Tag Archives: POD

REPLAY 2011: 5 Things Self-Publishers Shouldn’t Worry About (But They Do)

22 Dec

I’ve been using Tuesdays and Thursdays to replay some popular posts from 2011, in case some of the people who’ve discovered my blog in the meantime missed it first time round. Think of it as a “year in review” kind of thing. (Or a “I’m trying to finish the first draft of a new book and so I don’t have time to write five new blog posts a week” kind of thing…) This post was first posted back in September.

I get asked a lot of questions about self-publishing.

Most of these questions – I’d say at least eight out of every ten – are answered on my blog, and if the people who asked them took a few moments to read my blog every once in a while, they wouldn’t have to ask. Some of the answers don’t even require the reading of my blog, for instance: Do you recommend CreateSpace?

Do I recommend CreateSpace? Hmm. Let me think on that. You know what? No – no, I don’t. I hate those bastards. With a passion. In fact, I hate them so much that I’ve chosen to self-publish not one, not two, but three POD paperbacks with them, included detailed instructions for using them in my book Self-Printed and I’ve a fourth CreateSpace POD baby on the way. So recommend them? What do you think?

Some of these questions I’m asked – maybe one out of every ten, on a good day – are really, really good questions, questions I wish I’d already answered on my blog, questions I make a note of so I can answer them one day in the future. The kind of ones where I didn’t explain something because it feels second nature to me now, and I’ve forgotten there was a time when I didn’t have a clue. I like those kinds of questions. I hope they keep coming.

That rest are what I call the Are You Kidding Me With This? questions.

You know that saying “Don’t run before you can walk”? Well, some would-be self-publishers seemingly want to figure-skate professionally before they can stand upright. They want to know where they can buy “Signed by the Author” stickers before they’ve even wrote the book. Others have only the faintest grasp of what self-publishing is and what it means, realistically, for them and their book, and so presume that they’ll have to add things like “movie deals”, “paparazzi” and “Booker Prize” to their Things to Concern Myself With list. A couple of weeks ago an author told me that it had taken “four phone calls to Amazon” before he managed to get his book published on KDP. What? Why? And what could you possibly be calling them about? This isn’t rocket science, people!

Self-publishing is simple. It takes a lot of patience and hard work, yes, but it is, ultimately, simplistic. So don’t overcomplicate things. Don’t be overly ambitious. Don’t let your imagination run wild. Don’t run before you can walk (or figure-skate professionally before you can stand upright.) Don’t get your knickers in a twist over movie deals.

And whatever you do, don’t worry about these things:

1. Shipping Charges

CreateSpace’s shipping charges are a bit on the pricey side. They used to be on the astronomical side, but at least now they’re somewhat affordable. But they don’t really matter that much. They certainly don’t matter so much that they should affect your decision when it comes to picking a POD company because if you want to make money self-publishing, start by not sending books to yourself.

If you want to sell your POD books in bookstores, you’ll have to buy them, ship them to your home and then try to sell them to bookstores. But if you want to sell your books in bookstores, then don’t get them printed by the likes of CreateSpace or Lulu. There just isn’t enough room in the margins to accommodate the manufacturing cost, a cut for the bookstore and your profit while keeping the retail price far away enough from the stratosphere for anyone to consider buying it. Don’t buy your own book, even for stock.

You also shouldn’t worry about your readers having to pay those shipping charges, because you shouldn’t encourage anyone to buy your book from, say, your CreateSpace e-store. I just despair when I see authors asking readers to buy their books from there because their royalty/profit is the highest. The way to sell books is to make them visible on Amazon – once you do that, the books sell themselves. “Visible” means high up bestseller ranks, high up search results and in things like “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” Every time you sell a book on Amazon, you contribute to this visibility. So why would you encourage anyone to buy your books from CreateSpace, where the sale leaves no trace at all? In that case there’s a tree falling in the woods with nobody around, and we can definitely say it doesn’t make a sound.

The only times you have to even think about shipping charges is (i) when you post the proof copy to yourself and (ii) ordering books for friends and family. Let’s say for the sake of it that that totals somewhere between 30-50 books. Presumably your goal is to sell thousands, so why would you make a decision based on something that affects a fraction of the books you hope to shift? There’s no good reason, so don’t worry about it.

After a while, your POD paperback’s cover will start to do this. But who cares?

