Quality Control for Indie Authors

I've read some bad ebooks.

I never post reviews for them, just because I don't want to hurt some poor struggling author's feelings. I admire anyone who puts themselves out there, you know. Sometimes, I email the author with notes for improving the book, but other times I just don't post anything. I've had folks send me novels to review who are probably scratching their heads.

However, my policy on this is probably going to change, because I just can't stand how badly written ebooks reflect on all ebooks. It's not something that only makes the author of the flawed book look bad. It makes all self-publishers look bad. How can I expect readers to wade through the bad to find the good, when I myself can't seem to do it? It's frustrating, because the best thing for ebooks sales is word of mouth, but you don't get word of mouth until a certain number of people read your book, and a lot of people are just avoiding self-published books because they think 90% of them are crap, and they're right.

I've been talking about this on one of the groups I belong to on Goodreads. It really surprised me when several fellow members posted answers to my initial post saying that they don't see what the big deal about good grammar is, and that some readers/reviewers suddenly think that they are "English teachers" as soon as they pick up an indie book, and that there are too many grammar Nazis. What this tells me is that these authors don't care if their books have major grammatical and stylistic flaws. The fact that they view people who care about grammar as "Nazis" and, worse, "English teachers"... well. I say, if an English teacher reads one of my novels and thinks it's good, then I've really done a great job. And I want that. I want my books to be that good.

There are a few folks on GR who are talking about putting together some sort of consortium of authors/readers/reviewers who would evaluate books for their writing quality (not in terms of content, but in terms of grammar etc.). I may participate in that. I'll keep you posted.

How about you? Do you care about grammar and style when you read a book, or does story just trump everything else? What sorts of things make you pause when you're reading (not in a good way)? If a consortium formed to evaluate books on their writing quality, would their seal of approval make a difference to you?

Twitter: Spam vs. Marketing

A few months ago I took down all of my programmed tweets that directly marketed my ebooks. I did this out of frustration with how many of these tweets I was seeing in my own stream. They vastly outnumber tweets where anyone actually says anything about how their day is going or whatever. When I attempted to make  list of tweeps who "tweet real stuff" I only managed to accumulate 24 people, out of a potential group of nearly 2000. This makes Twitter really boring to me. I felt like I was just looking at a stream of spam, and it didn't help that 4 out of 5 of these marketing tweets used quotes from the novels with grammar errors or style issues in the quotes. One vampire novelist's quote said something along the lines of, "A dead body! Someone sucked his ass dry!" Now, just give that one a minute to knock around in your head. Not a pretty picture, is it? A couple of times I couldn't help myself--I had to @ the person with the troublesome tweet and point out the problem. This was never received very well (I can't imagine why!). Seriously, though. You're tweeting something from your book. Why not choose a line that actually flows well?

Yeah, that's what I end up thinking, too. They've probably already chosen the best line in their book.

But I digress.

Back to my point: I got fed up with all the marketing tweets especially since most of them seem to come from people who otherwise are not engaged with Twitter at all, or very little. I nixed my own, and kept an eye on my sales. At first, nothing changed. Then I had a couple of pretty dry months. Then, April happened. In which I more than tripled the the best month of sales I ever had before on Amazon, and had my second best month ever on B&N. What changed?

Well, in April I was giving away two books. I released The Plane and the Parade so I was giving away The River and the Roses. And I had just started giving away Myadar's Snare then, too (I still am; get it here.) And because I wanted to be sure everyone knew about these giveaways, I did a lot more tweeting about them than I had been. I also sent out some direct messages--I really hope those didn't annoy anyone, but since what I was DMing about was free, I decided it was a risk worth taking. Since the free books are located here on the blog, I can't be sure that the tweets led directly to the sales--after all, for that to be the case, a lot of people would have had to click through on the pictures in the margins here or on the links on the ebook description page or something. I also joined several Goodreads groups in April and added my books to a few bookshelves, so it's quite possible that made a big difference--although I only did that with the Myadar books, and I sold a bunch of Veronica books as well as Broken Ones, too, which I didn't post.

So I've decided to give marketing tweets another try and see what happens. Right now, I'm only going to send out 2 or 3 a day. This is extremely low. Michael Hicks, who is my hero because he started out like any indie publisher and worked his way to where he quit his day job and bought a house in Florida with a pool, for pity's sake, sends them out every 60 to 120 minutes, for instance. He's being moderate compared to some of the spammers I mentioned above. I just really don't want someone who only has three dozen followers to open their Twitter account one morning and have to scroll through my fifty marketing tweets clogging their stream.

