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Leng posted:
I've sold one physical copy in two months since I finally got round to putting the option up. The rest have been downloads or kdp so as long as they're all correct then I'm good.
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# ? Apr 7, 2021 22:06 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 10:00 |
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Alright, back with more questions! Based on new data coming in, it seems like the majority of my target customers buy either from Amazon (in which case they'll most likely order the KDP paperback over the ebook), or direct from the publisher (i.e. me). Reading up on IngramSpark's vaunted "distribution" into actual bookstores seems like it's not that accurate and also not that beneficial (you would have to set royalty at 55% AND allow returns AND they won't ship returns to Australia so the only option for returned stock is destruction ). HOWEVER, the majority still prefer reading in hardcover. So right now I'm thinking of ordering small batches of author copies and selling hardcovers directly through my own website. Since it's such a niche audience, I think I'd have more luck selling directly. Has anyone done something similar? If so, what are you using for the ecommerce side of it (WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix, etc)? I'm looking at Ecwid currently as they have a free plan (https://www.ecwid.com/pricing) which would suit me fine since I won't need anything more complicated.
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# ? Apr 9, 2021 15:12 |
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Leng posted:Alright, back with more questions! I haven't. I know someone who's done his through Lulu, then linked that on his Amazon page as another version of the same book - he says it sets a price point nicely, even if he doesn't sell many. However, I understand that KDP are now beta-ing hardcover. Main nuisance is doing yet another version of the cover. No idea when it's on general release.
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# ? Apr 9, 2021 21:28 |
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Leng posted:Alright, back with more questions! Where are you pulling the information about people buying directly from a publisher? I seriously doubt most people even know who the publisher of a particular book is. Having the infrastructure / volume to justify hardcover seems beyond the means of most self pub. You really should just stick with kdp/Ingram (with 55% and returnable).
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# ? Apr 10, 2021 00:27 |
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n8r posted:Where are you pulling the information about people buying directly from a publisher? I seriously doubt most people even know who the publisher of a particular book is. Having the infrastructure / volume to justify hardcover seems beyond the means of most self pub. You really should just stick with kdp/Ingram (with 55% and returnable). Yeah that's what I initially thought until I went and did some research (direct survey responses and actual observation). Bilingual books are hard to find and source overseas. Most big name book stores just don't carry them because it's not worth for them as they cater to a primarily English speaking audience. Group buys direct from publisher are a regular occurrence on Facebook groups. When people ask for book recommendations, most give links to Amazon or publisher websites, with an occasional shout out to bloggers who make book lists. What's your experience been like with 55% and returnable in getting books into stores? My recent lurking in the Ingram community is turning up a lot of stories about how despite having 55% and returnable, authors aren't able to get their books stocked (granted most are talking about Barnes & Noble where apparently there's a corporate policy against stocking POD titles?).
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# ? Apr 10, 2021 01:15 |
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The book industry runs on 55% and returnable. If you don’t give that discount I believe they call it a “short” discount. If a bookstore can’t get full discount / ability to return it, why carry it? The reason most people’s books aren’t stocked is most people’s books suck rear end. I know nothing about bilingual books. I have dealt with selling English language through kdp/Ingram internationally. For actual foreign rights we just wait to get approached by a publisher and sell them for a flat fee.
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# ? Apr 10, 2021 04:26 |
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angel opportunity posted:There’s a lot of a stuff on there other than litRPG. I read one for a while about an older woman who got sent back to her body as a teenager and got a second chance at life with all of her adult experience. It was set just like in high school and had no magic or weapons or other nerd poo poo I really hope there was no love interest in that story
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# ? Apr 10, 2021 16:04 |
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So I’ve done a soft launch of my book so I have a few days to work out if there’s any issues with it. So far everything seems fine EXCEPT the ‘Look Inside’ feature on Amazon. I prepared the book in Kindle Create and on phone and ereaders it looks fine. The look inside feature messes up the formatting of the first paragraph so it looks like this: Instead of Is there any way to fix this? I found some blog posts from authors but all they say is that Look Inside uses an HTML setup that’s known for messing up formatting.
