New Ebook Library

My obsessive, repetitive Amazon searches paid off!  Available just this last week are a series of releases from the New Ebook Library, a name I'm willing to bet was chosen to have the same initials as the New English Library.  It has some connection to  another favorite of mine, Piccadilly Publishing.

A few new titles and lots of reprints in multiple genres: horror, crime, western, scifi, and romance; with names like John Burke, Johnny Mains, and Victor Banis.  A lot of names I'm not familiar with, but some promising looking noir and espionage.  And don't overlook the romance - there's some gothics in there.

Short titles, around a hundred pages each, and currently listed at 99 cents on Amazon.  Click here to see the selection, or visit their website.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Reviews

There's a prevailing view that you won't sell any books until you have reviews, and it's hard to have reviews if you haven't sold any books.  This stress has tipped some authors over the edge, and lightened quite a few wallets.  What's an author to do?

Here are some legit and semi-legit means of getting reviews:

Waiting for them organically: This may have the best results, but can take time.  Depending on the book, one has to have from 100 to 5000 customers to get one review.  While time consuming, this is the most ethical and perhaps the most effective way.  This is an audience that wanted to read your book so badly they sought it out and paid money for it, and then felt so strongly about it they went out of their way to say something.

Give books away: either free KDP Select days, permafree, or handing them out on the street corner.  This will get more takers, but a much lower percentage of folks will actually read the book, much less review it.  Also, you get folks that don't want to read your book, but downloaded it because it was free.  I've read (and experienced) accounts of reviews garnered from free giveaways that go like: "This isn't my kind of book, but it was free.  I didn't bother reading it.  One star."

Give review copies to bloggers: Find blogs that review books similar to your own and email them, asking if it's ok to send them a review copy and what format they would like.  Keep in mind they have no obligation to give you a good review, any review, or even respond to your email.  You start to get in a grey ethical area with how you do this, as sometimes authors will submit their review copy preloaded on a new iPad or some such shenanigans.

Solicit reviews from existing readers: Here's a method I've tried with no results, but it's worked for some.  At the end of the Kindle file, ask readers to review on Amazon (or Goodreads or wherever) and email you their contact information, offering a free ebook if they do.  Even though you're not specifying that it has to be a positive review, it probably would be - if they think your book sucked, they probably wouldn't want another.  This also gets a titch grey, as you are basically bribing readers for reviews, but it's not the same as flat out buying positive reviews from folks that never looked at it.

Then we have our grey areas:

Professional paid reviews:  These would be like Kirkus Indie and the like.  You pay money (up to $500 or so), and get a review, which is not guaranteed to be positive.  I don't think I've ever run across anyone who was happy with the results here.  Of course, authors that get bad reviews (and paid a premium for it) are going to be very sad.  But even authors that got positive reviews complain that the review just repeated the plot, didn't talk about the actual book much, or was otherwise lazy.

"Honest" review swaps: I've got a zillion offers for these over Facebook and Twitter.  Two authors agree to read each other's work and give an "honest" review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever.  Sometimes this is baldfaced fraud - neither author really reads the book at all and gives a generic 5 star review ("Couldn't put it down!  The characters and plot were fantastic!").  Even if there isn't the intention of fraud, people are inclined to do nice things for people that do nice things for them.  I would avoid any quid pro quo arrangement.

And then we have full blown fraud: writing your own reviews under sock puppet accounts, paying for positive reviews over fiverr, getting your friends to write them, etc.  Don't do this.  It's transparent, people figure this stuff out, and there are consequences.  I've run across indie books with sales lower than mine that have been out for a month and literally have like 50 five-star reviews.  People see through this kind of stuff, folks at Goodreads will lynch you, and eventually Amazon will start cracking down.

Which brings us to our next topic - what to do about negative reviews?

First and foremost, don't try to respond to them!  I've seen otherwise rational self-publishing blogs explode into insanity as they become convinced that the Illuminati is out to destroy them.  Reviewers get doxxed, flame wars burn across Goodreads - nothing good can come of all this.

