My Self Publishing Journey Part 1

 

In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've been self publishing since 2011 and was absolutely self-taught.  I'm sure I Googled a lot back then, used the how-to guides provided by Amazon and Smashwords but I don't know if there were any YouTube guides back then, almost certainly are now, but if I used them I've forgotten entirely.

I do remember it being a steep learning curve, probably helped by my having three novels - one a  relative behemoth at 115k words - sitting on my hard drive, so once I'd worked out what to do for one I was able to apply that learning and reinforce it on the following two.

I even blogged about the process (links below).  A quick perusal of that content fourteen years later shows it was more about the general process I'd learnt and less about what button to press and when in which piece of software.  Probably useful for someone starting out and almost certainly outdated in parts now.

How to self publish Part 1

How to self publish part 2

How to self publish part 3

How to self publish part 4

How to self publish part 5

The bit that might stick out like a sore thumb if you're reading those blog posts today is that there's no mention of print editions.  I think Amazon were spreading rumours about print on demand coming and if memory serves it was the US market that got POD first, but it just wasn't an option at that point.  Today most authors would want a print option for their readers, even though the profit margin is generally lower.  Actually that isn't accurate, you can price your eBooks and print books at any price you want within certain constraints, but most authors will be trying to make the print version as affordable as possible, and that usually means the lower priced eBook returns more in royalties.

Now all ten of my books are available in eBook and print versions.  The last couple are available in both paperback and hardback versions although I doubt I'll ever sell any hardback ones.  I created them because the only extra cost is my time and if I (or someone else) really wanted to provide a special gift of one of my books, then the hardback version would be a nice upgrade.

In addition to the ten books listed at the bottom of this blog I also was heavily involved in the production of the four (to date) Newsbiscuit compilations that exist to supplement our meagre income.  They were created by a small team of editors including myself and I was the person who did all the preparation, formatting and setting up in our NewsBiscuit KDP login for eBook and print versions.  Again, there are both paperback and hardback versions available.  We've actually sold 23 hardback copies, which at around £20 a book isn't bad.

  

The challenge for these books was similar to all the other books - setting up the prelim pages, setting the page and section breaks so the prelim section used roman numerals (apart from the leading pages that had none) and the main section had Arabic.  Like all print books I had to be aware of orphans and widows - chapters ending on the first couple of lines on a new page, for example.  Usually solved by careful selection of font and font size, but also by very fine editing if the story supports it.  One advantage of these books is that on any given page there are usually between two and four short stories and shuffling them around the chapter often resulted in a more efficient use of page space.  That technique generally doesn't work in a long-form novel!

Other challenges with print that you don't have concern yourself with for the eBook version is page size, page colour and margin sizes.  I initially used the default 9 x 6 format Amazon suggests.  Apparently it's a popular book format in the US but looks large for a piece of UK fiction.  Fine for textbooks and I set a large page size for the Newsbiscuit anthologies, however for my more recent print books in my range I've gone for a more traditional UK 8 x 5.  Obviously smaller pages mean more pages and with POD every page raises the unit cost, but equally smaller page sizes reduces the individual page cost.  I knew that maths degree would come in useful one day.

So these fourteen books have given me a grounding in preparing books for publication in eBook and print format, skills that have been acquired through hard work and more than  a little perspiration. I'm sure I will be setting up an eleventh Ray Sullivan novel at some point in the near future and we're way overdue a fifth NewsBiscuit anthology, but it turns out I've had the opportunity to use my skills to help other authors produce their books.  I'll be discussing who I've helped and in what ways in the next part of this story.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

     

   

 

Bronze - The Detectorist Detective

 

This post is really overdue.  I published Bronze in September 2023 and actually thought I'd blogged about it.  Clearly I was wrong, so this post is a belated attempt to put that situation right.

Most books have a genesis backstory, an event or a conversation that gets the thought processes churning.  My first two books, Parallel Lives and The Journeymen were both originally short stories written working away from home in my last few months of Royal Air Force service that kept tapping away at me.  Skin, for all it's near future politics mixed with the largely unresolved WMD issue that we went to war for was in many ways a parallel story of the manufacturing company I was working for at the time.

