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Zaepho posted:Wait a few months and KDP or Ingram or somebody else will change something on you again. KrunkMcGrunk posted:ha, yeah, the reason this isn't well documented is because the workflow is constantly being tweaked by Amazon, and competitors. It sucks if you're navigating it for the first time, but it's better to have storefronts making changes than not, imo. Yeah, I get that the specific screens, buttons, etc are gonna fluctuate over time. But things like the order in which you set up pre-orders, etc - those should be relatively stable unless these players make bigger changes to how they operate. The hardest part about documenting a workflow is the initial step of mapping it all out; after that it's just periodic review to make sure it's current. Welp, another one for the YouTube channel project list! My current problem is I actually had a random sale on Google Play! Except the customer then reached out to me and said that the format of the EPUB on Google Play is all screwed up. Apparently what counts as fixed layout on Apple iBooks and the Calibre ebook viewer does not count as fixed layout on Google Play.   I freaking hate ebooks. So instead of diving into the next book this morning, I'm going to be spending my time reading through THIS guide: https://bisg.org/store/viewproduct.aspx?id=6974109 Which was buried in a Google help page and hopefully be able to fix this issue with the Google Play layout. FML. EDIT: so 3 hours later, I've figured it out and I have a fixed layout EPUB3 that looks fine both on iBooks and Google Play Books...IF I side load these into the apps. For whatever bizarro reason, uploading the same file as the "content" file in Google Play doesn't work and the layout ends up super messed up after Google's done whatever 6 steps of processing to the file. Trying to reload it at the moment to see if it's definitely on Google's end or if I had a brain fart and uploaded the wrong file before.  EDIT EDIT: It was an app caching error, which can be fixed here: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/3238095 Leng fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Jun 8, 2021 |
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Jun 8, 2021 01:09
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:Does anyone here have experience advertising pre-orders? What platforms work? I kind of half-assed mine and I regret it. What I did: 1. Post in some Facebook groups with my target audience and ask for beta readers 2. When the slots filled up, asked people to sign up for a mailing list to be notified about when the book came out 3. Set up a book page on my website 4. Once pre-order links were available and most of the info had replicated from IS to the major retailers, I posted an update in the Facebook group with a link to the book page Platform will depend on your audience. I have not done ads yet, but will probably run some on Facebook and Instagram, which is where my customers hang out. I set up a Twitter account but it's mostly just to sit on the handle, I don't really post there. I have heard from other forums that A/B testing blurbs using Facebook ads is a good way to refine what's working and what's not. I'll probably do that for my next book as well, though I think I'd use a small ad spend and funnel people to pre-order, then use the best performing blurb to run a bigger campaign on release week. I did a bunch of ARCs as well, and so far, I'm not sure it's been worth the effort. We're nearly a month post release and I'm yet to see an actual review from any of them. I think if I were relying on ARCs to drive pre-orders, I would need to organize them a lot earlier than I did, and also get a definite agreement in place regarding the timing of their review. Likely the next time around, I'm going to reach out to different people for ARCs. Sponsored giveaways are also popular in my niche, because of specialty book retailers. That's something I've got on my list for next time around.
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Jun 8, 2021 16:14
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:I just split off people from my mailing list for ARCs. Just straight-up asked if anyone would like to volunteer, and said I'd take the first X number of people who responded. It has worked decently. ARCs are funny in that, you'd assume people who sign up for them would actually, like, download and read the book and leave a review, but a maximum of only about 50% of people actually *do* those things, ime. Yeah, I was thinking of going that route next time. With my ARCs, I was targeting people in my niche who already had a following (mommy bloggers) because I had the hope that they would post the review on their PLATFORM which would drive more people towards the book. But they are so busy posting other stuff that I think your approach would work much better - at least it would translate into Amazon or Goodreads reviews.
