Authors Electric

Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits - oops no, hares hares hares as it's 1st March. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been driven as mad as two March hares, beginning the process of putting my Kindle ebooks on all the non-Amazon platforms I can find. Encouraged by other AE luminaries, I’ve gone with Draft 2 Digital for most of this, and I can announce that my Kindle comedy novel LYDIA BENNET'S BLOG is now on Nook, Kobo, PageFoundry's Inktera, Scribd and Tolino (links below). However the process hasn’t been totally straightforward even with D2D who have a simple to follow method, and Apple/iTunes is a whole other vale of tears not yet put behind me. My AE colleagues have had to put up with my howls of anguish on Facebook and I don’t see why any of you should be spared so here is the tale of occasional woe. Lydia Bennet, shameless as ever, now more widely available. So I scrubbed and polished a nice clean version of LLB in Word. D2D supply front and back matter, but I adde...

When it comes to e-books I'm definitely a Kindle kind of guy. I read on my old basic Kindle, on my iPhone Kindle app and sometimes on my laptop Kindle app. When it comes to e-book formatting of new releases (the bulk of that sort of work at Marble City Publishing Ltd falls at the door of Mark Turner who is me anyway), I use the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) process to proof e-books. Those kindle editions of the Marble City books are as clean and shiny as I can get them. Hyperlinked contents pages (when they are needed), back matter with links to other titles, hyperlinks and QR code to the publisher social media platform etc. But wait! There's a whole world of people who don't worship at the altar of Kindle. The ePub file is their staple diet. Nook, Kobo, iTunes, Google Play and a bunch of others all fire up on ePub files. Their readers deserve just as much care and attention put into the finished ePub product. For indie-authors and independent publishers there are seve...

One of the advantages of being an independent author or micro-publisher is you get to choose and control your sales channels. One of the disadvantages of being an independent author or micro-publisher is you get to choose and control your sales channels. If you have an e-book to sell then the obvious place to go and tout your wares is Amazon. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing has an easy upload platform, good opportunities for testing the product before finally clicking Publish, global storefronts and facilities for tweaking the book page via Amazon Author Central. Happy days. Amazon even offers a couple of promotional schemes if you give them 90 days exclusivity and join KDP Select. Up to 5 days of Free Book Promotion (would you want to do that? Debate is never-ending on the subject) or the Kindle Countdown which gives a time-based promotional discount for your title. Why does Amazon offer these benefits in return for exclusivity? Because other channels do sell e-books. If yo...

          And not only available on Amazon , but also on Barnes & Noble's Nook , and on Kobo too, thanks to Draft2Digital , which is a great boon to the self-publisher.           Nice ad, eh? It was put together by my brother, Andrew, from one of his own illustrations for the book. This one:-             At the moment we're battling through the problems of turning The Wolf's Footprint into a paper book, with Createspace. The pictures in the paperback will probably be black and white, because of the expense of colour-printing - but in the e-book they can be as colourful as we like.            I asked the artist who produced the illustrations, Andrew Price, about the size the images needed to be. He said that the images in Wolf's Footprint are 1563 pixels wide by 2500 pixels high. This is a good s...

When I started to write professionally just over 15 years ago I read that apparently the average author earned £10,000 per year. Recently I read (sorry can't remember where so unable to include a link) that this figure has now dropped to £5,000 per year. A scary figure and one that unfortunately in my experience appears to be true.   I started writing for magazines when they paid a fair amount for the work involved and didn't expect world rights. Some magazines are now paying less per page than I was earning 15 years ago and are demanding full world rights. This means I'm no longer able to boost my income by selling the same feature abroad.  Publishers are lowering their advances and I've noticed some are even saying they no longer offer advances. So I have had to diversify. I've returned to teaching, something I was able to stop for around two years whilst my writing actually earned me a living. The way I teach has also changed. I not only teac...

Katherine Mansfield by Kathleen Jones I'm writing this in New Zealand, which is a big country with a small population and it's a long way from anywhere by ship or plane.  That makes books expensive - particularly imported books.  There are quite a few small publishers here, and there are off-shoots of big publishers - like Penguin and Random House, but the print-runs are short and the costs high.   When Penguin NZ published my Katherine Mansfield biography , I was horrified to find out how much it cost to buy (about £50).  The consequence of the economic downturn is that publishers have been struggling here (Penguin have been taken over by Random House) just as they have elsewhere - and book shops have fared badly too.  There are wonderful small independent bookshops, but the big chains, like Whitcoulls, have been in deep financial trouble.  New Zealand is the kind of place that is perfect for the e-reader - no distribution costs and access to the fr...

As fellow members of Authors Electric will know, I have a sometime tricky relationship with technology: it doesn’t always do what I expect it to, although pressing the wrong button might reasonably be regarded as just plain dim. Since technology and business systems have played a greater part of my working life in 2012 than in any other year of my career, I thought I would review the trials. THE KOBO ISSUE KOBO, bless ‘em. Are they really geared up for self-publishing authors? Their website is pretty, in a twee kind of way, but their customer care people don’t seem to have a clue what’s happening when you have a problem. In November, I uploaded the first of my Sprite Sister books. On the basis that it all went through okay, I uploaded the other five titles – except they didn’t upload. They got stuck somewhere. I had filled in and ticked all the boxes: have uploaded and re-uploaded my e-titles numerous times on Amazon, so it’s not unfamiliar. Then nothing. You ...