Castle Falcon was approved by Smashwords for inclusion in their “premium catalog,” and has been shipped to six new markets so far, including Apple and Kobo. I “opted out” of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, where I already had the book set up. Again, not bad results for no fee and not much work.
The Apple version is up on iTunes already.
How does it work? From what I gather Amazon gets a license on a popular fiction property, and then fans get to legally make money with their fanfic of that property. Sounds like a good idea on paper, but I can see some possible problems.
So far, Amazon has announced licenses for Gossip Girl, by Cecily von Ziegesar; Pretty Little Liars, by Sara Shepard; and Vampire Diaries, by L. J. Smith. A lot depends on whether they can secure licenses for the really hot properties, and I’m thinking the major players in books and movies (the ones that generate the most fanfic now) might not be that eager to get on board.
Rules say “no pornography,” which from my limited knowledge of fanfic may also put a considerable damper on things.
Article at “The Digital Reader.”
One of the hardest parts of self-publishing is generating a good cover, either for paper books or digital ones. Places like Createspace and Lulu, among others, already have “cover wizards.”
You can certainly get a workable cover out of these “wizards,” but in my opinion it’s worth the effort to learn how to generate the artwork yourself, or at least hire it done. For one thing, there may be rights issues involved in reusing a cover created by a particular format’s “wizard” for another format. For another, you’re never going to get as much originality from a “wizard” as you can from real artwork.
Artwork for paper books, using the “one piece cover” art method, is hard to lay out. A one-piece cover is what you get by basically flattening the book out, or in the case of a book with a dust jacket, by removing the dust jacket and flattening it out. It’s easy to see that lining up the spine, end papers, and everything else can be tricky. Even changing the number of pages can affect this kind of cover design as the spine area gets larger or smaller.
Cover artwork for Kindle (or other e-books) is much simpler. It’s just a single JPG picture with art and title text. Last time I checked, preferred sizing for Kindle covers was 1563 pixels on the short side and 2500 pixels on the long side.
If you’re planning to do a lot of this kind of thing, it may be worth it to invest the time and money in learning Photoshop, InDesign, or other professional publication software. Adobe’s “Creative Suite” isn’t cheap, but it could be a good investment.
Story at the Goodreads blog.
I’m mostly a Goodreads “dabbler” so I don’t have much of an opinion on it, but reaction in the comments at the link is decidedly mixed.
My book Castle Falcon, formerly $14.99 in paperback from Amazon, is now only $12.99!
Stock up for the holidays next year! Impress all the people at the beach who are blindly following the crowds and only reading those best sellers! Fix that wobbly table with the short leg!
486 pages!
“…will last a household all winter, with care, providing no one’s ill and the paper’s nice and thin.” – Granny Weatherwax, Lancre.
In my annual ritual, I’ve entered Castle Falcon again in the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards.
They started taking entries last night, and they’ll quit when they hit 10,000.
I’ve made it past the first round twice. We’ll see what happens this year.
Amazon has dropped money into my bank account!
Okay, okay, so it’s only $48.54 but it’s a start, and it’s the first money I’ve ever made as a fiction writer.
Say, does this technically qualify as a Publishers Marketplace “nice deal?” ($1 – $49,000)
The “formatting tweaks” took more tweaking than I thought (I won’t bore you with the messy details), but I fired off my EPUB version of Castle Falcon to Barnes and Noble this morning. I’m interested in how the book’s online web page will look.
As I said before, the hardest part of e-book publishing is coming up with a file that does what you want it to when it shows up on someone’s e-reader.
A quick summary of programs I found helpful:
Adobe InDesign is great for formatting real paper books but it’s expensive. If you’re a student, you can get it a lot cheaper. The Kindle Plugin turns out reliable Kindle files, but I found that InDesign’s EPUB save function had some bugs. Your mileage may vary. Most people will get more use out of methods of converting Word files and the like, and unfortunately I didn’t do a lot of that so I don’t have much advice in that area.
Calibre is a great program for dealing with e-book files on multiple levels. I used it to create good EPUB files by simply converting my final Kindle files. It can do a lot more, but that one function was what saved my bacon.
