Tanya Lisle

Author: Tanya

  • Distribution: PublishDrive

    These guys are… new. They are super new. It seems to me that they were originally a service just for small press companies that has decided to now try to capitalize on the indie market. Which I have no problem with, given one of the more elusive locations that they distribute to.

    File preparation

    So here’s the thing about PublishDrive. They only accept ePub as a file format. If you want to give them a doc to convert, I’ve heard quotes at $180USD for it. It sounds like they are very manual about the whole thing1 so I’d suggest converting it yourself.

    Now, I have two options here: Calibre or downloading a premade epub from one of the places I’ve already uploaded my book to. I try not to rely on Calibre too much2 so I opted for the latter. Nice and easy.

    Except no. The problems:

    • The Smashwords epub has that Smashwords Edition page, so that was out.
    • The Draft2Digital epub that I made has links in it that will get stripped out because some stores don’t allow your books to have links to other stores in them.
    • The Kobo and Amazon epubs don’t have their required copyright page.
      In the end, rather than creating a fourth and fifth file3 for the fifth outlet in Calibre, I just uploaded my Draft2Digital epubs and let them strip out the links.

    Distribution

    Ah, the only reason I decided to try them out in the first place. They distribute to a lot of little, non-English markets, which is less ideal for me, an English speaker that knows tourist French and less than tourist Thai. They have exactly one outlet I’m looking for: Google. Since Google shut its doors to indie publishers ages ago so we couldn’t go direct, you pretty much have to use a distributor to get into this location. And since Draft2Digital doesn’t have them, I’m giving PublishDrive a chance.

    The rest

    Because I’ve been with them for less than a month and I’m still waiting for some of these books to process, I can’t say much about payment or extras or anything else. I don’t even know how my sales are because, despite being the first things I uploaded, I still haven’t gotten Syndicate or Return to Wonderland4 distributed.

    They are new, so I’ll give them a lot of slack, but it feels really obvious that they weren’t quite ready to make the leap to indie pub at this point. The UI hasn’t been refined and, given what they said when I mentioned it, I think they are using a manual process for just about everything.5 Which is… concerning long term.

    But that’s the end of the getting stuff into stores. Next, onto the thing I’m terrible at: Marketing.

    1. In a few ways… [↩]
    2. Too manual, and generating new versions tends to do weird things for me [↩]
    3. The doc and the epub [↩]
    4. Or Backstreets for that matter [↩]
    5. If it was automated, the day of the week would not matter [↩]

  • Distribution: Draft2Digital

    The next place I go to is Draft2Digital.1 This one just does distribution without a storefront, but it has some pretty fantastic extras. Which we will get into. But first, guess what I have to do again!

    File preparation

    Because of the way Draft2Digital does it’s thing, I opt to remove the front and back matter from my books. No title page, and no links at the back! It’s yet another file, but removing things is pretty quick, and then I save my doc.

    Once that’s done, I get to upload the file and use the Draft2Digital uploader. And then their builder. See, Draft2Digital has probably the best of all the ebook conversion options of all of them, including the ability to pick front and back matter pages, and apply a few preset styles to your book so it looks a little nicer.

    Among their front and back matter, they also give you the option to add previews for other books, and these Books2Read links to your books that I will get into a little later. Better, if you use their front and back matter options, they will update the links and content for you2 without you having to redo your documents all over again.

    Distribution

    Besides Amazon and Kobo, I distribute to all of their options because I like the ePubs that they generate. They don’t have that many options right now, but they have been adding, however slowly, more outlets. And they will let you present your opt ins and outs.

    The UI

    The UI is nothing special, which is pretty much exactly what you want with these things, honestly.

    Their statistics are useless, however. They do give you the amount they owe you and that is always nice. On the other hand, you might as well download the spreadsheets because the graphs and charts that they show you on the site aren’t very flexible. I just want to know what book sold to what outlet when, guys. And give me a few more time ranges than Last Month.

     

    Payment

    Draft2Digital is nice in that it gives you both the Paypal option and the direct deposit one. They take 10% of the royalties, if I remember right, and you get the rest. Other than that, there’s not a heck of a lot to say. They pay regularly when they get paid from their outlets and… that’s it.

