Next Up For 2024: Getting Published to IngramSpark

Okay, as you know I've published a book through Amazon Kindle Direct. As a librarian who teaches computer skills classes especially one on self-publishing, I need to understand the process for getting published through the OTHER market through IngramSpark, so my next project is getting my blogging article collection set up through THAT.

So I will be distracted by getting this done over the next month or so, including making an order for a book cover - what should a non-fiction book cover look like? - and then making sure the formatting is done proper (Ingram seems to use different formatting than Amazon).

I will update when I can. In the meantime, PLEASE tell your friends about Funny Locations and get them to buy copies and leave reviews! Danke.

Book With the Blue Cover: Logos and Branding, Eh

So the topic of self-marketing and branding came up among the writers group I'm with here in the Lakeland area, and considering I have an account with VistaPrint to make mousepads and coffee mugs promoting my Witty Librarian brand, I wondered if they had a Logo Designer I could use to make logos I could slap on stuff to promote meself.

So I made this, primarily to create logos for this blog site: 

It's a bit wordy, I admit, but I can work with it and design other logos.

Granted, I'm not as creative with design as I'd like to be, but I'll try.

Update: How's this for an avatar-ish logo?

Changes to My List of Works

I don't know if anyone else has paid attention, but I've been having some issues with the Print-On-Demand service I've used to get two works published.

One thing I tried recently was to email XLibris and request a change on pricing to the ebook release of Last of the Grapefruit Wars, which was supposed to be covered by the agreement I had with them back in 2003. Unfortunately, the only thing they DID do was remove the ebook offering altogether from Amazon and Barnes&Noble (and likely all other retail providers). I think they changed the parameters of the deal on me (or I didn't understand it to begin with), or else didn't care. Either way, they never emailed me back about what they did. I had to see it for myself. Not a good way to handle a client.

Back when PoDs first appeared, I gave XLibris a try to see how the service would work, which ended up being a lot of work at my end and not much else. They did provide decent copies of books, the bindery has held up relatively well for more than a decade. And they did have some decent marketing materials... which have now gotten too expensive for my budget.

And the only thing I do get from them are calls from a new "agent" every six months asking me to sign up for a new marketing plan... which is essentially the same marketing plan they offered me since 2003 of spam-emailing everybody.

I'm a little bit discouraged about this.

I read up the current rules for XLibris to see if I can cancel both of my book deals with them... and it looks like I can.

So my plan is to cancel both my books with XLibris - the political book has sold... well, maybe once - and re-edit the Grapefruit Wars anthology with a few new stories. Update the collection as it were, make it bigger - at 124 pages it was pretty thin - and repackage it to a self-publishing service - Ingramspark - that might provide a better deal with both print and ebook.

(This won't include my Talents superhero stories as I want to package them differently, preferably anchored by an honest-to-God book)

Thing is, I also want to change the anthology title. I've found out Last of the Grapefruit Wars confused too many people.

So I'm brainstorming now about what a good new title for the book could be.

It's a mash-up of different genres - there's one true sci-fi, a couple of fantasy, a lot of coming-of-age - mostly from my college years and the 1990s when I tried getting into the short story market. If there's any consistent element to the stories, it's been a lot of humor (I hope). Most of the newer stories to add are humor-oriented as well. So I'm thinking that would be the way to re-brand the set of stories.

Right now, the best title I can think of is Slices of Crazy: Collected Stories.

Titles like Welcome to Florida won't cut it, that's too common. So's Out of My Mind and variants thereof.

One story I might add is "Jar of the Atlantic" but as a book title might be as confusing as Grapefruit Wars. I'm intrigued with the idea of making the subtitle to any decided title be ...And Other Personal Disasters but that's too self-deprecating.

If any of my seven blog followers got any suggestions, let me know.

If I Can Clean It Up, I Have A Work To Publish this 2019.

If you note my habit of writing for November, I will on occasion finish a rough work-in-progress and win the NaNoWriMo prizes for crossing the 50,000 word mark.

Now that I've gotten a few side projects out of the way, I am re-tasking myself towards cleaning up that particular WIP and using a particular prize to get it out to the world:

A self-publishing discount with IngramSpark.

In case you're not a librarian or bookstore manager, Ingram handles a lot of book and AV distribution. With the growth of self-published works, they've jumped into that market - competing with Amazon's Createspace, you might have heard of that - and they bring to the table an advantage of providing print / ebook for market to libraries and brick-and-mortar stores (the stores are not obligated to display books, but you may be able to make personal arrangements with stores in your area).

