Category Archives: Amazon

Dodging the Perils of Kindle

Have you ever tried re-upload a corrected manuscript to Amazon’s Kindle publishing function, only to find the corrections don’t go across? What you see is what you HAD, not what you WANT NOW.

This annoyance is most likely to occur after you’ve clicked “Save and Continue,” as opposed to “Save as Draft,” but I’ve had it happen pre-save or while I was in “save as draft” mode.

There’s a simple work-around.

Each time you run a manuscript through the “preview” process in Kindle and find something to correct, save the corrected MS under a new filename.

Let’s say you’ve uploaded ThePerilsofPaulineTemplate.docx.

You’ve downloaded it to your(!) [not Amazon’s online!!!!!] Kindle previewer and found some damnfool thing you should never have missed in the first go-around.

You’ve gone into ThePerilsofPaulineTemplate.docx and fixed the errors.

Now save your file as ThePerilsofPaulineTemplate1.docx and re-upload.

And hallelujah brothers and sisters! This is far more likely to overwrite the first file than than the corrected file saved under the original filename.

Why, I do not know.

All I know is that this is so.

Every time you need to make corrections in a file you’ve already uploaded from .doc or .docx to .mobi, CHANGE THE FILENAME before the re-upload.

Vast numbers of intensely frustrating minutes will be saved.

Today I sat and watched the gear grind endlessly as I re-uploaded this book a good half-dozen times before the fix dawned on me…

…and so, my loves: Do as I say, not as I do!

♥

Learning Experiences

Sitting here watching Bowker grind away and Amazon grind away…ugh! I’ve spent the WHOLE DAY watching little digital gears spin. Mind-numbing and exhausting.

Started out this morning to obtain ISBNs for the upcoming ePub versions of the Fire-Rider series, to be published on SmashWords. That seemed to take forever. Or nearly so: was stymied at Book 15, when Bowker’s damn system decided that I’m selecting UK even though I’ve repeatedly entered US as the country for selling stuff. Instructions from the company’s CSR worked. Once. After that: FAIL.

I finally gave up, after sending three screenshots to the woman to SHOW her that the page says I’m in the US and is uncontaminated by UK-itude.

Failing to complete that job, I turned to uploading the new high-res cover images to Amazon.

Yes. I’m having to re-upload 14 images; not 18 only because I haven’t yet posted all 18 bookoids.

And yes. The horror is, when Ken the eBook Builder went through the data to upload to Smashwords, he realized that all the cover images were 72 dpi. They need to be 300 dpi. Or better yet, 350 dpi.

Holeee ess-aitch-ai!!!!!

So I had to get the artist to redo every damn one of EIGHTEEN covers.

This process dragged on and on. I figured out how to use the one high-res image he’d given me, which happened not to have cover lines, insert it in a PowerPoint slide, add cover lines, download to a PDF, and then convert that to a 300 dpi tiff. That actually was working, although it was astonishingly time-consuming. But I was plodding and plodding away at it, figuring (based on experience) I wouldn’t see the revised images anytime soon. Possibly not in the present decade.

But after I’d done three or four of them, my artist friend showed up with a CD bearing the revised images.

So today, two tasks: Obtain as many ISBNs as I could stand to register (it’s an exceptionally tedious, time-wasting process); and re-upload all the Fire-Rider covers to Amazon.

Either of these consumes half the day. Together, they’ve consumed the whole day.

BUT…

Two redeeming qualities:

I knew this whole publishing venture was going to be one massive learning experience. And that, as it’s developed, was right in spades. Every step along the way has been instructional. And every hair-tearing snafu has been a learning experience not to be forgotten. I now know a fair amount about publishing e-books. In the future, the process should go a lot faster.
If I can get all the FR covers reloaded today, that may free up some time tomorrow to do what I want to do. Truth to tell, I didn’t sign on to spend my time doing computer and clerical work. When I stood down from teaching, I thought I’d be able to use my time to write.

So far that has proven to be wrong with a vengeance. I don’t think I’ve written more than a couple of paragraphs over the past month. Fortunately, we have a month or so of inventory in house. But I’d hoped to have two months’ worth by now. So that’s been a long-term frustration, fulminating behind the daily tattoo of large and small immediate hair-tearing frustrations.

