Select so will remain with Amazon.

Black Willow Books is live on this page.

I’ve been busy over the last few months marketing Painting of Sorrow and reediting the other books. Murderous Roots is almost done and it’s the last.

I’m also plotting a sequel to The Jewelled Egg Murders and one to Painting of Sorrow as well.

I have a request. If any of you have read Painting of Sorrow and not yet reviewed it, please do. Stars and a brief review on Amazon.com will go a long way in helping me with marketing. This is also true for any other indie author. Getting the word out is the toughest job.

If you want to know what I’m up to without waiting for it to appear in a blog, sign up for my reading group. The pop-up and an offer of a free short story will appear with the page.

You might remember that we have a new puppy, A black Standard Poodle, Cully, now almost 8 months old. Here she is a week or so ago.

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That’s about it for today.

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Updates on Publishing

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Another chilly Sunday in the Kawarthas and it’s April. At least the ground here is bare of snow for now.

I’ve been working for the last few weeks on re-editing The Facepainter Murders and I’m happy to say that the new, better version is up on Amazon and Create Space.

I’ve also explored some further advertising opportunities.

Bublish

I’m in the midst of a 2 week free trial with this company, in which a membership costs 99$ US a year. A lot, but that lets me upload all my books and get them before the thousands of people who follow the site. Every weekend, Bublish hosts a twitter campaign that ends with a virtual bookstore on Monday. Whichever bubbles(see below) are new the week before are featured.

The bubble includes an author biography, an extract from one of the books and an insight section. The latter is a short paragraph about what ever the author might think would interest a reader, such as an introduction to why the book was written or how the writer coped with a particular scene. I started with book 1 of my Dangerous Journeys series last week, wrote two bubbles and have had 187 views so far and 2 clicks thru to Amazon. I’ll see how it goes by Thursday.

Amazon Ads.

You know the books that appear below the one you have searched for on Amazon? Those lists result from Amazon Ads that are written by the author or publisher. Amazon runs a bidding programme so that each ad, once clicked upon, costs the author what she bid for placement of that particular ad. It’s not a great system. The results are delayed, sometimes by as much as six weeks and the sales are not in real time. However, the clicks data and the information about sales form Kindle Direct can help determine whether or not an ad is working.

Brian Meeks wrote a book on the subject called Mastering Amazon Ads, which is helpful although a bit confusing for a non-analyst(Brian is one). There is also a oa free course in the subject. You can find it here. I’m in the midst of both the book and the course and setting up ads. I think it’s useful to do all three in conjunction. Brian runs a Facebook group about the ads as well.

 

Launch in 2 days

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A Superior Crime and other stories, a collection of five Anne McPhail Dangerous Journeys shorts plus seventeen others, launches on Feb. 13, 2018. This is the sixth publication of my company, From The River Publishing. For new readers, the others are:

Murderous Roots

The Facepainter Murders

No Motive for Murder

The Child on the Terrace

The Jewelled Egg Murders

See all of them at Amazon world-wide.

I’m re-editing all but The Jewelled Egg Murders. Murderous Roots is done, reissued and available on Amazon. It is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited as are all the others except The Jewelled Egg Murders. I’ll enroll it when a NetGalley subscription runs out in March.

In the early summer, From the River Publishing will bring out Painting of Sorrow, the story of a young woman hiding a brutal past who discovers a Caravaggio painting, long thought destroyed in the bombing of World War II Berlin. That discovery resurrects her past and brings both danger and love into her life.

This autumn, if all goes well, Stolen Children, the story of a young woman who exposes a criminal enterprise that kidnaps children and feeds them into the illegal adoption trade.

We’re expecting freezing rain today so indoors it is. That’s about all for a snowy Sunday in the Kawarthas.

Publishing, Cont.

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A Superior Crime and other stories is set to go on Feb 13. at Amazon. Karen Phillips(PhillipsCovers) completed the final version for print and I think it’s terrific.

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I’m continuing with the re-edit of Murderous Roots and The Facepainter Murders. I completed No Motive for Murder some time ago. Only one to go after that—The Child on the Terrace.

Painting of Sorrow is back from the editors at Books Go Social with a gold mark of excellence. I have only a few corrections to make so perhaps it will be out in May rather than September.

I noticed discussion recently on some of the author sites I follow about writing programmes, editing and publishing.