As a distributor, Ingram has a decent reputation, so this may be something that can help a self-published guy like me find an audience.

We'll see. First things first, EDIT MY DRAFTS. :)

Book Covers Are Always Important

As part of teaching self-publishing - more specifically e-Publishing - one of the things I urge is the need to get a book cover lined up before you're ready to publish.

Well, first thing is obviously the book itself needs to be done, edited, corrected, spell-checked, etc. The second thing is the cover.

The book cover is what catches the potential reader's eye. It has to relate to the book's genre or topic. It has to be legible, visible, with a contrast of shadows to light that would not force people to go all cross-eyed glaring at it.

If you're a good graphic designer with effective photo editing tools (Photoshop, cough) then you don't have to worry much. If you're not that good (guilty look here) you ought to go shopping for one.

Depending on the type of book, there are places online you can shop. I've looked at several, tried some pretty expensive artistic ones - had to, for my superhero-themed books - and now I'm looking at the cost-effective ones.

There's a pretty decent marketplace site called Fiverr.

It works like a marketplace where the graphic artist posts their willingness to work on projects for a certain fee. They start as low as $5 - which is a boon for poor struggling self-publishers - and then charge a fee for additional costs. Throw in a tip at the end and you can be getting a book cover costing you around $20. Not too shabby.

An excellent part of the program is the time limit option: you can find graphic artists willing to get this done within a day. Which - if you're pressed for time focusing on a looming release date - can help get at least one thing taken care of while waiting on the rest.

Just to note, I did hire someone on Fiverr name of leahdesign, and she did good work so if anyone else is looking, check with her.

Good luck with your writings, everybody. And don't forget, NaNo is almost one month away!

Indie eBook Award Via Library Journal

Just to be fair aboot it, I want to let everyone else who's self-publishing their eBooks to know that Library Journal - as part of the American Library Association - is hosting an Indie eBook Award for 2016.

The rules are simple. Two eBooks enter, one eBook leaves.

Okay, actually, it's this:
The competition is open to all English-language self-published ebooks for which the author is the copyright holder of the Work, and holds the rights to digital distribution. Entries will be evaluated on content, writing quality, and overall quality of production and appearance. There are no restrictions on date of publication. (Library Journal may demand proof of eligibility of semifinalists.) Review our full terms & conditions before submitting your entries.

Library Journal (“LJ”) honors the best self-published ebooks in the following genres: Romance, Mystery, Science Fiction, Fantasy and Young Adult.
ATTENTION: If your book in not in one of these genres, you can still submit to SELF-e using our standard submission form.

Judging committees will be comprised of Library Journal editors and public library collection development & acquisition librarians, who are responsible for selecting content suitable for their libraries. Some winners of the 2015 contest will also be participating as judges. They will select one winner and designate two honorable mentions in each category. We are accepting contest submissions through July 31, 2016.

Each genre prize Winner shall receive $1,000.00. All winners and honorable mentions shall also receive:

• A full LJ review, in print and online
• A promotional ad in LJ’s December “Best of Books” issue, displaying all award winners honor books
• Recognition at LJ Self-Published Ebook Awards reception at the 2017 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta

So you have until July 31st to get your eBook copyright-protected, perform a summer solstice pagan ritual (gotta get that done by June 21, you heathens), and submit at least one of your eBooks.

I will. I'm tempted to submit two: Body Armor Blues and A Serious Tank on a Clockwork World. I'm more curious to see what the response will be like rather than considering I'll win anything. What makes it worthwhile is even the honorable mentions will get a review published of their works, which means a lot of public and college libraries will see those reviews in Library Journal (and libraries are good markets for books AND eBooks)...

Such is life, c'est la vie.

NEW Published: A Serious Tank on a Clockwork World

You may notice an earlier post about teaching a class on self-publishing and e-publishing in particular. Part of the class was to demonstrate how to actually upload that book and make it available.

So I took a story I'd been fiddling with for years, cleaned it up as best I could, struggled over designing my own book cover, and tried the upload.

I messed up the file size of the book cover JPG, so the class got futzed in a hurry.

In the meantime, I'd discussed the whole issue of book covers online with fellow NaNoWriMo writers, and a ton of them all told me the same thing: my cover design skills suck. So a couple of them threw out their ideas, and writer Mary Crawford came up with a cover that just looked gorgeous so I begged to buy hers off at $100 to use for the story.

That looks beautiful, with the reflective blue glass, doesn't it?