     

    The Extras

    So besides what I’ve already mentioned with the conversion, they also have this Books2Read thing. Which, the UI on it is not fantastic3 it provides this nice extra feature or giving any reader who clicks the link the option to choose their retailer and send you right to the book page. It doesn’t even limit it to just the ones you’ve used them for! It lists my Amazon and Kobo links on there as well as several options that Draft2Digital doesn’t even have.

    They also have an option you can add in the back matter to allow readers to sign up for alerts about new books. Which is always a nice addition.

     

    Sales

    The sales aren’t fantastic through Draft2Digital, though it’s might be because of how I tend to use the epub files.4 I mostly get sales through Barnes & Noble and Tolino. Other than that, I haven’t seen much from the other outlets.

    Next week, one last distributor!

    1. Help me out, sign up with that link! [↩]
    2. Like, add the link to your new book as soon as you finish uploading it to every book in your catalog [↩]
    3. Come on, bit of a bigger cover, put the title next to it and add in the description. It’s not that hard to make this better. [↩]
    4. More on that coming [↩]

  • Distribution: Smashwords

    So, I go wide, and the first place you want to check out when you’re thinking of going wide is going to be Smashwords. It’s not only another sales channel on its own, but it will distribute your books to other retailers and give you a decent cut of the profits, though there are some hoops.

    File preparation

    Yeah, so with Smashwords, on top of all of that preparation you did with your file beforehand, also requires one extra little bit. I take my file and save a separate Smashwords version of it and add in the extra page they require, stating that this is a Smashwords edition.1 Which is annoying, and it means that shows up on every copy they distribute, but they have a lot of outlets I don’t want to distribute to directly.

    Distribution

    Once your book passes their checker2 you will have you book placed in their Premium Catalog and it will be available for wide distribution to a variety of stores. They will go out automatically and be available in those stores within a week.

    However. I don’t want Smashwords to distribute everywhere. I’ve opted my books out of several retailers, including Smashwords and Amazon. Every time I upload a new book, I need to opt them out of the retailers individually, since you can’t just set your store to always opt out. And opting out is… annoying.

    The UI

    So for those who don’t know, on top of being a Canadian, I’m also a web developer as my day job, and I work mostly with doing UX3 and UI4 design these days. And I can definitively say that Smashwords has put minimal time into theirs. It has gotten better, but things are not where you’d expect them. There’s a whole separate page to manage your ISBNs for some reason, instead of editing them right with the rest of your book. And the opt out page involves a hell of a lot of side scrolling, just to even see what all the retailers are.

    And you can’t even define presets for it! Every time!

    Although, Smashwords, if you want someone to redo your UI, I will totally redo it. Hell, I may just redo it for a portfolio. It is seriously annoying.

    Payment

    There’s one more strange thing abut Smashwords. Since I reside outside of the States, they pay me monthly via Paypal instead of a deposit into my bank account. Which is… unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome for my particular situation.5

    On the bright side, when you’re setting your pricing for your book, Smashwords will outright tell you what their cut is, both through their own storefront and what everyone is making on a book sold through one of their affiliates.

    The Extras

    Smashwords has my most favourite of all of the statistics. There are charts that will let you see sales by book, series, and outlet.6 It also gives you a running total of what they owe you, along with the all time books sold. Though the stats aren’t as good when you look at the numbers for the individual books, they do give you enough so you can see how many people downloaded even the sample of your book, as well as how many users added it to their library.

    This is also the only outlet I have that lets me make coupons whenever I want. I can discount my books sold on Smashwords down to free if I want. I do have to make these individually per book, rather than for the entire store, but you can set things like an expiration date on them and use them as promotions. I know I’ve put a coupon in a newsletter before to try and drive people to get a book and they have.

    Oh, and there’s the Pay What You Want option, which is strange. See, a common practice for people who write longer series is to set their books to free so people will give it a shot. Smashwords will let you do that, but they also have this other option. For the first book in a longer series, I’ll set it to Pay What You Want, and let the reader set the price for the book, whether that’s free or if they want to pay anything for it.

    And lastly, they have site-wide promotions. They allow you to set what your discount is from a set of options and your book will be listed alongside the others on the site opted into the promotion. It’s a really easy and cool way to get your books out there, particularly since a lot of Smashwords authors also promote the hell out of it when they roll around.