So we'll see if these tweets do anything. I may eventually up it to 6 a day, although I'm going to give it some time first. I'll give an update when I've seen what happens. By the way, if you don't already follow me on Twitter, you can do so here.

How do you schedule your tweets? Have you found that one kind of tweet is more effective for your sales than others (a book description, a quote from the book, a quote from a reviewer)?

When you see promo tweets, is there one kind you prefer? How do you feel about seeing a lot of promo tweets in your stream?

Titles: How do you pick them?

Man, when they say "full-time mother" they aren't kidding. Lately the bug has been limiting his naps to 30 minutes at a time, and only about three of those a day. And the rest of the time, he demands constant attention. Even as I type he's fussing. ::runs over to crib::

::returns after entertaining the baby with his toy monkey and giving him a paci::

And yet, I've managed to finish part 2 of the serial novel, which is as yet unnamed.  Which brings me to the question of titles.

For The River and the Roses, the title came after a lot of deliberation, and while I think it's the best of the options I was debating at the time, I don't know if I really like it. It's long. It doesn't really say, "This is a mystery novel about a woman coming to accept her psychic ability." But I do like the gothic quality of roses, and I like the cover, which mirrors the title. So... I'd give it a B, I guess.

Broken Ones was tough, too. I wanted to address the emotional damage the characters are coping with, as well as make a reference to the several broken windows in the story (which are tied symbolically, of course, to the emotional damage). I also wanted a title that was original, and there are a lot of titles with "broken" or "broken windows" or whatnot. When I chose Broken Ones, it was the only book with that title that came up in an Amazon search, although since then more have popped up. But I wonder if it sounds too angsty, and maybe that's why people haven't been downloading it. I changed the (VERY) brief description I've been sending out with my "thank you for following message," though, and there have been three more downloads in a week, so I do think calling it "paranormal" was part of the problem there. It's very hard to capture what Broken Ones is about in three or four words, though, so the new description says "a novel of escape & survival of abuse." Which has a weird feeling to me, syntax-wise, and may give the impression, again, that the novel is angsty. Which I guess it is, a bit, but I wouldn't describe the narrator, Louise, as angsty at all. I think what makes Broken Ones stand out is her voice, which is very matter of fact. Louise has a lot of humor and she tends to see things in fairly cynical terms--she's not the "woe is me" type. Anyway, so I'd give that title a B, too.

Veronica in Paris is the best of my title choices, and it was totally easy. There was no debate. It was my working title, and it stuck. It gives a pretty accurate impression of the story, I'd say--it's about a woman named Veronica who goes to live in Paris for a year. Paris is pretty strongly associated to romance in people's minds, so the fact that there's romance involved probably comes as a shock to no one who reads that title. So, A for that one.

Anyway, so now I'm working on this new book, and the working title is the name of the city, Helésey, where most of it is set. Which isn't going to tell anyone anything about the book, and may even mislead them into thinking it's French in some way. It actually draws on Norse mythology for some of the culture, although I've altered a lot of aspects. I also draw inspiration from America and Italy in the 1920s, as well as Germany in the 1930s. But there's really nothing French about it--the word "Helésey" is an altered version of the name of an island in Norse mythology, and the city is on an island, so it seemed to fit. The accented e comes from the original word, too.

My main character is named Miadar, which is not a common enough name, I think, to put it in the title--I suspect most people won't recognize it as a woman's name at all, which isn't surprising since I made it up by combining the words for "honey" and "hair" I found on a site claiming to have words in old Norse. I have no idea if the site is legit, and it doesn't really matter--I often choose names for characters based on what they mean, but it never comes up for the reader, so if it only means something to me, that's okay. The first part of the novel revolves around a coronation, and Miadar leaving her home because she's summoned to Helésey, the capitol, to witness it. So I've thought about The Coronation as a title, and also Summoned. The former may work, but I'm not sure about the latter, although I like the idea of having a verb in the title. Summoned conjures images of magic and demon summoning to me. Maybe I've read too much urban fantasy. The second part revolves around a night out Miadar participates in, where she visits an illegal gambling hall (think speakeasy). So I thought about Invited, The Invitation or The Gambling Hall for that one, although I'm really not in love with any of them. The next part will have to do with a seduction... so The Seduction, perhaps. Seduced, maybe. Parts four, five and six I haven't worked out completely yet, but they will have something to do with a vigilante, and probably at least one debauched party, and a betrayal. The last parts (not sure how many there will be total) will involve fighting for freedom, bringing down an evil leader, finding someone who is lost, and escaping. It's fairly murky in my mind at this point, and I don't like talking in detail about stories I haven't written, but you get the idea.