All the new ISBNs for ePub versions have been registered now. I still have EIGHT covers to re-upload.

That’s because I figured out (among other things) that I can upload a cover and MS to Amazon but I don’t have to publish it right that minute. In theory, I can upload all 18 of the bookoids, and then go back in to the page and click “publish” on the appointed day.

It’s 6:20 at night, I’ve been working since 6 a.m., I haven’t had lunch or dinner, and I want a bourbon & water in the worst way. So it remains to be seen whether the second goal of the day will be accomplished.

I’m hoping that once this gigantic thing is out of the way, the routine will settle into something resembling the day 1 write/ day two write/ day 3 write /day 4 publish routine that I’d envisioned. Recent experience suggests that things will never be that easy — whatever can go wrong will go wrong, as we know.

What have I learned? Self-publishing as a business that might earn enough to support you is publishing. It’s not writing.

Publishing on Amazon: What I’ve Learned So Far

Thinking of self-publishing on Amazon? Here's what I've learned. The first two books I put online, Slave Labor and 30 Pounds/4 Months, were frank sandbox projects. While I thought some folks might buy 30 Pounds (diet books are popular, particularly when coupled with recipes), I harbored no illusions about the Slave Labor rant. My main purpose in publishing these two works was to learn how to publish ebooks on Amazon and how to arrange a print-on-demand version.

Those really were learning experiences. But the 18 short Fire-Rider serializations you can see on our “Books” page also served the same purpose, if not so deliberately.

People will buy some obscure titles!

Fire-Rider was online for only nine days, and somebody had already bought it. Two readers bought the cookbook, and strangely, Slave Labor continues to sell one or two copies per reporting period. Slave Labor was plugged only at The Adjunct Project, a very obscure website, indeed.

You can publish to Amazon directly from a Word file, without having to convert to ePub or .mobi format, provided…

you have a well designed Word template and use its styles function consistently; and
your format is extremely simple, with no tables, graphs, zingers, doodlebugs, or whatnots; and
you understand that what you see in Word is not what you see in Kindle.

If your book’s layout is any more complex than chapter headings and plain-vanilla text, conversion from .docx format will require some sophisticated coding exeprtise.

In that case you either need to convert to a Kindle format in a program such as Calibre (extremely techie) or hire someone like Ken Johnson, Your eBook Builder.

If you think you’re going to sell print-on-demand books to be fulfilled through Amazon, you’ll need to buy bar codes matched up to your ISBN through Bowker.*

Amazon will not handle your print-on-demand masterpiece without a barcode.

* UPDATE: You can generate a free bar code for your ISBN here: http://www.creativindiecovers.com/free-online-isbn-barcode-generator/

You need an ISBN to get your book listed in Books in Print.

An ISBN, which you buy through Bowker*, is used identify each book that is published, and each edition of the same book. ISBN also identifies the publisher of the book. It is the standard ID number used to identify books by booksellers, libraries, book wholesalers and distributors.

*See the update, right above. ↑

Amazon can be very difficult to deal with.

For every book, you will spend a half-hour to 45 minutes filling out forms.

Instructions are obscure.

Anything out of the ordinary (such as the use of a pseudonym or a book that doesn’t fit into a specific hole) confounds the system.

Amazon’s handiest Kindle previewer is worthless. Download their more sophisticated viewer to proofread your e-book.

After you have uploaded your file to Amazon’s publishing software, you will be given the opportunity to proofread the result in an online Kindle viewer in the Cloud. Don’t use this: what you see is not what your reader will get.

Instead, download a resident Kindle viewer — Amazon also offers this option at the same point in the process. Download and install the Kindle viewer, and use that to proof your document. Bear in mind that even this viewer doesn’t necessarily show what all readers will see on all devices, which can include cell phones, tablets, Kindle devices, laptops, and desktops.

If you’re going to publish books on Kindle and Nook as part of your business model, you had better be amply capitalized, since you’ll be hiring lots of help.

Among others, I now contract to two writers, a web guru, a graphic designer, my assistant editor, a social media consultant, and that eBook builder.

