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Sundae posted:I actually have a serious problem writing if I have internet connectivity. It's awful. It used to be that the only way I could write was on my notebook in the bed room, with the ethernet cable removed. Then I got an Ipad and a wireless router, so now that is gone, too. Productivity has not recovered.
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Jul 16, 2015 17:08
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the brotherly phl posted:I'm constantly trying to subvert governments with smut. Viva la smutolution! And to think that the big act of defiance in 1984 is to have sex.
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Jul 31, 2015 22:18
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One would assume that a kickstarter campaign would work a lot better if you had some works out to show to people. "I'm going to write an awesome book and for 100 bux you get a minor character named after you!" isn't going to inspire a lot of people unless you are already a name in the genre.
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Aug 10, 2015 17:41
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jon joe posted:Thinking of getting into this, I have a few technical questions: Depends on how many genres you want to be active in. Think of an author name as a brand. Some genres are compatible (Fantasy and Sci-fi), some considerably less so (hard mil-sci-fi/Romance). Cross-promotion of your books gets more difficult the more pen names you have, though. Think about the audience you're aiming at and what they would expect to find in your catalog. Exception: romance should have a female pen name (and I suppose hard sci-fi sells better with a male pen name). quote:What's the minimum non-free price on amazon for self-publishing? If there's not one, (aka I could hypothetically charge 2 cents), is there an expected minimum price, aka people will not tend to buy things below 0.99 dollars? quote:How many words do people tend to expected per cent of price (starting at the minimum or expected minimum price)? I know this can be variable by genre and quality of those words matters too, but my general plan is to match a word-count to minimum price for a serialized-type storytelling. I don't think you can really fit that to a formula. People don't buy 20k words of fantasy romance, they buy a story. But then again, Amazon is running a special program for serials, which is 99 cents per installment I believe, minimum 10k words.
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Sep 3, 2015 23:10
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ravenkult posted:So, could big bundles be a solution to the whole KU problem? Keep your singles out of KU, bundle them together later, put it on KU, make bank? I thought you couldn't put content that was in KU up anywhere else? So the singles would still be restricted to amazon despite not being in KU, which means you get all the drawbacks for none of the benefits.
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Sep 15, 2015 11:48
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Blue Scream posted:The safety of our twelve-year-old teenagers can wait for no one. Look at it this way: once Amazon closes this loophole, there is no way for a teenager to find porn on the Internet.
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Sep 17, 2015 09:27
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:I wasn't thinking of anything so aggressive. If I can't find anything out there I'll probably kill a bit of time hacking together something for myself, but I would imagine I'd just mark a few Scrivener folders to track, check modified files every hour, then open, count, compare, and log word count differences on those. For my own purposes I don't care about final total output or 100% accuracy (so I don't need a keylogger) but instead about general productivity, so if I write 1000 words and delete 2000 words I wouldn't log 'minus 1000', I'd just mark it as 0. Basically "current word count minus last tracked word count, if < 0 set to 0". Then I'd upload that data to my webserver where I can publish a pretty graph of output over time and I can shame myself into keeping it above '0' every day. I use yWriter, which is a lot like Scrivener except not nearly as fancy but free. Logs daily word counts just fine.
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Sep 27, 2015 12:33
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Yooper posted:Blurb check, whatcha guys think? Yeah it's kinda not that good. Too many awkward sentences. I think you're trying to jam too much information about the plot into the blurb, including plot twist after plot twist. It's supposed to make me read the book, not tell me the plot. Just out of curiosity, what do you guys think of this attempt: quote:The Terran Union and the alien Qin have been at war for over twenty years. Neither the human Army nor the Qin space fleet have been able to break the stalemate. But now the biggest offensive in human history is about to unfold. In the Summer System, 50 Million soldiers and an armada of warships have gathered to take back the first human planet that fell to the Qin.
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Oct 3, 2015 01:31
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We are talking about a company that has this gem on their website:quote:For example, some authors may the Book Manager role themselves So we'll take that as the level of competence you have to expect. You're saying Booktrope offers a lot more than just self-publishing, what exactly do you mean? It sure as hell isn't promotion. Coverartists selling premade covers exist by the dozens. Editors and proofreaders, when they can't even proofread their own website? Long story short, you got scammed.
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Oct 21, 2015 11:46
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Unless the memoir involves you having sex with someone it is probably not going to sell. Short stories are pretty much constrained to only erotica these days. I mean you can absolutely throw it up there, you sell 0 copies of a story you don't publish and so on, but I would be surprised if it made back what you spent on the cover. But if you have a talent for writing funny memoirs, write a couple until you have about 50k words, bundle them and put them up as "Weird stories from my silly life" or something.
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Oct 26, 2015 15:49
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Hijinks Ensue posted:Don't know about the rest of you, but I just smile when I get a sale here or there in some far-flung market. Just had a sale in Amazon Germany and my first-ever sale in the Netherlands. Not gonna lie, I got top 50 in genre in Australia and I'm now referring to myself as a bestselling sci-fi author (it sold like 3 copies)
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Nov 4, 2015 12:23
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Yooper posted:Same here. I found it quite useful to get the words started. Once I committed to that 25 minutes then I found it all went smoothly. But man, sometimes the words were like pulling teeth. It's just one of the things I've come to accept. Some days you just sit in front of an empty screen for a few hours, and that is still work. The other technique I've found useful is to tell that inner critic to shut the gently caress up. Like, anytime that tiny voice in the back of your head pips up telling you you used an adverb too many or the same word twice in the same paragraph or yet another comma? Ignore it and keep going, or just tell yourself you'll fix that in editing. Then you come back after you're done with the entire book and you delete the adverb, change the word and ignore the comma because you actually like it better that way. And if you wrote an entire paragraph that is unmitigated poo poo, well, you've got it out of your system and can move on, and when the time to edit comes you can just delete it all.