I'd like the titles to all work together:
The Coronation - The Invitation - The Seduction - The Betrayal - The ???
Or:
Summoned - Invited - Seduced - Betrayed - ???
Or:
The Capitol - The Gambling Hall - The [location] - etc.

Or I suppose it could be something like: Miadar Summoned, Miadar Invited, Miadar Seduced, Miadar Betrayed...

What do you think? What makes a good title? How do you choose your titles? Are you satisfied with the titles you've chosen in the past? Do you think about parts of speech or other specific characteristics of titles when you're trying to choose one?

Marketing: Doing Nothing Works Better?

In the first week of March I made a list of things to do for my writing/publishing goals. Among those things was to start marketing my books again, at least on Twitter. Over the last year I've gone through different phases with the marketing. I got a couple of book review bloggers to look at my books, but mainly I've sent out tweets promoting them. In the beginning this did seem to make a difference. Then I stopped doing anything to promote the books and even pretty much stopped blogging, because I was pregnant/a new mommy and my head just wasn't in it. And now since early March I started up again. Here's what I've observed:

Marketing seems to have no effect on my book sales, at least the tweet marketing. In past months when I wasn't doing any I sold an average of five books a month. This month, with renewed attempts to market, I've sold one.

I've been giving away books as thank yous to long time followers (let me know if you didn't get a DM on Twitter with a coupon code--I think TweetAdder has been patchy with this) and also new followers. The long-time followers got a coupon for Veronica in Paris, and the new followers got a coupon for Broken Ones. So far, about a dozen people have downloaded Veronica in Paris, and one person has downloaded Broken Ones. Generally, I sell about three copies of Veronica for every one copy of either Broken Ones or The River and the Roses. I thought it was because Veronica is priced at $0.99 and the other two are $2.99. But this would indicate that some other factor is at work, since I offered both for free.

Veronica is a novella, while Broken Ones is a full length, if short, novel. I've heard that novellas are popular--I didn't really believe it, though, because I like long books for the most part.

Veronica is a romance and is set in Paris, so it has a travel aspect. Broken Ones is a ghost story. Could people be tiring of the glut of paranormal novels out there? I think this is a possibility. Look at the popularity of The Hunger Games and the Steig Larsson books. No paranormal there. And everyone on Twitter seems to have a paranormal novel to sell. Myself included, of course. It's frustrating because I like paranormal stories a lot, I always have. But I think maybe some of these authors are just trying to sell what they think is popular. Did they all watch every single episode of Charmed via DVR, like me? I don't think so! Anyway, whether all of these authors are sincerely into vampires (or witches as the case may be) or not is irrelevant. I think paranormal may be in oversupply.

Then there's also the possibility that more people downloaded Veronica because they've known me for a while now and they wanted to give my book a try. It was free, so why not? Whereas with Broken Ones, it was offered to folks who've only just "met" me so it's much more of an unknown entity.

What do you think? Have you offered a book for free? What results did you get?

Do you think there's an oversupply of paranormal fiction? What genre are you into these days?

Using Tweetadder

In order to quiet some of my "shoulds," I've subscribed to Tweetadder, which Michael R. Hicks recommends for marketing your novels. It's a cool utility. You may get a direct message from me in the next week or so if you follow me on Twitter offering you one of my ebooks for free, for instance. I'll be curious to see if the marketing I'm doing with it amounts to anything. So far, I seem to sell between 1-5 books a month not doing any active marketing at all. If that number increases in any significant way, that would be exciting. I'll be sure to post here with my observations either way.

Also, I've redesigned this blog a bit. What do you think? Do you prefer the previous, aquamarine version, or this beige?