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Jun 9, 2021 00:17
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newts posted:Dumb question incoming… Yes there is! I don't know what everyone else is using, but I am using Publisher Rocket: https://publisherrocket.com/ It is not free, but it is a timesaver and it's not subscription based so I went and bit the bullet and paid for it. I use it to look up comparable titles and then reverse engineer their keywords/categories. Edit: PS - check your email
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Jun 14, 2021 11:34
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Paramemetic posted:I was recently approached by an audiobook publisher with a reasonable offer for audio rights I'm not using, however, they require that any ebook I have published have text to speech disabled. I have my book on KDP which of course naturally does this. I've emailed KDP and they suggest I need to reupload as a non-reflowable document. Can't help with the disabling text to speech, but I did my own fixed layout format ebooks because I have a kids book. Leng posted:I freaking hate ebooks. So instead of diving into the next book this morning, I'm going to be spending my time reading through THIS guide: That guide will basically tell you what you need to do, so if you have Calibre and some basic knowledge of HTML, you'll be able to muddle through it. I have plans to do a video explaining EPUBs but I won't be able to get around to doing that for another week or so. EDIT: the HTML principles are you need to define a fixed size viewport and then define all of your elements in it. If this is a novel, you're gonna be in a world of pain doing it by hand. Vellum doesn't support fixed layout EPUBs, though Pages does if you have a Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT202066#:~:text=Fixed%20layout%3A%20If%20you%20want,heavy%20or%20multi%2Dcolumn%20documents. Beware that EPUB exports from Pages might not play nice on any platforms other than Apple Books, because Google Play and KDP both choked on my export out of Pages. I ended up dropping Apple Books distribution entirely and went with a handcoded EPUB via Calibre to Google Play and then Amazon Kindle Kids Creator to KDP, since my publication date was before Amazon switched to EPUBs. There are some other methods (like converting a PDF to a fixed EPUB) that I can't personally vouch for as I've not experimented with it. Example: https://issuu.com/editions-heta/docs/pdf-to-epub-fxl-preview Leng fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 23, 2021 05:41
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Captain Log posted:I know my next step is taking a scalpel to this overweight manuscript, so I'm doing that. But past there, I'm getting a little overwhelmed. I've read the OP a couple of times, trying to become familiarized with the next steps. I'm not averse to throwing some money at the project, if it produces a better end result. I'm trying to focus on doing this right, rather than cheap or quick. In a perfect world, I could rejoin the workforce through writing. As I mentioned, when I'm not editing something, I write a minimum 1k words a day. Welcome and congrats on finishing your first draft! That's absolutely huge and worthy of celebration. Doing a self pass through edit is a perfect idea...BUT make sure you give yourself a bit of a break between finishing the novel and going back to edit, so you can see things with fresh eyes, otherwise you're just going to be too close to your work to get value out of the process. When you've put some distance between you and your novel, read through and look for big picture things first (what is the story about? do my characters have a clear and compelling arc? does every scene advance plot or character or both? do I have plotholes/continuity issues?), before working on scene level stuff (how do I make a boring but necessary scene more interesting?) then getting into the weeds (e.g. line level stuff, spelling, grammar, repetition in word choice). When you're ready to post excerpts for critique and look for beta readers, you should post in the fiction crit thread. In terms of familiarizing yourself with next steps, YouTube can be useful, though the quality of the "what next" videos are a bit mixed. There's a lot of videos focused on the craft of writing, there's a select few talking about the marketing side of things, and imo, most of the tutorial/"how to" videos suck because they kind of focus on step by step stuff without explaining the why behind what they're doing. I found the advice in this thread more specific and helpful, because of how many successful self-published authors there are giving advice in this thread so definitely take your time to slowly read through the thread in full. Based on your post, I assume you're in this to make money. If so, you need to understand what you're getting yourself into. If you want a general primer on how the publishing industry works, I did a YouTube video here (I spent 10+ years in audit and a lot of my clients were traditional publishers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrgRWJvhLjw
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Jul 1, 2021 02:58
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Captain Log posted:I do have a major question that I'd love any opinions on - In my view, the answer comes straight from the title of the fiction writing thread - read more, write more. Read the successful books in your genre that are selling and look at how long they are, because that's what readers are expecting and looking for. Too short, and they'll feel cheated that they didn't get enough story; too long, and they might find it off putting. In terms of chopping, it's not necessarily about cutting things out either. Your 217k could be because you are not a concise writer or it could be because you've got plot and/or character sprawl or it could be because every sentence you write only does one thing, instead of multiple things, so it takes you 217k words to accomplish the same amount of plot/character/world development that a more experienced author could do in 110k words. Or, it could be that you've just told a massively big story all in one book, and you could do better splitting it up into a duology or a trilogy. It's hard to say without having seen any of your writing samples! TL;DR - it depends on what you've actually written, but if in doubt, stick to the typical word count for comparable titles in your genre.