If you have a well-designed Word template and you apply its styles consistently, preparing a print-on-demand layout is MUCH easier than preparing a book for publication on Kindle.

Several outfits sell Word templates for print-on-demand production. CreateSpace, of course, will build your PoD book for you. However, this is done overseas on a mass-production basis and you have rather little control over the results.

But since no one expects a print-on-demand book to display the perfection of a professional page designer, you can get away with using a template if your layout is fairly simple — that is, if it doesn’t contain a lot of photographs, tables, and graphs.

I’ve found that Joel Friedlander’s book design templates work exceptionally well, both for simple e-book layout and for plain-vanilla print-on-demand books. Such templates come with standardized Word “styles” set up to coordinate heads, subheads, and body copy, and with correct margins and gutters. Several of Friedlander’s templates switch-hit: they can be used for e-book design as well as for PoD.

By and large, because what you see on your Word, Scrivener, or Pages screen IS what you’ll get in the print version, a template makes PoD much easier to accomplish than e-book design can be. Any image will present difficulties in designing an e-book, and trying to get fancy with heads, subheads, fonts, lists, pull-outs and the like can make quite a mess of an e-book. If your book is even slightly more complex than plain gray space with a few chapter headings and one level of subhead, you really should hire an e-book designer to get it right.

w00t! First Book of Fire-Rider!

It’s HERE! At last, the first installment of the Fire-Rider saga has hit Amazon!

It’s taken awhile, what with the medical adventures and the project involved in learning how to navigate Kindle while setting up new imprints for The Copyeditor’s Desk. Fire-Rider is published under the Plain & Simple Press imprint, which will be reserved for nonfiction books and for fiction that is not primarily erotic in nature. Camptown Races Press will publish the erotica. 😉

FireRider takes place 1900 years after the fall of the Mercan Empire and the near extinction of the Old Ones. A period of global warming flooded coastal cities and island nations, spread havoc and famine, and culminated in a series of global pandemics. The result was a world-wide population collapse that left too few educated workers to run the power plants, mines, oil refineries, and transportation infrastructure needed to sustain civilization. A swift climatic reversal gave way to a harsh ice age and foreclosed any possibility of reviving the human race’s former technological glory.

The survivors live during a postliterate, post-industrial, post-technological dark age that will come to be known as the Great Lacuna. Rival Espanyo and Hengliss cultures survive in agrarian, feudalistic cultures loyal only to local warlords and overlords. Chronic warfare defines their world.

The stories related in the books of Kaybrel Fire-Rider, Kubna (“warlord”) of Moor Lek, were gathered during his time by the wandering scholar Hapa Cottrite, one of the rare literate men of the Great Lacuna. Some 3700 years later, a crew of herders found a cache of crumbling documents hidden in a cave where they had taken shelter from a storm. These were the remains of the Cottrite Codex, a collection of arcana and journal entries penned by Cottrite himself. The Fire-Rider epic is a fragment of that invaluable trove, translated and narrated by the famed storyteller Estabanya Estabanya Marcanda do Tilár i Robintál do Nomanto Berdo of the Methgoan Academy of Written and Oral Performance.

A Gift for the Kubna joins the allied raiding parties of Okan and A’o before the burning city of Roksan, a major Espanyo stronghold that the Hengliss allies have defeated and sacked. It tells the story of how Kaybrel, the powerful and dangerous governor of an Okan province called Moor Lek, came into possession of the orphaned Tavio Ombertín and why he decided to take the youth under his protection.

Cover art was designed by Arizona artist Gary Bennett.

Thirty Pounds in Four Months…can be YOURS

By golly! The long-awaited (by me, anyway…) diet guide and cookbook is live and well at Amazon! You can get it here, or click on the brand-new widget I just installed, at left, for your unending convenience.

This book, which contains four chapters on commonsense healthy eating and 125+ easy recipes, came about when an enthusiastic doctor tried to put me on blood pressure pills. He envisioned me swallowing the things for the rest of my life.

Well, they made me so dizzy I couldn’t drive my car. Since I live alone in a city with no credible public transport, that presented a problem. Cardiodoc didn’t seem to recognize the dilemma: he refused to adjust the dosage or the chemical.

