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Publishing, Proofreading, and Promotion

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First of all, WOOHOO – the novella is now live. This post shall begin with a shameless plug, but it’s a free one. Since the free promotional period is a go. So I don’t feel so terribly guilty.

SS3DOWNLOAD ME

Or don’t.

Seriously.

On to the stuff you actually care to read.

As I said before, formatting was fairly easy. Wednesday evening I put my game face on and my little heart got to racing when I finally hit that “Publish” button. Holy goodness, I’d done it. It was on the market. People could search my name and find my work. It is a woefully intimidating feeling. Terrifying. I was suddenly afraid to have people read my work. Enter self doubt and insecurity. Which was only further emphasized when I sold one single copy in that first 24 hours. One.

Then again, it was pointed out to me that I had MISSPELLED MY OWN TITLE. Trust me. There were tears.

After all the minor errors were fixed, I started working on the promotion side of things. First, I posted Samara’s Song on Goodreads. Then I set up my free promotional period for this weekend. I’ll discuss why I decided to go the free route below. Then I got in contact with dozens of book bloggers and queried them for reviews. I’ve heard back from three. Two are interested – one of which I am quite excited about and is slotting me for a post this month. One rejected. But at least they were kind enough to let me know instead of leaving my request to rot, so that was sweet. I’m still waiting to hear back from a plethora of others. Lastly, after social media was hit (excluding facebook – see crippling insecurity), I listed my book on pages such as SnicksList.

Below are some of the hard lessons I’ve learned over the past couple of days.

  • Publishing is not instantaneous. It took about 8 hours for the novella to go live. During which time your book goes into a sort of limbo – it can’t be edited at all. Not the price. Not the manuscript. Not the minor spelling error in your title. The same is true every time you submit a minor change and republish. Right after the novella was published, I decided to change the price. Cue another 8 hours of bashing myself with the keyboard when I realized I had forgotten about the title. I blame pregnancy brain. Which leads to:
  • Proofread all the minor stuff before publishing. Please don’t make my silly boo-boo. It’s embarrassing and unnecessary.
  • Contact book bloggers and promotion sites before your promotion begins. The exception is SnicksList and other sites that only allow you to submit once the book is actually free. If I could go back, I would’ve contacted a dozen sources last week to let them know Samara’s Song would be appearing free this weekend. There’s simply not enough time for them to do anything about it now. Same with blog reviewers, who easily quote 2+ months for a review. While building a platform is obviously something to start early, it’s now been made clear to me that promotion is as well.
  • Free promotion only appears to be a useful tool if you don’t have sales. Free downloads do not affect your sales/borrow rank. In fact, they will hurt your sales rank (if you have one to speak of), because during the promotional period your book isn’t selling. In fact, I’m not entirely sold on the benefits of Select and will likely to be dropping it when my 90 days are up. My main reason for launching the weekend promo is to try to get on an “Also Read” list and hopefully pull in one or two reviews.
  • Refreshing the KDP Report page will drive you crazy. If you’re new and don’t have much of a following yet, just don’t do it. You’ll be more and more bitter with every click of that little f5 button.
  • Deciding on a price point is almost as painful as waiting for a sale. Amazon suggested I put Samara’s Song up for $2.99 – seems pricey for a one hour read, but the greedy side of me was smiling pretty big at that 70% royalty. I’ve now decided that the loss of readership isn’t worth the higher revenue (at least not yet). When the promotional period ends, I will be bumping the novella back down to that sad, sad $0.99.

Needless to say, it’s been a stressful 24 hours. I will check back in to let y’all know how the free promotion turns out and whether or not there is a payoff.

 

For Fear of Formatting

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Today’s the day I’ve been dreading for almost a week – the day I tame the beast known as formatting.

I spent a good deal of the morning avoiding the task at all costs. There were plenty of chocolate milk breaks, two walks/waddles with the pup – I even got three loads of laundry done and five episodes in of Parks and Rec before I decided procrastination time needed to end. I opened my manuscript in word and proceeded to waste another thirty minutes just staring at it, waiting for it to magically convert itself into ePub or mobi.

