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Category Archives: epublishing

Exciting news

31 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Writing

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It’s been very quiet around this blog recently, mostly because I’ve been busy on the sequel to The Roman and the Runaway. I hoped to finish it in 2011 and I’ve actually managed to do that, thanks to some free time over the Christmas break and a last-minute flood of ideas for the final chapter.

You can find the ebook at Smashwords – where you can get 20% as a sample, or buy the whole thing for $2.99. It’s also available at Amazon’s UK Kindle store and in the US. Thanks to Brenda, a Flickr user, for making the image of the knife available under a Creative Commons licence. I think it makes a great cover.

Happy New Year!

Pink Snowbunnies in Hell (and Amazon…and Smashwords)

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Indie writing, Writers, Writing

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Back in May, author Debora Geary put out a challenge on a Kindleboards forum, asking whether people would be interested in contributing a story of under 1,000 words to an anthology. The story had to contain the line ‘pink snowbunnies will ski in Hell’ in it, but other than that, anything went.

The resulting publication (which had a cover before any content) is now available for sale at Amazon and Smashwords. It’s interesting to see how the different authors interpreted this brief (for me it was a chance to dip my toe into ‘light romance’ territory…). All proceeds are going to animal shelter charities and there are chances to win free copies over at Jimi Ripley, Coral Moore, Rex Jameson, Nicole Chase and Barbara Annino’s sites.

The difference between free and nearly free…

23 Monday May 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Websites

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…turns out to be quite considerable. A glacier-slow drip of sales at Amazon became a torrent of downloads when the book was made free instead of 99 cents/70 pence.

Downloads at the UK Amazon site passed the 1,000 mark this morning, while over at the US site, the figure is close to 3,000.

It really brings home the scale of Amazon’s market share. The book has been freely available online since late 2009, via Scribd, Smashwords (and the various sites to which Smashwords ships books), Feedbooks and Manybooks. It took eight months to reach 4,000 downloads on Smashwords, while on Amazon that number has been reached in less than two weeks. It’s exciting, but a little bit frightening, too.

Amazon update update

12 Thursday May 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Free reads, Sales

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Well, how quickly things change in this new epublishing world. Last week I was delighted because I’d had two sales in May through Amazon – bringing my total Amazon tally to a not-terribly-awe-inspiring FIVE WHOLE BOOKS. Well, five whole files, anyway.

Yesterday morning Amazon marked the price down from 99 cents/70 pence to… FREE! The effect on downloads via the Kindle Store was instantaneous By this morning my four Amazon.com downloads had burgeoned to a more impressive 1,072, while the UK sales had grown to a sedate but respectable 122. Of course there won’t be any royalties as no-one is making any money out of this arrangement, but it does mean that The Roman and the Runaway will be lurking on people’s Kindles and may even get read by some of them. 😉

Ebook quality

28 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Editing, epublishing, ereading, Free reads, Libraries

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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

She was watching them and biting her Up.

…from the sideboard as! I held their attention…

Ill work on Terence and make another stab at the diary.

“J think he lost the battle because of his hemorrhoids.”

Kõiõing-neeaies as sne spoêe.

Authors of self-published books are often criticised for poor editing. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to edit one’s own writing – this is one area where a book that goes through the traditional publication process is almost always going to have an advantage. Almost always…

The examples above are not from a self-published book. They’re from the first ebook I borrowed from my public library (via the OverDrive service I discussed the other week). In theory, from a book which has undergone a rigorous quality-control procedure. Oh yeah?

They’re clearly errors which have crept in through an OCR (optical character recognition) process. Which has been poorly checked. Now I haven’t paid anything for this book, having read it through the library service, but if this is the same file that is made available for purchase, then I would have paid between $6.07 and $7.99 for it. And would have been even more annoyed by the mistakes. It’s not just self-published books which need careful proof-reading.

The book is an excellent read, by the way, despite the distracting errors.

Cover again

13 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Artwork, epublishing, Software, Websites

≈ 2 Comments

Revised cover, January 2011

One day I might stop tinkering with the cover of The Roman and the Runaway. Probably when I finish The Viking and the Vendetta and have a new toy to play with. No time soon, then…

The book is in so many different places now, that it becomes a major task to update the cover in all of them, which means it isn’t something to be taken on lightly. Top marks to Feedbooks, who make the change instantaneously. Smashwords comes a creditable second, with a very quick approval process. Amazon is slower and won’t let you make more than one change at a time, so I still have to go back to them and submit the final version, as my first wasn’t quite up to the job. For sites which are more heavily mediated (ManyBooks, for example), I have to send an email to make changes. As you might imagine, the version of the book on those sites doesn’t get updated very often!