2. Perfection

Once upon a time I had the misfortune to work as a campsite courier, a kind of general assistant on a “camping” resort in the south of France. Our customers paid big bucks to stay in mobile homes, chalets and oversized tents, and we got paid practically nothing to clean them before they arrived. Whenever anyone complained about a stain on the floor or a bit of dust on the window or a smear on a glass, we’d shrug, hold up our hands and say, “What do they expect? It’s camping!”

This is Print-On-Demand. This is a machine that throws together a book in a matter of minutes. It’s not a professional printing press that uses high quality cover card, elegant binding and smooth, beautiful paper. And these are self-published e-books. It’s a Word document that’s been run through an almost free-to-use, automated conversion program that spits out several different formats at once. It’s not a team of highly trained techie types who work from the code and make e-books that are things of book-design beauty. Yes, you should make your POD paperback and e-book look as great as you possibly can, but don’t chase perfection because you won’t find it.

Your POD paperback will likely have:

  • a glossy cover that collects fingerprints
  • a cover made of card thinner than a traditionally published book, so it’ll bend more
  • some pages that may appear printed very slightly off kilter
  • the occasional ever-so-slightly damaged corner
  • “Proof” printed on the last page if it’s a proof copy
  • A barcode, date and address printed on the last page no matter what.

Why? BECAUSE IT’S CHEAP-AS-CHIPS POD, people!

Your e-book will likely have:

  • spaces where you didn’t intend for there to be spaces
  • lines where you didn’t intend for there to be lines
  • page breaks where you didn’t intend for there to be page breaks
  • an automated table of contents (that’s different to the one you put in).
But it will still be perfectly readable and if you’re lucky, looking good too. So don’t worry about it.

3. Unrealistic Retailing

Every time a self-publisher wonders aloud how they can get their book up on Amazon for pre-order, a fairy dies.

FACT.

What kinds of books are available to pre-order on Amazon? Books published by actual, proper big publishing houses. Who should be thanking their lucky stars they’re even allowed on Amazon in the first place without a warehouse of stock, a meter-high stack of paperwork and some credentials? You, the self-publisher.

Don’t be getting ideas above your station. If you’re Hilary Swank and you’ve been invited to the Academy Awards, Oscar de la Renta will send you a beautiful gown made just for you. If you’re you (or me) and you’ve been invited to your (or my) grandmother’s 80th birthday party, it’s off to Debenhams (Macy’s, American friends) to buy something mass produced off the rack.

So when you say anything about pre-ordering, I say: Puh. Lease. If you self-publish a POD paperback, it will be for sale on Amazon.com. If someone orders it, magical elves will print it, package it and ship it, and then the cousins of those magical elves will deposit the profits earned from that sale into your bank account. This is amazing. This is fantastic. And this is ENOUGH.

Don’t worry about whether or not Waterstone’s can stock your book, because they won’t ever want to. Don’t worry about VAT and Whispernet delivery charges, because they’re on all books, not just yours, and therefore the concern of the buyer, not the seller. Don’t worry about who is selling your book – just be glad anybody is.

And don’t even mention pre-ordering.

(There goes another fairy…)

4. ISBNs

An ISBN is a 10 or 13 digit number that identifies your book. If CreateSpace or Smashwords give you an ISBN, they own the ISBN but they DO NOT own the work you assign the ISBN to. In other words, you are free to publish your book anywhere else whenever you like, but you’d have to use a new ISBN.

So, repeat after me:

“ISBNs identify, copyright owns and protects. ISBNs identify, copyright owns and protects. ISBNs identify, copyright owns and protect…” and continue to do so until you stop worrying about how taking a free ISBN might affect your future movie deal, agency contract or first million dollar cheque.

Just STOP.

5. The Future of Publishing

In one dark corner of the internet right now, last month, next week, there is a conversation comprised of blog posts, articles, tweets, etc. that’s going like this:

“The book is dead.”

“The book isn’t dead.”

“Yes, it is. I just bought a Kindle.”

“No, it isn’t. Can you decorate with it? Can you decorate with your Kindle? Didn’t think so…” and so on and on and on.

There is also another conversation running parallel, going like this:

“Publishing is dead.”

“Publishing is not dead.”

“Your children won’t remember bookshops.”

“My children will be visiting their children in the bookshops they work in…” and so on and on and on.

And yet another that goes like:

“I heard these guys saying publishing and books are dead. I’m going straight to self-publishing e-books. It’s best for my career.”

“I don’t know how to do it though. I’m going to submit my novel.”

“You’ll be sorry when you die before you hear back.”

