Popular historical fiction novelist M. Louisa Locke, who has over 500 reviews of Maids of Misfortune, is one of many authors who will be participating on Read Tuesday, a Black Friday event just for books. Check out this article, which highlights a handful of authors who will be participating in this big event.
Updating a Book at CreateSpace or Kindle Direct Publishing
Today I will share my experience of updating books at Amazon. I recently updated Volume 1 of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers at CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The paperback now includes a comprehensive 18-page index, and both the paperback and eBook include minor updates (such as mention of recent changes at CreateSpace, Amazon, and Kindle and correcting a few minor typos).
If you need to revise your interior or cover file at CreateSpace, first study your sales rank history (you want to know the time of the sales, not the time that the royalties report) to help choose the time where you’re least likely to sell books. Your book will be unavailable for sale while the new file is being reviewed, so you don’t want it to interfere with sales (unless your revision is more urgent, then you just have to do it immediately).
It takes approximately 12 hours for your files to be reviewed. The biggest concern is how Murphy’s law will get you:
- One way is for CreateSpace to make changes to your cover, even when you didn’t change the cover file and it had been perfect. The best thing to do is resubmit your files for review and hope the next reviewer doesn’t make changes to your cover. This is another 12 hours. But if you call, they put in a request to research the problem, and this can take a couple of days (and may not even resolve the problem). There is, unfortunately, a worst-case scenario where your book is offline for several days. You just have to cross your fingers and hope it doesn’t happen to you. Let me add that this rarely happens, so most likely it won’t be an issue. I didn’t mean to scare you. Just prepare for the worst, then if something does happen, you won’t be surprised by it.
- Another way is for you to make a minor revision, which winds up causing major changes to the layout of your book. You see, revising a phrase on page 3 could cause a crazy page break on page 8. Take the time to scroll page by page through your book in the Digital Proofer to ensure that there aren’t any crazy layout problems and you might be able to avoid this problem.
- Then there is conservation of typos, whereby you introduce a new typo in the process of correcting others.
- Finally, there is the Doh! moment when you click Approve Proof and suddenly remember something else that you should have done.
Very often, your book is again available for sale in 12 to 24 hours after uploading the revised file.
A crazy thing is that you can actually order the paperback directly from Amazon after the revision and receive the older version. This evidently happens when they already have your older version stocked in their warehouse (e.g. if there was a returned copy to resell or if they had ordered some in advance to stock up).
What I like about KDP is that your previous edition remains available for sale while your new eBook is in the process of publishing. This way you don’t miss out on any sales in the meantime.
I put a note on the copyright page indicating when the eBook was last updated. This way, when I viewed the Look Inside at Amazon, I knew I was looking at the updated version.
I like the way the Look Inside turned out. The Look Inside when viewing on a PC is the greatest formatting challenge. I went into the HTML in my effort to perfect this. The indents look large on the PC, but that’s because I set them to a percentage instead of a value in inches. That way, the indents will look fairly reasonable from a cell phone to an iPad.
Another thing to consider is updating the description. I updated the paperback description from CreateSpace, using the basic HTML that’s allowed to create linebreaks, boldface, italics, and bullets. I used Author Central to do this for the eBook. The paperback description begins with a note about the new index that has been added.
The paperback was ranked around 14,000 on Amazon, but has now dropped down to 45,000. It’s amazing what a 16-hour window of no availability can do to sales rank. On the other hand, the eBook edition jumped up to 40,000 from the 100,000’s. I guess when the paperback wasn’t available, people decided to go with the eBook (ordinarily, I sell many paperbacks for each eBook that sells).
For those who may have purchased the original paperback without the index, there is a free index available in PDF format online: https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/index-for-a-detailed-guide/
Now I need to work on an index for Volume 2.
Volume 1 eBook: http://amzn.com/B00AA5CJ7C
Volume 1 paperback: http://amzn.com/1480250201
Volume 2 eBook: http://amzn.com/B00CSDUP66
Volume 2 paperback: http://amzn.com/1484037243
Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing), Facebook page, Twitter
Check out Read Tuesday (a Black Friday event just for books): website, Facebook page, Twitter
Indie Book Blast
What a wonderful opportunity! Check it out and give three cheers to Green Embers. 🙂
Zoink Swoosh Cachink Psst Gurgle Splat Buzz Thunk
How do you feel about words that are created to mimic sound effects in fiction?
You’re reading along, the words are flowing nicely, the story has a smooth pace. Then, without any warning. BAM! There comes a word, all by itself, disrupting the flow, shaking things up for you as reader as much as it is for the characters.
I like it. However:
- This device loses effectiveness the more it is utilized.
- The spelling and sound need to agree with me.