Am I being sabotaged?
Probably not.  There are some folks that see publishing as a zero-sum game.  If someone is reading your Tree Elf Dystopian Romance, then they're not reading mine.  It doesn't help that Amazon is giving bonuses to the top 100 sellers in various genres under KDP Select, because that actually does benefit one author to tear another down.  Other than that, it's not really competing.  DC is rubbing their hands together over the success of Marvel films, because they know it means that interest in superheroes in general is going up, which will benefit them.  However, there is no shortage of malicious jerks on the internet, so nothing's impossible.  But more likely, authors are just not dealing well with the fact that somebody doesn't like their books.

One quick note about Amazon's "Verified Purchase" tag.  When one reviews a book, they have the option or not to click this, it's not automatic.  Update: Just tested, and it is automatic.  However, keep in mind, especially with Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime, someone could be reading the book under their spouse's account or something.  Anyway, if you get a quick one-star "Sucks, don't bother" that isn't verified, it could be an honest review by an actual reader that thinks you suck, not a random troll or saboteur.  Free books do count as verified purchases, and I've read conflicting reports of whether you have to actually ready 20% of the book for it to count.

Bad reviews are not the end of the world, and may be beneficial.  When I check reviews, and not just for books, I check the one-star reviews first.  If they're thoughtful with specific gripes spelled out, I'm inclined to think the product sucks.  If they're MISPELED ALL CAPS RANTS or from someone with unreasonable expectations, or if it's clear the reviewer is not in the market for that product, that says good things.  I don't even bother reading five stars reviews for books.

I've bought books because of one-star reviews: "The most disgusting thing I've ever read"  "This gave me nightmares for weeks".  And one-star reviews can produce positive reviews in response: "I don't know what the reviewer below was talking about, these are the best cotton swabs ever."  And I'm not the only one.  Some book bloggers have reported that they get more Amazon Affiliate earnings from their negative reviews than their positive ones.

Overall, be thankful and gracious that someone took the time to read your book at all.  All my negative reviews were by folks that flat out said they didn't read it.  Seeing as how I have a review series titled "Things I Didn't Finish", well, that's just karma.

And reviews may not be all that important after all.  Many authors report an inverse relationship - their bestsellers get worse or fewer reviews out of their titles.

And, yeah, there's also the possibility that you just suck.  But don't let that stop you.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Covers Part Two

Before going to the nuts and bolts of making covers (or rather, I link to people who can actually explain things), let's take a look at some of the cover elements.  For physical books in a physical store, covers were like miniature billboards that first got the reader's attention.  Things aren't too much different today, but now we're looking at thumbnail images on Amazon.  This means that your image needs to look good at this size, and (most) text needs to be readable.  Let's look at some particular elements.

Title:
Simple enough.  Just make it readable.  Even if readers already know the title, it looks bad to have some kind of smudgy nonsense on the cover.  The title can also be the major visual element of the cover.

Author:
If you look at bestsellers, the author's name will be bigger than the title.  That's because Stephen King or James Patterson or whoever can sell a book on the basis of their name/reputation alone.  You are nobody.  Nobody will buy a book because of your name.  One could make an argument that if you put J.O. Nobody on the cover you could fool people into thinking you're more important than you are, and sadly that me be true.  For me, I'll say that the author's name is the least important element of an ebook cover for beginning authors.  If someone is looking for you, they'll find you through the search box, not by browsing covers.  And your name will pop up anyway below the cover in those coveted "You might like" thumbnails.  You do want to have the author's name there somewhere, though, as some retailers require it.  Smashwords has kicked back my stuff sometimes for not having it.

Subtitle:
These are optional, but are often used as a way of sneaking more keywords into the Amazon metadata.  Here's where you'll have your "In the tradition of a [enter real book here]", or "If you liked [actual writer], you'll love [your crap]".  Or my favorite, "By the Bestselling Author of a Book That Made it to #99 on the Free Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Settings/Mountains list for two hours that one time".  I hate those techniques, but they probably work.  You are excused for something like "A Curvy, Were-Walrus Menage Fantasy" or the like.  If you want to put it in the "Subtitle" entry when submitting it to KDP or wherever, it needs to be present on the cover.  Note that if you're just using a subtitle to get in more keywords, it might not be as important to have the text readable at thumbnail size.

One difference between physical books and ebooks is that readers may be more critical of ebook covers.  If a book is in a store, there's an implication that it's passed some kind of editorial scrutiny before getting there.  An ebook, not so much, and the competency of the cover may be a warning sign for the rest.