“You’ll be sorry when no one buys your clump of computer code…” and so on and on and on.

If you are thinking of self-publishing and haven’t yet sold a single book, or even if you have self-published and sold a few copies, NONE OF THIS MATTERS.

And for the ranty record, I really wish people who don’t work in publishing – and that includes me, and almost all self-publishers – would shut their pie holes about what a world they don’t live and work in may or may not have happen to it, theoretically, in the future, based on how many guys down the pub they know with Kindles. Knitting a scarf doesn’t make you the fashion editor of Vogue, and self-publishing a book doesn’t make you a publishing expert, and it especially doesn’t make you an expert on the whole global industry of publishing and where it’s headed. Self-publish, sell a few hundred thousand, make money and perhaps either refuse or sign a publishing deal, and then I’ll start to listen. Otherwise, I’m going to need you to actually work in publishing.

See also: debate over whether people like me should be called “self-publishers” or “indie authors.” What’s next on the agenda of irrelevancy – whether it’s e-books, E-books or E-Books? Because I don’t know about you, but that’s a question that’s keeping me awake at night.

NOT.

Instead, concentrate on your own little corner of the world, the part of the world you do know about, on your big picture, and–

[Say it with me now]

Don’t worry about it!

Let’s all have a nice, big cup of coffee now. That will also help with the not-worrying.

No Printed Proof: A Very Bad, Very Good Idea

16 Sep

For a while now, many CreateSpace customers have been seeing this when they go to order a proof copy:

As part of a limited trial, CreateSpace are offering their customers the opportunity to skip the proof copy stage and instead make their book available immediately – without anyone ever having seen it in print. I think it’s a very bad, very good idea, depending on who you are and why you’re publishing your book.

Why It’s a Very Bad Idea

The obvious reason it’s a bad idea is bad self-publishers. They’re the ones who have apparently never actually seen a real book, and so use Cover Creator, put their text in point 16 Bradley Handwriting and start their book on page one. There was always the hope that when they held their book baby in their hands, they might actually notice that it looks nothing like every other book they’ve seen during the course of their life, but without a printed proof, that’s never going to happen. And thus the pool of self-published poop grows ever bigger.

This may sound strange considering the average proof copy from CreateSpace is under $10 and shipping, if you don’t mind waiting, only another $5 or so onto that even if you’re very, very far away, but having to pay for a printed proof acts as a deterrent against trigger-happy self-publishers. I know that if I had a manuscript in a drawer and discovered a POD site that let me get a book up on Amazon in mere hours without having to pay any money at all, I’d be so tempted to do a quick spell-check and chuck it up there now. But knowing that you have to pay for a proof (and shipping) is a little Stop sign in the road, a little pause button on your plans. Hopefully one that makes you reconsider, and do the POD thing properly instead.

The people I really fear for in all this though are the ones who work in CreateSpace’s customer service department. As it is, I’ve encountered plenty of self-publishers getting their knickers in a twist because “proof” is on the back page of their (wait for it) proof copy, who send death threats to CreateSpace HQ because one corner of one book in a shipment of fifty has a slight bend at one corner and who insist that the “you’re” that should be a “your” on page 6 was definitely a “your” in the PDF they uploaded and that the “you’re” in the finished paperback was all CreateSpace’s fault. Can you imagine what these people would be like if they could order personal stock without seeing how the book looks first, or if they could sell their book on Amazon without checking it themselves? Nightmarish, for sure.

Why It’s a Very Good Idea

One of the major benefits of Print On Demand is that you can update your book at any time and know that the only books without the update will be the ones on shelves in the homes of the customers who already bought them. You might want to update your books because:

  • You discover errors and want to correct them
  • You release another book (and so want to add it to your “Also by” or put an ad for it at the back of the book)
  • You need to update contact info, like a website or e-mail address.

The procedure for updating your book was:

  1. Put your book on hold so you could make changes (which usually listed your book as “Ships in 2-3 weeks”)
  2. Upload your new files and submit for review
  3. Order a proof and wait for it to arrive
  4. Check the proof and okay the files, so it becomes available again.

The problem was that (i) this cost a proof plus shipping every time and (ii) if you waited for your proof to arrive, your book would likely go to “Temporarily unavailable” on Amazon and so become unorderable. Normally I would order the proof, but as soon as it shipped, go back to CreateSpace and approve the files, “publishing” it again. I was taking a chance, of course, that everything was fine, but if I’d only changed a line or two I could be confident that it was. With this no printed proof option, I can make the changes, submit them for review and then as soon as they get the okay, approve them as is. It saves time, money and trees.