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Jul 1, 2021 08:30
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:i am now firmly in the "compulsively check sales and second guess every piece of marketing" phase of my launch day That was me as well. Does it ever get better with successive releases?
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Jul 3, 2021 06:51
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Captain Log posted:tldr - American healthcare is bad. The American healthcare system indeed sucks majorly. My YouTube video that I posted explains in more detail, with diagrams, but this is the essence: I have some bad news for you. Unless you're planning on ghostwriting, you are not going to make a salary from this endeavour. Authors make royalties (which is a form of profit sharing) and publishers pay the bills with profits. All publishing–including traditional publishing–is akin to gambling. If you go traditional publishing and are lucky enough to get signed, you will receive an advance on future royalties (maybe, I hear that the amount of advances being given are no longer as generous as they used to be, and some places may not offer advances at all). This is not free money; it's a payday loan on the royalties you earn on the future sales of your book post publication. You do not get more money once your book is published unless the publisher "recoups" your advance, from which point on they will start paying you your cut of royalties (rates vary according to contract, region, format, etc but say, 10-15% of RRP or cover price). Royalties are paid ONLY when you have sales of your books and you won't see the money until at least 6-9 months after the sale. If you self-publish, you are the author AS WELL AS the publisher, so you get to keep the publisher's cut of the profits in addition to your author royalties. It is entirely a numbers + marketing game (okay, some luck as well). If you write to market, deliver a quality product, release frequently and consistently, and crunch your title P&L numbers the right way, you will make money. In either case, publishing a book is making a bet that enough people will buy your book to at least break even on the costs of publishing it, with the hope of making a profit. In traditional publishing, the publisher takes on the risk of the bet not paying off, hence why your author royalty rates are low. In self-publishing, you are the one taking on the risk, so you get all of the upsides (if you hit the jackpot) as well as all of the downsides (i.e. lose what you bet if you don't sell enough copies). Finally, as the kicker: most authors who are traditionally published do not earn out their advances. Traditional publishers rely on a few megabucks authors to pay for the advances for everybody else. So chances are, unless you are the next Stephen King, you are probably not going to get any money from a traditional publisher beyond your advance. Captain Log posted:I’m asking this after hearing the OP is pretty old. KDP = Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform KENP = Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (basically how many page reads you got if you put your book in the Kindle Unlimited program)
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Jul 5, 2021 14:11
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Captain Log posted:You absolutely rock, thank you for effort posting on the topic. This is worth hours of searching around the internet, trying to pick through endless Mommy Blogs about, "WRITE A BOOK IN A MONTH!" Captain Log posted:Thanks for the input, yours and Leng's has been really illuminating and helps show me how I need to think about moving forward in this venture. I'm sure I'm going to have some more silly questions pop up, but it's great to have a goon resource to keep me from trying to poke through a hodgepodge of "SO YOU WANT TO WRITE THE NEXT BEST SELLER IN THIRTY DAYS?!?!" blogs and advertisements. No worries; the plethora of those blogs/vlogs you refer to is exactly why I started my YouTube channel–it was unbelievable how all of them were overselling and oversimplifying publishing. It's so easy to see how people would watch one of those videos and not understand what they're really getting themselves into, and most of them only give you half the picture on what to do without explaining the context and the reasons they made that decision. Captain Log posted:I think I'm going to go with some recommendations here and step away from turning my rough draft into a first draft for a little bit and stretch my legs on other story ideas. I'm lucky, in that I have the entire arc of stories in my head beforehand. If I can keep myself from blabbering, I think I've got some stuff that could be a more feasible first foray into having a book with my name on it. Your situation sounds unimaginably awful  so kudos to you for maintaining such a positive outlook. Keep at your writing and shout out whenever you have questions!