The story itself... look, I got to admit, this wasn't a SERIOUS attempt to publish as it was a way to show how others how to do it. If you wanna know, it's a tale built off the Asimov's Laws of Robotics - with revisions - and it involves a future world where a planet full of androids have to cope with an unwanted destructive military tank.

It's not much, just an excuse to throw some ideas out there. I had bits and pieces of sentences and scenes that I liked, and needed to put in something somewhere. If you do read the story and notice how uneven it is, that's why: set pieces strung together with barely enough in common to make a coherent tale.

I wouldn't say it's "Very Bad Poetry, Captain" but it's not exactly Hugo-worthy either.

Still, it's out there, on the market, with a beautiful book cover to it, and I really need to get about 100 people buying it so I can recoup my purchase of the cover from Ms. Crawford. Have at it, kids!

Oh, you need links:

Kindle download version

Nook download version

If You EVER Have To Teach A Class on How To E-Publish Your Writings

Just remember to have the PROPER pixel size on your damn JPG file for your e-book cover BEFORE you teach the part of the class on how to actually upload everything to get published.

/headdesk

Next time, Bartow Library attendees, next time I'll have all my ducks in a row like I was trying to teach today. Sigh...

I'll finish uploading the e-story on my own and let you know what it is. Just a little disappointed with myself tonight for messing up that one little OBVIOUS thing I forget to check. DRY RUNS, damn you, do a test to make sure you got the steps right. /trout-slaps self

The Problem Of Self-Publishing: Self-Marketing

I may have noted this before.

Writing a novel is difficult in terms of time: it takes hours to days to weeks to months to get over a hundred pages written unless you dedicate entire blocks of time to it. Part-time writing spreads out over the calendar while full-time duties elsewhere - professional or personal - take priority.

Editing isn't as bad with time or effort, but psychologically draining. Writers are terrified of finding flaws on paper that made so much sense in the mind. Once you can get past that mental block, the rest is easy.

Neither of those problems compare to the third one writers face: Actually getting people to read your works.

Let's be honest: I write so people can read the stories I've got in my head. I have a story, think it might be funny, I type it up, I put it out there, I see if anyone gets a laugh from reading it. The whole point of a story is to share it.

So how do I get it out there that I've got these stories that people can read (at a reasonable cost)?

This is the part I'm not comfortable with. And I see a lot of fellow writers in the same situation.

Writing can be an introverted, personal affair. A lot of writers - the artistic sensibility - tend to be introverts. Marketing - the "buy my book!" part of the cycle of life - is all extroverted.

With a new ebook out, I'm looking now for places that can market it. I'm thinking along the lines of "professional" or at least respected review sources that can take a moment to say "oh hey, this guy has this new book about superheroes if you got an interest go take a look". As a librarian, I know about review sources like Booklist and Publishers Weekly, but I also know that PW charges to list self-published titles in their previews section.

This is where the big publishers - or even the small press types - have a leg up: they have marketing offices that handle all of this, with ties to the retailers and advertisers. I'm just wondering if self-publishers have a legal, safe place to get the same kind of effective (and honest) marketing service but at an affordable rate. I've dealt with a marketing group for Print-on-Demand once, and was horrified by what they offered. It was ALL they offered: a mass email spamming service. (I think since then they'd expanded to cover professional reviewers and retailer connections, but by then I didn't want anything to do with them on that).

If anyone's got any suggestions about how I can get the word out for Body Armor Blues, I'm willing to hear you out. Thank ye.

The Problem With Book Covers

When it gets down to it, books have to attract readers to get read.  And you attract readers with what they see.

So the book covers need to catch the eye.  The cover needs to stand out with a unique or enticing image.  The cover has to rock.

Getting a good artist or photographer helps.  But the other thing is that the labeling - the title, the author - has to be both legible and eye-catching too.  Anything too bland - a basic Sans Serif like Arial, or a basic Roman like Cambria - and people won't notice.  Anything too cutesy or gimmicky - Comic Sans, Papyrus, Papyrus Sans (ye gods) - and people will recoil.

So I'm working with the artist for my next work, and trying to come up with a feasible cover text for the title and author.

My personal preference for the author font is Flareserif (similar to Albertus).  I suppose I *could* use the same font for the title, but most times you'll notice publishers don't go that route: the title has to stand out a little more.  Have a little more flair to it.

So I'm juggling between these fonts for "Body Armor Blues":

Bulletproof Deco:

Glaser Stencil D:

Red Circle:

If anybody suggests Helvetica I will hurt you.  That costs money, dammit.

Things About ePublishing February 2015 Notes

1) There's a lot of work to put in to keep up with your Author's pages on Amazon.com and Goodreads.