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Nov 10, 2015 10:06
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Just out of curiosity, for the people with very active mailing lists, how often do you send out mails, and what do you write in them? Whenever I think about getting one, I can't help but think that it wouldn't do much for me because it'd be one mail (New Book is out! Buy it!) followed by several months of silence, so that anyone who signs up probably doesn't even remember who I am when the next book is out. Now, obviously, write moar is the answer here, as always, but for the people who have longer production cycles - do you write in links for other people's books? Status updates? Gardening tips?
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Nov 13, 2015 17:15
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gerg_861 posted:Now for a few questions: 1. The British market is far too small to justify a version in the Queen's English. The market for people who will not read Urban Fantasy unless centre is spelled correctly is even smaller. 2. There is something to be said for pushing a release so you can get a sequel out within the month, so you get essentially two months of high priority covering from amazon. But Christmas is coming, which a) will gently caress with your production schedule and b) is the biggest time for new releases. So, personally, I'd go with a release now. 3. Foreign accounts might make taxes more complicated. You get an automatic 30% tax on any sale of an author from a non-US country, unless you provide a valid US tax ID. That shouldn't be too hard, but I guess you still have to file taxes in the US as well, so why double the paperwork? ArchangeI fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Nov 16, 2015 00:04
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EngineerSean posted:I mean I've never added a dog dream sequence but you have no idea how many times I've been like "god, where can I put another sex scene in here?" or "can I have them verbally spar one more time in chapter seventeen?" The nice thing about writing military sci-fi is that you can always have something explode. Bobby Deluxe posted:^^^ I overwrite by 10% in my first drafts so I can feel confident I have lots to edit. But as I hope is apparent, i'm not a professional and i'm just repeating things i've heard others say. It's something I've struggled with a lot, too. You can only force creativity to a certain degree, so you can't scale your word production endlessly. If I had to give an advice, it'd be setting yourself a minimum target that you know you can hit (500 words seems easy enough) and allow yourself to be open ended about it. If you want to write more, write more. High word goals create a sense of pressure (at least for me) that isn't always motivating but often terrifying (the "oh god I still have to writte 1k words and I don't know what I'm supposed to write about, I'm the worst author ever"-effect).
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Nov 25, 2015 17:26
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Shima Honnou posted:I'm just gonna kick around an idea here, someone with way more experience in the game than me can say if it's good or bad and I have zero idea how long a zombie/post-apoc story should be, but if you're coming up way short on what people expect you could court the idea of releasing them as seasons (Spring, summer, fall, winter, ~152k words each) instead of months and probably safely charge more per pop as well. This. Alternatively, deliberately market them as serials and price accordingly.
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Nov 27, 2015 13:33
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I'm just not that good at writing romance really, the idea of making up both sides of the attraction baffles me. I basically have no idea how I attracted my wife, but i'm hardly the most maladjusted goon I've seen, and this isn't even reddit. Read some romance in the top ten,
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Jan 16, 2016 15:05
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Sundae posted:Welp, so much for boxed sets raking it in. Funny, I checked on some of my boxed sets, and the KENPC count is actually higher than the one shown on the store page, by about 50%. Not complaining.
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Feb 2, 2016 00:13
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Bardeh posted:It's been going on for quite some time, but when it came to light last month and people started digging up numbers on just how much some of these scammers were making, the KU rate suddenly lurched upwards to coincide with Amazon's statement that they were dealing with it. The trouble is, unless Amazon actually start reviewing the content of the books they accept and not just the cover and blurb, it's pretty much impossible for them to keep on top of it. Unfortunately, when you outsource your 'content review' to low paid Indian workers who may not have the best grasp of English, and who are probably dealing with dozens if not hundreds of books per day each, that is just never going to happen. They could simply check the content of a book that is a) very long and b) getting read by Prime users a lot, with little or no actual sales. That'd probably get a good part of them. But yeah, poo poo like that makes you wonder why you even bother.
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Apr 21, 2016 00:45
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So, I have a bit of an issue. Someone just gave one of my books a one star review, accusing me of stealing the title of another book that came out several years ago in another genre. It's the only review the book has, so now its sales have tanked. Does amazon care at all if I flag the review as inappropriate? Should I just delist and republish with another title? For the record, its super-romance so the title is by no means super-original. A quick search showed three other books with the same title, all of which also have reviews by the same person complaining about title theft.
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Jun 21, 2016 11:01
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Bardeh posted:Not much you can do, unfortunately, apart from just taking it down like you said and renaming it. That's what I thought. So, it's on Kindle select, so I'm guessing that I have to wait for the select term to end (in September, of course), depublish and then publish as an entirely new book (and probably have to tell people that it's the same as the old one so they don't buy it twice). Simply changing the title of the book doesn't remove the reviews, right?
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Jun 22, 2016 05:55
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The Fuzzy Hulk posted:Right. Amazon won't throw a fit if I publish a book with the exact same content under a new title? What is keeping me from doing that with all my old content to get it back into the "new release" queue?
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Jun 22, 2016 07:52
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It did reasonably well and stayed in the top 100 of the genre for about two months, so there is a certain amount of people who bought it. I'm guessing I will just have to make it very clear that this book previously had a different title. Does Amazon remove unpublished books from people's kindle after a while? Thanks all.
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Jun 22, 2016 11:17
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EngineerSean posted:Never. I said it was erotica. It moved a couple hunded copies and a couple tenthousand pages read. Nothing breathtaking, but I was pretty happy with it.
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Jun 22, 2016 16:08
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