The Best of Both Worlds

I think CreateSpace will be making a mistake if they offer this option unequivocally, but I also think they’ll be making a mistake if they don’t offer it at all. I think they should make every customer order at least one printed proof per title but, once at least one printed proof has been ordered and shipped, changes can be made after which the files can be approved as is, i.e. with no printed proof.

That way, this is a win-win. It doesn’t open the floodgates for trigger-happy self-publishers, but it means correcting one word or adding a book title to a list won’t cost you a proof copy and ten days of no sales.

Have you seen the “No Printed Proof” option on CreateSpace? Have you used it? What do you think?

When the Postman Brings Proof Copies

29 Aug

Whenever I’m asked what’s the best bit about my adventures in self-publishing, I always say the same thing: seeing my book for the first time. For me, that means the morning my first proof copies from CreateSpace arrive in the post.

And this morning was quite the proof copy feast! Behold:

It’s Backpacked! (Nails by New York Nails. Fingers author’s own.)

It’s the inside of Backpacked!

It’s the back of Backpacked!

It’s how Backpacked matches Mousetrapped! (Be still my heart…)

It’s Results Not Typical!

It’s the inside of Results Not Typical!*

It’s the back of Results Not Typical!

It’s the Results Not Typical sampler that’s going out with Backpacked pre-orders!

Collect the whole set!

Getting letters from readers is pretty sweet, not having to do a 9-5 job that kills me a little bit more each day is even sweeter, and I was way overexcited to get a BBC security pass the night I spoke for about thirty seconds on an episode of Arts Extra on BBC Radio Ulster back in February. (Before that, my way overexcited moment was seeing a book of mine listed on Amazon for the first time. I just stared at it non-stop for ten minutes.) But still the best thing about all this, the most exciting moment, is when months and months of words and PDFs and cover designs and trim sizes and page counts comes together to make a book.

I must now go spend an inordinate amount of time gazing at them adoringly, stroking them, smelling them, seeing how they look on a shelf, see how they look in a To Read pile, etc. etc. and then a final round of pre-proofread typo hunting is so ON.

*I ordered my maximum of five proof copies of Results from CreateSpace as four of them are going out for review. One was randomly on white paper and that was the one I took the picture of before I realized that actually it should be on cream. Luckily the other four were on cream and I don’t mind because I can use the white one for myself, but I’d be annoyed if I were selling them. Weird, huh?

Backpacked will be out September 5th, all going to plan. Results will be out October 1st. Find out more about those titles here.

20k Books Sold: My Game Plan

11 Jul

Even though my e-book sales took a dip in May and June, I’m still not swayed from my goal of selling 20,000 e-books by January 2012.

To date I’ve sold 6,310 self-published books so that just leaves 13,690 to shift in the next six months or so.

Um, yeah…

[Gulps]

How am I going to do it? Can I do it? And why, pray tell, don’t I just write my goals down privately instead of telling the whole world (or at least this tiny corner of the internet) about it, thus saving myself from the potentially horrendous embarrassment of failing miserably at achieving them?

Well, I tell you them to motivate myself and yes, I think it’s possible. Likely? No. But possible? Yes. Maybe. I think 15,000, frankly, is doable – although with a lot of hard work – and 20,000 is a bit of a stretch. But doable goals are kind of pointless so 20,000 it is.

The game plan has three elements:

  1. Release new titles, including a novel
  2. Take at least a module at the Konrath School of E-book Selling
  3. Launch the novel with an all-guns-blazing publicity campaign.

Release New Titles

My first book (perhaps you’ve heard of it?), Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida, was released in March 2010. The paperback is $14.95 and the e-book is $2.99.

My second book, Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing, was released in May of this year. The paperback is $15.95 and the e-book is $2.99.

In June I released three “Self-Printed Shorts” in e-book only and priced at 99c. They are: Publish a POD Paperback with CreateSpace, Publish an E-book with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Sell Your Book Using Social Media.

So that’s 5 titles, so far.

In September, I’ll release the sort of sequel to Mousetrapped, Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America. (I say sort of because although it chronicles my backpacking adventures after I left Orlando, it stands alone too.) This will be identical to Mousetrapped in size and price: $14.95 for the paperback and $2.99 for the e-book.

As soon as Backpacked comes out, I’ll bundle it and Mousetrapped into a single e-book title, Mousetrapped… And Then Backpacked Too, priced at $4.99.