Keep in mind, you can change your cover whenever you want.  I've done so several times, and it takes mere seconds to upload, though it does sometimes take several days for the changes to take affect on the various websites.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Covers

I love book covers.  Up until around 1990.  You can share the love with these websites:

Too Much Horror Fiction

Pop Sensation

Women Running From Houses - Gothic art with a similar theme

Good Show Sir - a celebration of bad sci-fi art, but its still wonderful

Everything after around 1990?  I hate.  Hate, hate, hate.  Ebook covers?  Forget about it.  Worse than useless.  I've almost missed reading fantastic stuff because it had cover art someone's Mom wouldn't even magnet to the fridge.  There used to be websites for bad book covers, but that's become such a redundancy that they stop bothering.

At best, they are inoffensive.  Author, title, maybe a silhouette of something.  At worst, they look like clip art being beaten to death by fonts.  There are some decent artists, but even they just make decent graphic novel covers, which I think should be different than novels.

I am also the last person to ask about this, as my tastes are clearly different from other authors and readers.  I've seen semi-professional printing houses brag about the artwork they've commissioned, only for it too look like Lawnmower Man level computer graphics.

Read this instructive yet soul-destroyingly depressing blog post by our friend Lee Goldberg about updating his covers.  The original .357 Vigilante covers were great.  Not the best out there, but good covers, and ones that probably set the publisher back some coin.  Now look at the new covers.  Competently done, but I hate them, they aren't as good as the originals, they are bland, uninspired, look like a million other covers, and I know that they were done in around 15 minutes.  Thing is, when judged commercially, ie. how many books they sell, they are objectively better covers.  Readers liked them better and they sold more books.

If you can manage to figure out a little bit of Photoshop, GIMP, or the like, you can try your hand at doing it yourself, which I'll address another time.  I'm not the best person to address commissioning cover work, as I've never done it myself, but here's where you can start.

Do you want an original piece of art?  If not, you don't need an artist, just a graphics person, which is a different skill set.  There are a lot of places that will put together a cover at various levels of  cost and competency.  I don't know how they operate, but I can guess - they have a few dozen set ups of stock images and backgrounds, and they literally just change the cover text for your name and title.  Probably takes them all of thirty seconds once the basic design is sorted, which itself probably took two minutes.  I haven't used any myself and can't vouch for anyone, but you could start with fiverr and work your way up.

If you want some original art, there are a few routes to go.  If you find modern covers you like, find the cover artist and check out their website.  I did this with the Hard Case Crimes artists and it looks like they started at $3000, so that's as far as I got going that route.

Someone suggested that I look for someone on Deviant Art and contact them, but I didn't find anybody I liked.  Be warned that no matter what you search for, you'll end up with pictures of Transformers banging My Little Ponies or some such.

You can also look around for a professional or semi-professional artist, but they can run a good four figures.  If you're one of those internet social types you might be able to network your way into a cheaper deal, or find someone just starting out.  Honestly, you can find high school kids from third world countries who will probably do a fine job.  People throw together these stupid meme things for free and this doesn't take that much more work.

Adventures in Self-Publishing: Table of Contents

Almost forgot!

There's a bit more formatting that you'll need to do - add chapter headings.  Even if you don't have an actual table of contents, you'll want to do this to help the reader navigate.  Do yourself a favor and ignore most instructions you'll find online for this, as they are needlessly complicated, even on the official KDP style guide.  Don't use the built in TOC creators in Word.  Don't try to integrate a NCX file.  Don't mess with styles and headers.  This method is the easiest and will cause the least amount of headaches.

Go to where you want your chapter breaks or have your chapter headings and highlight the chapter title or first few words - this is what will show up in the ereader when someone brings up a menu.  Insert a bookmark and name it something that makes sense to you - you won't be able to put in spaces, so CHP1 or ChapterOne, etc.  These are your chapters.

It's a good idea to have a Table of Contents at the front of your book, even if it is just "Chapter 1, Chapter 2" etc.  Just type out the contents in plain text - chapter #s, story titles, whatever, like:

Chapter One - The Dawn Breaketh
Chapter Two - Thus Cometh the Horseman

,etc.  Highlight your first line and click on "Add Hyperlink", then click on the option to choose from within the document.  Your bookmarks should be listed there.  Click on the right one and you have your first link.  Do the same with the rest of the chapters.