Over the last year, I developed the following steps:

  1. Write in Scrivener.
  2. Export to Word as a docx file.
  3. Upload to Vellum.
  4. Edit chapter by chapter in Autocrit and Grammarly.
  5. Generate books from Vellum in all the formats available. The print version should be generated separately as it requires a different ISBN. Also, ISBNs for Smashwords differ from those at Kindle. Amazon doesn’t require an ISBN for books published on Kindle.
  6. Publish at Kindle and Create Space.
  7. Market. I use the book promoter service at Books Go Social and tweet with askDavid.

That’s about it for a snowy Sunday in the Kawarthas. We’re supposed to get 10cm more today and there’s about that much on the ground. Winter was hiding after all.

 

Writing projects update

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I have four writing projects and one puppy project on the go for January and February. Cully, our new Standard Poodle puppy is banging at the door to get in. Puppy classes began a week ago and we are making some progress in sitting and standing.

Graphic designer Karen Phillips and I are working on the cover for Dangerous Journeys: A Superior Crime and other stories. I’ve finished editing and the launch date will be sometime in February after the manuscript makes it through the process at Create Space and Kindle Direct Publishing. I still have to write the cover copy.

Painting of Sorrow, a stand-alone novel outside of the Dangerous Journeys series, is out for editing. I’ll work on getting it publication-ready through the summer and publish in September or October.

I re-edited Murderous Roots, book 1 in the series and I’m proofreading the hard copy now. I hope to finish that by the end of February.

The Facepainter Murders is at the beginning of the re-edit phase. It should be finished and republished by the end of March.

That’s about it for another Sunday in the Kawarthas. Mild and sunny today. Has winter left or is it hiding, waiting to pounce on us again.

 

Marketing and other publishing mysteries

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The Jewelled Egg Murders, published on December 1. Marketing the fifth book in a series depends, as I see it, in letting readers of the first four books know that it is available. To that end, I bought a package from Books Go Social, enrolled in Book of the Day at BGS, and took an ad in the holiday magazine at that site. I also have a package of twitter opportunities that goes out to about 10 thousand readers.

My dilemma is when to place it on Kindle Select. I hope to publish a volume of short stories, five of which involve the main character from the series. With luck, that will appear in February. Which leaves January as the most logical month to enroll in Kindle Select.

Another issue is spelling and grammar. I tried to write the first 4 books in American English. This was not successful and many Canadian/British spellings crept in, all interpreted as typos and mistakes in grammar. I wrote The Jewelled Egg Murders in Canadian English. The British editor, noticing that I spelled some words in American, thought those were typos. ie I use spelled not spelt(which is a variety of wheat here and in the USA).

No reviews as yet. I get it. It takes time, especially if you want to leave more comment than the stars you gave the book(if any), but even the star count would be encouraging to the authors of the books you read.

On a personal note: Our new puppy, Cully came home a week ago. She is now nine weeks old.IMG_1646

 

 

Kindle Select, first month

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Sixteen days ago, I pulled my books from all other sites and enrolled them in Kindle Select. A few observations:

My sales have plummeted. I hadn’t had a day with 0 sales since I took over the publishing of my books, but since enrolling in Kindle Select, no sales on four days.

Pages read have replaced some of those lost sales. My readers are strong users of Kindle Unlimited, but unless the earned per page royalty is higher than July’s .00402, it won’t replace those sales.

In fairness, I haven’t used the promotional tools yet, although I have a promotion on Murderous Roots scheduled for October and will use the available promotions for the other books, including the boxed set of Dangerous Journeys, in November as part of the launch of The Jewelled Egg Murders.

Sixteen days don’t make a trend, but those 0 days were a shock. The question now is what to do about The Jewelled Egg Murders. In Select or out?

 

Publishing Journey: Boxed Set

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Summer’s over, unless we get a spell of warm weather in September. Like so much in 2017, it came and went so quickly we almost missed it.

I’ve been writing and editing my next Anne McPhail novel, The Jewelled Egg Murders, these past few months and the end is now in sight. At least, I hope it is. My projected date for publishing is November 1, 2017 and I need to get advanced reading copies out before then. This business of working for yourself is great but the deadlines loom regardless of who sets them.

Before I publish The Jewelled Egg Murders, I’ve gathered my first four books to form a boxed set of e-books at Amazon.com, .ca, etc. Look for it as Dangerous Journeys Vols. 1-4.