Title-wise, we’re now up to 7.

Then in October, the novel, Results Not Typical. I don’t know how much the paperback will cost yet, but the e-book will be $2.99.

That’ll be my eighth e-book title.

In November, I’ll send out the final More Mousetrapped story. (If you’re not familiar, new stories from my time in Orlando go out to everyone on the More Mousetrapped mailing list once a month, and have done since March.) Come November, I’ll take the nine existing stories and compile them into an e-book, More Mousetrapped: 10 More Tales from A Year and  A Bit in Orlando, Florida, the tenth being a new, previously unreleased story and some bonus articles, etc. and charge 99c for it. This isn’t really a stand alone title; it’s aimed at people who have already read Mousetrapped.

So by December when, if last year was anything to go by, the e-book high season begins, I’ll have 9 e-book titles for sale (with 4 of them also available in paperback).

And I may also be suffering from exhaustion.

The Konrath School of E-book Selling

Deluding yourself into thinking that you can emulate J.A. Konrath’s success is so common amongst self-publishers that there should be some kind of formal support group for it, and you can rest assured that I don’t think I can. However I do think that his recommendations for selling e-books make a lot of sense and should be applied, even if they don’t result in the same royalty cheques for you (or me) as they do him. After all, they can’t hurt.

Here’s some things he’s recommended doing on his blog that I am incorporating into my own game plan:

  • Dropping the price for a time. For the month of August I will be dropping the price of Mousetrapped‘s e-book to 99c. I’m doing this because I’m interested to see what will happen and because I hope what will happen is that I’ll sell a lot of books. I won’t make any money off them – when you charge 99c you only get a 35% royalty – but maybe some of the people who take a chance on it at that price will then be willing to pay $2.99 for Backpacked which, wouldn’t you know it, comes out the very next month. Before I drop the price I’ll be updating Mousetrapped‘s e-book with the opening chapter of Backpacked.
  • Taking up plenty of virtual shelf space. If you’ve ever accessed Amazon’s Kindle store from an actual Kindle, you might well have wondered how anyone finds anything on there that isn’t Stieg Larsson or The Help. (Although if all I could find was The Help, that’d be fine by me. I LOVE that book.) Most of the people who buy Mousetrapped e-book, based on e-mails they send me, finds it by happenstance. Either it comes up in a search they do for “Disney” (and is high enough up the results for them to find me), or Amazon recommends it to them because of other books they’ve bought. If you’re one book in a million, how often might that happen? Who knows. But I do know it’ll happen more if you’re five books in a million, or ten, or fifteen. The more books you have, the more space you take up, and the more space you take up, the most visible you are. So I’m releasing more books, and bundling some of those books together. It really is the opposite of dieting: you want to take up as much space as possible.
  • Link your e-books. One of the most exciting things about having more than one book available is that I can snare Mousetrapped readers into buying Backpacked and or vice versa. I can try and get people who enjoy my non-fiction to read my novel, and people who enjoy my novel to read my non-fiction. Konrath says that every e-book should have a few chapters of another of your e-books at the end of it, so I’m going to do just that. And with a link directing them to the full book at the Kindle store where they can continue reading it with one click, it should work well. I hope it will, anyway. As I said it can’t hurt.
  • Treating your e-book as a second store front. This was an issue raised on Konrath’s blog recently that I had never thought about. If you buy a lot of low-cost e-books, you probably download a lot of e-book samples. If many of them are self-published/by authors you don’t already know, you might end up with a Kindle chock full of books and no memory of why exactly you wanted to read them. To help these readers, start your e-book with the blurb or product description that appeared on your Amazon listing. (If it’s long, you can always put a “Skip to beginning of book” link above it.) In his book How I Sold 1 Million E-books in 5 Months, John Locke recommends that you not only put your blog URL at the end of your book, but at the beginning too. It takes a while to read a book and with your blog URL in their head, the reader might have a sneak peak at your blog or Twitter feed at work tomorrow morning, and find a good reason to finish reading your book when they get home.

The Novel: All Guns Blazing

I don’t really have anything planned publicity-wise for Backpacked, other than informing as many readers of Mousetrapped as I can that it exists (and a little video that for now is a secret but which I’m very excited about).