It isss posssible to have a high frequencssy of sssuch sssound effectsss, but the sssituation mussst call for it. For example:
- It may accentuate a character’s unique speech pattern.
- More use could appeal to young readers (think Dr. Seuss).
When I say that the spelling must agree with me, I don’t mean that it has to follow some standard spelling. A new sound effect word may be refreshing.
What I really want is to agree with the way it sounds.
Don’t give me a rirr rirr when it’s more of a ree-ro ree-ro.
On the other hand, you also have to be reasonable as a reader. If you can say, “Okay, maybe it could sound like that,” you need to accept it.
As with the spelling of a character’s name, there is an aesthetic property associated with the way the letters of the sound effect are selected and arranged. For example, a swoosh is a smooth, unassuming sound effect, while a thunk is hard and abrupt.
Sometimes it’s unnecessary to devise a new sound effect. For example, if two objects collide, why not go with one of the words already in use, such as bump, clunk, thud, or splat?
Is it useful to emphasize the word with CAPS, italics, boldface, or color? The sound effect already stands out because of its unique spelling. Very often, it appears as a single-word sentence. If it already stands out readily, perhaps added emphasis isn’t necessary.
What are some of your favorite sound effects?
Clink clink gurgle gurgle biff biff pau.
Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing), Facebook page, Twitter
Check out Read Tuesday (a Black Friday event just for books): website, Facebook page, Twitter
Wrapping Up the Details: Step 10 of How to Write a Compelling Nonfiction Book Proposal in 10 Easy Steps
This is an excellent series of 10 posts on how to write a nonfiction book proposal. In paragraph 3, you’ll find links to the previous posts.
Even if you plan to self-publish, the information in this series would be quite helpful. It will help you think in terms of marketing and marketability, for example.
I’ve been blogging tips for writing a nonfiction book proposal, and here we are at the last step. As we’ve been discussing, the purpose of a nonfiction proposal is to sell an agent or editor on the concept of your book. Writing a nonfiction book proposal is all about marketing yourself, your writing, and your idea. Each section of your proposal answers the questions, “Why will this book stand out in a sea of other books about this subject?” and “Why are you are the perfect author to write this book?”
Over the previous few weeks I’ve covered each part of a proposal and offered specific ideas for what should be included and why. Today I’ll focus on tying up some loose ends by giving you tips about details that can be the difference between a proposal that’s ignored and one that agents and editors can’t wait to read.
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Show & Tell
One of the ‘rules’ of writing is:
- Show; don’t tell.
First, I’ll ‘tell’ you what this means:
- Showing, rather than telling, can provide a more vivid understanding to the reader.
Now, let me ‘show’ you what this means:
- “My daughter was upset because I refused to give her ice-cream,” tells you how my daughter reacted.
- “When I refused her request for ice-cream, my daughter crossed her arms, spun around on one foot, and stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind her,” shows you how she reacted.
There may be times where it is more appropriate to tell rather than to show:
- Showing a very minor point may detract from the storyline.
- Showing may lose its effectiveness or seem tedious if done to an extreme.
- Main points stand out better when just these are shown.
- Telling can help make a quick transition between different scenes. For example, “They had an uneventful journey.”
- A good balance between showing and telling may help achieve the proper rhythm and pace.
- Telling is often more concise than showing. Imagine how long a typical novel may be if everything were shown rather than told. Readers want to feel like the story is making progress.
- Telling may be more appropriate for technical writing than showing.
It may be better advice to say:
- Balance your showing and telling.
But it isn’t the phrasing of the rule that matters. What matters is understanding the distinction between showing and telling, learning how to do each effectively, discovering when to do which, finding the right balance, and making the story and wording flow well.
I have a little riddle for you:
- What do you get when a novelist takes showing to an extreme?
Spoiler alert: The answer is coming now. If you’re going to exclusively show, you might as well not write a book at all. You might as well film a movie.
Many people who love to read often remark that a book is better than the movie. (Partly, this is because a movie is over in two hours, but a novel involves several hours of reading.)
A movie inherently shows a great deal. So if showing is better than telling, shouldn’t a movie be better than a book? Maybe not:
- Too much showing reduces the role of the audience’s imagination. A book is better at cultivating the reader’s imagination.
- Too much showing limits the creative freedom of the audience. When fewer specifics are given, the audience has more freedom in visualizing people, places, and things to their liking. Once they are shown a detail that they don’t like, they feel stuck with it.
A good balance between showing and telling can help provide the best of both worlds.
An interesting point arises when you consider book covers. If the main characters appear on the covers, the reader is shown very specifically how those characters look:
- Does this hamper the reader’s imagination and freedom in visualizing?