Dangerous-Journeys-KindleI used Vellum for this task as well. This was amazingly easy and no rejects from Kindle Direct because of formatting or other issues. I can’t say enough about this programme. Tasks that took as a long as a month to get through, now take minutes. Well worth the cost.

Marketing, as always, must be done but I enroll my books at Books Go Social, Laurence O’Bryan’s terrific business in Dublin, Eire. Reasonable rates and terrific results.

That’s about it for today. Do check out Dangerous Journeys Vols. 1-4 and let me know what you think. Cover art as always by Karen Phillips of PhillipsCovers.

2 more publishing lessons

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In my last post, I detailed some of the lessons I learned about publishing while I prepared my 4 manuscripts for my new company From The River Publishing. Since then, I discovered, thanks to Joanna Penn, a terrific new tool, Vellum. By the way, if you are a writer and haven’t discovered Joanna’s website, have a look here. Lots of great information.

Vellum is a somewhat expensive, but outstanding program that takes all the worry trouble and hard work out of the final stages. It would have saved me 3 months had I read about it long ago.

Rather than struggle to format a manuscript correctly for uploading to different platforms, such as Kindle and Create Space, or to aggregators like Smashwords, I used Vellum.

The program requires a Mac and a Word document in .docx format. Input the file and the metadata, and Vellum shows you the file converted to e-pub, mobi and pdf. Proof as much as you need, input other books if you want, and, when you are ready, push the buy button, purchase the program and generate the books you need in the required formats.

If you review and want to proof further, go through the process again until the manuscript is polished and upload to your chosen publishers. Nothing more to pay, no annual fee, no rejections, no trying to analyze the mysterious messages about pagination from Create Space, just a seamless process that results in books that are ready for the buyer.

I’m working through my list again, and have finished Murderous Roots and The Facepainter Murders. Both will soon be live, as revised, on all the platforms mentioned above.

Lesson # 2? Read The Creative Penn often.

My Publishing Journey

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When my publisher retired, I had 4 books at retail outlets online, POD at Amazon, and distributed by Smashwords. Changing over to self-publishing would be easy, I thought.

Not so easy. At CreateSpace, the POD arm of Amazon, I began the process, submitting PDF’s for each book and cover, getting new ISBN’s(free at Library and Archives Canada) for each version and making sure that no vestige of the old publisher remained in the documents. These were then uploaded, assessed and if passed, a proof available on line and if wanted, in paper(for a fee). It’s taken longer than I thought it would and the books aren’t available on Amazon as yet. Along the way I  used Acrobat Pro DC, a terrific program. I’m proofing No Motive for Murder and The Child on the Terrace, while en route to visit my family in Bermuda. I started at the end of the series rather than the beginning because I am making changes in the cover art.

Karen Phillips, of Phillips Covers, is designing covers for all 4 of the published books and for the as yet untitled fifth book in the Dangerous Journeys series. The covers will have common fonts and set-up and a logo. When the latest book is ready to go to press, I’ll present them as a boxed set wherever that is possible.

That brings me to Smashwords, the company set up by Mark Coker, that publishes and distributes e-books to all the major retailers except Amazon, unless one has sold $2000US of the title at Smashwords.

The initial process to change over to me was easy. Arline Chase, at Write Words Inc. turned over the files to me and there they were, all set up to go. Except, her publishing company’s name was in all the books, and I wanted to change that. I also wanted to add a chapter of the preceding book to the next one in the series. That meant getting the original files, adding matter at the end, learning about the page numbering system at Smashwords, and then uploading.

The page numbering? It has to be consistent with their’s and changing it, with my rudimentary knowledge of the finer points of Word, meant hours spent learning and then renumbering. Finally, both cover and content were through the Meatgrinder(that’s the name) and on to Autovetter. This program found errors that at first I didn’t even understand that were left-over ghosts of a pdf file in the Word document I was using.

I’m at the end of the Smashwords process for No Motive for Murder and it and The Child on the Terrace are available under my new imprint From The River Publishing, at Smashwords. The older books are there as well, and at Kobo, Nook, and many other fine e-book retailers.

Oh, yes. The first of my series, Murderous Roots, is free online at all those retailers. No time limit on that and I’ve developed new lower pricing for Volumes 2-4.

One final thought. I’m working on a new web site for my imprint From The River Publishing. It will be available at fromtheriverpublishing.ca. I’ll post the news when it goes live.

That’s it for a sunny Sunday in March.