1a) Does Barnes and Noble carry an Author's page like Amazon does?

2) Wondering if I can submit my self-published stories to the Florida Writers' Association awards for this year.

2a) Tempted to write a story for the FWA's annual anthology.  This year's theme is Revisions.

3) Keeping an eye out for when local authors' events might happen so I can try and shill some of my work.

Still working on my Ocean Dancers rough draft for NaNoWriMo.

New Story: Welcome to Christmas In Florida

I got the cover art worked out: a co-worker at the library is good at drawing and so helped me out of this jam.  Remind me to pay her commission when she gets back from her Christmas vacation.

It's a follow-up to my earlier estory "Welcome to Florida."  It happened for two reasons: 1) I wanted to do a Christmas short story about how we cope in Florida with a snow-less holiday that's supposed to have snow, and 2) a local writers' group Writers 4 All Seasons had a writing challenge of having characters react to a surprise guest visitor from their lives.  When that challenge was offered, I realized I had a conflict in that second idea I could use to tell the first idea.

So I made the surprise guest visitor a Santa Claus with a dark agenda.  Hopefully, hilarity ensues (I am pimping the story as humor - short story).

I also wanted Trans-Siberian Orchestra to show up as a caroling group so I could riff off the old holiday special tropes of having musical guest stars.  I changed the band name within the story (trying to avoid the lawsuit, eh), but you can kinda tell it's them when they show up.

Amazon.com already has it up for sale as a Kindle book for the ereaders.

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) has it up for sale as a Nook book too.  Both stores have it selling at $.99 (the lowest price an author can set: as a short story, I shouldn't be charging any higher).

If you have the inclination, own an ereader Kindle or Nook (or have a tablet/laptop with the ereader app), and like humorous stories that are wildly implausible and contain at least three grammatical errors, please do me a favor and consider downloading my tale.  If you do, please also leave a review.

Danke, and IO SATURNALIA!

Kindle Loading

So I finally got around to plugging in my estories "Welcome to Florida" and "Hero Cleanup Protocol" to the Kindle Direct service.

It didn't make sense to not have my estories available in one of the two major ebook formats - Kindle's and EPUB's - but Amazon never got around to accepting Smashwords (in which I first submitted "Hero Cleanup Protocol") and I wasn't certain it was legally okay for me to re-publish a story I had first loaded for Nook ("Welcome to Florida").

Since I own the copyright on both stories, I figure I ought to be able to re-submit to cover Kindle and ensure I can publish in both formats.

Now it's a question of finishing the Christmas story sequel to "Welcome".  Hopefully get it reviewed by Tuesday, uploaded by Wednesday... :evil grin:

Anniversary: Tenth Year of my first Self-Published Work

This snuck up on me as I was getting to bed last night: Gee, ten years ago I was working at the University of Florida Libraries and... OH YEAH that was when my book got published!

I had actually finished completing the last story I wanted to add to the Last of the Grapefruit Wars anthology back in May 2003.  Submitting the work to the Print-on-Demand service Xlibris went pretty quickly because I had enough of my stuff lined up and because I sped through the editorial process (there are glaring grammar goofs I spotted when the print version got out, my bad).  Anyway, on September 2003, boom, actual print copy of the book showed up on my doorstep: two hard-copies and twenty paperbacks.  Seeing it available on Amazon.com a few weeks later was part of the thrill.

There was a particular thrill to getting something actually in print, in hand, the feel of the book itself.  I suppose with the advent of ebook publishing that feeling may fade, although the need for print books may never truly die off... but that's another issue.

So... um, for anniversary celebrating... should I offer an autographed copy or something?

The Pains Of Self-Marketing

One of the biggest decisions in a wanna-be author's life of getting published and read these days is the decision to either go the old route of "get agent, get publisher interest, get reviews" or the newer tech-savvy route of "get self-published, get reviews, maybe get agent and publisher afterward".

The old route was tricky, messy, disheartening: getting an agent was one thing, but it was still no guarantee of getting a publisher who would get that book on the market for you.  But getting the publisher was a huge boon: the publishers had ties to established reviewers, and publishers had the financial means to market and promote.  The new route is satisfying in that you get your book out there right away, on your terms: bad news is, you don't have the financial means of marketing (ad space is costly) and you don't have access to a lot of the major reviewers (some will review self-publishers but they're swamped with thousands of self-published authors already).  You're usually reduced to social media like Facebook and Twitter, and most of the time it's just spreading the word to the 80 or so online friends you've already earned.