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# ? Apr 13, 2021 12:51 |
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If the dropcap is being done using CSS to float the first letter left and make it big, then the LOOK INSIDE might be playing havoc with it and overriding it. Dropcaps can be hit and miss.
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# ? Apr 13, 2021 13:14 |
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Yeah that's probably the issue... don't know if it's worth getting rid of the dropcaps to fix the formatting issues in Look Inside. I kind of like them. Edit: There appears to be some real problems with the "First Paragraph Chapter" preset in Kindle Create. When I removed the dropcaps suddenly the formatting got all hosed up. I removed the preset and re-added elements I liked from it manually and now things looks fine in the Previewer. Waiting until the manuscript changes show up on the Amazon site to know for sure if the Look Inside is now fixed. Once I'm sure everything is actually functioning i'll post a link to the book. Ccs fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Apr 13, 2021 |
# ? Apr 13, 2021 13:21 |
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how's it look in the Kindle Previewer program on a PC?
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# ? Apr 13, 2021 23:51 |
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It looks great on the kindle previewer for desktop and on the previewer that runs before publishing. I ended up going through in Kindle Create and making sure every paragraph had the settings I wanted. Honestly they’ve got to improve that program, it’s insane that you can’t edit the indents on the whole manuscript, you gotta select each page or paragraph at a time. I think I finally got it though. Updated the version which is now publishing on the store, which seems to take 4 hours or so to fully reflect in the Look Inside. This has been an exciting learning experience in the fun of formatting 🤮
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# ? Apr 14, 2021 02:34 |
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My week so far: Monday Went through beta reader comments. Unfortunately, they confirmed two main flaws that I thought were there but didn't fix because . Tuesday Gritted my teeth and fixed both of the main flaws, i.e. rewriting sections of the text and then laying out the new text, then reformatting all of the pages for all the different formats. Wednesday Upload new revisions for hard cover and epub to IngramSpark. Epub was created by using the Kindle Kids' Book Creator, then converted from mobi using Calibre. Stupidly assume it's gonna be fine because it was like 3 AM Thursday Look at ebook with new eyes. Amazon's stupid rescaling of images makes everything illegible. Experiment with adding popups. Decide popups suck. Create ebook AGAIN, this time with individual pages as pages instead of spreads as pages. Spend hours trying to pass epubcheck. Try out draft to digital, except they basically don't help and their proof version actually makes something that was correct worse. Realize that this means the version on IngramSpark will probably have issues and that they will distribute the same file to everybody. Realize this means I need to distribute to each place myself, and create separate epub specific to those formats. And that I need to yank ebook distribution back from IngramSpark (I had already opted out of distribution to Amazon before but now I need to yank it from them entirely) and that you have to do this by contacting their customer service team directly (and their response times are abysmal). I freaking hate this part of the process and can totally understand why authors would opt to outsource this pain entirely. No wonder there are so many ebooks about how to self-publish and make ebooks etc etc etc. I just want to go back to planning out the next two books in the series. Right now I don't even know if I want to set up a second paperback version on IngramSpark for Australian customers only (since KDP will apparently ship paperbacks from their US printer instead of...just printing in Australia via a partner) because I am so sick of wrangling with all of these back end platforms. I will probably be less upset when I get my KDP proof next week. I hope. Maybe. But just the thought of it is again making me think I should just set up the paperback on IngramSpark so I can get and compare the proofs at the same time, since IngramSpark takes forever to process a title.