The Last Simple was inspired by the ludicrously short chapters in the Dan Brown (and other writers') books, and Project: Evil was simply inspired by catching the end of a Roger Moore Bond movie and thinking 'how the hell do you go about project managing a secret lair for a megalomaniac?

Digital Life Form was sparked by a conversation about where tech will go in the future - we'd just bought one of those new-fangled Tom Tom Sat Navs.  That was written in 2011 and most of the tech was pure Sci Fi - what we would now call AI and self driving cars was only vaguely talked about. 

Hotel California was, obviously, inspired by the song but quickly took on a new meaning.  I still refer to famous folk leaving too soon as new residents.  Bronze, on the other hand, was someone else's idea.

I'm retired now, but two years ago I finalised my fifty-one circuits of the sun as a wage slave, working as a lecturer in a Welsh technical college, teaching maths and science in the aeronautical engineering department.  I worked in a small office, with just five of us in a room that was technically overcrowded.  My desk was in a corner facing the only door, so the other guys (it was an all-male environment until I left, my replacement has moved the diversity dial and is doing a great job).  You've probably assumed I was probably the oldest in the office and you'd be correct with the other four ranging from just under forty at the time to mid fifties.  Not only was I the only one who taught the tough academic stuff at that time, I was the only one who wrote stuff - books, satire, occasionally blogs.  That sentence will be relevant in a paragraph or so.

Given the age of the other guys it shouldn't come as a surprise that three of them seemed to go through a mid-life crisis simultaneously.  They'll deny it, but one by one in early 2023 they all bought soft top sports cars.  I'm not being a critic - I'm jealous, I missed my mid-life crisis, probably because I had a major life change leaving the RAF and buying my first and so far only house while learning to survive in civvy street in my mid forties.  Anyway, first one, Steve, bought a Mazda MX5, a second, Jason, bought a BMW - don't ask what model, it had a soft top and probably didn't have working indicators - and the third, Simon, bought an Alfa Romeo Spyder.  It's on the cover of the book, if you're into these sort of things.  Simon is a keen detectorist and extremely knowledgeable about British history.

Anyway, the three amigos started meeting up at the weekend, parking up three soft-tops abreast at a café on the Horseshoe Pass or somewhere in the Llyn Peninsula to have a coffee or two and put the world to rights.  Then one Monday, after one of these meetings, Jason entered the office and said he'd had a great idea for a TV show.  He was telling the room, but looking directly at me as I shuffled maths worksheets for my first lesson.  Apparently he'd been following Simon in the Alfa and it came to him - Bronze the Detectorist Detective.  A TV show each week with Bronze solving a crime.  I pushed for more, but that was it really.  I went off and taught my lesson and pretty much forgot about it.  Until break time when he brought it up.  And lunch.  And afternoon break.  Remember the sentence about how I was the only person with a writing background?

Obviously the brief was a little thin, so quietly I gave the idea some thought.  Although I'm no detectorist - I have literally bought and used one for the first time in my life this year for messing around with the grandsons on the beach - I have a long term friend from my Airforce days, Dougie,  who was and is an armourer and who drifted into Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or bomb squad as his calling is often called. He trained in EOD and was involved in clearing war graves in the Balkans as the Serbians often booby-trapped them.  I recalled Dougie recounting some of his experience on a fleeting visit to me after we both had left the RAF and it had stuck with me.  Doug kept in the industry, has worked near the DMZ in South Korea, was part of the team that cleared the Falklands of land mines and works clearing brownfield sites in the UK these days. So I created an amalgam character, only known as Bronze, who had a military career in the Special Forces and in EOD and who was now consulting as a civilian, just as Dougie does today. Dougie wasn't in the Special Forces, BTW, that was the usual artistic exaggeration.

