Although I have sold a few books and some Kindle downloads I am not getting many comments on Amazon yet. I put this down to the fact that there are a lot of pages to slog through and possibly that people are being too kind to tell me what they really think.
I have gleaned one 5* review from someone who will remain anonymous and who pointed out the perils of too much boring detail. Ah well!
It is hard to start marketing something which seems to have gone off on its own and doesn't want to belong to me any more. I wrote it because I wanted to and now telling the world about it is difficult and a little embarrassing.
Perhaps when the summer is over and I am shut up in my shed in the rain I will be a bit more energetic about telling the world. Until then my excuse is that without reviews I can't start to shout loudly to the world in general.
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Thursday, 11 September 2014
Monday, 11 August 2014
Whatever next?
Now that I actually have the book in paperback form the question arises, what next? I never wrote the thing to get it read, particularly, but now it is out there I feel I ought to do something to let people know there is yet another travel / history book about India for them to enjoy.
Publishing was hard enough, but marketing is yet another new game to play and one with which I am not exactly comfortable.
I recently had the experience of sitting in a room with several acquaintances who enthused over the fact that I had written a book. Some of them had been to South India and were genuinely interested, but others seemed to think that writing a lot of words was an achievement in itself. All very embarrassing!
The dreaded Amazon gives many tips and articles on marketing, all of which hinge around having reviews on the site. I think that is going to be a very slow process. It is not a short book and most of the people who have bought it so far (thank you friends!) as far as I can tell, may not necessarily have bought or read yet another travel / history book about India. They have bought it because they know me.
I feel as though I have stripped off in public. I really wouldn't mind severe or negative reviews, I don't think, as long as they were honest. No reviews at all is really scary. Letting it sink without trace is such a relaxing idea!
Publishing was hard enough, but marketing is yet another new game to play and one with which I am not exactly comfortable.
I recently had the experience of sitting in a room with several acquaintances who enthused over the fact that I had written a book. Some of them had been to South India and were genuinely interested, but others seemed to think that writing a lot of words was an achievement in itself. All very embarrassing!
The dreaded Amazon gives many tips and articles on marketing, all of which hinge around having reviews on the site. I think that is going to be a very slow process. It is not a short book and most of the people who have bought it so far (thank you friends!) as far as I can tell, may not necessarily have bought or read yet another travel / history book about India. They have bought it because they know me.
I feel as though I have stripped off in public. I really wouldn't mind severe or negative reviews, I don't think, as long as they were honest. No reviews at all is really scary. Letting it sink without trace is such a relaxing idea!
Tuesday, 22 July 2014
At last the paperback is going to appear.
I've finally pressed the button on the paperback of my book and it will be out at the end of the week! These last couple have weeks have been like one of those dreams where you keep trying to do something and then get sent back to the beginning to do it again.
My proof copies arrived in three days, printed and delivered from the US and it was really weird to have a solid copy in my hands. The cover has worked OK, much to my astonishment, and I thought that, after four proof reads, I was home and dry.
I found a mistake the first time I opened the book and all the page numbers on the first couple of chapters had gone squiffy- again. I was rapidly losing the will to live, when enter Richard. My friends from Stroud arrived in their caravan for a week of forts and military tunnels, and while not crawling around underground and when it was raining they volunteered to proof read for me. Richard used to edit very long technical documents and in no time the poor old proof copy was bristling with markers and covered in pencil. Just what was needed! He did a very thorough and accurate job and I can't say how grateful I am.
He didn't get all of the typos, inconsistencies and bad grammar, however, as I proof read it again, for the fifth time and found a couple more daft things. Then back to Amazon to fight their review process and go round in circles a couple more times before I finally pressed the button today!
This is it folks, warts and all and very scary.
It will appear in about three to five days and then the real work begins if I want anyone to buy it. That's a good question.
My proof copies arrived in three days, printed and delivered from the US and it was really weird to have a solid copy in my hands. The cover has worked OK, much to my astonishment, and I thought that, after four proof reads, I was home and dry.
I found a mistake the first time I opened the book and all the page numbers on the first couple of chapters had gone squiffy- again. I was rapidly losing the will to live, when enter Richard. My friends from Stroud arrived in their caravan for a week of forts and military tunnels, and while not crawling around underground and when it was raining they volunteered to proof read for me. Richard used to edit very long technical documents and in no time the poor old proof copy was bristling with markers and covered in pencil. Just what was needed! He did a very thorough and accurate job and I can't say how grateful I am.
He didn't get all of the typos, inconsistencies and bad grammar, however, as I proof read it again, for the fifth time and found a couple more daft things. Then back to Amazon to fight their review process and go round in circles a couple more times before I finally pressed the button today!
This is it folks, warts and all and very scary.
It will appear in about three to five days and then the real work begins if I want anyone to buy it. That's a good question.
Wednesday, 9 July 2014
Ripped off already!
The Kindle version of the book has been up for just four weeks now and already it is appearing on a website as a free download. No, I am not going to tell you where!
I didn't go into publishing it with the idea of making money, but it would be all the same if I needed to recoup my costs.Having spent a career fighting other people's attempts at copyright infringement (well, OK, not too aggressively at times, but always with an eye to not doing it where possible) I find this galling.
How dare people take ownership of what I spent four years producing?
I have demanded that they take it down, which they say will take 72 hours if they decide to do it. Amazon say it is my responsibility to get it removed as I have an agreement with them which says I must not sell the e-book elsewhere. They are not bothered that their links are being hijacked by a resource which then gives their books away- strange, as it is essentially stealing from them as well.
I am not sure I have the energy for this crusade, but it is pretty unfair on those who are trying to write for a living, so I suppose I'd better join.