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# ? Apr 15, 2021 07:41 |
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That sounds like hell. I did a lot of artwork for my book while I was working on it and at one point considered including it in the ebook. But then I realized that would bloat the size and Amazon doesn't like large ebooks, and images are incredibly suspect in terms of how they'll actually display on various Kindles. For example, the cover of my book shows up fine on the previewer and on Kindle Fire but gets scaled a tiny bit thinner on Kindle Paperwhite for some reason. And this is just uploading a jpeg at the exact size resolution that Amazon recommends. It's kind of crazy that the display of text and images can be such a headache when the distribution for video seems to be so much simpler on the internet. I asked a friend who works at Amazon why this stuff is so difficult to deal with. He says the various departments don't coordinate with each other at all. The people who make the Kindle previewer are in one city, while the people who actually work on Kindle are on another, and the third dev team for the "Look Inside" feature is somewhere else. "Each org is like a startup bound to investors. The few commonalities between different Amazon orgs are only basic HR rules and the "leadership principles". "
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# ? Apr 15, 2021 17:18 |
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yeah. I had this for my book and that was just text. I did an epub (Kindle accepts epubs) and hand-did each image as a full-screen image, with XHTML like:quote:<div><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" version="1.1" width="100%" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 1640 2550"><image width="1640" height="2550" xlink:href="images/image.jpeg"/></svg></div> and that survived both most readers and epubcheck. If you remember to add it to content.opf: quote:<item id="id11" href="index_split_031.xhtml" media-type="application/xhtml+xml" properties="svg"/> and in conclusion, if you ever find yourself hand-editing the XHTML in your epub then kill me. full post of all the dumb poo poo I did, written as a reference to myself for next time
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# ? Apr 15, 2021 22:11 |
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Ccs posted:That sounds like hell. As an amateur front end web developer, I can say that this is exactly like trying to ensure cross browser compatibility and standards compliant code when IE6 was the most widely used browser. divabot posted:full post of all the dumb poo poo I did, written as a reference to myself for next time Your article was one that I referred to over and over again during the course of the ebook saga. I kept not going through with your solution, because I hoped that someone ELSE would have solved the problem for picture books but I may have to end up doing what you did. Also in other website chat (because I'm now just sitting waiting for meta data to update and IS to give me my eproofs), I found a really good free Wordpress theme today: https://rarathemesdemo.com/author-landing-page/ It is great if you specialize in one type of books (like I am currently doing) and is well documented (https://docs.rarathemes.com/docs/author-landing-page/faqs/how-to-configure-footer-credit-settings/) on how to customize. My website now looks so much better than it did before and I'm glad I spent the afternoon fixing it up, because literally as I was putting the final touches on the book's product page, someone posted in a Facebook group asking for books exactly like the one I've written. I have a mailing list sign up on that very page for people to be notified when the book comes out so here's hoping I can add some more emails to my list, in hopes of getting on that Amazon Best Sellers list on launch day.
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# ? Apr 16, 2021 08:27 |
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So my book is live and will be going on a free promotion starting in a few hours for the duration of the weekend. In the past 2 days it's sold 13 copies, most of which came from this forum and 2 of which were from irl friends I told about it. I'm curious to see if the promotion sites I'm running with this weekend actually do much to boost sales, in total I spent $60 between Genre Pulse, Book of the Day, and Book Runes. The bigger promo sites like E-Reader News Today, Fussy Librarian, etc. all require at least 10 reviews so I can't use those right away. I'll probably run another promotion with them down the line if I manage to get 10 reviews. At least the cover is nice, it definitely makes the whole presentation seem more legitimate. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092CHN6S6/ quote:Cantus dreams of glory in magical combat. He should have ample opportunities to win fame by hunting down rogue spellcasters for the Order of the Magi. But when a seemingly simple mission leaves him permanently disabled, he must journey to the center of the Auduwyn Empire to track down the errant mage who can heal him before his magic disappears entirely. To make matters worse, he soon discovers a growing threat that challenges the very fabric of the Order and the lasting peace it has established. Ccs fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Apr 17, 2021 |
