Category Archives: self-publishing

I Hate G.I.M.P.

I think I’ve written this before. I hate G.I.M.P. (which I’ll type as GIMP to speed things up). This is a graphical design program, a poor man’s Photoshop.  I’m using it to make book covers. I do that because the copy of Photoshop Elements (i.e. Photoshop lite) on our laptop looks very hard to use.

TCEEA print cover 01But GIMP is probably just as hard. The first cover I made with it was for Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. See that yellow background? I have no idea how I did that. I couldn’t figure out how to add color to the canvas. At least I did figure out what the canvas was and how to create it at the size I needed. That was kind of easy. But when it came time to select the simple color that the canvas should be, I couldn’t figure out how to make it happen.

I tried a bunch of things, and eventually that color appeared on the canvas. I have no clue what set of keystrokes I used to achieve that. When I wanted to do the same thing with the cover for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, the same thing happened, more or less. Though maybe this time it wasn’t quite so random. I thought I figured out the right place to do the color add thing. I must have been in the right place, because the color added, but, again, don’t ask me what keystrokes I used.

Of course, since I couldn’t figure out how to resize the cover photo and change the aspect ratio, without cropping, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do anyhow.

I suppose I need to take a couple of weeks and just learn the program. Trial and error, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Problem is, I don’t have a couple of weeks of spare time to devote to that.

Amazon v. Hachette—Again

The Internet war between bookseller Amazon and book publisher Hachette is heating up—although it is being fought through or by surrogates. How much either of the two negotiating behemoths are orchestrating the surrogates is just speculation. I suspect some of it is, but not all. So far the war isn’t dying down; if anything it’s escalating.

I won’t trouble you with a bunch of links. If you follow them then follow the links they give and one more time you’ll be blaming me for all the time you’re spending. No, I won’t be giving you links. It’s all pretty easy to see. The Passive Voice blog has a number of summarized, aggregated posts about it. Joe Konrath has a couple, as does Barry Eisler, David Gaughran, and Hugh Howey on the self-publishing side. Several on the trade publishing side have blog posts as well. I have read a few, but don’t remember the names. All of the self-publishers I mentioned have links to blogs on the other side.

I’ve said before that the gist of the war is the Amazon-Hachette negotiations. Because of non-disclosure agreements no one knows for sure what the negotiations are about, or why they are taking so long. Lots of people speak authoritatively, as if they do know, but then say they don’t. One such person is Stephen Zacharias of Kensington Publishing, who, in comments on another blog, wrote: “The negotiations stem from one side wanting more money than before and the other side not wanting to give it up…but no one knows for sure what all the negotiations entail.” So he states it as a sure thing, then says he doesn’t know. This is typical of the commentary on the negotiations.

The latest salvos are open letters. An open letter to Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, has been written and signed by several bestselling authors, including James Patterson and John Grisham. The gist of that letter: Amazon, stop hurting authors and readers. It has around 70 signatories. A competing letter written by Howey and signed by most of the outspoken in the self-publishing world says: Hachette and other big publishers, stop hurting authors and readers. It has, at last count, a few less than 5,000 signatories.

I haven’t signed either. But I think I’ve made it clear on this blog where I stand. Amazon actually wears a few hats in the publishing world. They are a bookseller. They are a book publisher through a couple of trade publishing imprints. And they are a publisher for the huge self-publishing community through Kindle Direct Publishing. My involvement in publishing is through the latter.

Since it’s remotely possible that someone may read my blog who is considering what side “to take” in the Amazon-Hachette standoff, I offer my take on which is better for writers and readers.