I created a synopsis that covered chapter by chapter what would roughly happen in the book and set it mainly in Mold, north Wales, a very nice town not that far from my home but with a diversion to Pristina as part of a murder mystery.  For the benefit of North American readers, the grungy stuff that forms on your windowsill and in the shower is spelled mould over here - the town isn't musty! Bronze, as well as being a consulting EOD specialist is also used by police investigating serious crimes by using his skills to look for buried evidence and is roped in by north Wales Constabulary to assist with the investigation of a man found in a field just outside of Mold with his head almost cleaved in two.  Scattered around the man are what look like bronze artefacts but turn out to be from the Copper Age and originating in the Balkan region.

By the way, if you've never heard of the Copper Age it's because we didn't really have one in what we now call the UK - we went from Stone to Bronze pretty much in one leap, but in continental Europe Copper was the metal of choice for a long time and, despite not bothering with it as a pure metal much, north Wales was home to one of the largest copper mines in Europe.  The other large one was in the Balkans - the book is fun, fast, violent, scary and yet educational.  Dougie provided lots of background information on how bomb disposal operates and I've tried to incorporate that in the story in an authentic way.

The book weaves a seemingly unrelated crime and a serial terrorist bomber from Bronze's past with the investigation of the crime literally in his own backyard.  For a bit of fun I incorporated the office people into the characters, not always in a flattering way.  To be fair I did something a little scary as a writer - I set up a shared folder in the public part of my cloud and gave them all access as the book developed.  Being a little mean I stopped sharing the story after a very dramatic cliff hanging moment, so they had to wait for the book to come out to find out who survived and who didn't.

I'll post the first couple of chapters on the blog in a day or so, for you to sample it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

The book is available in eBook, paperback and hardback formats, there are links to all my books below

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

   

   

 

Createspace Expanded Channel - What's the Point?

Like most sensible self published authors I publish through Amazon and all the other mainstream publishing outfits via Smashwords distribution. Not that I'm selling particularly significant numbers, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords itself have all sold copies of my books recently whereas Amazon has literally flat-lined following the launch of Kindle Unlimited. I can't join that club because I refuse to publish exclusively through Amazon, my choice and one that I'm sure Amazon don't care about.


I also publish through Amazon subsidiary, CreateSpace. This permits those who want to read my books but prefer to kill trees as opposed to reading eBooks. The quality is good, the service is really author-friendly but the unit costs are high. Consequently I sell even fewer paperbacks than through any other channel and expect that most other self published authors have similar experiences.


A few months ago CreateSpace invited me to add some new sales channels to my books - they call it expanded distribution and it aims to get your books in front of libraries and universities in the US. I didn't pay too much attention when I added the new channels - I hardly sell paperbacks -but did notice that the US prices were automatically hiked by about $3 - $4 a book, making them even more expensive. I did briefly consider reversing the choice as I don't want to penalise readers for choosing print, but I guess I ran out of time and never revisited the situation.


Then the other day I discovered that a copy of Project: Evil had been sold in the US at the inflated price and had net me $0.06 in royalties. Now I guess Amazon, CreateSpace and possibly some middleman bookstore have all made some money from this sale and I'm guessing I'm the only one who only racked up $0.06, less 30% US tax as I can't get my head around the exemption documentation for the IRS, so nearer $0.035 by the time we're done. I'll take a cheque if it's alright with Amazon.


Needless to say I've removed the expanded distribution option and dropped all my US prices to suit, so if you've been looking at my print books and thought they are pricey - they are but they were more so - then please note I've trimmed the price pretty much as low as I can without paying Amazon for the privilege of printing them for you. If anyone knows of an author benefit from this distribution channel then I'm all ears, because I can't find anything on the CreateSpace site that explains it.


If you are a self published author using CreateSpace then I suggest you review your channels.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here

    

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

Should self published authors be concerned about the Amazon/Hachette dispute?