Weekly Update on the ePub journey

No new sales, unless you count one free download to a reviewer. But the good news is, I'm starting to get the books reviewed, and the reviews are positive! The very latest was 5 stars (well, "ratties" by this blogger's system) for The River and the Roses. She said she couldn't put it down! Yay! That sort of thing is SO GOOD to hear, because I do get discouraged. I worry that I have an unrealistic sense of how good my writing is. I don't think it's the best ever, you understand--but I do think it's just as good and sometimes better than a lot of what's already bestselling. But it's like that verse in Desiderata says,

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Not to mention the Fate Factor, as Nathan Bradsford recently put it. How much luck do I need to make this writing-as-my-day-job thing happen? Quite a bit, I suppose. Oh, for a blog post that literally made me laugh until tears streamed down my face, on the topic of whether you're ready to be a professional writer, go here.

But anyway, marketing helps. And I haven't really been doing a ton of that lately--not for a little over a week, other than to tweet links to my recent reviews. I'm holding back, because I figure I need to accumulate more followers... but I do think I'll be making some announcements about the sequel to River coming out: The Fire and the Veil. You, my beautiful blog readers, are the first to know. The question is, when? I need to get it beta read and to put it through its paces on my writing forum. This whole process will probably take a minimum of two months. So I think announcements about it probably need to wait until the launch date is a good deal closer.

Weekly Update on Sales (or lack thereof)

This week, I sold two books, and that was on Sunday. Since then, crickets have been chirping.

I have given this some thought, and here's my theory as to why.

1. I reformatted two of the books at the beginning of the week, and sent out a lot of tweets about that. So I figure, I probably lost some customers because they were concerned about my formatting, even though the point of the tweets was to let people know that an existing problem was fixed, and that I'd comp a new copy to anyone who had an old, flawed version.
2. I raised my prices on two books: the two full-length novels. They went from $0.99 to $2.99. Although Amazon is still discounting one of them to $0.99, at least last time I checked. I did this after doing some research on prices, and I think it's the right choice. And I expected sales to slow a little but then recover. At this point, sales are beyond slow and show no signs of recovering, so we'll see. Also, the price change doesn't explain the halt in sales of "Veronica in Paris," which remains at $0.99.
3. It's possible the pre-programmed tweets I sent out were in some way unappealing. I've been puzzling over this. I know a little bit about sales, and what little I know I've been applying to the tweets. For one thing, don't ask a rhetorical question, because a person's internal response may be "I don't care." As in, "Will Veronica find out who the murder is in time to save her friend?" My own response to such tag lines is often "Who cares?" so I don't want to make that mistake. And then if you do ask a question, make it one people will say yes to. So I had a couple of tweets going out with a question at the beginning, "Got a Kindle?" figuring some people would say yes. The next thing I asked was, "Like stories about ghosts, psychics, and strong women?" figuring that after the first yes they'd be more inclined to say yes again and click the associated link. However, that seems not to be the case. So I want to go back to my drawing board and figure out a different formula for my book tweets. I had a couple of others going out with just a summary tag, like "Veronica must accept her psychic ability or someone she loves will be the next to die." Those were generally more successful, if you believe my sales of the first two weeks were in any way correlated to them, and I think they were. But they didn't work this week. So maybe people got bored of them.
4. It's possible that I've reached all the potential buyers I can within the first two weeks, among the population of followers I had on Twitter and Facebook. I've gotten new ones, but I have decided to wait at least a few days before putting out any more advertising. I figure if my tweets were in any way annoying, I'd better give people a break before starting up again.

Anyway, so this has been discouraging, but of course I'm not giving up. I'm focusing on the fact that 24 people have bought the books and presumably are reading and enjoying them. That's pretty cool. Also, on other blogs chronicling eBook sales, it seems typical to have bad weeks. I've got all three books out to reviewers, so I'm hoping those reviews will be good, and that once they are posted on Amazon and the rest, I'll see a return to regular sales. I've been getting mixed messages about the value of tagging, and in any case I can't seem to convince anyone to tag my books, so I'm not going to obsess about that. I may join the Independent Author Network, but they do charge a fee ($19.95), so I'm not sure yet. I probably will.

If you have any ideas for me about marketing, please let me know! Have you had to deal with any writing setbacks this week?

fixing the formatting

So I finally got to the bottom (more or less) of the weird formatting problem. As far as I know, it only turned up in Broken Ones (although I ended up reformatting The River and the Roses, just to be safe). Some em-dashes, for no apparent reason, were different from the rest, and as such, unreadable to most ereaders. They would instead show up as 3/4 signs. Just figuring that out took me a while. Then fixing it was a real pain, because I'd copy the bad em-dash and try to do a Find/Replace, only to have Word inform me that there were no such symbols to be found in the document. And I'd be staring at a page with four of them. Argh.

