Tag Archives: POD

CreateSpace in Europe

22 May

Things have been hectic around Catherine HQ over the last few days, and so when people started saying to me “Great news about CreateSpace and Europe, right?” I didn’t really have time to go and check if it was good news. I presumed it must be, because up until now, paying for CreateSpace’s expanded distribution channel upgrade did not guarantee that your book would appear on Amazon.co.uk which, for self-publishers on my side of the Atlantic, was very important indeed.

So if CreateSpace was now saying that your paperback would appear on Amazon.co.uk (and Amazon.de, and Amazon.fr, and Amazon.etc) in the same way it would on Amazon.com—automatically, and only a week or so after you published—that would be A Very Good Thing.

Which it is.

But now that I’ve had a chance to go investigate, I’ve realized that it’s even better that that.

No More EDC Lottery

Up until now, using CreateSpace only guaranteed that your POD paperback would appear for sale on Amazon.com. It might show up on Amazon.co.uk (and other international Amazons) but if it did, it could take anywhere from a couple of weeks (as it did with Mousetrapped in March 2010) to a few months (as with Self-Printed a year later), or it might never appear at all— or appear and disappear at will (as with Backpacked). If you were lucky, you got the next best thing: a third party seller flogging your book on Amazon instead. But that would mean that your book was unlikely to qualify for Super Saver Delivery, or ever be discounted. In short, it was a bad deal and the alternative, i.e. directing people to buy your book from Amazon.com, would mean higher shipping costs and a longer wait for your customers.

Now CreateSpace is saying that international Amazons are going to be just like Amazon.com: publish, and you’ll be on there. For free, as part of their publishing service. And on the same time schedule, which is 5-7 days. You don’t even have to upgrade to the EDC. (Now, that’ll just be for getting on the likes of Barnes and Noble, I presume.)

So, yay for guaranteed availability!

More Money

This is what I didn’t realize until I went onto CreateSpace to find out for myself what had changed: this means more money.

Flashback to a year ago. I’m selling Mousetrapped, a 232-page paperback in a 5.5 x 8.5 trim size, and I’ve paid a one-time fee of $39 to upgrade to CreateSpace’s “ProPlan” which gives me cheaper unit costs and enrolls me in their Expanded Distribution Channel, or EDC. If I sell a copy on Amazon.com, I pocket around $4.52. If I sell a copy through the EDC, I make around $1.53. And because every online retail site except Amazon.com falls under this EDC umbrella, I only make $1.53 from paperback sales on Amazon.co.uk.

Now that the international Amazons are on a par with Amazon.com and have been taken out of the EDC, there’s a lot more money to be made from paperback sales there—and I don’t have to pay for any ProPlan to avail of it.

More Information

There’s yet another bonus to this whole CreateSpace Europe thing: more information. Up until now, you could only find out how many books you’d sold through Amazon.com and how many books you’d sold through the EDC. You had no idea if those EDC sales were from B&N, other Amazons or a guy with a trunk full of books. (Well, you could probably guess it wasn’t the last one…) But now you’ll know—or at least know more, because your sales will be divided into Amazon.com, Amazon Europe and EDC. Furthermore, your payments will be divided into dollars (Amazon.com + the EDC), British Pounds (Amazon.co.uk) and Euro (Amazon.de, Amazon.it, Amazon.fr and Amazon.es), so it should be fairly easy to figure out where your paperback sales are coming from.

The Downsides

This leads me on to the one real downside of this I can see: separate cheques. Right now if you publish on KDP Select, you receive three different cheques: one in dollars, one in pounds and one in euro. That’s all well and good, but in order to get them, you have to reach the minimum threshold for them, which I believe is a hundred apiece. Up until now, you only ever received one cheque from CreateSpace and it was in dollars. Now, you’ll have to wait to meet that $100/£100/€100 threshold before you receive the cheques, so chances are you’ll be waiting longer to get paid.

The other sorta downside is shipping charges. According to the CS website, if I order stock of my own book, they’re still being shipped from the US and still costing me a small fortune to get to my house ($112 at economy/6 weeks speed for 100 books). That’s approximately a third of what the books themselves would be costing me. But fingers crossed, that’ll get sorted out eventually…

Come Join the Party

If you have titles already for sale through CreateSpace, they won’t be entered into the Amazon Europe channel automatically. You need to do a few things:

  1. Log on to CreateSpace and update your royalty profile information
  2. Go into each title and manually open the Amazon Europe channel
  3. Select your prices: automatic conversions (as with Kindle books) or set your own GBP and EUR prices.

I did this just after midnight yesterday, and this morning I already have a few euro and a few pounds in my CreateSpace kitty. Also yesterday, Backpacked‘s paperback was showing “out of stock” on Amazon.co.uk, but now it’s in stock and reflecting my new end-in-99p price. So the switch-over must take effect as soon as you do it on your account.