My blood pressure was slightly high — not excessively so, unless I was having one of my occasional sh!t-fits — because a) middle-age creep had done crept up on me and because b) my idea of exercise was a brisk walk from the computer to the refrigerator.

Cardiodoc thought I needed to lose 22 pounds and made no secret of his heart-felt belief that I couldn’t do it.

I thought I needed to lose about 25 to 30 pounds, and, after some study at sites like the Mayo Clinic’s, I learned that the standard approach to slightly elevated blood pressure is actually to see if the patient can lose weight before prescribing drugs, and if so, to monitor the BP steadily to determine whether weight loss in fact helped and whether it continued to help.

So, without Cardiodoc’s permission, I quietly got off the vertigo-inducing, rash-making pills and built my own diet.

It’s based on the idea that salt and sugar have baleful effects, as do many of the chemicals used to make the various food-like substances that these days take the place of real food.

I designed what I called a “real-food diet” for myself, took 40 minutes each day to indulge in mild, non-excessive exercise (I hate banging myself around and am not a-gonna do it!), and started to watch the scale.

Lo! Forthwith I started to drop about two pounds a week. And incredibly, the weight loss continued at that pace until I got down to my target weight: 128 pounds, exactly in the mid-range of the recommended BMI for someone my height and gender.

Meanwhile, the blood pressure followed the same trajectory. Within four months, it dropped to a steady 125/75 — not bad for a 70-year-old woman!

This diet plan works. It’s easy, it involves no extreme theories or schemes, it’s not a crash diet, it’s not a fad diet, and it does not require joining a club or paying to subscribe to a commercial product.

How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months is a guide that simply engages common sense. Buy it. Try it. Review it.

Seriously: I do need reviews. If you will review the book at Amazon or Goodreads and in the comments section of any Writers Plain & Simple post, let me know, which review is yours and what books you’ve published, I will cheerfully return the favor with a purchase and an honest review of yours.

wooHOO! New Book Posted on Amazon

Wow! It was like giving birth…with a LONG labor. But finally the “Publish” button has been clicked for How I Lost 30 Pounds in 4 Months. It’s not available yet, but as soon as I have a link, I’ll post it here. In the meantime, just covet this fan-freaking-tastic cover art:

This is the wrap-around for the print version. It still needs a bar code, but since I may not sell it on Amazon at all (the plan is to use it to help with fund-raising for my fave cause), I decided to hold off for awhile on spending extra money on that detail.

I have to say, I’ve never had such a difficult experience with a project like this. The PoD version went together fine and uploaded happily to the printer of choice. I used a Book Design Templates choice called “Pulp,” which is specifically designed to save on the number of pages and also switch-hits between e-book publication and print layout. Compared with the “Focus” design I’d used for Slave Labor, the effect in page proofs was disappointing: in print, “Focus” is much more polished and handsome. Easily solved, though: I just pasted it from “Pulp” into “Focus,” did a few adjustments, and re-uploaded.

“A few adjustments” turned into a long, time-sucking slog. Probably worth it, though. In a review of the PDFs as the printer’s software received them, the new format looks very handsome.

But the e-book conversion…oh gawd. I thought I was gunna DIE. NOTHING that I did would make it work to upload to Amazon.

It did upload once. But then I needed to make some corrections, and after that… Bleyagh!!!! The main problem was it wouldn’t upload the TofC. And wouldn’t. And wouldn’t. And wouldn’t. And wouldn’t…

Word, which my associate editor and I justly call “Wyrd” (the Old English cognate for modern English “weird”), came up with every glitch it could contrive. Several of these required me to comb through all 363 pages several times removing bugs and fixing copy. It was BRAIN-BANGING tedious.

I’m pretty sure the main reason was the complexity of the book’s organization. It starts with four chapters on the diet strategy. Then it presents about 125 recipes, organized in 14 sections. So we had chapters, then sections, then chapters (i.e., the recipe titles) within the sections.

So I’ve spent a fair amount of today and of the past two or three days groaning in front of a computer and ripping at my hair.

Finally, Tracy Atkins of Book Design Templates came to my rescue. Tracy thinks it’s my version of Wyrd — 2008, the buggiest version Microsoft every produced, wouldncha know — and suggests I should pay the price to connect with Wyrd online.