Nobody outside of Amazon and Hachette knows the fine details about their current dispute, despite the war of words and deeds being very public. At the popular book level readers are finding it difficult to find, order, pre-order or buy books by authors such as J K Rowling (under her pen name Robert Galbraith), Malcolm Gladwell and James Patterson. Gladwell has broken ranks with many of his Hachette co-authors in public, speaking critically about Amazon. His view is that although Amazon sales have made him a lot of money in the past years, they've also made Amazon a lot too. He feels their dispute is treating him unfairly, given the money Amazon have made out of him to date. Most affected authors are not speaking out publicly in case Amazon targets them long term. I think that's unlikely, but for the majority of Hachette authors who probably eke out a marginal income from their books (the median annual income for traditionally published British authors is estimated at £11000, according to recent research) the risks of upsetting Amazon are very real.

Patterson has been outspoken, too. He's pointed out the risks we face if Amazon gets a monopoly in every field it dabbles in, and lets be honest, there are very few fields it doesn't dabble in. He calls Amazon's attempt at forming monopolies 'a national tragedy'.

The dispute has happened because of a court ruling that determined that Hachette and the other four big publishers in America had colluded with Apple over pricing. Part of the ruling stated that publishers had to renegotiate with retailers like Amazon and Apple, taking into account the findings of the case. Hachette are the first of the big five to engage in these negotiations. If Amazon get their way with Hachette then it is likely that their subsequent negotiations with the remainder will be easier for them. It would appear that Amazon have seen the negotiations as an opportunity to leverage a deal that reaps them a lot of additional money and to erode the sales base of their competitors.

So, should self published authors care? As I've said in another recent post, the relatively high cost of Hachette books makes our self published books look more like a bargain. But let's not forget that behind all traditionally published books lie an army of editors, formatter, designers, marketers and the myriad other actors that play a part to get a book into a bookshop. Because we tend to carry out these activities ourselves we tend to forget that they are a value adding element of all books.  In part this is because many self published authors produce highly creditable book covers, write effective blurb and engage in reasonable levels of self promotion.  We also tend to do a reasonable job of editing, but probably miss the cutting insight of a professional editor who makes a good book great.  The detail management of our books is also generally good if rarely perfect, however I've read a lot of ebooks via the big five lately and the typos are unfortunately too frequent, so perhaps us loners are on or near a par.  Marketing is probably our weakest point, I can't afford to take out full page advertisements in national newspapers and most, if not all, book reviewers are and probably always will be, unaware of my books.

Let's be brutally honest.  If Hachette or one of the other major publishers showed an interest in publishing our books, most of us would give it serious consideration.  Sure, some well established authors such as Stephen King are moving the other way, probably in an attempt to strengthen their negotiating positions with the industry, but they are doing this from a position of financial security.  This isn't to say there's anything wrong with self publishing; I'm proud of the movement and the effect all of us are having on the industry collectively, but I think there is still a strong place for the traditional publishers too.  Their models may be dated and they will need to change the way they deal with authors and retailers, but they are needed.  A world of only self published books is as unhealthy as the one that treated self publishing as worthless vanity, a world that we left only a few years ago.

So we do need to care about the current dispute?  The problem is that we don't know exactly where the sticking points are, what the terms Amazon are trying to achieve.  But in the absence of hard facts it is not unreasonable to assume that Amazon are trying to railroad the publishers and long term that won't be great for authors or consumers, even if there is a short to mid term advantage in book pricing for consumers. I think we should care and we should do something about this. Individually we are but nothing; collectively we are kings. I think we should send Amazon a message, not an email such as it sent us attempting to procure our services to do its dirty work, but a collective statement that hurts Amazon where they care, in their wallet.

About 18 month ago I blogged about this, just after the DoJ ruling, and looked at the issue from self published authors.  I suggested we could present some passive resistance to Amazon by suspending our books for a week at a time, not just me and a few friends but a whole army of self pubbed authors.  You can read the blog post here.  The post was well read, but the reaction was muted to say the least.  A temporary boycott needs to be in numbers that Amazon will take notice of, so how about we revisit the concept.  Perhaps traditionally published authors would like to consider joining in too?