  • Amazon, as a bookseller, discounts aggressively and extensively. Big Publishing colluded to fix prices and prevent Amazon from discounting. Higher prices hurt consumers, i.e. readers. So Amazon wins this round.
  • Amazon, as a publisher, pays higher royalties to authors. For an e-book that costs the consumer $5.00, at Amazon the author receives $3.50. At Big Publishing the author would receive $0.63. Larger earnings per book sold are better for the author, so Amazon wins this round too.
  • Except, of course, Big Publishing won’t price their books as low as Amazon does. They will price it around $14, and the author would earn $1.75 per copy sold. Also of course, they will sell fewer copies at $14 than they would at $5, so they will receive less per copy and sell fewer copies. So at the higher price the author is not truly helped and the reader is hurt. I still award this round to Amazon.
  • When e-readers proved successful to early adaptors and commercially viable, Amazon innovated and developed Kindle Direct Publishing. Taking no rights from the author, and charging nothing for use of the publishing platform, they made that 70% royalty possible for any author, independent or with a publisher, to use it and put their work before the public. Big Publishing waited a few years, and when they decided they needed to compete, they bought Author Solutions (well, one of them did, but the others all use it), that company that takes money from writers to profit, rather than doing so by selling books. So this round clearly goes to Amazon.
  • Bookstores boycott products published by Amazon while they embrace products published by Big Publishing. This one we can’t mark off against Big Publishing, unless they are the ones convincing booksellers not to sell Amazon-published products. I suspect booksellers have enough motivation on their own. This one is a draw.
  • That leaves only the book creation process itself. Big Publishing does things for each book it publishes: three different types of editing, professionally made covers, professionally designed book interiors. Some self-published books have that, either because the author hired some or all of them done or happened to have those skills. But I will admit that, on average, the average trade published book is of better quality than the average self-published book: in the writing and the production. This round goes to Big Publishing as being better for the reader, and for those writers fortunate enough to be let in the gate.
  • Oops, I forgot about rights. Who’s better in terms of what rights they insist on having for the money that the author receives? This is a long subject, much too long to discuss here. I’ll summarize by saying that Amazon takes no rights while Big Publishing typically takes all rights for the life of the copyright (which is the author’s life plus 70 years). Some authors are able to negotiate more favorable terms, but most can’t. At least that’s what the best heads in the industry tell me. So obviously Amazon is better for authors on this than is big publishing.

Food for thought as you go about your book buying.

 

June 2014 Book Sales

June was a stronger month for me with book sales. I’ll post my sales table below. I released two short stories this month:

“It Happened At the Burger Joint” and

“Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral”

I only sold three of the first and one of the second, but they did contribute to both total sales and titles selling. The other thing I did this month was release the paperback version of The Gutter Chronicles, the Continuing Saga of Norman D. Gutter, Engineer. The e-book has been around since October 2012, but I finally did the work to have the paperback available. I asked people around the office if they were interested, and pre-sold 21 copies while waiting on the books to arrive. Four of those I haven’t been able to deliver, so I’ll count them in July.

I sold a total of 26 books. 17 paperbacks in the office, the rest e-books at Amazon. I had six titles selling, including one more copy in Japan of my Thomas Carlyle public domain book.

All in all, I’m happy. This is  my second best month ever for sales, and second best for royalties. Now time to get back to my novel and edit it and then publish it.

2014-06 Book Sales Table full size

 

2014-06 Book Sales 529x227

Typos are Killing Me

I consider myself a good typist and good proofreader. But, as the experts say, it’s difficult to proofread your own work. This has certainly come home to me lately.

First, in March I published the e-book version of Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. I did much proofreading of the text, especially in the two longest articles, which were from optical scans and had all the usually scanning errors in abundance.  In April I was putting the print book together, which included my first print cover creation using the graphic arts program G.I.M.P. I posted the cover to my self-publishing diary at the Absolute Write forums, and a person pointed out a typo: Enclyclopedia instead of Encyclopedia. It wasn’t published as a print book yet, which made it easy to change. I clicked the “publish” button in April.

After I did, I had an odd feeling that I didn’t remember the contents of one article. I was pretty sure I had proofread all the articles twice, and the two difficult ones three times. I pulled out the print book and read that article. Sure enough, somehow I had skipped that in the proofreading. I then went through it, and found one optical scanning error. Not awful, but something I shouldn’t have let slipped through. I haven’t yet corrected it and uploaded revised versions for print and e-book.

Then, earlier this month I published my short story “It Happened At The Burger Joint“. Shortly after I did I posted about it on my Facebook personal page and author page. A FB friend pointed out to me a typo on the description. I think it’s a “the” that should be “they”. Since I was waiting on the Smashwords premium catalog approval, I decided to wait to fix the typo until I had that. That approval has come through, but busyness has prevented me from fixing the typo.

And last, in October 2012 I published the e-book version of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1. It’s a novella, not a full length novel. I’ve had only eight e-book sales of it. Finally last month and this I worked on completing the print version and getting it up for sale. I did that, ordered the proof copy, and did some spot reading. Found two typos, not awful ones. I decided to go ahead and publish it with the typos and fix them with a revised version ASAP. It went on sale around June 8.