# ? Apr 17, 2021 04:52 |
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Are you doing any additional promotion of your own? I haven't reread your published version but I did flip to the back and noticed you didn't include any links to a website of your own or a mailing list. Your Twitter handle was mentioned but almost as an aside. I'm currently in the midst of prepping for my own launch while my proofs are stuck with KDP and Ingram, so curious as to what you're doing. Though as I type I've literally just logged in and noticed both of them are cleared! Yay! On the other hand, something I just learned is that if you have a foreign language title, you are boned if you want to change it halfway through the process. Thorpe-Bowker's system chokes on Chinese characters so it just shows up as "???????" in the records. Chinese characters show up fine in both Ingram and KDP, but KDP won't accept a title change if it doesn't match Thorpe-Bowker records exactly, which it never will because of the aforementioned choke issue. There wasn't a problem if I set up the book title first before assigning the ISBN though! I need to make more calls this week to speak with someone who can figure this out and see if the system can be overridden. Otherwise I guess I go paperback with Ingram only, which will suck for KDP distribution. At least Chinese characters in titles works fine in Ingram, who have leapfrogged KDP again now. I wonder which of them I'll love/hate more at the end of this process. EDIT: Wow, ok, KDP hate confirmed, back to liking Ingram:
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that if you plan on self-publishing in print, you should just do Ingram and screw KDP. Maybe I'll change my mind again next week. Leng fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Apr 17, 2021 |
# ? Apr 17, 2021 12:16 |
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Yeah I don’t have a following in terms of a mailing list or anything so there wasn’t much promotion I could do on my own. The cover reveal is absolutely blowing up on r/fantasy right now though so sales are doing very nicely. Edit: Today went well. Ccs fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Apr 18, 2021 |
# ? Apr 17, 2021 22:39 |
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Ccs posted:Edit: Today went well. Congrats!
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# ? Apr 18, 2021 02:02 |
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Congrats, that's awesome!quote:Best Sellers Rank: #72 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) Still riding at the top for Epic Fantasy and your other category, that's a nice achievement!
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# ? Apr 18, 2021 13:14 |
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Yeah, this weekend was great. I actually got a really terrible headache today from things going so well, it seemed like there had to be some catch. My choice of cover artist really paid off, that's what caused the book to go viral on the r/fantasy subreddit. That artist wasn't cheap, but he's my favorite and for a self-contained novel that I've been picking away at since 2017 I figured I could swing it. Glad it worked out. Kindle runs sales in Pacific Standard Time which means the book will be free for another 6 hours, but I think most people who were gonna pick it up already have. In total I moved 1209 free copies on Saturday, and another 826 so far today. In addition there were around 2000 pages read through Kindle Unlimited, meaning I actually did make some money (a whole $8! ;P ) The majority of those page reads were from today, which means some might've come from reddit while others might've originated from the book hitting those sales ranks and coming to the attention of people with KU subscriptions. I've heard from other authors that free sales can produce long tails of KU readers so I'll be interested to see how those numbers shake out over the next week when the book reverts to its normal price. I kind of wish I was the type of author who could crank out another book in 6 months, but I'm gonna take it easy for now and pick away at a short story set in the same world to try to develop my prose. And pray that the reviews from all these readers is generally positive, if they bother to leave one.
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# ? Apr 19, 2021 01:56 |
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Congrats, glad this went well! FWIW I have definitely seen KU tails from free giveaways - although for a new release the giveaways are worth it in and of themselves just to rack some reviews up. They may not translate into immediate financial gain but it's all building towards that in the long term.
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# ? Apr 20, 2021 09:39 |
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So this popped up on my feed today: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=21613975011&ref=tsm_1_tw_s__4743373791&linkId=116620400 Kindle Vella sounds like KDP trying to get in on WattPad/Royal Road action. Is anyone planning to experiment with this?
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# ? Apr 20, 2021 11:09 |
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Leng posted:So this popped up on my feed today: i'm always weary of transactions that use Fun Bucks. Why does Amazon need a go-between currency?