Let's set a date, 1st September push the unpublish button on your dashboard for all of your books and leave them unpublished for a week.  If you want to take part in a bit of active resistance then push this blog post out to all your author friends on your network.  Let's start #boycottamazon on Twitter to see if there is any support out there.  Email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to pledge support.  Let's make a difference.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here

 

    
    Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

 

Will it go round in circles?

Back in the day I bought a live LP by a guy called Billy Preston that included the title of this posting. The song itself has a blues and gospel history and was a decent reworking by Billy and his group, the God Squad if memory serves me correctly. The LP is up in the attic with other obsolete artefacts and I hadn't given it a thought in years until today.

Google looks like it is giving up its intentions to challenge Facebook with its Google + endeavour, the social medium that promoted Google Circles. The reality is I don't think many of us understood what Google+ was trying to do - to be fair, I'm not sure Google knew either. I'm fairly certain they wanted to take a chunk out of Facebook's market, but tried to do it in such a way that it didn't make much sense. I'm in a few Google Circles because I've been invited in by people I've never heard of - in itself an established practise on Twitter - but haven't felt any compunction to follow it up or generate other contacts. In truth it just seems that little too complicated.

Not that I'm necessarily the right person to review it. Sure, I've got a Twitter account that I use pretty much to promote my books, if a little half-arsed (although I do post my blog entries there), and I do have three FB accounts, but don't tell Facebook. If they find out that not all of their accounts are real and unique it could affect their share price, bless them. Why three? Well there's the mandatory one I can share personal stuff with family - a bit one way as I forget to look let alone post, one to promote my books (and perhaps the one that linked you to this entry, via that Twitter posting), and then there's the one I run on behalf of the criminal mastermind B L O'Feld, megalomaniac owner of B L O'Feld Megalomaniac Industries (BLOMI) as he's rather busy cooking up evil plans to destroy the planet. If you haven't met Barry Liam O'Feld then why not take a peek at his website (link at foot of this blog) or take a loom at Project: Evil, the nook of world domination gone wrong, all on sound project management principles.

Yet I never felt the compunction to utilise Google+ to promote my books. Maybe the failing was mine, apparently it's the second largest social network on the planet but largely so because you can't do anything on Google these days without pushing the 'oh go on, enrol me' button first. Google are saying goodbye to the guy who has made Google+ work, or actually hasn't, which I guess is why he's leaving, but maintain that they are stripping enough of our data from the technically defunct social network without it actually becoming popular - or even known about, come to that, anyway. So that's ok, as long as they're monetising my data, I don't mind.

Actually I do mind, a little bit, but realise I can't do much about it apart from setting my circles into a terminal spiral. It's not like I can try and 'monetise' my books through Google - according to Google Books I don't exist. So promoting my new book, Assassin, released on 1st May through Apple, B&N, maybe Amazon if I time it right, on Google is unlikely, unless you include Blogger. But who reads blogs?

I guess I'll consign Google+ to the attic, along with Billy Preston (who also played the organ on 'Let It Be' for the Beatles in an earlier phase of his career, BTW). The difference is that one day I'll get the Billy Preston LP down and give it a spin. That one will go around on circles.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here

 

    
    Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Amazon KDP updates dashboard

One of the bugbears for me with all of the distribution channels available is the limited amount of data available. Blogger, for example, attempts to let the blog authors know where and when their entries have been read, providing numerical and graphical information. It also splits the entry sources of the data and the operating systems down. It sounds useful, especially when using a blog as an advertising window on your books, but in reality it isn't that helpful at all. For example, I might know that in the last twenty four hours that my blog has been accessed in maybe ten countries, with fifty two percent of hits originating in the US, and maybe just a couple of hits in Japan. I may also learn that Firefox accounted for thirty five percent of browsers used, with IE just behind, then Chrome. I appreciate that some blogs might embed media that works better in one browser than another, but most of us just blog words and the occasional picture. The biggest issue with all of this, though, is that the data is too coarse. The US is a big place and it would be helpful to know where you are being read - East Coast, West Coast, good old Midwest maybe.