For Kindle, put in another bookmark titled "TOC" at the beginning of the Table of Contents.  You don't link to this one, it just helps the ereader software locate it.

That's it.  Just highlight, insert bookmark, highlight, insert hyperlink.

Book Creations Inc

Book Creations Inc, also called the novel factory, was set up in 1973 by Lyle Kenyon Engel.  They concentrated on series books and were positioned between authors and publishers.  Engel and his staff would create series characters and farm out assignments to various authors, giving them synopses or outlines.  The works were edited and in house before being sold to publishers under house names.  BCI would split the proceeds 50/50 with the author, and they were involved in the marketing as well.

They seemed to have their best success with historical dramas, but there were a few Men's Adventure series as well, including:

Baroness
John Eagle: Expeditor
Nick Carter

Trash Menace authors in ebook

One of my favorite things about ebooks is they allow my favorite (and not so favorite) authors (or their heirs) to keep their backlist in print and at a reasonable price.  Some don't quite get ebooks and price themselves out of the market, while others don't have the rights to particular series characters or have other complications.  Others, sadly, just aren't being reprinted and will languish until they go into public domain or get bootlegged.

Many times the books have been stripped of their series number or title, and almost all have a new (and inferior) cover, so there may be series favorites from the 80s that are hiding under a generic "thriller" packaging.

Below are some of my favorites, to be updated as more become available.  And yes, I want your affiliate percentage.

Jerry Ahern: The author page for Ahern is incomplete, so you'll want to browse by name.  Includes the Survivalist, Defender, the Takers, They Call Me the Mercenary, Surgical Strike.  Too pricey with most at $9.99 each.

David Alexander: Including the Phoenix and Nomad series

Ian Barclay: The Crime Minister

Mike Barry: The Lone Wolf

Chet Cunningham: The Penetrator series isn't here that I could tell, but there are a lot of westerns and stand alones.

George Gilman: Piccadilly western house name for Edge, Steele, and the Undertaker

Lee Goldberg: The Jury series and some TV thing

Donald Hamilton: Matt Helm

William W. Johnstone: There are a billion here, most of them from after he died.  The westerns, recent thrillers, and Ashes garbage fill up most of space here, but it looks like many of his horror books are finally becoming available in 2015.

Len Levinson: The Rat Bastards, the Sergeant, Butler.  His stuff isn't up to date on his author profile, so you'll just want to browse by his name

Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir: The Destroyer - first one is free

Marc Olden: Another one without a good author page.  Includes Black Samurai, Narc, and Harker Files

Don Pendleton: Unfortunately, his stuff is mixed in with the hundreds of later Mack Bolan titles, and there's not a good way to sort out the real Pendleton.

John Russo: This one's hard to sort through, as the author page only has two titles, there are multiple authors with this name, and he has a habit of re-titling his books.  Just look for "From the Author of Night of the Living Dead".

Barry Sadler: Casca, way too pricey at $9.98

Guy N Smith

Randy Striker: The MacMorgan series

Adventures in Self Publishing - Formatting

A word about formatting - don't.  That is to say, when people format their books for submission to Amazon's KDP or Smashwords or where ever, it becomes more of an issue of un-formatting what is already there.  Starting with simple text makes life so, so much easier.

I've had formatting issues before and went down the rabbit hole of the KDP forums, which invariably suggest opening it in HTML and messing with the CSS code and a bunch of other things that will make things a million times worse.  Just don't.  A simple .doc or .docx file will be better.

The first thing you should keep in mind is that you will lose almost all aesthetic control when publishing for ereaders.  The ereader, the reader software, and the human reading it can adjust the font, the size, all kinds of things.  I know there are some OCD folks that want the words to show up just so, but sorry, it doesn't work that way.

If you intend to do all the fancy layout jazzamatazz for the hard copies, do yourself a favor and start with a clean, simple file in .doc for the ebook.  I use Google Docs and Open Office myself.  Word works, but it can add unnecessary coding.