Maybe. But it may be a necessity in genres where this is common, like romance. A cover that clearly depicts the genre can be a valuable marketing tool. If readers are accustomed to seeing the characters on the cover in a given genre, a cover that doesn’t do this may suffer through many fewer sales.
At least, if the characters are depicted on the cover, those characters are apt to appeal to people who purchase the book. So while readers may not be able visualize the characters in their own fashion, they will probably be okay with it.
I also come across this issue of show and tell when teaching physics:
- Very often, showing is a more effective teaching tool than telling.
- However, many valuable thinking skills are developed through telling—for example, the ability to reason abstractly and to synthesize information.
- Students prefer to be shown, but if they never experience processing information they are told, they won’t develop some of these other valuable skills.
- Examples show students how to solve problems. Some students ignore theory, concepts, and proofs, focusing solely on the examples. When they do this, they miss out on important learning elements.
- It’s better to be able to solve hundreds of different problems by understanding the underlying technique than it is to memorize hundreds of different solutions. For example, understanding how to apply conservation of energy can help a student solve hundreds of different physics problems. The student who must rely on a very specific example as a guide will struggle with many of the problems.
- Some skills are difficult to show. Many laboratory, reasoning, and application skills must be learned by trying.
As with writing, a good balance between showing and telling may provide a better learning experience in some ways.
Similarly, there may be some benefits to reading writing that is more abstract, showing less, telling more, and requiring more thought from the reader.
It depends on what you’re writing and who your audience is. An enjoyable read for a popular audience should make things easier on the reader. There are audiences who like things more abstract, for which there should be less showing and more telling, with more opportunities to puzzle things out.
Effective writing meets the needs of the specific target audience.
Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing), Facebook page, Twitter
Check out Read Tuesday (a Black Friday event just for books): website, Facebook page, Twitter
How Are You Adapting to the New WordPress Reader?
We’ve now had some time to experience and possibly adjust or adapt to the new changes in the WordPress Reader. How are you handling it?
There has been some applause for the return of the word count. Yay!
My eyes have adjusted to the larger text. It was a shock for the first few days, but now it looks normal. However, I still regret that one post very often takes the entire screen height on my rather large monitor. It takes much more scrolling to read the same number of posts. Very likely, this means that more readers are giving up sooner, so more posts are going unread.
Indeed, I’ve noticed that I get more or much less activity depending on the timing of the post. If people are checking their posts after several hours, anything buried down at the bottom is less likely to get attention.
That popup window is still annoying and requires several extra clicks (unless you click on the word count). If you actually make it to the blogger’s site, you’ll see something new at the bottom of the post. It will show a few related posts. Unfortunately (perhaps), these seem to be automatically generated. These may help to generate interest in prior posts.
A second complaint about the popup window is that many readers aren’t making it to the blogs. They miss out on the design of the blog and content geared toward the target audience. This really affects bloggers who have something for sale on their blogs. Those who have paid for upgrades aren’t happy about the new Reader providing a means of reading the blog without visiting the site. If they choose to only show a portion of the blog in the Reader, hoping to lure the reader to their site, they run the risk of the reader giving up because it’s too many clicks.
The WordPress forum specifically devoted to this issue is now 10 pages long. You can find it by clicking here. There is talk of reading blogs in bloglovin’ that might be worth checking out.
Here are my previous posts on this issue:
- https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/temporary-fixes-wordpress-reader-problems/
- https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/update-on-the-new-wordpress-reader/?relatedposts_exclude=1066
- https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/new-wordpress-reader-what-do-you-think/
- https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/share-your-opinion-about-the-new-wordpress-reader/
Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing), Facebook page, Twitter
Publishing a Book Is Like Applying for a Job
In many ways, publishing a book is like applying for a job:
- You scour the want ads searching for a job opening, and you scour the Writer’s Market and other lists searching for agents and publishers.
- Self-publishing is like starting your own business. Writing is a business, if your books are for sale.
- A prospective employer first looks at your resume and cover letter before deciding whether or not to contact you. A prospective agent or publisher first looks at your query letter and book proposal. A prospective reader first looks at your cover, title, description, and sample.
- Contacts and social media can help you meet employers, find head hunters, discover training opportunities, get resume help, be referred, and become part of a support network. In the writing world, contacts and social media can help you meet other writers, connect with editors and designers, learn publishing and marketing tips, discover agents and publishing opportunities, get writing help, and give and receive valuable support.
- Referrals from contacts, supervisors, and previous employers can be quite valuable. For authors, word-of-mouth referrals, book reviews, and recommendations are golden.
- A product or service needs to be highly marketable and effectively marketed in order for the business to succeed. Books similarly must be marketable and effectively marketed.