But it's just a blog, right?  What about people looking at my books? Well the best information available is through the Smashwords dashboard. That tells me how many times each book has been viewed and perhaps more interestingly a twenty percent download has taken place. People can stumble across your book page by any number of ways, and even those stumbling across a book through a wrong turn could result in a new fan, but downloading a sample is a real declaration of interest. You have to be checking your dashboard on a regular basis to get a feel for when the downloads take place, otherwise it's just so many on such and such a date. Location? No luck there, unless you spot the download being registered you have no clues at all. Sales are different because Smashwords emails you automatically, but book sales isn't their main function, distribution is. However, once a sale is confirmed it usually comes with some country ID, however that's about it.

The Ebook stores Smashwords distributes to such as Apple and B&N are black boxes. You find out way after the event that you've accrued sales, sometimes months later, and sometimes you get more granularity. I can recall watching sales of Project: Evil move steadily around Canadian states over a two week period a while back, forming a mental image in my mind of a group of readers emailing each other about a book they had enjoyed. But generally, that's as good as the data gets.

Then you have the Big A. Amazon indicate on your dashboard immediately you have a book downloaded, but they don't inform you by email, so you have to check manually. When I first published on Amazon I was checking my dashboard daily, sometimes several times a day, and would spot sales pretty much as soon as they were registered. Nowadays I review a lot less often, in part because waiting for the post is such a boring endeavour but mainly because Amazon have made it a lot more time consuming. As they've rolled out Kindle stores in individual European countries and in Japan , Brazil, Australia etc, they have added these to a drop down box that you had to interrogate one a time to see where you had sold, how many copies of which books and roughly when. The country data is as crude as with Blogger, so although I know how many copies of The Journeymen I have sold in the US, I still don't know if it's across the board or just in certain parts.

However Amazon have now added a new graphical tool that automatically indicates how many books you have sold over the last thirty days (if any) across all regions and your entire canon. You still have to drill down if you want more data, but as an overview it makes checking daily easier again. The graphics are straight out of the eighties, which is a little disappointing from such a big company but at least it is a step in the right direction.

But what is the big deal on data? Well curiosity apart, it would be helpful to know where in the world I am appreciated, and where I'm making zero impact. Such information could help me to reward the areas that follow me, to work with those that are unaware of my books, which may result in more sales that would benefit Amazon, Smashwords, Apple and B&N. It would also help me target promotional activities for my new book, Assassin, ahead of its release on May 1st. I'm fairly certain all of the above companies could provide better data easily, to their mutual benefit. But at least Amazon have tried to close the gap a little.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here

 

        Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Changes At Amazon Direct Publishing and Smashwords

Smashwords has announced a change to its dashboard, which it admits it hasn't tinkered with since it was launched several years ago.  Mark Coker has flagged that this overhaul is long overdue for some months and he has been building up his software team and deploying them on the new dashboard design recently.  Apparently it is going live sometime today (17 December 2013 for those reading this blog entry on Dave).

The existing dashboard has been sluggish in recent months, probably due to the increase in authors self publishing - if we're all pinging the server constantly to see how we did or didn't do in the last week, day, hour (inversely proportional activities based on how long you've been self publishing - once the reality sets in most make it at most a daily routine and I'm contemplating just diarising a monthly check).

The old dashboard is clunky, it takes a while to gather stats and always feels like one click too many, so hopefully the new dashboard is an improvement.  When it goes live, if it works (too many years involved in software launches, unfortunately) I'll update on it.

Amazon, not to be outdone, have announced that they're changing their payment methods for authors who have elected for electronic funds transfer.  Up until now authors had to accrue a minimum amount of royalties ($10, £10, Euros10 etc) before payment was made.  Now, apart from Brazil royalties, which retain a threshold, all royalties will be paid 60 days after the month the royalties were earned in.  The email suggests that any accrued royalties will have been transferred on the 16 December however I haven't checked my bank account.  What with Christmas around the corner I can't take much more excitement.