My wife hasn’t read it, so last Saturday we read it aloud to each other, each taking a chapter or two and switching off. As we were reading, here and there we found a typo. At a few other places I noted where I could have worded something better. We marked those as I went along. Last Sunday I made the changes in the print book and uploaded the new version. It went live Monday (yesterday) evening. Error free? I hope so, but make no such claim. Since then I’ve typed the corrections in the Kindle version and uploaded them. The revised version went live sometime during the evening. Tonight I hope to make the corrections to the Smashwords edition.

These are way too many typos. I realize that even books by trade publishers have typos, that proofreaders are fallible people who don’t catch every error. But doggone it, I have to do a better job than that.

May 2014 Book Sales

May followed April in terms of book sales. When I first reported April sales, I said I sold eight books. I have to update that to nine, as I sold one book at the Apple store in April, which wasn’t reported until May. So that’s good. And, in May I sold 10 books, all on Amazon. Six of those sold in one day, including one each of all five of my short stories. That’s sort of a dream, to have someone discover my writings and buy my entire collection. To purchase all of my short stories is close to that. If, that is, they were all bought by the same person. I have no way to know that.

So here’s the table, full size, and a smaller version for me to link to at Absolute Write. And here’s hoping that June sales will be just as good or even better, and that I get a couple of more things published in June.

2014-05 Book Sales Table full size

2014-05 Book Sales Table 535x212

 

Upcoming Publishing Schedule

My decision to self-publish Father Daughter Day as a non-illustrated book, in paperback only (because poetry doesn’t work all that well with e-books) has caused me to think about my publishing schedule and all the tasks related to that. Here’s what I’ve come up with—subject, as always, to finding time to accomplish everything and sudden inspiration that causes me to change or reshuffle.

  • complete the writing of Headshots, my novel-in-progress. I think I have a couple of weeks left in the writing, after which I will let it sit and simmer a couple of weeks before going on with editing and publication steps.
  • publish my short story “It Happened At The Burger Joint”. This will require creation of a cover. I have an idea and have located a graphic I’d like to use, but have yet to contact the one I need to for permission to use it. This will be an e-book only, so the cover and formatting should go quickly, just a day or two.
  • create and publish the print book for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. This requires that I wait on a certain photo that a certain person has promised to take and let me use for the back cover. This should only take a few days to do, though waiting on proof copies will occupy some time, which I will fill with:
  • create and publish the print book for The Gutter Chronicles. My novella has actually picked up some sales recently. I know a few people who want it who don’t own e-readers. I’ve decided on the back cover image, so I just need to format the book for print and put the cover together. I think a week or so.
  • by that time I’ll be done editing Headshots and be ready to do the publication tasks: e-book formatting, e-book cover, print book formatting, print-book cover, upload to three places. At this time I don’t think I’m going to do a launch team. It didn’t work out so well with my last novel, so I’ll just publish and hope for the best.
  • write and publish another short story in the Danny Tompkins series, dealing with teenage grief at the loss of a parent. I’ve had the next story rolling around in my mind for some time, at least the start of it and subject matter. After Headshots is done I’ll be ready for something short. Since this involves new writing I’m not really sure how long it will take. That will give me four Danny Tompkins stories, which might be enough to put together in a short collection as an e-book.
  • Publish Father Daughter Day. The toughest part of this will be the cover, for which I’ll be doing my own “artwork”. I have a comic-like font in mind for the words, a font I’ve already been drawing out for practice. I have a scene in mind I’d like to use for the front cover, though finding a photo for it might be difficult, and drawing it will be impossible. So, I’m a little up in the air about it; also about what to use for a back cover. That may be easy, though, as I could use a synopsis of the book on a uniform or textured color. I think the internal formatting will be fairly easy. The hardest part will be figuring out appropriate page breaks. Poetry books tend to have lots of white space, and you want to end the poems at a place that makes sense.

After that, I’ll have a whole host of projects to chose between. Most likely a sequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant? Possibly a Civil War edition of Documenting America (for which research has already started)? Start getting serious about another volume of The Gutter Chronicles? Perhaps another Sharon Williams short story, probably titled “Sierra Kilo Bravo”? Or perhaps work on another Thomas Carlyle project? Time will tell.