Have one master file, then separate files if there are changes per venue (one for Amazon, one for Smashwords, one for Lulu, whatever).  Then if you make any changes later, you know which file is the most current.

Do your basic formatting (or unformatting) before your final edit, so you can check for things while you're going through the text anyway.

You may have written in various different files and combined them later.  Even if you use the same program with the same defaults, there always seems to be a difference in style between them.  You want it to be consistent throughout the document, so hit your ctrl-A and make the font and font size the same.

You'll want to left justify or align.  Justifying on both sides doesn't look good on ereaders.  You can center, but since the margins are so narrow, unless the text is very short, you might not be able to tell.

Here is the biggest mistake I see (and made) - never, never, never use tab to indent.  If you have already used tab, or even if you haven't, go through and delete all of them.  Look here for tips on that.  What happens is that ereaders read tabs as distinct from indention, and some ereaders set their own indention.  So what happens is you get double or triple indention randomly through the text.  After your tabs are gone, hit ctrl A, then go to paragraph styles and set the indent option for "First line" between .25 to .33.

On a similar note, don't try to use double indents for a block quote or something similar.  With the margins so narrow, you end up pushing all the text to one side and get maybe one word per line.  A lot of poets hate ereaders for this reason.

There are a couple of things that are particular to ebooks.  Many authors put an extra line between paragraphs, kind of like I'm doing here.  Also, make use of the page break at the ends of sections or chapters, which is usually ctrl enter.  In ereaders, this ends one section and you have to turn the page for the next, regardless of how long the text is.

Basic stuff like bold, italics, and underline is fine.  While you can't control font size, you can usually control relative size, so you can have chapter headings larger if you want.

If you start out with a pretty clean copy, you shouldn't have any issue just uploading the .doc file.  Smashwords has what they call the "meatgrinder", which takes your word file and spits it out into multiple formats, and it's a bit more particular with extra formatting.  Even if you strip it out, often the code lingers.  This is when you go nuclear.

If all else fails, there the nuclear option to strip out your formatting.  Copy (ctrl c) all the text, and paste it into something like Notepad or Wordpad.  Save that as a .txt file, close it, reopen it, then copy and paste it back to where you want to proof it (Google Docs, Word, Open Office).  This will strip all the formatting, even the stuff you wanted to keep, so you'll need to go through and add your page breaks, bolds, etc.  If you're starting out with a heavily formatted proof copy, you might want to start with this step and add your formatting back in while you proofread.

Above all, there is no reason to pay anybody to do this.  If you create and/or proof in an ebook friendly format, you don't even have to spend any extra time formatting.  And frankly, you'll probably do a better job than the "professionals".  These days, most authors will have an ecopy of their book, but there are services that will take a paperback, OCR the text, format it, and give it to you to submit.  I'm sure some of these are good services, but as a reader I've seen some turkeys.  When every letter I turns into a ! for two chapters, this is profound sloppiness on their part to not even do a basic spell check.

In summary, start with a stripped down version with minimal formatting, get rid of tabs and indent with paragraph styles, do it yourself.

Down the rabbit hole

  

Blog posts will be getting rather thin for the next month as I participate in National Novel Writing Month, in which participants attempt to write a 50,000 word rough draft in one month.

This will be my first attempt at a novel in almost fifteen years.  I intend to cannibalize every idea I had in Junior High and pad out the rest with sex scenes.  It's going to make a million dollars.

Adventures in Self-Publishing - Proofing and Editing

I'm skipping the whole "how to write" thing, you're on your own there. The roles of various copy editors, proofreaders, and the like confuse me, and I also don't use them. I know I suck, and I'm not going to pay someone else to tell me I suck. At the bare bones proofing level there are things like punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. Stuff that should give you colored squiggly lines when you look at it. You can do this yourself, but spellcheck isn't enough. If you're super serious, you hire a proofer, find alpha readers, get friends to check it out, but if you're a broke misanthrope (aka, a writer), you won't do those things.

Here's what I do. I use the spell and grammar checks from multiple plug ins in Open Office to find the obvious stuff. Obvious misspellings can be missed on a read through. It won't catch everything. Do you have a habit of mixing up your and you're? Its and it's? So does everyone else. Do a search and double check every instance - it won't take long. Unsure of the rule? Just google "its vs it's" or whatever and figure it out. Read the damn thing, preferably a while after you wrote it. Take notes for continuity. That express elevator needs to stop on a floor in the middle, better fix that. Is his name Zach or Zack? Better do a search and replace.