I’ve uploaded a copy of the book to Goodreads now too. This involved using Calibre to convert my Word document into an epub file. Sounds easy, but turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. Not Calibre’s fault for the most part, but Word’s. For some reason, the navigation had gone screwy, even though I’d diligently labelled all the chapters as ‘Heading 3’ and all the parts as ‘Heading 2’. When I saved the file as HTML before importing it into Calibre, this meant that the table of contents was messed up, too. I must have done that conversion six or seven times before I was finally happy with the epub. I could just have downloaded the Feedbooks version, I suppose and used that (Goodreads does suggest doing this), but I wanted to see what the conversion process entailed (and wanted to use my chapter numbers, instead of the ones Feedbooks insists upon). In this respect, Smashwords is less obliging – they won’t let you use the files that they create from your Word document, in other places. I recommend Calibre generally, as a management tool for ebooks.

It’s all very complicated, I must say. Makes you quite nostalgic for the days of print…

On Amazon

09 Saturday Oct 2010

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Websites

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When I first looked at using Amazon to publish The Roman and the Runaway, which I suppose was about a year ago, it seemed very complicated. I got a long way through the process before realising that I couldn’t complete it, as I didn’t live in the US. It also wasn’t possible to make the book available for free, as it is on Smashwords, so I gave up on Amazon at that point, thinking that eventually my book would get there through the Smashwords distribution system.

It was only recently that I found out that publishing on Amazon is now possible for non-US residents and that it is significantly easier to do so. Two days ago, I uploaded the book and set the price at $0.99. And this morning it’s on Amazon’s US and UK sites (it’s 71 pence in the UK).

 

Kindle edition

The whole process was a lot easier than I expected it to be, after my initial experiments last year. Now I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner!

Instant gratification and literacy

13 Friday Aug 2010

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Editing, epublishing

≈ 1 Comment

I thoroughly enjoyed Kent Anderson’s blog post ‘It’s the End of the Book As We Know It – and I Feel Fine’ over at the Scholarly Kitchen blog. It sums up a lot of my own feelings about ebooks and literacy. These paragraphs, in particular, resonated with me:

But will book reading actually suffer? I doubt it. My kids would love to have Kindles so that they could read spontaneously. They get addicted to a series (don’t get me going about “Pretty Little Liars” right now), and once one book is polished off, they want to start the next one. But the scarcity model of book publishing means having to wait days between reading events if ordering a book from an online retailer; calling around town to find a book and often failing; or checking the library which often doesn’t have the latest materials. Does waiting, calling around, or getting frustrated help the reading experience? Not at all.

The new era of books may actually see more authors, more reading, and more books being bought and sold.

There is a lot of complaining about standards of content in ebooks (particularly from professional editors, I’ve noticed…). Not just in those that have been self-published, but in books purchased from mainstream publishers, too. Usually it is standards of literacy that are criticised in the former and formatting problems in the latter. I agree that it’s irritating if a book is badly put together. I also agree that it is difficult for highly literate people to read a book if they are spotting spelling or grammatical errors every five sentences. What I would argue here, though, is that this doesn’t matter for every reader.

To illustrate my point I’d like to introduce a twelve-year-old would-be-author. She is three chapters into her first book and is happy to admit that:

I might make a few mistakes in spelling and grammer.

She loves writing and is spending a fair part of her spare time working on her book. Yes, it’s littered with errors, but she’s learning her craft and is committed to improving. Would you sneer at her for her mistakes? I hope not (especially as she’s my daughter).

This trainee author loves to share her work and get feedback on it. I think that a lot of self-published authors have a lot in common with my twelve-year-old. They have given up on the old publishing model and are anxious to share their stories with the rest of the world. Since many ebook retailers offer the opportunity to download a sample of a book before purchase, it is easy for you, as a reader, to assess its quality before you make a purchase. If you’re bothered by bad grammar and spelling, you won’t buy a book that offends your sensibilities. If your literacy levels are low, you probably won’t notice and you might buy the book and enjoy it anyway.

So what? Surely it’s better for someone with low literacy levels to be reading something than reading nothing? If a story is very good but the spelling and grammar are bad, then it isn’t too late to do something about it, when the book is still only in electronic format. Self-published ebooks are quite often works in progress, in this respect, as I’ve argued before.

In lowering the barriers to book publishing we are also lowering the barriers to book purchasing and opening up the written word to people who might have been too intimidated to walk through the doors of a library or a bookshop. It’s never too late to discover a love of reading. I agree with Kent: the availability of books in electronic form can only be a good thing for readers and for authors of all calibres.

Smashwords

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Indie writing, Websites

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I’ve mentioned the Smashwords site before, but thought it was time to write something a bit more in-depth about my experiences with the service. Frankly, it’s hard to do so without coming over as a gushing fangirl, but I will do my best.