Now that’s customer service for you.

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: I LOVE CreateSpace.

(And isn’t it nice to be talking about actual books for once?!)

Thanks to Sally Clements for alerting me about this!

Why You Need Some “Self” in Your Self-Publishing

22 Mar

As you know, my least favorite self-publishing related word is gatekeepers. But did you know that my least favorite self-publishing related combination of two words is Big Six? Or that my least favorite self-publishing related combination of three words is one-stop shop (as in “Look at our shiny website! We are a one-stop shop for all your self-publishing needs!’)?

Well, you do now, and one-stop shops are what I’m going to talk (read: rant) about today.

I think I'm just going to put random coffee pics in all my posts from now on. SO much easier than looking for book pics...

The typical one-stop self-publishing shop goes something like this. You, via the magic of a shiny website, find a self-publishing service called—let’s just say—ProperlyPublished.com. (Is that a real domain? I’d better check!). They promise to publish your book for you, as in produce a crop of glossy print copies, sell said glossy copies on their website and make your book available to bookstores. They will take care of the whole shebang: editing, typesetting, design, printing and ISBNs. All you have to do is submit your manuscript, then sit back and relax. Oh, and pay them the equivalent of a few mortgage payments. But then you can sit back and relax, and perhaps look forward to the “10 FREE copies!” of your book they’ve generously included in their offer.

Sounds great, right? Of course it does. Especially if you’re not a techie, or don’t have the time/coffee reserves to do this kind of thing yourself.

And maybe it would be great for you, but I doubt it.

I don’t think you need someone else doing everything for you, and I especially don’t think you need someone else project-managing the publication of your book. I’m positive you don’t need to be paying someone else to self-publish you. (And how, pray tell, is it self-publishing if there’s no “self” involved?) Self-publishers have never before had so many tools, advice and information—free tools, advice and information—at their fingertips, and yet new one-stop shops are popping up all the time.

I don’t think you should be tempted by them. I would go so far as to say you should avoid them, because using a service like this will, generally, have you paying through the nose for sub-standard work. Instead, you should project-manage the publication of your own book, finding and enlisting professional partners (editors, cover designers) as needed.

Let’s start with the paying through the nose bit. I don’t want to name any names, but I picked one popular one-stop shop self-publishing company (which I think is a fair example of how things look across the board) and compared it to using CreateSpace (in the way I do) to produce a standard length paperback.

The One-Stop Shop
  • Publishing package: $1,900

This includes interior design (i.e. typesetting), cover design based on template, up to 4 electronic proofs and 1 bound proof copy, 100 copies of the finished book. Your book will be listed for sale on the service’s website and “made available” to bookstores and to you, for ordering stock. The ISBN will be supplied (owned by the service) and copies of the book will be filed with relevant national libraries*. Your book will probably be available on Amazon.com, but there’s no guarantee. No mention of other retailers.

  • Cover designed from scratch: Add $450
  • Ordering personal stock: $6 per book

Total cost to publish paperback with original cover and get 200 copies**for yourself: $2,950

Using a POD Service (e.g. CreateSpace)
  • Publishing package: N/A
  • Pre-publication costs: We have to find an editor ourselves, so let’s say this will cost us $1,500
  • Cover designed from scratch: Let’s give a generous budget to the cover design we’ve sourced ourselves, so $400
  • IBSN: Free
  • Proof Copy: The cost of one book, so $3.50
  • Expanded Distribution: $25 (You’re on Amazon.com—that’s a given—but this will get you on other sites too)

Total cost to publish paperback with original cover and get 200 copies for yourself: $2,628

So at the moment there’s only about $300 in it, which is a pocket of loose change in the scheme of self-publishing things. But let’s use my own self-publishing costs, for Mousetrapped, instead of a theoretical budget. (Mousetrapped was a 232-page paperback measuring 5.5 x 8.5 that I published with CreateSpace and got an original cover for, which was copyedited but not structurally edited or proofread by a professional.)

  • Copyediting: $1,000
  • Cover design: $200
  • ISBN: Free
  • Proof copy: $3.63
  • 200 copies: $726

Now our total is down to $1,929 and some change—and that’s my point. If you use a one-stop shop, there is no negotiating. You pay the total advertised, and that’s that. But if you do it yourself, if you become the project manager of your self-published book, you can shop around. You can invite bids. You could even barter. Maybe your cover designer will give you some money off if you agree to run an ad for him or her on your website or something. But there’s no scope for anything like that with the one-stop shop.