So for the benefit of those who are reading and thinking, how do I avoid this happening to me? I'm going to tell you the best way I've worked out to format a clean copy, free of bizarro em-dashes or other glitches.

First off, read the Smashwords Guide on how to get rid of things like text boxes and inconsistent indents--I never do these even in first drafts so they are not a problem for me. And let me say, if you use tab to indent your paragraphs, it's time to break that habit. The Smashwords Guide gives excellent instructions on the proper way to indent, and I won't go into that here.

The following instructions are based on Guido Henkel's guide to formatting, although I have made several alterations to deal with my em-dash issue and also some other problems I ran into with it. Also, his guide is long and can be intimidating to get through, although I recommend reading it if you want a more thorough explanation of why you're doing each step than you're going to get here.

Download JEdit and Calibre. These are both free programs and you'll need them to make your clean, glitch-free formatted ebook. There are other similar programs out there--if you're confident using them, do so. I know virtually nothing about them and can't adapt my instructions--I can only tell you how I did my formatting, and I used those two programs.

Before you start these steps, go into your word processing document and make sure you have all curly quotation marks. You may choose to do Find/Replace on each type, to be sure: there are “double” quotation marks and ‘single’ quotation marks. Make sure all of these are curly. You also need to Find/Replace all typed out ellipses to a symbol representing ellipses. That is, you probably have three periods in a row, like this: ... but what you need is a single ellipses symbol, like this …  . They look pretty much the same, right? But if you use the arrow keys to go over them, in the first instance you have three separate characters, and in the second, just one. You can copy and paste from this page into your Find/Replace boxes, if you like.

Okay, now that those preliminary steps are out of the way, we're ready for the process that will kill glitches in your formatting. Take a deep breath. There's some code coming up, and it can look scary. It's okay, though--you're just copying and pasting, and finding and replacing. You can do this.

Steps to Clean Formatting

In your Word doc:

1. Find/Replace: In Find box, type Ctr + i and in Replace box, put <i>^&</i>  . Replace all. (This preserves any italics you've got in your document for later--if you don't do this step, you'll lose all italic formatting.)
2. Ctr + A   Ctr + C   (Selects your whole document and copies it.)

3. Open Notepad (NOT WordPad), then Ctr + P  (Pastes your whole document in Notepad, killing all weird hidden Word formatting that is destined to mess you up later. Also known as the "Nuclear Option" in the Smashwords Guide.)

Now working in Notepad.

4. Find/Replace all em-dashes with --

Select an em-dash from your document and copy it, paste it in the Find box, then manually type the two hyphens in the Replace box. These will be replaced with real em-dashes later in JEdit, in such a way as to prevent weird 3/4 characters and the like from turning up. You might want to scroll through your document and make sure you don't spot any lingering em-dashes; but chances are, you got them. Also, while you're scrolling, look for empty box characters--just little squares. These are nasty symbols that cause glitches. If you find one, highlight it and copy it. Determine what it was supposed to be (in my case, an em-dash), and do a Find pasting in the box, Replace for what it was supposed to be.
5. Ctr + A    Ctr + C     Open JEdit, then   Ctr + P

Now working in JEdit.

6. F/R    ^(.+)$   with   <p>$1</p>    (This will put <p> and </p> symbols around each line)
7. F/R   …   with   &hellip;   (Copy that code from this page, including the semicolon.  DO NOT do this until you have replaced all three-dot ellipses with a single ellipses symbol--otherwise very weird stuff happens.)
8. F/R   --    with   &mdash; 
9. F/R  curly right  “  with  &ldquo;  and left  ”  with &rdquo;
10. F/R curly right  ‘  and left  ’  single quotes with  &lsquo;  and  &rsquo;

11. Save with an .html file extension. You will have to manually type .html after the file name.

12. Copy and paste the following at the top of the file, before any text:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  <head>
    <style type="text/css">
      html, body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, ul, ol, dl, li, dt, dd, p, pre, table, th, td, tr { margin: 0; padding: 0em; }
           p
{
  text-indent: 1.5em;
  margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}

p.chapter
{
  text-indent: 0.1em;
  font-weight: bold;
  font-size: 1.5em; 
  page-break-before: always;
  margin-top: 5em;
  margin-bottom: 2em;
}

p.centered
{
 text-indent: 0em;
 font-weight: bold;
 font-size: 1.2em;
 margin-top: 1em;
 margin-bottom: 1em;
 text-align: center;
}
span.centered
{
  text-indent: 0em;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: 1.2em;
  font-weight: bold;
 margin-top: 1em;
 margin-bottom: 1em;
}
  </style>
  </head>
  <body>