    Sales

    I do actually get sales from Smashwords, and not just because I am using coupons to lure people to the store. Somehow I get people stumbling onto the books organically, though I still am not quite sure how. I’ve had people give extra on the Pay What You Want books, and I always get a lot of sales during the site wide promos.7 It’s been a generally positive experience using them. Even the sites they distribute to get sales, which is always a plus!

    And honestly, despite the terribly UI, Smashwords has been pretty fantastic to me in terms of getting my books out there. The people coming to Smashwords are looking for indie books, so the general feel you get from everything on the site is a lot more appealing to an indie author, and you do kind of feel like they got your back, even though they are a company and they probably don’t.

    But that’s the last of the ones with a storefront. Next up, straight distribution services.

    1. They outline how to do this in their own docs [↩]
    2. This can sometimes take a while. I’ve found that Smashwords has the strictest formatting guidelines, though if you follow their guide you’re generally fine [↩]
    3. User experience [↩]
    4. User interface [↩]
    5. I work with other people via Paypal, so having a balance in there is generally pretty okay [↩]
    6. Although outlet is kind of… not fantastic [↩]
    7. Even full price sales, oddly enough. [↩]

  • Distribution: Direct Distribution

    All right now that we have Amazon out of the way, time to make this clear. I have been going wide on my distribution, meaning that I put my books out everywhere that I can get away with. Wide distribution is fantastic to reach audiences outside of Amazon’s US market1 and lets me do a lot of interesting things.

    Financially, it makes the most fiscal sense to publish directly through the individual retailers. This way, you will make the most profit on each sale and you will not have anything skimmed off the top from other distributors.

    One small problem.

    I’m Canadian.

    This means I can directly distribute through far fewer places. Many of them2 will only allow you to even register if you have a US or other local bank account, and some aren’t open to indie publishers directly at all.3

    There’s also the small issue of me being kind of not willing to make and maintain hundreds of accounts for smaller sales channels, as well as market individually to each of them, so the only direct distribution channel I use outside of Amazon is Kobo. Let’s get into them.

    Kobo Writing Life

    Kobo will allow you to upload and convert the same file you used for Amazon and, upon completion, it usually takes no more than 24 hours for them to actually list them in the store. You also have the ability to add your book to Kobo Plus, which is like Kindle Unlimited for folks who want that. I have seen exactly zero traction from the service so far, but I’ll let you know if it ever bears fruit.

    The nice thing about this one is that my readers are from not the US. Most of my readers are Canadian or the Netherlands, oddly enough, and it feels like they are reaching a much larger audience. Though, let me be clear, sales are not fantastic through this channel. Most of the audience I reach do not use Kobo, so it’s a little hit or miss as a channel.

    The statistics are pure garbage, though. They have counters for “All time”4 and “This month” without giving you what you currently have earned and is sitting in your account waiting to be paid out. If you want to just see numbers for a specific book, you have to know the eISBN or hope you type in the title correctly. They are largely useless except to tell you how many books you sold that month and a rough royalty estimate for each individual month.

    Also, payment. So Kobo pays either monthly5 if you reach a total sales threshold of $50USD. If you do not, then you have to wait to get that payout every 6 months. It was a bit of a hassle to get my account hooked up and I do not make that much from the channel, so it’s not… fantastic. On the other hand, they do offer 45% royalty on books priced under $2.99, so that is nice at least. Just… not ideal.

    Overall, it’s got a decent process to get the books out there and an interesting market, but it’s not one of the better ones in terms of the usability or statistics, and the payments are a bit of a pain.

    Next week: Smashwords!