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Jul 7, 2021 02:30
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Captain Log posted:Are there any examples I could read about? I'd be really interested in seeing how they managed that, especially in regards to the length of their works. Cassandra Clare. She's traditionally published and massive in the YA urban fantasy niche. She started out as a Harry Potter fanfic writer and had a bunch of viral internet things, including the Very Secret Diaries for the LOTR movies when they first came out, before her first novel came out (and I would guess that a lot of her initial fan base came from people who had already read and enjoyed her fanfics). Extremely divisive due to a crapload of controversies, but whatever you wanna say about her, she's a genius at writing to market and also very commercially successful. Captain Log posted:Small Question - When we talk about targeting a market, what precisely is meant? Is the market defined broadly as "horror" or are we talking "Horror that involves cats in space fighting miniature aliens?" There are broad, umbrella market categories, then specific sub-genres. "Horror" is a genre at large, "YA" is another genre. Some of these can intersect, e.g. "YA horror". Within genres, you can have sub-genres/niches. "Dark fantasy" vs "occult" for example would qualify. A really good way to figure out what niches there are is to look at the Amazon categories. Amazon changes these over time to respond to changes in reader tastes. "LitRPG" and "progression fantasy" for example, weren't things a few years back but now it's a big portion of SFF self-publishing.
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Jul 9, 2021 00:50
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DropTheAnvil posted:Launch day is in a few days for me. This was very much a first-time publishing thing/vanity project. Would there be any value in me posting my thoughts/processes here?  because we're all here to learn!
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Jul 20, 2021 02:38
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oliveoil posted:Can people make decent money self-pubbing now? I got the impression it became so competitive that one had to be willing to spend 60hrs a week writing smut for minimum wage. Will Wight (https://www.willwight.com/) is a very successful self-published author, so much that I think when he went to some writing convention, he stood up and asked Sanderson if there was any value in him switching over to traditional publishing. Wight reeled off some numbers, then Sanderson (and the rest of the panelists) told him he's doing great and that it's probably not worth his while to switch over, because he would end up making LESS. His most recent release (Bloodline, Book 9 in the Cradle series) hit the NYT bestseller list. Wight earns enough to hire and pay for his own team (there's at least a part time business manager on board, don't know to what extent his other staff are employed as). It's also very much a numbers (and catering to your audience) game. If you have enough books on back catalogue and you're releasing consistently and frequently, you should be able to build a steady income stream over time. But building that audience is tough, because you have to keep putting out other forms of content that AREN'T books (which then eat into your time to get the next book done). I'm so behind on my second book right now that I decided to try a desperate tactic: I went and live streamed me doing the illustrations for 2-3 hours because that would a) force me to work on the book, b) qualify as putting out "content" that doesn't take time away from working on the next book, and c) experiment to see if this would be a thing people would be interested in. I was expecting zero views so ended up being surprised that I actually had some viewers. I might experiment with consistently streaming until I finish illustrating the book just to see what happens.
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Jul 23, 2021 05:32
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DropTheAnvil posted:A very good post that should be linked to in the OP There's another goon that self publishes short stories...I can't find the user id on my phone but I'll have a look when I'm back at my computer. DropTheAnvil posted:
That can be one of the reasons but it's a terrible reason. The other reasons are for branding and a separation of your business interests from your personal affairs which is a generally good idea to do if you're serious about things. You do not want personal screw ups interfering with your professional assets (or vice versa).
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Jul 26, 2021 12:54
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Ccs posted:Hey thanks for the shoutout, Anvil! My thoughts about marketing on reddit are that the Fantasy community seems the most open to self published endeavors. There's a few high profile authors that have gone from self-publishing to traditional success, then there's dudes like the creator of Cradle who proves it can be profitable with the right content staying in self-publishing, and there's not the immediate recoil from self pub work as long as the author seems to have put the time in to prepare a polished manuscript and know the genre. My book fell off from its early numbers but still gets a few sales here and there and a few hundred KU page reads per week, and that probably wouldn't have happened without reddit. I think a lot of your success came from the awesome cover you had too! But I think it was a hefty investment. Any idea on what your payback period is looking like?