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# ? Apr 21, 2021 17:57 |
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also, hello thread, the last year has been hard. Last I popped in here, I was shopping a book to Thomas and Mercer with my co-author. They declined last winter, but w/e. Rejection happens. We released the book early this month, and it's doing very well. I'm looking forward to having writing income again after not publishing anything in a year and a half. I also have a solo book in the same genre that I got back from my editor last week. Hoping to drop it on Amazon in May. It's been two years since I've launched a first in series, so I'm a little rusty (and short on cash), but I think I can make it work with newsletter spots from other authors in the genre I've gotten to know. That said, I'm nervous about a new release without having a sequel nearly ready to go, but since this co-authored book is hot and in the same genre, I think I'll get a nice lift on my solo book if I release before co-authored book cools off.
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# ? Apr 21, 2021 18:03 |
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angel opportunity posted:Royal Road is a site with a lot of really active readers who are willing to pay to "subscribe" to stories that they read chapter by chapter. When you subscribe to an author on Patreon, you usually are just getting to "read ahead of the release schedule," but a lot of people are willing to pay like that to continue binge reading and to support authors. It's the first time I've done something like this, and I think it's a cool way to get writing in front of people who actually will want to read it, vs. just throwing it on Amazon with no promo and having it die immediately. I'm still curious long term about how I could use Royal Road for marketing purposes. My book is doing well on KU for now, but let's say in 6 months it's not doing good numbers anymore. I could take it off KU, start posting the chapters on Royal Road with a link to the Amazon page in the description that says "If you want to read ahead you can buy the book now." Then when its finished it's run on Royal Road, remove it after a month or so and put it back on KU for the next enrollment period? In theory that's a totally free way to get new readers that doesn't require paying $100 to Bargain Booksy, etc. to try to get what will probably amount to a measly 30 sales or so. Were you planning on listing your book on KU while also keeping it on Royal Road? Because i'm pretty sure Amazon doesn't allow that, though it's uncertain if they'd ever find out.
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# ? Apr 21, 2021 18:03 |
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Amazon is abandoning .mobi as of the end of June this year: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634390 And of course this is going to happen after my launch date.
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# ? Apr 23, 2021 22:56 |
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Leng posted:Amazon is abandoning .mobi as of the end of June this year: well, mobi was always a zombie oddity. Though I'll always remember my first smartphone, a Blackberry, and how the MobiPocket reader was the only ebook reader for it, and how it was almost impossible to get a copy 'cos Amazon bought MobiPocket and removed it from the web, and I installed a binary I found in some weird and disreputable corner of the web, and how I had to convert epubs to mobi with Calibre. time to go ePub!!!!! :-D !!!!! until Amazon makes KPF mandatory of course
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# ? Apr 23, 2021 23:17 |
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Leng posted:Amazon is abandoning .mobi as of the end of June this year: Is your book reflowable or fixed? It says they still support it for fixed layout books.
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# ? Apr 24, 2021 15:29 |
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Fixed, because children's book. But it would have been nice to just fiddle with ONE format instead of multiple. At this point I'm not even sure it's worth doing ebooks for all the major platforms; I'm tempted to just throw a PDF up on my own website and sell it direct. At least the PDF would display properly regardless of device.
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# ? Apr 24, 2021 22:22 |
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Yeah, honestly it's pretty weird these services don't accept PDFs. Something to do with how the format works or the control Adobe has over it that prevents using it?
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# ? Apr 24, 2021 22:52 |
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Adobe is the developer of the format but these days it's pretty ubiquitous after it was standardized as an ISO in 2008 (so Adobe don't get royalties off people using the format anymore). The main issue is PDFs are perfect for fixed layouts on larger displays, since they're essentially printer files, but technically ebooks should be reflowable and optimized for smaller displays. Most ereaders will choke on a PDF, or if they display it, it will be an annoying reading experience full of scrolling or repeatedly pinching to zoom in and out. In other news, the last round of my proofs have come in! I got an early proof from KDP, plus a paperback and a hard cover from IngramSpark. Gotta say, IngramSpark wins this round:
Still need yet another revision because I picked up errors when looking at the proof. But better now than post launch!