    1. Really, it’s mostly the US market buying books from there [↩]
    2. Looking at you, Barnes and Noble [↩]
    3. Hey Google Play, I see you too! [↩]
    4. I almost never want to know my all time numbers [↩]
    5. After 45 days [↩]

  • Distribution: Amazon

    Let’s get one thing straight. Amazon is just… awful as a company. The’ve put a bit of a stranglehold on a lot of the online publishing industry and keep trying to make things worse so that they can make a profit. Because they are a company and their publishing arm is just… ugh.1

    Amazon KDP

    Amazon’s program is called KDP, or Kindle Direct Publishing,2 and it is one of those friends that I have to see more than I want to see. It will take .doc files and the conversion is fairly painless, though their viewer to check them online is… eeeeh. Look, you’re pretty much always going to want to download an actual copy rather than use an online viewer. Important to note: Amazon works in .mobi files, which are pretty much only used by Kindle. But, because Amazon is everywhere, .mobi is still important.3

    Amazon’s sales statistics dashboard is the second best of them all, which is very pathetic. It will give you live sales updates, but it will not tell you which book got sold on their visualizations without selecting the book individually. It also will not display if a book has been returned.4 Also missing: A running total of what they owe you. You find that out right before they’re about to pay you, two months after the sale.

    It’s also the channel that I have sold the most books through by far. The sales are fairly decent and regular, mostly because Americans buy most of their ebooks through Amazon.5 And Amazon knows it.

    The Problem with KDP Select

    So Amazon has this one program in order to access their extras. KDP Select. If you enroll in it, you can get free days during each three month period you are enrolled in, or the ability to offer it for a discount to promote your new release to the wide audience that Amazon has. They even have a page to help promote your discounted book! And it gets your book in Kindle Unlimited, where you can get paid per read page! 

    Unfortunately, enrolling in this means you can’t put out your book anywhere else. No Barnes & Noble, no Google Play, no Kobo, nothing. You technically can’t even put it out on a personal store that you run on your own site. You cannot do a wide distribution.

    But Kindle Unlimited! Except that the amount that you get paid per page6 dropped drastically from the time I started to the time I eventually pulled my books from the program. From what I understand, Amazon has a certain fund every month to pay authors for their pages read. They take that amount,7 divide by the total numbers of pages read per month across Kindle, and you end up with fractions of a cent per page. This has no bearing on the price of your book.

    This and the ability to discount your book for a week8 or set it to free for a few days are all great for promotion and getting your books into the hands of people, but my experience has been that people who get a free book off Amazon don’t come back for more. So I don’t advocate for this long term. 

    Pricing

    We talked about payment already, but let’s talk a little about pricing, because Amazon has made this standard across the industry. Basically what you need to know is this:

    Below $2.99 – You get 30%

    $2.99 and above – You get 70%

    Something else to be generally aware of is that Amazon will price match any price you have listed elsewhere.9 On top of that, I’ve also seen them change my pricing on different stores, or all stores even, without my setting anything.

    And then there’s the prints

    So Createspace looks like it’s getting absorbed by KDP Print. Currently, you are much better off with Createspace because they will do both proof copies and discount any author copies you order for your own purposes. Personally, I won’t be making the switch. I’m currently looking at Ingram Spark when the time comes and Amazon eventually kills Createspace.

    1. Met the guy in charge of KDP once. Just the slimiest person I have ever met. [↩]
    2. I think. I have never actually looked it up [↩]
    3. And just an awful file format [↩]
    4. Heads up, someone can return your book after they’ve had plenty of time to read it [↩]
    5. Other countries do not, though [↩]
    6. The amount that I did,  anyway [↩]
    7. Subtract an amount that they use to pay select books bonuses [↩]
    8. The Countdown deals are pretty sweet and a nice way to get some quick sales! They even actually advertise these for you a little, unlike the free books [↩]
    9. Which is how people list their books for free [↩]

  • Distribution: Createspace

    Okay, so when I said that next was the fun stuff I… lied. Kind of. See, I’ve changed my process lately, and I’ve decided to put all of my new books out in print. This means that getting print done has to happen sooner, which means it’s the first outlet I’m going for.

    So, quick word to start. I chose Createspace because it does print on demand with minimal cost to set up, the books they turn out are of good quality, they have a good number of options, and they let you order your own books at a discounted rate. KDP, Amazon’s ebook arm, does have print options now, but I don’t know if the first two are still true about it, and the third is not. And now, onward!

    File preparation

    So there’s a lot of things to deal with here. What size do you want your book? How do you prepare the PDFs so that they’ll work? Bleed? No bleed? Widows? Orphans? Why does all this sound like a horror novel?

    I won’t be getting into the specifics of it here.