And what if you don’t want 200 copies? What if you don’t even need or want the 100 you’re supposedly getting “free”? (Which I just think, by the way, is the biggest joke ever. It’s like Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party at Magic Kingdom. You pay nearly $50 for a ticket that gets you into the park for a few hours, and they tell you you’re getting “free” hot chocolate and cookies. Um…?) Say you just want 25 copies. Well, use CreateSpace and you’ll end up paying just $1,293.

A bigger issue, for me personally, is what you’re paying for. You really don’t know. I’ve seen two books from the same one-stop shop in the last year or so, one paperback and one e-book. In the paperback there were no misspellings or typos that I could see, but it hadn’t been edited at all, at least not in any kind of professional way, and there were blank lines here and there for no reason and at least five or six sentences that stopped mid-page. The cover was about as good as a CreateSpace Cover Creator cover, and it looked so self-published it may as well have come with an alarm shouting just that. The e-book had misspellings and other typos, and again, was filled with formatting errors. The impression I was left with was that there was just no attention to detail, and I don’t see how there could be on a conveyer belt system where books are coming in and out all the time, and the customer base is mainly made up of people who are unsure about how a book should look.

These companies tend to work around templates. They’d have to, or their business wouldn’t work. If you are offering a service for x price, you aren’t making any money by sitting down with each and every author who comes your way, talking to them at length about what they want and then going away and spending hours and hours creating and then fine-tuning just that very thing. You wouldn’t be able to charge flat rates if you did, because every book is different. So in order to charge flat rates, you pre-design a bunch of book types, and then get your clients to fit into them somehow. Same goes for the cover. (I’m guessing this has something to do with why books produced by these companies always look self-published to me.) Now I don’t blame them or even admonish them for that—if I was in the same business, that’s exactly what I’d do. Otherwise you’d be a kind of bespoke book-producing boutique, and you’d have to charge astronomical prices. But I do admonish them for the hyperbole they fill their sales pitches with, crap about control and choice and “working together to realize your vision” and all that nonsense. They always talk about what your book “deserves”. It’s very easy for a writer who has just come round to the idea of self-publishing to get taken in.

CreateSpace offer a similar package, and although I’m recommend you go with them for your self-publishing adventures, I would never recommend that you avail of any of their services, for the same reason. I love, love, LOVE them—I love the books they make, how little they charge for them, their customer service, etc.—but I would never go to them for their editing, typesetting or design services. You just don’t know what you’re paying for. There’s no guarantee of quality. And from what I’ve seen, you’ll get a better result if you go looking for individuals to do the work yourself.

Above are two self-published covers. The one on the right (the horse) is a cover CreateSpace put on their website as an example of an “original illustration” cover. It costs from $949. The one on the left was done by Design for Writers (see this post) and although I don’t know how much it cost, I’m betting it wasn’t a third of what Mr. Horse did.

And what about when the book goes on sale? How much do you make then? Well, with the same one-stop shop used in the example above, you’d get around 70% on the profit (i.e. NOT on the list price) after a $2 “handling charge” is deducted. So let’s say your book was selling in a store for $14.95, and the bookstore was taking a 35% cut. I figure you’d be collecting a little over $5 from each sale. I don’t know how much you’d get from an Amazon sale. With CreateSpace, you get about $5 from an Amazon sale (using the example of Mousetrapped) and less from “expanded distribution” sales from other online retailers. So that’s little difference there between the two—but there is a big difference in the cost of the book to you. To buy a copy of my own book costs me $6 from the one-stop shop, but only $3.60-ish from CreateSpace. Many self-publishers go to companies like this because they want stock, but if that stock is twice as expensive as it would be from CreateSpace, why bother? I wouldn’t.

They say “We make self-publishing simple!” Self-publishing, if we’re talking about an e-book and a POD paperback which is what most self-publishers are talking about these days, is already simple. If you can’t do something yourself—editing, cover design, even formatting—you’ll get a far better deal by sourcing the people you need and paying them individually, than you’ll be handing over wads of cash to one company who claim to do it all. You’ll have much more control if you do it yourself. You’ll get, in my opinion, a better product. And you won’t end up with boxes of dusty books under the stairs, which is what this whole digital self-publishing thing is about avoiding in the first place.

In my opinion, your self-publishing needs to have some self in it. What do you think?

*Filing copies of your self-published books will national libraries is an exercise in ridiculousness.If your national library actually began receiving copies of every self-published book not only for sale in your country but available to buy from there too, they’d change their tune on their policies pretty quick, I’d imagine. Except they wouldn’t be able to reach their desks because they’d be piles and piles of POD-d books in their way. I’d never done it and you don’t need to either. **Paying only for 100, because 100 of them are free. Both examples exclude shipping costs. 

Mick Rooney at The Independent Publishing Magazine both reviews and ranks self-publishing companies, if you’re interested in learning more.

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.

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