Vellum

Kindle Select Progress

/ ginny200 / 2 Comments

Two months ago, I decided to take my books into Kindle Select. Since that time, my sales have continued, although somewhat lower than my best month. However, the pages read in Kindle Unlimited have made up for the lack of sales and extended my readership, so I am pleased with the result.

The Jewelled Egg Murders is on track for release on December 1. I haven’t decided about taking it into Kindle Select, although doing so would give me more options for sales and promotions. My current chore is proofreading.

Steps in Editing and Proofreading.

  1. I reviewed the manuscript in Autocrit, correcting as I went.

2.  I ran it through Grammarly.

3.  I submitted it to Books Go Social for their Quality Mark programme. The manuscript received a Gold Mark, but the reviewer noted that it needed further proofreading. As well, she found a mix of British and American spellings, i.e. Canadian. She suggested I choose one, but I prefer to write in Canadian English.

4.  I used Word for Mac 2016 to identify spelling and grammatical errors. Word does allow one to choose Canadian English as the default.

5.  Now, I shall upload to Vellum and use its proofreading tool.

Why not engage a professional proofreader? Cost.

I shall rely on Books Go Social for most of my marketing efforts and turn my attention to the next book.

I have a collection of short stories in mind, five of which are Anne McPhail adventures and the remainder Dangerous Journeys of other kinds. Taking a page from Agatha Christie, I could expand one of them into a novel as she did with her short story, Yellow Iris.

That’s all for today from the beautiful Kawartha Lakes.

Publishing Journey: Boxed Set

/ ginny200 / 4 Comments

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

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

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.