But the novel – Results Not Typical – is an entirely different kettle of fish and I’m going to put a lot of thought into its promotion and launch campaign. I’m treating it as if I’m starting from scratch and essentially, I am. I have no reason to believe that anything more than a handful of my non-fiction readers will automatically purchase my fiction. So I have two things to do: convince my other existing readers to try it too, and somehow tell everyone else, i.e. people who have never heard of me.

One of the things I’m already doing is offering samplers of Results to everyone who pre-orders a signed edition of Backpacked from me. (Click here for more information about doing that.) These will be mini-paperbacks of about 100 pages wearing the actual Results front cover, a preview of the novel’s first section. I’m hoping that having them out there in the world will lead to some sales and if they don’t, they’ll still make a pretty attractive novelty item.

Or something.

I haven’t really decided on the specifics yet but the other stuff I do will probably include:

  • Writing guests posts/doing interviews for other blogs
  • Supplying review copies to book review sites and bloggers
  • Releasing the first chapter as a PDF/putting it on the blog
  • Blogging about it
  • Tweeting about it
  • Talking about it on Facebook
  • Video blogs
  • QR codes (just as soon as I think of a reason why)
  • Giveaways (I’m going to be giving away something BIG – watch this space!)
  • Paying for advertising (still on the fence about this; we’ll see)
  • Chocolate-based bribery.

If there is anything you can do to help me promote Results, I’d love to hear from you. Message me through the Contact page.

I’ll be finished the main prep on all this by September and will take between then and Christmas to write the first draft of a new novel that I hope will one day be traditionally published. That’s where the “20,000 books sold” will come in – I hope it’ll help sway an agent towards “yes” in the decision to represent me.

And after that, I’m off to lie on a beach for a year.

Or for a couple of weeks, anyway.

(Actually, what am I going to next year, book-wise? Going to have to put figuring that one out on my To Do list, me thinks…)

P.S. I’m putting the finishing touches to Backpacked this week so apologies for the Twitter silence and Facebook neglect!

Click here to pre-order a signed copy of Backpacked.

Announcing: New SELF-PRINTED Shorts (And a Story About an E-mail)

13 Jun

Two things about Self-Printed that happened over the weekend: (i) I got the most amazing e-mail ever and (ii) I released three new 99c e-books, called Self-Printed Shorts.

The e-mail was from Nicola Morgan, who I’m sure many of you know from her blog, Help! I Need a Publisher!, her Twitter feed and her staggering number of (traditionally) published books. When I think of common sense and the publishing world, her name is the first one that comes to mind, and I am in total awe of all her accomplishments, including a novel, Wasted, that was nominated for a Carnegie Medal, one of the highest accolades – if not the highest – a children’s book can get. So when I saw her name pop up in my inbox, I assumed it had to be a different Nicola Morgan. But no, it was her, and the message was about Self-Printed which unbeknownst to me, Nicola had been reading. To cut a slightly longer than that story short, I am ecstatic (and slightly giddy) to now have this glowing endorsement for my book:

“An exceptional breath of realism, real knowledge and hard experience – don’t dream of self-publishing your book without it. This is the self-publishing guide to read if you actually care about the quality of your writing and your readers.”

–Nicola Morgan, award-winning author of 90 books – including the Carnegie-nominated WASTED and WRITE TO BE PUBLISHED – and the blog Help! I Need a Publisher!

How fantastic is that?! Thank you so much, Nicola!

So now onto Self-Printed Shorts. The idea is that instead of buying Self-Printed for $2.99 and paying for everything I’ve learned about self-publishing, you can just hand over 99c (or 69p)* for the information that you need. For instance, if you’ve already self-published, you don’t need the sections about how to use CreateSpace, Amazon KDP or Smashwords, but you might want to read the bits about how I promoted my book. Or maybe you already have a paperback and you just want the e-book bits. Or you already have an e-book and you just want the paperback bits. Or maybe-

Well, you get the idea.

They are three Self-Printed Shorts. They are:

Publish a Print On Demand Paperback

It includes the following sections from Self-Printed:

  • Why Self-Printing?
  • Preparation
  • Publishing a POD Paperback with CreateSpace.

It’s just 99c for Kindle on Amazon.com and 69p for Kindle on Amazon.co.uk.

Publish an E-book

It includes the following sections from Self-Printed:

  • Why Self-Printing?
  • Preparation
  • Publishing an E-book (with Smashwords and Amazon KDP).

It’s just 99c for Kindle on Amazon.com  and 69p for Kindle on Amazon.co.uk.