I’ve resisted this, because

a) I hate, loathe, and despise the effing “Ribbon”;
b) Signing up for Wyrd represents ANOTHER monthly drain on my checking account, which I do not welcome by any means whatsoever; and
c) I welcome yet another goddamn learning curve even less than I welcome yet another monthly budget drain.

In a draftig way, I uploaded the content of a short novel and thought it worked just fine. But no. On second look, I see it ALSO didn’t upload the TofC links.

So obviously, I’m going to have to find a way to get an updated version of Wyrd. And that’s going to be a hassle of the ongoing variety.

But I must say, I am utterly hassled out right this minute. I’ve wasted three full days on this shit, during which I’ve written all of about four paragraphs in the current Bobbi & the Biker series.

You know, if I had wanted to do book production, I would have gotten a degree in graphic arts, not in English. I would have made myself unemployable with an MFA in design, dammit, not with a Ph.D. in late Renaissance and Early Jacobean literature and history!!!!!

Claro que I am not a creature of the endlessly dystopic 21st Century.

Progress Being Made!

At last… In the absence of the late, great teaching hassles, I managed to work on not one, not two, but all three books in progress today!

Holee maquerel. It’s some sort of a miracle. Got a little work done on each of two books and a lot done on the third:

• Revised (while word-processing) another chapter from the ancient graduate-student novel, lately retrieved from a dust-covered box in the garage. Contemplated the possibility of spicing it up…a rich possibility, indeed.

• Organized research materials for the Boob Book. In the process identified topics that are over-researched and some that are under-researched. Realized the next step really oughta be to draft the appendix describing how to read & understand a scientific paper.

• And finally, went through (at endless length) the long, long manuscript of Fire-Rider‘s first installment, did word counts of its 79(!!) chapters, and figured out how to organize it into bookoid-length installments. Discussed this idea with graphic designer; procured his agreement to create “brand name” covers based on the present cover image, at little extra cost to me.

The latter was the biggest project and potentially the most productive. As I thought about the tale of the guy who’s minting vast riches (so we’re told) by churning out 5,000-word “books” of erotica and peddling them on Amazon, it occurred to me that the model could apply to any brand of fiction, even the nonpornographic variety. And, by golly, I happen to have an excess of that laying around the computer drive.

It took all afternoon, but by 7 p.m. Fire-Rider‘s content had tidily coalesced into 18 segments averaging a little over 8900 words. Only one of these runs less than 5,000 words. Interestingly, each section holds together pretty well, and taken together they move the story forward at a nice pace.

This is a book, as it develops, that lends itself to serialization. In one piece it’s impossibly long. But in separate pieces, it can carry a reader along happily.

So I’m thinking for sure that one gets put online in shards.

Ditto, I think, the proposed racy-fied crime novel , which I now think starts out at about 85,000 words. The writing’s atrocious, but at the rate of a chapter every day or so, I should be able to clean it up and zing it up over the course of a few weeks.

If I could break loose enough time every day, seven days a week, for several weeks in a row, I could probably get at least one of these up on Amazon very soon. If I can learn the Kindle conversion software (which doesn’t appear to be very hard), it shouldn’t be hard to mount both pieces of fiction, in serialized format, over the course of a month.

Stoked!

Making Money on Amazon?

The other day I learned of a gentleman who earns $30,000 a month on sales of Amazon e-books. As it develops, what he writes is erotica, which he markets in 5,000-word novelettes selling for $2.99 apiece. He cranks these things out as fast as he can, targeting a rate of one a day…at this point, he has 265 racy bookoids posted on Amazon.

Holy mackerel.

Well. I don’t need to earn 30 grand a month. Twelve hundred would free me from adjunct bondage, and that is all I want.

What I learned about the man’s enterprise inspired some insight into how to turn one porn author’s experience into the next scribbler’s profit. This morning I held forth at my personal-finance blogsite on the subject of how to accomplish this.

Right now I have to get to work for a client, and besides, I really don’t want to reiterate what I just wrote in all new words. So, if you’re interested in what I think would work to generate profit in the Amazon retail environment, come on over to Funny about Money and check out the proposed new business model.