I didn't go into publishing it with the idea of making money, but it would be all the same if I needed to recoup my costs.Having spent a career fighting other people's attempts at copyright infringement (well, OK, not too aggressively at times, but always with an eye to not doing it where possible) I find this galling.
How dare people take ownership of what I spent four years producing?
I have demanded that they take it down, which they say will take 72 hours if they decide to do it. Amazon say it is my responsibility to get it removed as I have an agreement with them which says I must not sell the e-book elsewhere. They are not bothered that their links are being hijacked by a resource which then gives their books away- strange, as it is essentially stealing from them as well.
I am not sure I have the energy for this crusade, but it is pretty unfair on those who are trying to write for a living, so I suppose I'd better join.
Saturday, 5 July 2014
The Paperback is on its way!
At last, after about ten attempts, I managed to produce a file which was acceptable to the non-humans at Amazon Create, and then acceptable to the human file checkers.
The non-humans seemed to have the most awkward requirements, each check coming up with a different,and increasingly obscure, problem.
The last objection was that some characters were appearing as squares on page 2. There never has been any text on page 2.
In desperation I produced a Word-translated .pdf file and after some grumbling, this was OK.
The next job was pricing. Boy is it expensive to produce print-on-demand books! Having had to choose a price structure which effectively makes me want to apologise and say I'll lend everyone who wants to read my book my own copy, I had to go with the arcane methods and choose a price which means I won't exactly get rich on royalties, but that was never the idea.
So now I am waiting for the proof copy to make its way from America, bearing in mind that the 4th of July will hold everything up.
Still, hate Amazon as you might, I can't fault their systems on this. There is no other way I would be able to have a real book in my hands and a world-wide distribution.
The non-humans seemed to have the most awkward requirements, each check coming up with a different,and increasingly obscure, problem.
The last objection was that some characters were appearing as squares on page 2. There never has been any text on page 2.
In desperation I produced a Word-translated .pdf file and after some grumbling, this was OK.
The next job was pricing. Boy is it expensive to produce print-on-demand books! Having had to choose a price structure which effectively makes me want to apologise and say I'll lend everyone who wants to read my book my own copy, I had to go with the arcane methods and choose a price which means I won't exactly get rich on royalties, but that was never the idea.
So now I am waiting for the proof copy to make its way from America, bearing in mind that the 4th of July will hold everything up.
Still, hate Amazon as you might, I can't fault their systems on this. There is no other way I would be able to have a real book in my hands and a world-wide distribution.
Friday, 27 June 2014
Self-publishing
Having taken the decision to publish my book myself on Amazon, I never really considered what this would mean.
The Kindle edition has gone very smoothly and the fact that you are publishing to display on several types of device means that issues of formatting are easily sorted- the simpler the better. However, the paperback is a whole new world. It should be straightforward, but it's not.The formatting of the paperback file so that it prints properly is dealt with by means of a Word template. So far so OK, until the book gets to 390 pages and the file starts to choke on the sections.
The text is a piece of cake, but the headers and footers have driven me close to despair. However, I got it into the right place in Amazon, complete with cover design. What do you put on the back cover if you have no ecstatic comments from celebrities and newspapers? Write your own blurb, again---- and again----- and it still doesn't take up enough room!
Then the pictures. We had to stage a photo shoot in the back garden to simulate me walking along the beach staring into the distance, and then resort to a heavy edit. It took just over two weeks to get it more or less right and I still forgot to compensate for the fact that the photo makes me look less than glamorous.
The Amazon system allows you to look at an electronic proof copy, so I did and discovered that three proof reads are not enough. I found a completely unbelievable number of errors in the text, mostly tenses and missing words which had got cut out in a previous edit, and a couple of formatting problems.
A week later, I am ready to go again, but Amazon will not let me load my amended file. I don't know why, and am gritting my teeth and waiting for the help desk to get back to me.
What have I learned? This is not to be done in a hurry. I am a couple of months behind where I hoped I would be and the ***** book is still driving my daily life. It's got to the stage where I am anxious about what I will do when I eventually manage to get the stupid thing on sale! I have also learned that being a publisher is something you have to take seriously, and, with a world-wide distribution, you are a publisher, like it or not.
Thank you to the four wonderful people who have bought the Kindle version! I will soon be able to market the thing and perhaps sell four paperbacks.
Job done!
The Kindle edition has gone very smoothly and the fact that you are publishing to display on several types of device means that issues of formatting are easily sorted- the simpler the better. However, the paperback is a whole new world. It should be straightforward, but it's not.The formatting of the paperback file so that it prints properly is dealt with by means of a Word template. So far so OK, until the book gets to 390 pages and the file starts to choke on the sections.
The text is a piece of cake, but the headers and footers have driven me close to despair. However, I got it into the right place in Amazon, complete with cover design. What do you put on the back cover if you have no ecstatic comments from celebrities and newspapers? Write your own blurb, again---- and again----- and it still doesn't take up enough room!
 |
| the back cover |
The Amazon system allows you to look at an electronic proof copy, so I did and discovered that three proof reads are not enough. I found a completely unbelievable number of errors in the text, mostly tenses and missing words which had got cut out in a previous edit, and a couple of formatting problems.
A week later, I am ready to go again, but Amazon will not let me load my amended file. I don't know why, and am gritting my teeth and waiting for the help desk to get back to me.
What have I learned? This is not to be done in a hurry. I am a couple of months behind where I hoped I would be and the ***** book is still driving my daily life. It's got to the stage where I am anxious about what I will do when I eventually manage to get the stupid thing on sale! I have also learned that being a publisher is something you have to take seriously, and, with a world-wide distribution, you are a publisher, like it or not.
Thank you to the four wonderful people who have bought the Kindle version! I will soon be able to market the thing and perhaps sell four paperbacks.
Job done!
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