The toughest part is the self-promotion: most writers are artists at heart, and while there's a part of us that's eager to show off, there's the other half that's defensively private about ourselves and our craft.  We're not also keen on shilling ourselves: it somehow rubs against our integrity.  Advertising always has something... disingenuous about it, like there's too much exaggeration and hyperbole.  Just blogging about it here, half the time posting "buy my book!" isn't as eager as it may read: I half-treat it like a joke, with a bit of dread that somehow I'm just not "getting it" in terms of sincerely looking for readership.

Just read what this fellow is up against:

It reeks of desperation, these pleas, this constant litany: read me, recognize me, buy me, buy me again. On an authorial scale, being relatively unknown and resolutely Mid-list is like spending a few years on the floor of a deafening concert, angling for attention from every quarter, stuck in a sweaty throng of the equally disregarded, ultimately reduced (en masse and from the obstructed view seats) to holding up a lighter and screaming at the bass player–who couldn't possibly give less of a shit, even if he could hear above the distortion and tinnitus and quart of hastily guzzled Jack Daniel’s...

In fact, I’m almost certain my years-long squat of self-promotion has been entirely pointless. If I could have back every minute I've spent on social media and apply it to churning out actual prose, I would probably have finished at least one bestselling swords-and-incest fantasy trilogy instead. Maybe even two. In any case, it’s pretty clear that whoever reads what I post (a diminishing coterie, to be sure) has either already bought whatever book I’m flogging, or never had any intention of doing so in the first place. Everything else is just more white noise, a narcissistic armada of turds floating down the center of the Hudson, or the river of pixels, or the throat of the cybersphere. We've all heard it before, seen it before, been pitched everything from Sham Wow to rote sham. We've sat through a lifetime of fifteen-second commercials in order to watch the ubiquitous YouTube clip of some Khaki Dad taking a Wiffleball to the nuts. Like everyone else, I am truly and deeply bored by the incessant marketing and self-promotion that comprises a majority of any day spent in front of any screen...

Writers are an odd lot. A volatile mix of bravado, insecurity, insatiable need, unusual discipline, and occasional talent. Despite that fact that writing itself is a lonely, obsessive, and mentally unstable vocation–just the sort of pursuit that lends itself to anti-social habits and behaviors–authors are likewise expected to be great in front of a crowd, hilarious at the podium, and engaging at the lectern. They are expected to represent the worth of their prose through expressions of personal charm. Which is, of course, completely ludicrous. But since the collapse of publishing (or at least the explosion of dire, whiny articles about the collapse of publishing), publishers themselves no longer spend the requisite money to advertise the existence of all but a handful of titles.

So, as a self-employed independent contractor of suspect means, you either have to get out there and market yourself, or choose to remain silent and hope for the best. In an industry where 150,000 titles were published last year, hoping for the best tends to be a failing strategy–if not a bit naive. Therefore one is forced to ask themselves, “If I am not going to make the effort to publicize my own work, why aren't I a third-year law student instead?” Further, and most damningly, “If people are not reading what I write, why am I writing at all?”

For me, the answer is pure communication–an intellectual exchange. Telling a story is the first step. Having that story read and enjoyed and interpreted and understood is the second. Obviously I would like to do so on the largest scale possible. Forget bestsellers and movie rights and relative fame and huge advances (although all those things would be nice in their relative ways), the bottom line is that if I am not communicating with a sizable group of readers, if I am writing in a vacuum for a static body of acquaintances–spending six hours a day in front of a laptop for ten years suddenly seems like a masturbatory and delusional exercise.

The great white hope of writing is to reach the point where you no longer have to pimp yourself at all, where you tap into a weird alchemy in which you suddenly have enough name recognition and sales that word-of-mouth and momentum do all the work for you. Then you can sit back and troll Facebook, posting cake recipes and cat pictures and acting like your royalties are preordained and that you are way, way too cool to flog yourself ever again–as if you ever had.

Yeah, I want to get there. But mainly because I love writing, I love what I do, and I don’t ever want to go back.

That said... Yes, I am STILL working on finishing up my damnable first novel.

Shamelessly Creating a Facebook Page

As I get closer to finishing my first novel's rough draft, I'm setting up a promotional page on Facebook to get some self-marketing underway.

Just gotta get a better banner image posted... I tried inserting one and the dang thing kept telling me the pixel size was too small, and it wasn't, I SWEAR the pixels were over 600... and still it wouldn't aaaaaaahh /headdesking

Okay, this was the banner I was trying to post:

Is it too small?