13. Put </body> at the end, after all text.
14. F/R  <p>Chapter    with    <p class="chapter">Chapter    (Unless you have not named your chapters, "Chapter 1" etc.--in that case you probably can't use Find/Replace and will have to go through and manually replace the <p> in front of your chapter heading with <p class="chapter"> . <p class="chapter"> still should have the word chapter in it, even if you don't use the word in your chapter headings--in the code, it refers to a style.)
15. Put <p class="chapter"> in place of <p> in front of any chapter-like heading. You may want to do this for About the Author, for instance. Note that this heading style is not centered, though, so it's probably not the best choice for your title page.
16. F/R <p>section break symbols</p> with <p class="centered"><span class="centered">section break symbols</span></p>   (Except replace the phrase "section break symbols" with whatever you use as section break symbols, such as *** or ~~~, so it would look like <p>***</p> and <p class="centered"><span class="centered">***</p></span>)

Note that you must have both the p class="centered" and the span class="center" and corresponding closing code </p> and </span> to properly center text. Guido explains this if you want to know why.
17. Through your computer's start menu, open Documents and double-click the .html document you're working on to check how it looks as a webpage. It will automatically open as a new tab on the web, also long as your browser is capable of making tabs.
18. Apply heading formatting wherever else it needs to go, like the title page.

I've created additional p class="centered" + span class="centered" formats with different names (eg. p class="centeredsmall" + span class="centeredsmall") in order to have some additional options for centered text in various sizes, etc. Copy the original ones, paste after the originals, and change the names. You must make sure both the p style and the span style have identical codes and don't contradict each other. To mess with sizes, simply alter the number by font-size, for instance. I like to mess around with this, saving and then reloading the webpage that corresponds to the file, to see how it looks.

Once you're satisfied with all of that, you have your basic .html document. You can use this to upload to Amazon. ALWAYS look at the preview they offer, and be sure you like what you see.

In order to use this document on Smashwords and B&N:

Smashwords

Highlight the entire webpage of your document and copy it (Ctr + C). Paste that into a Word document. Make sure your Word document doesn't have any weird spacing or other default formatting that will annoy Smashwords. Use their guide if you aren't sure.
Save in .doc format. That's what you upload to Smashwords.

B&N

This is why you need Calibre.

1. Open Calibre.

There is a row of buttons at the top--we'll be using several of these.

2. Open your .html document in Calibre by clicking "Add Books."

3. Select your .html document in the book list, and click on "Edit Metadata."

Fill in the information (Title, Author, ISBN if you have one, etc.) and upload your cover.

4. Making sure your book is still selected, click on "Convert Books."

In the upper right hand corner, there's a drop down menu of format options.

You can convert to MOBI here if you want, and upload that to Amazon instead of the .html, and it will be faster--also, if Amazon throws up an error when you try to upload your .html, doing this can fix that.

For B&N, convert to EPUB.

5. Click on "Save to Disk" and select a folder in your documents you'll have no trouble finding later. Calibre will create a new folder within the one selected, most likely titled after your author name. Your book document is in there.

6. On B&N when you upload your book, browse into that author folder and choose the EPUB file of your book, and upload that.

Their preview will even show your cover, as long as you chose one when you were doing metadata. It's very cool.

ALWAYS CHECK THE PREVIEW.

You're done. I'll let you know if I run into any more problems, but it's my conviction that going through these steps will give you a properly formatted, glitch-free eBook.

If you have more complicated formatting, such as images to include, PLEASE read Guido Henkel's guide. I in no way have his expertise--I'm merely posting what I figured out after hours of trial and error, AND with his help. I emailed him twice with questions, which he graciously answered. So I owe almost all my formatting to him, and the rest to Smashwords.

Weekly eBook Sales Update.

Things are moving along!

The only fly in the ointment? Two readers have reported some formatting issues in two different Kindlebooks. I suspect it's the em-dashes, which some ereaders don't translate correctly. I am, at the moment, pretty stumped about how to fix this. The two readers both got their books from Smashwords (right Kathryn?) so I have no way of uploading the html version Guido Henkel teaches you how to make which is the only one that would address this, as far as I know. Smashwords only takes .doc files. So mostly at this point I'm crossing my fingers that the formatting won't be bad on most ereaders. On my laptop, using Amazon's Kindle for PC app, I am unable to reproduce the formatting bug. And I'm also unable to bring it up on my actual Kindle.