- Ultimately, valuable skills sets and experience are necessary for any job. Writing and storytelling skills and experiences thus serve authors. The writer is a craftsman.
- At a job, customers pay the employees’ salaries; without the customers, the company would go out of business. In the publishing world, readers pay the authors’ and publishers’ salaries.
Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing), Facebook page, Twitter
Authors for the Philippines
In addition to interest in supporting the cause, you may be intrigued by the sample list of items offered.
Promote Your Kindle Countdown Deal or Select Free Promo (or Other Book Sale)
The writer who carves a masterpiece out of words and publishes the book faces a new challenge:
- how to help the target audience discover the book
As there are millions of books to choose from, this is no easy task.
One way to try to help stimulate sales is to put the book on a temporary sale, e.g. through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
- Amazon has a new Countdown Deal available for books enrolled in KDP Select. This allows for a temporary reduction in price and shows customers how much they are saving and when the sale ends.
- The older KDP Select free promo option is another alternative. (Note that you can’t mix and match Countdown Deals and free promos for the same book in a given 90-day enrollment period.)
- Books that aren’t enrolled in KDP Select can still have a temporary price reduction by simply republishing at the new list price.
Everyone likes a sale. It’s great to save money.
But there’s a catch: The sale won’t attract buyers if customers don’t know about the sale.
You still have the problem of discovery. Just putting your book on sale through a Kindle Countdown Deal, KDP Select free promo, or other temporary price reduction isn’t enough:
- A temporary sale, all by itself, probably won’t help much with getting your book discovered.
Nevertheless, a temporary price reduction can be effective if you succeed in spreading news about the sale:
- Instead of just promoting your book, promoting that your book is temporarily on sale may generate more interest. That is, it can help make your marketing more effective.
- Any promotions that you do to spread the news about your sale may be amplified by people in your target audience who become interested in your book.
- If people develop interest in your book, the looming deadline may help to generate sales.
- Sales that you may generate as a result of placing your book on sale can help improve your book’s visibility through sales rank, customers-also-bought associations, and customer reviews.
(Note that KDP Select free promos generate a free rank instead of a paid rank, but any subsequent sales once the free promo ends will help boost the paid rank.)
It all comes down to getting your book’s sale discovered by your target audience.
The usual marketing strategies—blogging, Twitter, Facebook, press release, building buzz, interacting with your target audience, readings, guest blogs, etc.—can help with discoverability. Instead of just promoting your book, you’ll be promoting the temporary sale of your book, which may help to generate more interest than your usual marketing.
Also, if you’ve been branding an image, prospective buyers who may have been considering your book might be sold when they see that your book is now on sale.
However, you probably want to use this golden opportunity to try and go beyond your usual marketing reach. For example, you might want to consider if a low-cost advertisement may be cost-effective.
Don’t focus solely on projections for how many people may view your advertisement. It’s also important to consider:
- What fraction of the people who view your advertisement are in your specific target audience? They are more likely to make the purchase, appreciate your book, and leave a review.
- How marketable is your book? Will the cover and blurb make the genre clear and appeal to your specific target audience?
If you have a highly marketable book in terms of both packaging and content—i.e. it will both attract and please a significant target audience—then it may be worth advertising at a site that can show your advertisement to your specific target audience.
One popular site is BookBub, but there are other options, like Ereader News Today, Kindle Books & Tips, Book Gorilla, Book Blast, and Pixel of Ink. You want to learn about stats to help you with your decision. For example, the BookBub pricing page provides data for subscribers by genre, average downloads, and average sales. There are also sites to help you promote seasonal events. For example, check out Read Tuesday, designed to help stimulate holiday sales.
With a Kindle Countdown Deal or temporary price reduction, you earn royalties during the sale. Your hope is that these immediate sales and a possible increase in sales following the sale will recover your investment and then some, but as with any investment, there is always a risk.
In contrast, a KDP Select free promo doesn’t yield any royalties during the sale. Here, the hope is that if you succeed in creating interest for your book during the promo, then enough people will read the book (only a percentage who download it for free will eventually read it, and some will be from outside your target audience) and recommend it to others. That’s a big IF, and it doesn’t always work out that way. A successful free promo can lead to a significant improvement in sales, but not necessarily (it was more common in the early days of KDP Select, but still happens now; a highly marketable book and an effective promotion improve your chances).
A nice feature of the new Kindle Countdown deal is that any sales made during your promotion improve your paid sales rank, whereas your sales rank slides during a KDP Select free promo.
Publishing Resources
I started this blog to provide free help with writing, publishing, and marketing. You can find many free articles on publishing and marketing by clicking one of the following links:
Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers
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