It may present a small problem for UK authors who have small amounts lodged with Amazon in their US region as the royalties will be paid less US tax unless they've jumped through the myriad hoops the US tax authorities make us jump through to take advantage of the tax arrangements between our countries - if that's how they treat friends, I'd hate to be on the wrong side of them generally.  The paperwork is so tortuous I've deferred all my payments from Smashwords for the time being as they treat all sales, regardless of where they occur, as being in the US.  One day I'll file that return, because I expect the UK government will expect me to pay tax on that income when I get it.

So if you publish on Amazon and Snashwords (which you should to gain access to Apple store sales) then check your dashboard and your bank account sometime today.  Hopefully they'll both make you smile.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here

        Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Blame the Triple Breasted Whore

Last weekend I went to see the live theatre production of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show, an ambitious performance that attempts to draw inspiration from all five books of Douglas Adams' famous trilogy.  To be fair, most of the production covered the original subject matter from the original radio series, but by carefully excising some significant parts of that story the cast were able to shoehorn some less familiar parts of the H2G2 story.  I may have missed it, but one omission appeared to be the triple breasted whore of Erotica.

It seems I'm not the only person to have missed references to erotica.  A British national newspaper pointed out, or exposed in the parlance of the industry, that WH Smith, a stalwart bookseller of the British high street and the internet was selling erotica on its website.  It answered a question I asked myself in passing some time ago but never bothered to research.

You see, Smashwords, the eBook aggregator that supplies self published books to Apple, Sony, Kobo (and by inference WH Smith as they have tapped into Kobo's catalogue) and Barnes& Noble, to name a few, has forged a home for erotica books alongside many other genres.  Now I don't write or read erotica, but I don't judge those who choose to either.  It's just not my bag.  My guess is that if Smashwords hadn't become the distributer of eBooks that it has then it would have faded into insignificance as a niche seller of erotica books by now.  What Kobo may or may not have realised and WH Smith clearly didn't was that once the authors of the erotica market had achieved the formatting standards required by Smashwords their books were eligible to be shipped to all of the above eBook sellers unless they excluded them themselves.  Apple realised this about a year ago and started to vet the content of the eBooks they took from Smashwords.  This was a very public happening that Kobo and WH Smith should have been aware of but clearly didn't think it worthy of following, possibly because it requires effort and therefore costs money.

Now WH Smith have been outed by the newspaper they have taken their eBook store down completely, Kobo have removed a lot of eBooks, possibly everything they have received via Smashwords.  I haven't carried out a lot of research (spotting a pattern here?), but I can confirm that my books, which do not contain erotica, have disappeared from Kobo.  My guess is that once W H Smith have identified all of the self published books, regardless of content, then they'll restore their eBookstore.  Which means that they'll resume selling 50 shades (originally a self published book) and of course the Hitch Hikers Guide, along with its harmless references to the triple breasted whore.  They will stop lots of erotica being available, and that's fine, but many other good books are going to be blocked from the public.

Smashwords owner, Mark Coker, is understandably outraged by the reaction.  I'm actually surprised it has taken this long to come to a head.  The self published phenomenon has trundled along unregulated for quite a while.  It has challenged the established publishing industry and caused it to take stock.  That is healthy, the old way of working wasn't moving literature forward as well as it could and the prices were, and to some degree remain, too expensive.  But one price has been the lack of control over self published books.  Apple have taken some control over this matter; it's time the other eBook sellers do so too. 

Taking all the books off sale should be, at most, a short term solution.  While  I agree that under the current paradigm, like the one it left behind, good, well written books may or may not be successful but in general badly written books of any genre should fail.  The issues around the subject matter of some books being objectionable to people need to be addressed - the young and the vulnerable especially should be protected from inadvertent exposure and WH Smith is right to want to remove them from their catalogue, but it's really important that a sense of perspective is maintained.   Smashwords is looking at a voluntary metadata process where authors declare if their book is unlikely to be suitable for Apple or Kobo.  I think this is pie in the sky - some authors may play ball, but some, perhaps many, might ignore it.  Also, I suspect that Sony and B&N may go down this route sometime soon.