The site is aimed at anyone who wants to get their work into the hands (onto the screens) of readers with the minimum of expenditure. You can put a set price on your book, permit readers to set their own price, or make it available for free. The first two options work best if you are based in the US or already have a relationship with the US tax system. If you don’t, then you will either lose 30% of your income to the Internal Revenue Service or you have to do a lot of form-filling in order to meet the IRS regulations. Even if you live in a country which has a 0% tax agreement with the US. Smashwords gives a lot of information about how to deal with the various forms. Other self-publishing websites (Amazon and Lulu, for example) are effectively closed to non-US writers at the moment. Apple recently announced that you can publish directly to the iBookstore. If you own an up-to-date Mac. Luckily, Smashwords already distributes to the iBookstore, so I don’t need to get as irritated by that stipulation as I could if I put my mind to it…

I’ve talked before about the requirements that Smashwords places on texts: they’re mainly concerned with technical formatting issues, rather than content. I have noticed over the nine months that I’ve had my book with them that the formatting requirements have gradually got tighter. Every time you upload a revised version of the book, it goes through an automatic and manual checking process. Twice now, a new version of The Roman and the Runaway has been rejected in the manual check for something that was considered fine in the previous version. I originally had the book in block paragraphs and had to change it to indents to satisfy one of these checks. Then, more recently, I had to go through and alter the spacing between paragraphs.

To make books acceptable to the various other distributors that Smashwords deals with, there are often other changes that need to be made: the size of the cover image and hyperlinked tables of contents, for example. These evolving requirements involve some time on the part of the author to make sure that their books comply. The most significant change was the requirement for an ISBN number (in order to ship books to Sony and Apple). Again, detailed instructions were given for this and Smashwords is able to assign free ISBNs. In Canada, our ISBNs are free anyway, but the process of dealing with the Canadian ISBN Service System (CISS) is fairly complex and time-consuming. I think it’s worth it to get your name as the publisher, rather than Smashwords’. I found Sarah Ettrich’s post very helpful in getting mine. Randolphe Lalonde has also recently posted on this subject.

There’s a huge amount of helpful information on the Smashwords site itself – the Smashwords Style Guide covers a lot of the formatting issues and the Smashwords Marketing Guide gives useful tips on how to promote your work (including some great general advice about using Twitter). Overall, the ethos of the site is one of support and empathy with writers. Books in the system get (or are going to get) distributed to Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple and Amazon. All for relatively little effort on the part of the writer.

There are some things I’d like to see on the site that aren’t there yet. Statistics on the download of different ebook formats would be interesting (though that’s a bit geeky, perhaps). I’d also be interested to know how people got to the download page and whereabouts in the world they came from (the Feedbooks site offers this functionality): some detailed referral stats would be great. It would also be good if the Site Updates page had an RSS feed so that I could monitor it in my feed reader.

Overall, if you’re a writer who’s wondering about the best way of getting your work out into the big wide world, then I can’t recommend Smashwords too highly.

On pricing of ebooks

27 Thursday May 2010

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Indie writing, Websites

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I was thinking of doing a post about ebook pricing anyway, but the discovery of my own book under someone else’s name for the bargain-basement price of $41.70 precipitated it, somewhat. $41.70! Who on earth would pay that? I could understand someone ripping off my content and presenting it for $2.99. That way they might actually sell a few copies!

Michelle Haley's version of 'The Roman and the Runaway'

(Click on the image for a closer look)

I love the way she used my cover for the book, complete with my name, and then claims the copyright in hers. It’s quite funny, really. The book does carry a Creative Commons licence which permits sharing, so long as the book remains unchanged. So she followed those guidelines, but conveniently forgot to notice the ‘non-commercial’ element of the licence. For some reason she has categorised it under ‘Craft and Hobbies’. I suppose it was a hobby of mine while I was writing it, but it doesn’t really reflect the content that well…

Anyway, back to the pricing issue. I mentioned in another post that I’m reluctant to pay anything at all for ebooks. (Maybe that’s just because I’m mean.) I do most of my fiction reading through our excellent public library system or via freely-available online material. I do occasionally buy printed books, although I try to limit that spending, otherwise the house gets full up of books too quickly. It tends to be mainly non-fiction that I buy these days: cookery books, for example. This might change if I get some sort of ereader, but the price of those is too offputting for now, too.

I enjoyed an online lecture by James O’Donnell on the Kindle, where he described his own ebook pricing barrier: $9.99 in his case. I suspect that many people share his scruples. There’s something too insubstantial about an ebook to warrant paying more than that. Or more than $5 or $3, perhaps. $41.70 would definitely be pushing it, I feel.

I’ve reported Michelle’s pirated copy of the book to the Lulu powers-that-be and have uploaded a free version on Lulu for good measure. Be interesting to see if they take the pricey one down.

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Free ebook

The Roman and the Runaway

Ebook: $2.99

The Viking and the Vendetta

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