    I prepare all of my files, except sometimes the cover. And even when I don’t do the cover, I usually have to convert the file into a PDF. Explaining how to use various programs, laying out a book, and the practices around widows and orphans, I would strongly suggest just looking up how to do it yourself or hiring someone who will do it for you.1

    Once your files are done and you’ve submitted all the information to Createspace, they will have a person review your files. Once they have reviewed them, I order a physical proof copy. And then the fun begins.

    Proof edits

    If you follow me, you will have seen some of my proofing. When I get a physical copy of my book, I go through and read it with a stack of post it notes. As I’m reading, I make notes of any formatting errors that occur. I also make note of any editing things that I missed while I was doing those previous edits. And I always find something I need to fix editing-wise.

    Once I have all of those marked out, I go through the print file and fix all of those errors. I also have the Word doc open and fix the errors in that file as well. Both at the same time, until all of the notes are gone.

    I usually go through at least two rounds of this process, sometimes more, until I’m comfortable with everything.

    Everything good?

    Awesome! Files are all good, the print copy looks good, and we’re all ready to go. I don’t hit publish yet, but make sure everything is ready for publication. Now that I’m doing things a little differently, this is when I pick a publication date. Createspace does not allow you to set that date, or put things up for pre-order, so whatever date I pick to put my ebook out, I make a note to hit publish on Createspace 3 days before. It can take up to 3 days for the book to actually show up on Amazon.

    Distribution

    Okay, so here’s the tricky thing with ISBNs. Createspace will give you an ISBN, which will list Createspace as the publisher. Not ideal. But there’s a whole section of distribution that opens up to you if you do it this way.

    On the other hand, you use your own ISBN and you get to be listed as your own publisher. But you will not have your print book listed in the catalog for academic institutions. So… be aware of that.

    Other than that, your book will appear in just about every other online store within about two weeks of publication. If getting in libraries through hoping that they look through the catalog and find your book is a priority, use a Createspace ISBN. If not, you can use your own.

    Pricing and Payment

    Print book pricing works differently than ebook pricing, which we will get into. For print books, there is a base cost for Createspace to make and distribute your book, and then you set an amount on top of that which will reflect your profits. You want to make $5 per book? You set your price to $5 higher than that base price. Once your book is out and for sale, all you have to do is wait for people to buy it and watch the profits roll in.

    Now, quick reminder. I am Canadian. This means I get to let you know about the fun thing about not having an American bank account.2

    If you have a Canadian bank account, they will only pay you when you hit a certain threshold of earnings. That threshold is $100. Per currency as near as I can tell. I’m getting close to finding out, because I have only recently made a lot of books available through print. But when I do, I will be getting a real, physical, paper cheque!3

    On the up side, I do sell print books! I just haven’t seen a payment from it yet because I’m waiting on the payment threshold.

    I know I didn’t go much into the specifics of Createspace, but it seems to be changing of late and some things I may bring up4 probably aren’t going to be accurate in a month or two. And so, let’s move on to the parent company. Let’s talk Amazon.

    1. Or hire me? I am considering doing some of this stuff freelance. [↩]
    2. Or an English one, because they don’t do this to folks with a UK bank account either [↩]
    3. This is so old school, you guys [↩]
    4. Like their statistics, which are awful [↩]

  • Some things to prepare

    We’re getting really close to actual distribution and getting your book out there! Or mine, however we’re looking at this. Now, this is going to be a do as I say not as I do sort of thing, because you should have this stuff done, but I never do. This will be quick and you’ll be so happy if you keep it all in a document somewhere. Anyway, onward!

    Synopsis

    The write up for your book that will go on the sale page. What is your book about? What would you put on the back cover of your book to get people who picked it up to decide to open it and flip through it? Remember that this synopsis will be truncated as preview text on some outlets, and others will ask for a short version and a long version of this. Either way, I would suggest keeping it to two paragraphs at most, since people will probably not want to spend a lot of time on the page reading it to decide if they want it.

    Categories

    When I say categories, I mean BISAC codes. Read through them and make a list of seven of them, and put them in order of how important they are to you. Different outlets will ask for different numbers of categories, and some of them will use older or newer lists. Or so I’ve found. It’s good to have backup categories.