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Jul 28, 2021 23:16
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https://twitter.com/JaneFriedman/status/1420408408419840005?s=19 Anyone planning on doing this?
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Jul 29, 2021 16:34
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:A friend has, but I'm not sure how it's actually going for him. It looks nice, at least. Here's what he did: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NHHZNMW Oh, that's NEAT! It does look really good. Guess we can all try it out with our next book/s and see what happens.
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Jul 30, 2021 12:42
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:you can do it all in Calibre. you'd have to break up each chapter into its own HTML file (as well as title page, toc, back matter, etc) but if you're technically proficient enough to code ebooks together by hand, i'm sure you'll be able to figure out Calibre. Seconding this. If you already have stuff in HTML and CSS, then you can just import that straight into Calibre without issues. Calibre also has a HTML splitter so you can just sit there and search for your chapter headings and split the files right there and then.
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Aug 3, 2021 23:47
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So there's a newsletter thread here in CC if you guys haven't seen it yet: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3974904&pagenumber=1&perpage=40 Seeing as how we're all supposed to have email lists, I'm gonna hop on over to crack out what people who are good at newsletters are doing, because I am not good at newsletters and have literally only sent one newsletter to my list to announce my book.
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Aug 16, 2021 16:20
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:i highly, highly recommend Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Lebrecque if you're looking for newletter info I saw that and was wondering about it. Thanks for the rec, I'll check it out.
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Aug 17, 2021 13:36
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So there are three big authortube channels making trending "unpopular writing opinions" videos that have all said they agree with the hot take "indie/self-publishing well requires financial privilege", which made me kind of mad. Mad enough to make a 13 minute video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_D-9JXCRHg If you're self-publishing because your first priority is to be able to hold a copy of your book in your hands and call yourself an author, then that's cool, but: 1) admit that it's a hobby/fun project for you and 2a) don't complain that it takes money; or 2b) just accept that you've picked what can potentially be a very expensive hobby (which is totally fine because lots of people have expensive hobbies) 2c) recognize it's a hobby and don't take the whole thing so seriously! (forget editing! screw getting beta readers! who cares about a nice cover! It's your freaking hobby, so go DIY and make it fit your budget) Just don't sit there and complain that "financial privilege" is involved because there isn't any. I do not understand why "publishing is a business" and "businesses require investment" are such difficult concepts for some people to grasp. /rant over
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Aug 20, 2021 03:49
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Ccs posted:For example I approached my book as a pure vanity project, and I suppose if you don't bother coming up with a business plan for the book then yeah, you do need some capital of your own to risk on it. Not a problem in my case, overtime hours put in on doing vfx for some bad movies paid for all my publishing costs. If I was risking more i would have tried to consider how I was actually going to recoup investment. drwiii posted:I'm writing the best book on planet Earth under certain circumstances, and I want to avoid Amazon Publishing and their Jeff Bezos space travel tax. I...  okay going on faith that you're serious, then there are any number of other print on demand places outside of Amazon (IngramSpark, Lulu, Barnes & Noble even). It's hard to avoid using the internet to do so, because most of those places will require you to upload via their websites. There are also any number of small printers that will do small print runs (100 copies or so), or you could go to an offset printer in China/Taiwan/India/etc.But if you're seriously contemplating printing the pages yourself (do you have access to nice printers and paper?? This is the part that confuses me the most), some places will offer cloth binding as an alternative. Otherwise there are specialist bookbinders around who maybe could bind your book? But mostly they seem to sell you supplies for bookbinding and courses on how to do it.  I think this will look great once you find some better fonts.