Sell Your Book With Social Media

It includes the following sections from Self-Printed:

  • Why Self-Printing?
  • Building an Online Platform
  • Launching Your Book (Online).

It’s just 99c for Kindle on Amazon.com  and 69p for Kindle on Amazon.co.uk.

*Thanks to VAT and “international delivery” (cracks me up every time), prices may vary in other Kindle stores. If you’d rather read the full-length book, it’s $2.99 in e-book or $15.95 in paperback (but Amazon are currently selling it at 28% off, or $11.28). Find out more about it and see other buying options on SelfPrintedBook.com.

CreateSpace, Amazon.co.uk and a Potentially Good Idea

6 Jun

I’m baaack….

As in, properly back. I was actually back last weekend but it took me a week to stop crying about the fact that I wasn’t in Spain anymore and gear up to get back into work, specifically finishing the first draft of Backpacked.

Yes, that would be the book that’s supposed to out in September.

Cutting things close, I know.

Speaking of which, I found myself wondering yesterday just what I’m going to do about Backpacked‘s paperback edition and Amazon.co.uk. As I talked about in this post, it no longer seems likely that it will appear on there, and if it does it will probably remain “Available from these sellers” which is essentially out of stock. Apparently I was lucky with Mousetrapped, which appeared available on Amazon.co.uk only days after publishing it, but despite doing everything the same way (i.e. signing up for CreateSpace’s Pro Plan) Mousetrapped‘s second edition and Self-Printed have both failed to.

(To overcome this with Mousetrapped, I updated the original edition with the second edition’s files. So if you order it, you’re getting the new one, no matter what. Self-Printed is only available from Amazon.com.)

Worrying too much about my paperbacks was a mistake I made with Mousetrapped. Sales-wise, they’re not that important. As of today (June 5th), I’ve sold 5,557 copies of Mousetrapped. Of these, only 542 were paperback editions and of those, only 212 were under the Pro Plan. Considering these include books sold from the likes of The Book Depository and Barnes and Noble as well (although I don’t get told how many were sold from each one), I think I can conclude that my Amazon.co.uk sales can’t be more than 100-150, or about 3% of all copies sold. Hardly enough to be getting my knickers in a twist. In fact when you take into consideration how much time, effort and money it takes to produce them, why bother with paperbacks at all?

Mmm… paperbacks.

First, I love books and so a physical book is a must for me. Second, some people – myself included – will only read physical books, and what I call the “on publication buyers” – the people who’ll buy your book when it comes out, i.e. family, friends, fans, loyal readers – generally are looking for paperbacks. Third, you can’t sign an e-book and signed books are like designer shoes to book lovers, and they also make great presents. So paperbacks it is.

So what to do to make Backpacked available to these people, without having to convince them to order from Amazon.com? How about selling them myself, through my website? Well, I did that with Mousetrapped and I later considered it a mistake. I had to order in stock I wasn’t sure I could sell (which is the complete opposite of the point of POD), I was constantly worried I wouldn’t have enough of it to fulfill a sudden order, and I didn’t really charge enough for them to make a profit worth all the effort. But it was nice to be able to sell signed copies to people, and I did get a lot of orders. I thought about it long and hard: how could I sell Backpacked through a website of my own, but without the stress, headaches or financial risk?

This is what I came up with:

Between July 1st and August 31st, there’ll be a website where you can go and pre-order a paperback copy of Backpacked. Payment will be at time of ordering and via credit card or PayPal. Your copy will be signed and personally inscribed if you want, and – although this is subject to change once I get the physical qualities of the book locked down – about €15 (£13 or $21, very ish) including shipping worldwide. (There will also be something coming with it – free – that hopefully will sweeten the deal slightly, but I’m not revealing what that’ll be just yet.) You’ll be able to cancel and get a refund up until a certain date; after that date, you’ll incur a cancelation fee (because I’ll have already ordered the book). Your copy will be shipped around mid-September and before the paperback is available for general sale. Behind the scenes, I’ll collect the pre-orders and just order the exact amount of paperbacks once I close the pre-ordering window a couple of weeks before publication. When they arrive, I’ll sign, inscribe and ship them, and that’s that.

Everyone’s happy, presumably.

The beauty of this if that even if I get just one or two orders, I’m not out of pocket and I’m not stuck with stock I mightn’t be able to sell. Anyone who wants a paperback and lives in a country that Amazon.com charges astronomical shipping charges to send books to will be able to get a copy at a reasonable price – and a signed copy at that – and if you’ve run out of Christmas present ideas, [cough, cough] here’s the solution.