Other people will tell you what to do on your third and twentieth draft - do that if you like, Proust, but your steampunk shifter erotica won't get any better. Check for continuity of style, again with the find feature. OK, ok, or okay - doesn't matter, just make it consistent. Decide you like dashes instead of ellipses? Change all of them.

Editing is something different. An editor addresses story concerns, not just the typing. A lot of it has to do with pacing, and in practice an editor tells an author to throw away half of the material. The sucky half. The Tom Bombadil half. This might apply more to your 200,000 word epic fantasy than your 15,000 word masked vigilante short, but a good editor will make you a better writer, and you will hate them for it. But we're not talking about how to make your writing better. We're talking about getting your crappy writing published. You do want it to be polished as possible the first time, and don't EVER submit an unfinished or first draft version. EVER. EVER. If you find a mistake later you can update the file, so don't panic, but the version you submit should be the version you're ready for the world to ignore.  A shocking number of people hit "submit" first, then do their spellchecking. Don't do that.

Next up, a little about formatting.

Adventures in Self Publishing - An introduction

Vanity presses were once a sad case of vultures feeding off dying dreams. An aspiring author would spend thousands, and if they were lucky would end up with a case of unsold hardcovers in their garage. Traditional publishing was not much better. I once got a letter in response from an agent, saying my novel had potential but could use a professional eye. Note that I had not so much as sent them a sample chapter by this point. Soon after, I got a letter from a "script doctor" offering his services, from the same address. He even called me, sounding exactly like a cartoon mobbed up con artist on my answering machine. I never got far enough to have a legitimate publisher take 90% of the take. Modern self publishing is easy and painless, and should also be mostly free. Sadly, the vultures are still out in force. While there are legitimate services (proofing, editing, formatting, cover design), there are also a ton of marketing scams, from fake twitter followers to fake Amazon reviewers. I mention this because there's no reason one's broken dreams of being a famous writer should also punish one's bank account. The one thing that traditional publishing has over self publishing is that a traditional publisher won't bother to print you if you suck. The people that do make it tend to suck, and the ones that don't suck even worse. Not to be rude, but lets just start there. Your book sucks, and you suck for writing it. I don't suck. I'm writing in a genre that is in a downturn, I don't have proper promotion, I haven't been given the right break, the Goodreads mafia doesn't like me, I'm still establishing my brand, and maybe I should go ahead and spend $500 bucks for that sidebar ad. No, I suck, just like you suck. We won't get rich self-publishing. People I know that consider themselves successful cover part of their utility bill with their writing. The numbers are even sadder. Amazon has this delightful self-worth meter called Author Rank, which will replace alcoholism as the main contributing factor to authors' suicides in the years to come. I hover around 800,000-1,000,000, because I suck. If I sell one single copy, I jump up to around 200,000 before sliding down again. Selling one copy sucks, but I'm still doing better than 4/5ths of the titles out there. There are only around a couple hundred self-published authors on all of Amazon that make enough to live on. You won't be one of them. You will be one of the other hundreds of thousands. The ones that suck. And it's a wonderful time to suck. Teenage boys sitting on couches make millions on YouTube. Twilight fanfic sells millions. Any amateur idiot can get on the exact same platform as the professional idiots. Temper your expectations, and there are still wonderful rewards. The first $2 direct deposit from Amazon. Reaching double digits in a very specific category during free promotions. Opening the box with your proof copy from Create Space that you got for less than $10. I can't help you stop sucking, but I can share what I've learned along the way. Self publishing can be intimidated, but once you've got it down, you can go from your proofed copy to being submitted online in a single evening. And there's no reason to spend a dime on it.

Clip of Lee Goldberg interview

A clip of an interview with author Lee Goldberg.  What he says here applies largely to midlisters with a large back catalog that's gone out of print, which can be said of pretty much every author we cover here at Trash Menace.  No matter how out-of-date or unpopular the genre, there is a market for these kind of books, and small but steady sales multiplied by several titles can add up.