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Aug 22, 2021 15:54
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DropTheAnvil posted:So I watched the videos you sourced. Something to note is all of the videos are answering the same question, and they all reference each other's channels. Yes, that's the nature of YouTube. The original question came up as a response to an anonymous survey Kate Cavanaugh ran on her channel, then her video elicited responses. DropTheAnvil posted:If I ignored how vague the question was, I would agree with the videos you sourced. Taking a look at developmental editing costs, at 9 cents a word, an 80,000 word manuscript can cost $7,000 just for a developmental edit https://marykole.com/how-much-does-an-editor-cost. That gets into numbers where people may not have the money to take that gamble. I haven't researched into marketing, or covers, but I think to do "Well" in those categories, the costs there are hitting a thousand dollars. Yeah, no one is contending it doesn't take money. It does take money. My point is that to jump from "it takes money" to "it requires financial privilege" ignores a whole heap of things. It ignores considerations like access to financing (other than from your own pocket), start up costs and risks relative to other industries but mostly it ignores that there's difference between people who are self publishing as a hobbyist and people who are self publishing in order to earn income. The cost for a book doesn't change depending on whether it's being published by a traditional publisher vs a self publisher. The difference is, in self publishing, you're also starting a business as a publisher, in addition to being an author. If you're in this just because you want your name on the cover of a book, that's cool, but that's also a hobby, and just like any other hobby, if you want to produce something that's at professional standards, then yeah, it's gonna be an expensive hobby and I won't argue that expensive hobbies require financial privilege. But if you're in this to earn income, then calling it a financial privilege is a real stretch and makes light of things that are actually privileges. You'd have to call starting any other small business (like a restaurant) an endeavor that requires financial privilege too, and self publishing is considerably less risky in comparison, given how little you actually have to front up in investment costs.
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Aug 23, 2021 22:27
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Amazon KDP just went wide with their hardcover printing beta. Everybody who has ever wanted to do a hardcover but didn't want to hassle with IngramSpark, login to your Bookshelf now! (unless you're publishing with square/custom trim sizes like me, in which case continue to grit your teeth and bear with IngramSpark...)
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Sep 17, 2021 17:18
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Annnnnnnd KDP are doing that thing where I can't ship a proof copy of the hardcover to an Australian shipping address. I might have to do the thing where I just live publish it and then sneak order a copy to myself to double check. Whhhhhhy.
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Sep 21, 2021 02:38
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Leng posted:I might have to do the thing where I just live publish it and then sneak order a copy to myself to double check. Whhhhhhy. Annnnnnnd 3 days later, my hardcover is live. But I STILL can't ship a copy to Australia because apparently "the book is not available for Australian customers right now". WHHHHHHY???? It's a book! You can ship it anywhere!?!??!?! I do not get it.
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Sep 25, 2021 02:03
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Icon-Cat posted:Those of you doing KDP hardcovers, interested in your reviews and/or photos when the copies come in. I know it may never be as high-quality as Ingram's or as pretty as a dust jacket, but I'm glad they're dipping their toe into those waters, and it can only get better from here, presumably! My hardcover for my low content book came in last week. Pages are still somewhat see-through but it was better than I expected. Sorry about the lighting, but hopefully this gives you a good idea.
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Oct 22, 2021 12:47
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divabot posted:How does the hardback paper and printing compare to the paperbacks? Icon-Cat posted:Hm - based on that, the cover is nicer than I was expecting, the paper worse. Although maybe the see-through-paper issue is only a problem because your pages have so much white on them to see the other side, it doesn't look bad when I'm looking at your text and graphics, only the white space. Thanks! divabot posted:Ya know how big publishers are having a paper shortage right now? Gossip it's hitting Amazon print on demand too. This was only a matter of time. Pretty glad I decided to delay my second book to next year!
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Oct 25, 2021 21:30
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divabot posted:Has anyone here dealt with this in practice? How did you work it out? I have not done this but you two need to get yourselves to a lawyer and put everything about your arrangement in writing in a legally binding contract. You could set it up in many ways from just doing as an arrangement between two individuals (where one individual receives the money and has to pay out the other person's share) or establishing a separate legal entity (which receives the income into its own bank account and then pays dividends to you both). You both should get tax advice about which would be best for your situation, because working cross US and UK is gonna be tricky.
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Jan 22, 2022 23:09
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The Courtney Project has just started doing a new series of videos on YouTube doing cover critiques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB34V4p66c4 It is very good stuff and super timely for me, because I recently got my draft cover from Damonza and I literally had no idea how to critique it. I mean, it is a good cover because Damonza know their stuff but I keep feeling like I should have a critique of some sort?