So.. what do you think?

P.S. A little birdie (read: Google Alerts) informed me that a newcomer sent to my blog for self-publishing advice got the impression that all I was doing was plugging Self-Printed. Lady, that would be because the book came out three weeks ago, and two weeks ago I went on holidays. But should anyone else get that impression, I’ve installed a quick link – see the button above right – that takes you to a full chronological listing of all my self-printing blog posts.

UPDATE: As Marcus pointed out in the comments below, you can “sign” e-books. I use the quotation marks because while you can put a personally inscription and maybe even the computer code equivalent of your signature, you can’t put a pen to paper. You can’t sit at a desk, meet and greet readers and ask them there and then what they’d like you to write, and then with a pen on paper write it on the title page for them. You can’t then go home and occasionally pull out the book and think, “Michael Connelly touched this!” like I do with my personally inscribed limited edition of Nine Dragons. (Not every day… but most!) And so while one day I will almost certainly succumb to reading the things, I will never “sign” an e-book.

Self-Printed Preview #5: What’s With the Be Professional Thing?

13 May

Welcome to the Self-Printed Preview Week! Today’s excerpt is from Part 3: Building an Online Platform and it’s called What’s With The “Be Professional” Thing? In Self-Printed I talk a LOT about acting like a professional writer even if you’re not one yet, especially on your blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, etc. But why do we need to? Why can’t we just blog about Jersey Shore, tweet about how our boyfriend’s dumped us and incessantly poke our Facebook friends? It’s because if you want to sell books, acting professional is the only way to go… 

Why do you need to act like a professional? Why can’t you smear your emotional crap all over the place? Why can’t you do whatever it takes to get to a nice round number of Twitter followers? Why can’t you virtually poke me in the eye, especially when after reading this far, you really really want to?

You Have Something to Prove

Self-publishers, in the eyes of the discerning reader, start off fairly low on the Book Ladder. In fact for some, we’re not even on the ladder. The ladder is leaning against a house and we’re across the street and five doors down from it. Before the discerning reader will give our book a chance, we have to convince him or her that we have the potential to be just as good as anything the top-selling, most lauded, international-superstar-authors have to offer, and that just because we’re associated with a group known for bad quality doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve gone down that road as well.

How can we do that? By sending I’m-not-crap signals at every opportunity. On the book, this is the cover. On our Amazon listing, this is the product description. And online, this is how much our blog looks like the website of a professional author, maybe even one who has someone else to make and maintain their website for them, someone with a website manager. (The dream!) When you’re a self-published author, everything you do online is a reflection of the quality of your book. Everything. Because even when no one is watching, Google is.

The More… the Merrier?

When you first start blogging, you feel like it’s just you and the screen. Then a few people leave comments, and you feel like it’s just you and them. Even though you know, intellectually, that whatever you type on those posts is entering the public domain, it doesn’t feel like it at the time. Even when your site stats say a couple of thousand people are visiting your blog on a regular basis, it still feels like a little group of friends, gathered together over a coffee every morning, chatting about quilts or whatever. It’s nice. It’s intimate. It’s safe.

It’s only when something from the real world pierces the bubble of your blogosphere that you realise how many people can, potentially, read your every blogged thought, and who some of those people might be. Maybe you write a post about how your family don’t believe in you, and then Aunty Joanne brings it up at your cousin’s wedding. Maybe you tell people the resort you’re going to on holidays and, while you’re there, someone comes up to you by the pool and says, “Are you the Quilting Queen of the Universe? I read your blog!” Or maybe you bitch about how your boss is clearly a devoted disciple of Satan, and then the next day you get fired.

And not to get all serious and sinister, but a lot worse can happen that that.

Your social media presence requires your personality, but it shouldn’t include your personal life. The easiest way to ensure that we keep one but exclude the other is to behave ourselves, and act the same way a professional writer – who knows, right from the outset, that lots of people, including reporters, agents and editors, are reading his/her every word – would do.

Dress for the Job You Want

You’ve heard that, right? Dress for the job you want, not the job you have? The same applies to your online presence. If you want to be a professional writer some day, start acting like one now – at least on your blog.

And so concludes Self-Printed’s preview week! I hope you’ve enjoyed these little tasters of the book that, through typing it, nearly wore my fingerprints away. (Over 100,000 words, people. What was I thinking?!) If you haven’t, we can still be friends. 

Find out more on SelfPrintedBook.com. 

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