What I suspect Smashwords needs to do is what Apple have been doing - adding a vetting process to all books before they accept them in their premium catalogue.  I'm sure most of this could be automated with perhaps a process for the public to alert them to books that have slipped through.  Then they can earmark any books that contain offensive (to some) subject matter - we're talking about incest, rape and other unpleasant subjects here.  They can then alert any resellers who want to limit their exposure to corporate risk who want to avoid these books.  They could also dispense of the prude filter they put on their website and just keep such books corralled in a subsection that potential readers have to overtly access.  That way, trust in the self published book industry would be restored and newspapers would be free to move on to something else to disrupt.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                                          Visit my Book Website here

        Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Journeymen II is Published

The publishing process gets, I guess, easier each and every time I do it, yet paradoxically makes me feel it could be slicker than it is.  Anyway, as I mentioned in my last posting I did this the opposite way to my previous attempts, starting with CreateSpace.  That went better than I thought possible and despite my assumption that I'd have to wait until the week started before the book would be reviewed it was up on CreateSpace's website for sale within a couple of hours and by Sunday UK time it was on Amazon.

One feature I haven't looked at previously is the one on CreateSpace that lets you publish on the Kindle using the same files and images.  It's not that I don't think it's a good idea, it's just that until this attempt, I'd done all that before going to CreateSpace.  Well, part of the routine doesn't seem to work in that it implies that when you push the button your file will whizz off to Amazon and will appear as a formatted eBook in due course.  Perhaps it will, but I'm not that patient.  But what it does do on that particular page, probably always has done and I've just not noticed it before, is that it allows you to download an 'Kindle ready' copy of your book which actually looks a heck of lot like the CreateSpace ready version I uploaded to them including page numbers that you wouldn't expect in an eBook and it lets you download a copy of the CreateSpace book cover for use on your Kindle submission.

Now for aspiring self publishers, this is a really useful feature, especially since Apple and Amazon upped the requirements for book images in the last year or so.  As long as you can make a cover you're happy with using the CreateSpace tools then you can re-use it across Amazon and Smashwords, and therefore Apple, B&N, Sony etc.  I've just used it not only for Journeymen II but also for a couple of my other books to standardise my images.  The downside is that CreateSpace haven't improved the range of images and features in the last two years.  This really is one area that they could look at improving, but perhaps that's the idea as I kept tripping over offers to produce book covers starting at 'only' $299.

But the long and short is that it is worth looking at publishing with CreateSpace before the eBook versions just to get a cover you can use.  After that it's your choice whether you work on the Kindle version or the Smashwords version.  As usual Smashwords is pickier than Amazon, but to be fair Amazon only has the one version to worry about, Smashwords tries to accommodate all formats at once.  Hence if you look at my Smashwords version you'll notice I don't have a first line indent, but on Amazon I do.  I prefer the first line indent, but Smashwords aren't keen and although they say it can be achieved, it ain't easy.

Pricing across the three media isn't consistent, which I know is considered a big no-no, but I can't do much about the cost of CreateSpace books, unfortunately.  Most of the price is split between them and Amazon, a few grains left over for the author.  Quite a bit like conventional book publishing, I guess.  Amazon have an irritating habit of forcing the price of eBooks up, which may surprise many newbie authors and general readers as I'm sure you know they have a lot of low price eBooks on sale.  But drop below $2.99 per book and they take 65% of the purchase price; make it $2.99 or more and they only take 30% of the price.  This forces authors to price higher, especially when they try to recall where Amazon were when they were struggling with a plot sequence.  Smashwords takes a trivial cut if readers buy direct from them and  you'll end up with about 60% as a worst case scenario through the channels they distribute to.  Hence authors can afford to market their books for less and not feel dirty after every purchase.

Anyway, if you want to take a look at Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning you'll find it on Amazon and Smashwords right now.  If you want to see it on Apple and the other eBook publishing sites then you'll have to wait a few days while Smashwords ports it across.  Take a look, I hope you enjoy the yarn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                                          Visit my Book Website here

        Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me