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Jan 24, 2022 07:46
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:turns out it wasn't that at all! divabot posted:*exhale* thank gently caress Dream Weaver posted:Alright can someone break this merger down barney style for me? I had thoughts. Many thoughts. I tried to be coherent. I'm not entirely sure I succeeded. It is as Barney-style as I could make it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAurKVm8iuM But the TL;DR is KrunkMcGrunk posted:D2D is good
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Feb 11, 2022 15:49
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newts posted:Oh, I had no idea the book formatting on D2D was free. I just assumed I had to publish with them. Publishing with them doesn't require an upfront fee either; they charge about 10% commission on every sale. Though I think Smashwords might be better for your book, their formatter is colloquially known as the "meat grinder" so...
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Feb 16, 2022 04:52
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divabot posted:Anyway, just got an email from someone at this lot, suggesting a meet and chat. https://www.therightsfactory.com Anyone heard of them, anything about them, know anything? Good/bad? Interesting! I was actually gonna ask about your next book and whether it will be on NFTs? Because that just seems like the next logical step from your previous publications.
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Feb 21, 2022 04:04
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In this month's misadventures in self-publishing, I learned that:
TL;DR: never archive the latest typeset versions of your published books—in fact, probably you should have multiple copies of that floating around everywhere. Because you're gonna have to update that front/matter with every new release and you don't want to deal with wasting a week troubleshooting network access issues with your file server. This especially sucks if you're doing picture/image heavy books because that's a LOT of files taking up storage.  I look forward to getting this next kids' book out of the way so I can go back to my prose novel which is all 100% in the cloud right now.
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Feb 22, 2022 02:59
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Bardeh posted:Just do what I did when I was writing and write directly into Google Docs and then format it later. Then you don't even have to think about it. This works great for my prose novel. Not so great for illustrating a kids' picture book. 
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Feb 23, 2022 02:58
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:drat, Brandon Sanderson is raking in cash from his fans. What I wonder is how he can pull off a kickstarter without royally pissing off his publisher - either they already passed on the stuff he wants to publish, or he's giving them a piece of kickstarter money, or he's just telling them to get hosed. So I made a post in the Sanderson thread last year speculating that he's moving towards self-publishing because over the years he's done a few things to signify this and today's announcement cinches it. With his publisher - as far as I know, Sanderson is their golden goose, so Tor is gonna let him do whatever. Not only does he have a super engaged fan base who buy everything, he sells tons of books, he's big enough to organize his own convention and have it well-attended and on top of all of that, he is consistent in meeting his deadlines. As long as he keeps delivering on his contracted books, Tor isn't gonna be pissed off. The only reason I can think of why Tor would pass on the stuff he wants to publish is literally capacity, but I suspect it's not Tor saying no, it's more that Sanderson wants to diversify himself from reliance on traditional publishing. These aren't the first books he's self-publishing either. Way of Kings Prime and Dawnshard are what I'd call his first self-publishing efforts. Way of Kings Prime is branded as a "Sanderson curiosity" because it's first draft alternate edition of a published work that only hardcore fans would ever want to read and is a freebie on his website, though he did do the full production process on it—it is like the highest quality reader magnet ever. Dawnshard is the first TRUE self-pub effort. It was ebook first—Dragonsteel Entertainment (his LLC) is the listed publisher for the ebook—was released as a reward for the Way of Kings leatherbound Kickstarter and the audiobook production is also being self-published, though he's hiring the same narrators as he does for his other books. The Kickstarter print version was a hardcover that Team Dragonsteel self-published with an offset printer and since then, has been published by Tor via their normal process (Tor is listed as the publisher of the hardcover which only just came out in mid-Feb apparently). I'm gonna have to spend the rest of today unpacking what this means and analyzing it in a video because the business strategy is genius. But he definitely psyched me out yesterday with his update video and I genuinely thought he was gonna burn himself out. The TL;DR here though is whether or not you enjoy his writing as a reader, Sanderson is at the top of the author game and is a very smart business owner and branding genius. By virtue of writing books that people love and building a great community of fans, he's been able to avoid the typical traditional publisher/author dynamic and has been able to leverage a traditional publisher's strengths into making him a household name as far as epic fantasy is concerned. And now he's leveraging the power of his brand and his share of the accumulated profits to build out his own production and distribution infrastructure and systems. With a lot of his recent projects, he's brought on co-writers to free himself up to write other books. Just watch. I might have been wrong about what today's announcement was but I really think Sanderson is building himself the next Marvel, with him in control. It's like what Michael Anderle does with the Kurtherian Gambit (which obviously works very well for him) but it's amazing because Sanderson is making this move as someone who has benefited from having the backing of a large traditional publisher.