Sigil is another editing program for working with e-books. Although I only used it for one minor formatting issue (losing my “coding virginity”) the program would be excellent for those familiar with HTML and working “under the hood” on e-books.
You can find book viewers (Kindle or EPUB) for any computer or almost anything that has a screen. If you don’t actually own an e-reader, this is critical for previewing your final files. All of the readers are free.
Kindle viewers can be found here.
Nook (EPUB) reading apps can be found here.
Now maybe I should get back to actually writing books…the one part of being an author that’s even harder than creating e-book files.
I finally had to spend some money on my self-publishing odyssey, but at least I put it off as long as I could.
I’ve been researching marketing and review opportunities for my book, and discovered that some places don’t take a book seriously unless it’s got an ISBN, particularly paper versions. My Kindle version has an ASIN assigned by Amazon, and Amazon gave the Createspace paperback an ISBN, but my Lulu-printed hardcovers had no numbers, and the dust jacket hardcover is the most professional-looking edition and the one I’d prefer reviewers to see.
Lulu will give you a free ISBN if you sign up for their distribution programs, but there’s some baggage attached to that. Nothing sneaky, but for maximum future flexibility and control, I decided to cough up cash for my own ISBN numbers, which will list me (not Lulu) as the publisher of record. Besides, I’m not interested in their distribution programs just yet. My hardcovers are only being sold through the Lulu store (you might have noticed the subtle links on the main page).
Bowker, the place where you buy these numbers, charges $125 for one ISBN number. Ouch. But you can get ten numbers for $250! How’s that for a price break? Each edition of a given title needs its own number, and I have three Lulu versions, so I went with ten. That leaves me seven for future use.
Bowker also has an interface that records and organizes book information for each ISBN number you buy. I’m just starting to explore it. I don’t think it’s mandatory, but it might be useful.
Lulu, in its revision process, has a step where you can add your own ISBN to the book. I did that. Then I had to revise and upload a new text file because I added the ISBN number to the copyright page (required).
The next step was revising the cover to add the bar code. That’s this thing on the back cover:
How you do that depends on how your cover was created in the first place. Cover wizards sometimes generate these automatically. I usually import a one-piece cover image, which is harder to do but gives me more options. When I imported the cover image for Amazon’s Createspace paperback, Amazon automatically assigned the ISBN and pasted the bar code on the book cover image.
With Lulu, you are responsible for adding the bar code image to your cover graphics. They are pretty good about reminding you of this during the process.
Bowker will gladly sell you bar codes for your numbers for $23 each, but I suspected I had other options. Here’s one of them I found, a website that will create bar codes for you and deliver them in PostScript and PDF formats. I used the default 90000 code in the price part, but you can plug a price in there if you want.
After that, it was simple to use Photoshop to convert the PDF to an image file I could paste into my cover on its own layer.
I also found a nice tutorial on the process here. Be careful not to scale the image, as this will change the nice sharp edges of the bar codes into aliased gray edges.
Once I had modified all the cover images I uploaded them, and my Lulu books with ISBNs were ready to go. Here’s my one-piece cover image for the casewrap hardcover:
I found out that Lulu does change the price structure on ISBN-equipped books, even if you don’t use their distribution. The books immediately developed a more expensive purchase price for Lulu marketplace customers (the purchase price for me was still the same). Fortunately, by using their price discount function, I was able to twiddle the price back down to the same price it had before.
Now the book will be more appealing to reviewers, libraries, and such. I hope.
I ordered a bunch of copies to send to reviewers (getting reviews as a self-published author is a major topic of its own). Which also set me back a nice chunk of money.
Oh, well, at least it’s deductible.
There was a short piece on the opening page of Amazon.com today by Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO and founder). He talks about an author named Jessica Park.
Jessica Park wrote an article for Indiereader on how self-publishing worked for her. Quite well, it seems.
I have to say I’m not anywhere near as down on the traditional publishing industry as she is, but her frustration is understandable.
TomAlanBrosz 