    Keywords

    Keywords are things people can search for to find your books. This is text that is not in the categories or the description or the title. There are a lot of articles about how to adjust these to hack the system and get all the sales, but I tend to just use them as intended. If there’s zombies, I add “zombies” as a keyword. These are less important, but they are useful to help people find your book.

    And now we get to distribution!

  • Publishing as a Canadian

    Now seems like an excellent time to mention that I am, in fact, Canadian. All those weird random Us in words? Totally intentional.1 And because I’m Canadian, there’s a few things that function more than a little differently for me on the legal side of things.

    ISBNs

    First and foremost: For most outlets, you do not actually need an ISBN.

    There are benefits to having your own ISBN in some cases, though. It does allow you to list your own imprint instead of the distributor2 which is nice, though many of these places will sometimes designate you their own ISBN as well. I have chosen to get my own, personally.

    Because I’m Canadian, ISBNs work a little differently here than they do in the US. In the US, you just buy them, but in Canada, you can get them free! All you have to do is go and request a login from Collections Canada. Once you have it, they will give you a prefix and you get 10 ISBNs at a time. Use them up, and then you can send in another request. It’s taken at most 24 hours for them to approve me for another 10. 

    They do, however, ask that you make a Legal Deposit of your book to the Archive. When you do this, you will have two options: Open access or Restricted access. Open access means that the copy of your book will be publicly available to anyone looking through the digital archive. You don’t really want this if you’re looking to make money off of it, so be sure to select Restricted access. You cannot change this from what I’ve found after depositing it.

    You don’t have to do this, technically. As in, they don’t check as far as I’m aware. It’s mostly an honour system thing. Because Canada.

    Tax Forms

    The other thing you really need to know is about taxes. Most of the companies are American or deal directly with Americans to the point that they might as well be American. And that causes some issues for us dear people from other countries. Such as all of the outlets taking 30% of all profits and having it all go directly to the IRS. 

     

    Luckily, as a Canadian, I can use my SSN for… all of them now. You used to have to go through the process of calling a US tax office repeatedly until you got someone who would just do what you were asking instead of sending you to a complicated form that they might reject if you happened to fill it out with the wrong ink colour. Now, you can fill it out with your personal tax information and be on your way and that 30% will go down to 0%.3 This changes by country, so if you’re outside of the US and Canada, then you may have a different method.

    I probably won’t be using it for much longer, honestly, and will be trying to switch it over to my TIN4 because I may not want all of this tied directly to my own personal tax information. I have gone through the trouble of registering Scrap Paper Entertainment as a separate business,5 but I have been slow to move the tax forms over. Mostly because I don’t currently know if they will take my TIN in the same way as they take my SSN.

    And now that that’s out of the way, we get to move on to… more prep work.

    1. Except in some books, where I remember to get rid of those. It varies. [↩]
    2. Smashwords, Createspace, etc. [↩]
    3. For now, at least. Let’s hope that trade agreement with the US holds for just a little longer… [↩]
    4. Tax Identification Number, I think? The one for my business [↩]
    5. You don’t have to do this, but I did [↩]

  • File preparation

    So in order to get this stuff all online, you’re going to need to get your files ready. I am at this point assuming that you have finished writing and done all of the editing passes until you are happy with the final result. Once you are, then it’s time to format the files.

    Documents

    First of all, you’re going to want to read this the Smashwords guide on this. It is invaluable, even if it is long. It’s also the most restrictive and, honestly, only Smashwords is quite this strict on their formatting guidelines, so keep that in mind. 

    I tend to work out of .doc files.1 They are the easiest to manage and edit later, plus most places will take them and do your conversions for you.2 Since I don’t do a lot of custom formatting, it’s the easiest for me to work with.

    And now for actually doing it. Since I write in Google Docs, I copy and paste all of my text into Word. From there, I open up the styles panel and then start murdering any style that isn’t Normal, Italic, Link, Center, Heading 1, or Heading 2. You can do this by selecting one of those custom styles3, and clicking on the little arrow to the right of it. There’s a Select All option to click. Once it’s all highlighted, you can then click on any of the other styles4 and it will change all of the styles at once.

    A word of warning about this method, since I write a lot of books with telepathy. This doesn’t always preserve the italics and other formatting. So be careful.