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# ? Apr 26, 2021 13:10 |
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Hi, all, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but is there a general freelance-writing-for-money thread? I haven't published on Amazon yet, although I'm planning to in the future, although my idea for a book about sexy female scientists who bring ancestral humans back via cloning and then bang them for science is probably verboten in this thread.
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# ? Apr 26, 2021 15:40 |
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:Hi, all, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but is there a general freelance-writing-for-money thread? I haven't published on Amazon yet, although I'm planning to in the future, although my idea for a book about sexy female scientists who bring ancestral humans back via cloning and then bang them for science is probably verboten in this thread. Yep! https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3476455
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# ? Apr 26, 2021 16:22 |
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In my ongoing saga:
EDIT: I hate marketing and publicity. Since I ran into technical issues with setting up ebooks, I spent the rest of this afternoon reaching out to bloggers, YouTubers and Instagram influencers. I swear writing the outreach emails are harder than writing the book. Leng fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Apr 27, 2021 |
# ? Apr 27, 2021 06:13 |
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Leng posted:
draft2digital deal with both pretty painlessly IME (indeed I find d2d less faffy than smashwords, so I hit Kindle for 90% of sales, d2d for the other 10% and smashwords just to sell on smashwords) Leng posted:EDIT: I hate marketing and publicity. Since I ran into technical issues with setting up ebooks, I spent the rest of this afternoon reaching out to bloggers, YouTubers and Instagram influencers. I swear writing the outreach emails are harder than writing the book. fuckin preach. writing and publishing are great now, so 100% of your problems are marketing.
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# ? Apr 27, 2021 13:38 |
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Thank you so much! I'll name a ribald Australopithecine after you.
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# ? Apr 27, 2021 13:53 |
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Today is an exciting update! Preorder links are starting to go up at various retailers (Amazon of course, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Kinokuniya, Dymocks), but there are weird glitches due to metadata lag:
In other exciting news, I've heard back from 4 out of 5 of the bloggers I've reached out to. 1 isn't interested, but recommended 2 of the others on my list, 1 hasn't responded, and the other 3 have agreed to do a review, though 1 of those 3 are backed up with projects and doesn't have a definite timing on when the review will happen. The other 2 are US-based so I'm going to organise for IngramSpark to ship those copies now, but worryingly, the only shipping option I've got is "Basic", which IngramSpark says has no tracking available but the IngramSpark community at large insists that all levels of shipping in the US have tracking despite what IngramSpark's own documentation claims. back to hating the stupidity and confusion of the IngramSpark interface. EDIT: welp, for whatever bizarro reason, after submitting the order for the first US reviewer using "Basic" shipping, I now have other shipping options for the second reviewer. There's just no rhyme or reason to IngramSpark's interface. My book's metadata has also finally hit Goodreads for the hardcover, which means I can now claim my Goodreads author page. We're getting close to the 2 week mark prior to publication date which means I need to start planning out a social media blitz. I hate social media and I never know what to post, so this is going to be fun like having my eyes gouged out during a root canal. Leng fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Apr 29, 2021 |
# ? Apr 29, 2021 06:25 |
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# ? May 13, 2024 10:00 |
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I hate Amazon so much. Preorder links that were working are now suddenly showing as temporarily out of stock. WHHHHY. Also the IngramSpark author copy shipping options are ridiculous. I'm in the process of getting physical copies out to my beta readers and it is actually ending up to be cheaper to order them copies off Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Book Depository, etc than to order them an author copy from IngramSpark. Don't get me wrong, the unit cost is cheaper, but by the time you add in the processing fee, handling, then the actual shipping cost, the only shipping option that would make the total cost cheaper is selecting the basic non-tracking non-insurable option, at which point I might as well just buy it on Amazon or wherever else so I at least get the royalty while also getting tracking. Also also this experience has definitely confirmed that I do not want to hassle around with fulfilment myself. Ugh.
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# ? Apr 30, 2021 03:24 |