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Mar 2, 2022 02:28
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Megazver posted:He'll go Full Marvel, when he starts hiring other writers to write Cosmere novels under his editorial control. So this already happened with the Cytoverse. 3 novellas already published, actually, with more to come. Cosmere is another story, but this has ALSO happened, just on a smaller scale. It's his life's work so he's more protective of who gets to write in it. But the Allomancer Jak short stories in the broadsheets in the Wax and Wayne novels are written by his art director Isaac who I think is the only person allowed to write in the Cosmere right now.
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Mar 2, 2022 12:33
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Bright Bart posted:I'm wondering if someone with experience in self publishing or who has done their research can point out which services might let me print on demand through a storefront with the lowest possible price to quality ratio. Royalty isn't an issue as unless my manuscript out of the blue gets accepted by a publisher (and it won't) I am just hoping to let people who worked where the story takes place buy a physical copy without shelling out $20 for a paperback. Where is that located and are you local to them? Because probably the cheapest answer is KDP with you ordering author copies and selling directly to them. But that will automatically distribute your book on the Amazon storefront. If you DON'T want your book publicly available for sale, you can set it up on Ingram Spark which has a print only option. I haven't compared prices lately since Ingram Spark is raising prices as of 8 March.
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Mar 4, 2022 23:07
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:I hope this opens the floodgates for trad authors. Publishing houses are getting filthy rich off authors like Sanderson, who can sell, and those same authors are not getting anything close to their value. I am all for whatever gives them better power to negotiate with publishers.  I got very excited about this. The traditional publishing business model has been problematic for so long, I can't wait to see the end of it: https://youtu.be/av64WXh_f80Also Will Wight dropped this response video: https://youtu.be/KjoQate39Po It's not going to be comparable exactly in terms of rewards (not gonna compare on scale because nothing will be comparable in terms of sheer scale) because it's raising funds for an omnibus but I can't help wanting to see what would happen if Will Wight went Kickstarter exclusive for a preorder of the last Cradle book.
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Mar 4, 2022 23:13
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Bright Bart posted:I did ask (and am still hoping someone has something up their serve that blowing KDP out of the water) as quick Google has a lot of complaint about quality. If I'm going to ask someone to pay more than 10 USD for anything it can't fall apart. Uh, what kinds of quality complaints? Because sometimes that's because those people didn't RTFM and messed up their print files. By and large, the print quality is fine. There are millions of indie books all being printed and sold via KDP/IngramSpark with no complaints about quality. If you're just doing a few copies and you want better quality, then you can try smaller printers. Lulu (which I've not used) is supposed to have better printing quality than either KDP or IngramSpark but they are more expensive. A lot of these other printers are more expensive because they specialize in doing photo books and have better paper quality and ink quality options. But again, will be more expensive. I don't recommend it as a commercially viable option for a prose novel. There's a reason why most indie authors use KDP and IngramSpark to print. You could TRY signing up for the Draft2Digital printing beta which is slowly rolling out—it's in beta to make sure they can scale but does work. I haven't personally tried it yet but I'm not holding my breath for a significant jump in quality. If you REALLY want to have high quality at a reasonable cost and you don't mind dealing with fulfilment yourself, just work directly with an offset printer in China or India and order like 100 copies. Eat the cost of shipping the 1-2 copies to your friends in Canada for the sake of friendship.
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Mar 5, 2022 22:59
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