    Once you’ve limited the styles used in the text down to just those few styles, then you’re usually good to go. Although, there’s one more thing for me.

    Front and Back Matter

    I have two specific things I always add.

    The first is a title page. It just has the name of the book, sometimes the name of the series, my name, the name of my imprint5 and the year of publication.

    The second is a page with a small bio on me, and a list of links on how to get in touch, including Twitter, Facebook, and the Mailing List. No one, to my knowledge, has ever clicked on them, but I’m in the habit of this now.

    Another common thing to add is a table of contents. I don’t personally recommend this in most cases, because the file will have an internal table of contents that will be more useful to your reader than the one at the front of the book.

    Calibre and ePub

    Now, every once in a while, you will need an ePub version. Of all the types, ePub will be the most versatile. Everything takes it,6 and this is the format it will be converted to7 so it’s handy to have.

    If you don’t already have it, get Calibre. If you have formatted your book as per the above, it will convert those docs really nicely into any ebook format you want. It will also allow you to edit the files directly, but you’ll need to know some basic HTML8 in order to make it work.

    Personally, I only use this for very specific instances, but we will get into those more a bit later.

    Covers

    I’m hoping you already have your cover done. You’ll want it in .jpg, since that’s what’s actually going to upload to all outlets.

    For most, you will want a .jpg file of about 1563 x 2500 pixels for the cover. It changes by outlet, but 100% of places will at least accept a file of this size without any issue, though one I’ll be talking about will ask for larger.

    1. Multiple, but we’ll get into that with distribution [↩]
    2. Looking at you PublishDrive. We’ll get to you. [↩]
    3. Mine are always called Body Text something something something [↩]
    4. Usually Normal [↩]
    5. Scrap Paper Entertainment [↩]
    6. Some will only take it [↩]
    7. Except Amazon [↩]
    8. And have a working knowledge of email HTML because it’s pretty similar with how much of a pain it is [↩]

  • So, here’s what I’m doing

    NaNoWriMo is over and I now have two more drafts! But now that the month is done, it’s time for me to start getting Hero Complex ready for publication, and working out just what I’ll be doing for next year.1 However, there have been a few people from the Vancouver region who have been curious about self publishing and were asking how they were to go about doing it.

    Self publishing is my jam, so I have been having a few conversations about what my process is and the specifics of what I’m doing. And now I am going to go through it all over the next few weeks with you.

    I’m not going to be going through things like how to write or edit your book. Those are very different processes that vary wildly between people, so I am not the one to go to in order to figure out what’s best for you. This series is just going to be how I personally go through the process of formatting and publishing my novels. But first, a small preamble to get us started.

    Why am I doing self publishing?

    People have a lot of different reasons for getting into it, so I can only speak for why I’m doing it. I ended up getting very quickly disillusioned with traditional publishing after going to a writer’s convention and actually talking to industry professionals and other authors. My assumptions about what I could get published were cast aside and my belief that interesting ideas would win out were largely proven to be untrue and that marketability and the ability to sell were much more important.

    I was very idealistic back then. Very.

    Worse, after talking to a lot of other people who actually had books published, I found that some of these people were having to start from scratch to get their next books published, back t the conference to pitch to agents fresh despite already having a book published. Some were looking to expand into other genres, some had their books go out of print and were unable to get their rights back, and none of this was something I wanted to hear at the time.

    And the final nail in the coffin for me, the main reason I wanted to go the traditional publishing route, was finding out that many of these smaller authors had to do their own marketing. As some of you may already be aware, I am absolute garbage at marketing.

    In the end, I figured that I might as well just start publishing them myself. At least that way I could publish whatever I wanted on my own schedule, and I wouldn’t have to re-pitch every time I had a new project that targeted a slightly different demographic. I also wouldn’t have to rebrand myself every time I wanted to expand into new genres.

    It’s a much more time-consuming route, to be sure, and takes up a lot more resources. I need to come up with my own cover art, need to find my own editor, and still have to do my own marketing, but in the end it’s been rewarding on its own. Even if only now, five years later, I’m only really starting to hammer down a process.

    So, if you want to know what my process for getting a book published is, stay tuned. First up is file preparation.

    1. Probably the White Noise sequels and another Wonderland book [↩]