Sadly that didn’t happen.

In the end, I decided to just wing it and upload the whole shebang as it was. I wanted to see how much of a mess I had on my hands. It was with great trepidation that I hit that little “preview” button, and much to my surprise it wasn’t that bad. The only issue? Indents. The bane of my existence. It took my husband all of ten minutes to resolve the issue. Ten minutes. The third attempt at uploading my .docx manuscript and voila, perfection.

Wait a second – clearly I’m doing something wrong. I’ve read through so many headaches concerning formatting that I was fully prepared to outsource the work to someone else. I even put up a job listing on Elance; I was that ready to not even try. But as far as I can tell, it’s not even near the realm of necessary. Hey, maybe I just got lucky.

There are only a few things that were important to keep in mind during the whole process:

  • Page breaks: I inserted a page break at the end of every chapter as I was putting the novella together, so it was a non-issue when it came to formatting. Simply click and done. You also need a page break after the title page, copyright page, acknowledgements, etc.
  • Indents: Don’t indent using the tab button. They will be all over the place, and it’s frustrating to have to go back through and delete them all. Save yourself the headache. Pull up the paragraph settings menu under the page layout tab in Word. Under “Indentation” there should be a pull down menu titled “Special.” Select “First line.” Your indentations will automatically be set at .5 inches, but you can adjust them if you want. These indents will convert perfectly. Easy peasy.
  • Keep it simple: This is probably why I encountered so few problems when converting; I was converting mostly just plain text. Some italics here, a few bold face words there, marginally resized title and chapter headings. That’s it. I’d imagine an image heavy or stylish manuscript might be more of a problem.

In the end, I’m grateful I didn’t go running to a freelancer with this one – and that my husband is far more tech savvy than I am. Hopefully I don’t discover in the morning, when the book goes live, that my so-called success was actually a terrible failure. But so far, the water seems pretty calm on this one guys. What about you? What have your experiences been with formatting and ebook conversion?

Self Publishing – Show me the numbers!

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A quick google search will reveal a plethora of articles claiming that self-publishing is the route for struggling authors to take in the new age. Just look at H.M. Ward who turned down millions of dollars in advances in favor of self-publishing. Or the million other success stories that seem to be cropping up all over the web.

Clearly those of us who are not yet millionaires are doing something wrong. Right? Well, that’s if the all the hype is to be believed. The honest truth is that these success stories do not account for the masses, and the majority of self-published titles are swept away and buried beneath an ocean of rubbish. Not to mention how rare it is for “successful” self-publishers to share their actual figures.

Okay, so maybe demanding to know someone’s income is not exactly tactful. But I’m not exactly the queen of tactfulness, so I will cross that line. We simply can’t ignore that this information is relevant. The few transparent blogs/threads I could find of self-publishers boldly exposing their entire process, expenses, and profits I absolutely devoured. And then I retreated to my corner in bitter disappointment when they stopped updating, returning to live vicariously through the google success stories overflowing on the web.

After months of wading waist-deep in that optimistic muck, I’ve decided it’s about time to get my hands dirty and figure out this whole process for myself. And I’d like to invite you along for the ride. You, the indie author who’s wondering what happens when an untested manuscript hits the kindle market. You who’s unsure where to even start when it comes to marketing and promotion. You, the skeptic who doesn’t buy into the hype. I am right there with you.

My name is Amber Feldkamp and I am an untried author with great ambition and probably a little to much optimism. This blog denotes the start of my self-publishing journey. I have a plan, a platform, a plot, and a promise: complete transparency. I offer up my successes and failures without complaint or censor. If everything goes to hell in a hand basket, you will be the first to know – well, after I cry into my husband’s shoulder for an hour or two.

Hopefully together we can learn what works and what doesn’t and if self-publishing really is a viable career path for the modern writer.