Another possibility would be to find/replace all my em-dashes and make them into "--" instead. I'm reluctant to do this without more of a sense of how pervasive the problem is, though. The "--" just doesn't look as professional to me. It's probably just me being anal. What do you all think?

Anyway, to the numbers!

Smashwords, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 5
Veronica in Paris = 2
The River and the Roses = 4

Amazon, total sales by title:
Broken Ones = 4
Veronica in Paris = 4
The River and the Roses = 2

B&N, total sales by title:*
Broken Ones = 0
Veronica in Paris = 1
The River and the Roses = 0

*Keeping in mind that B&N has a reputation for being slow to report sales.

Total sales of all titles, just this last week: 14

Total sales since the beginning: 22

My sales have almost doubled since the first week. This is very encouraging! I've been submitting my books for bloggers to review. I'm hoping once the books get reviewed, they'll really start selling.

By the way, if you have a minute, something you can do for me is go to the sites of each book and select some of the tags associated with each. For instance, The River and the Roses has the tags: psychic, ghost, mystery, etc. The more times people click on these tags (signifying that they agree with them) the higher up in certain lists the books go.

For Amazon, US, go here. That should bring up my three ebooks. Select one and scroll down the page until you get to the tags. Click on a few of those. That simple!

For Amazon, UK, go here.

For B&N, go here. Edited to add: I can't seem to find tags on B&N--did you? I think maybe they don't do them. Please let me know--sometimes I don't see the same stuff because I published the book.

Smashwords doesn't do tags the same way.

Anyway, THANK YOU whether you have a chance to do that or not--just that fact that you are here, reading this blog, shows me that you are supporting me.

Please comment and let me know how your own pursuits are going!

the aftermath of my week long writing binge...?

I have these ambitions.

I decided that spring break would be filled to the brim with writing, editing, and publishing... and that happened. I published three books (although I'm going to have to upload a new copy of the third, because I rushed it and then realized I needed to still fix a few things). I finished the first draft of the WiP. I came up with a new story idea. I pretty much drove myself nonstop for ten days (we had a snow day added to the break). It was wildly productive.

And now I'm tired.

I don't regret it. At all. But there's a part of me that's really dissatified with the fact that I can't keep that pace up ALL. THE. TIME.

I decided to make April my personal NaNoWriMo. I planned to come home every day after work and write, like I did in November. That hasn't really happened. Yesterday I came home and took a nap on the couch. Today the hubby took me out to eat, and I'm dreaming of just going to bed right now--and it's 7:30pm.

And I know I'm genuinely tired, because even though I have that whip-cracking inner voice going off about it, it's a very faint voice, and the rest of me can't muster up any energy to care.

I've done the rewrites on the third book. I could take it down from the sites and put the new version up right now. It probably wouldn't take me more than fifteen minutes to do. And then, I could find all the reviewer-blogs I've been collecting and start submitting my books to them like I've been intending. This would be a good marketing step. But it's probably not going to happen tonight.

Tomorrow, with any luck, I will make it home earlier from work, and I'll have time for a nap if I need it, and then I'll find the energy to do the new uploads and write some more for ApriNoWriMo.

I think, actually, with ApriNoWriMo, two things are slowing me down. 1) Definitely my fatigue. 2) The story idea. It's not a bad story idea, but it's a new one, totally outside my Veronica series, and as such, I'm not bought in to it yet. I takes me a while to get bought in, which is why I like the NaNo format--I'm in such a rush to get words down by the deadline that by the time the month is over, I've bought in at some point without even noticing. So what I may need to do is come up with Veronica Barry: book 3. One of the lovely things about writing VB: book 2 was that I slipped right in--no initial struggle to form an attachment. That was way cool. So maybe I don't need a break from it, as I had decided when I finished the first draft of book 2 during spring break. Maybe I need a little breather and then to dive right back into Veronica's story...

Something to ponder.

My question to you is, how do you deal with fatigue? Do you ever push yourself very hard and then pay the consequences? How do you handle that, if you do, or avoid that, if you don't? Do you write in series? If so, do you take breaks between each book to write something else, or remain immersed in your series' world?