April 2014 Book Sales

I do this every month—or almost every month: let you all know what my book sales are for the month just ended. Normally it’s a depressing number to share and thus a depressing post to write. I look for any silver lining I can as I write these posts.

The good news for April is that I had a definite up-tick in sales. I sold 8. That may not seem like much, but when Jan-Feb-Mar was 2, 2, and 3 respectively, that’s a huge jump. One of those was a self-sale of a paperback, two were paperback sales at CreateSpace, an Amazon subsidiary that pays higher royalties then Amazon, and five were e-books at Amazon, of three different titles. And, I sold one e-book of the Thomas Carlyle encyclopedia articles book. I really don’t expect to sell any of that, so that’s a plus. No sales at Smashwords or places it distributes to. This is the fourth straight month of no sales there.

All together I had sales of four different books this month, out of fourteen published. That’s obviously not great. I’d love to be selling multiple copies of all titles every month, but I’m a long ways from that happening. The sales were all of books, not short stories, so I’ll have a higher than average royalty per sale for the month. I’m not filling a gas tank on these royalties, but I’m not unhappy.

So here’s my sales table: the full size one first, then a reduced size to link to at Absolute Write.

2014-04 Book Sales Table

2014-04 Book Sales Table 545x242

My FB Ad Campaign

I can’t remember if I reported here, or only on my FB author’s page, that I received a $50 coupon from Facebook to use on an ad campaign. Prior to receiving that I had done a bunch of clicking on FB ad pages, going through the motions of placing an ad, but not really intending to. I just wanted to see how easy it would be. They [FB] of course knew about my clicks and thought “Ah ha! Someone who wanted to place an ad but stopped short. Let’s give him a coupon to run a small campaign, and we’ll have another advertiser.”

The coupon would expire in a couple of months, so even though I had nothing newly published worth advertising, I decided to go ahead and test the waters. I began the campaign on March 23 and set it to end on April 12. At any point I could change the ending day. Putting the ads together wasn’t actually difficult. It was all menu driven. Type in a title, some text, upload a photo, decide what the action is you want people to take, decide how the ads will be paid, click finished, and poof! Your ad is live. That sounds easy, but at many steps along the way I found I didn’t really understand what I was doing.

FB Ad Campaign SampleI decided to advertise my most recent novel, Operation Lotus Sunday, and an earlier novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Then I decided to also include The Candy Store Generation in the campaign. The last few days I decided to add an ad for Documenting America. When I did the ad for OLS, I decided I wanted two photos in the ad. I uploaded the front cover, then uploaded the back cover picture. Unfortunately, I didn’t know FB interpreted that as two different ads and, through the course of the campaign, the back cover photo ad was used much more than the front cover one.

  • Here are the stats from the campaign, as reported by FB.
  • Reach 31,355 (times the ads were seen)
  • Website clicks 135
  • Frequency 1.21 (no. of times a person saw the ads)
  • Avg cost per website click $0.37

And, the statistics reported by me:

  • Books sold: 1

FB Ad Campaign ResultsYes, during the ad campaign I sold only one of those books via Amazon (the links included in the ad), an e-book copy of DLA. So $50 spent generated $4.99 in sales, and less than that in revenue. I’m glad I wasn’t spending my own money.

Much of this process was uncomfortable. I could decide to pay for the ads by the website click, by impression, or another way. It’s interesting that my money lasted exactly till the end of the campaign. I’m sure FB’s algorithms knew how much per day I had to spend, monitored the actions being taken, and showed the ad more or fewer times according to how much budget and time were left.

The look of and information in the ads was limited, which was good, I guess, as I couldn’t have done much to spiff them up even if I wanted to. I’m not there on my knowledge of computer graphics.

One of the decisions I had to make was whether I wanted the ads associated with my personal FB page or my author page. I decided my author page. This really skewed my stats for that page. It went from “interacting” with about twenty to forty people a week (not all unique) to several thousand. Of course, FB was saying someone seeing my ad was an interaction. So for two weeks I interacted with thousands of people. Now, more than a week after the campaign, I’m back to twenty to forty a week, and the pages says that’s down 99.9% from a week ago.

The bottom line from all of this: I’m glad I wasn’t spending my own money. I don’t see myself ever running a FB ad campaign again, at least not until something happens that shows me it does some good.

More On Creating Book Covers

I now know enough about using G.I.M.P. to create book covers to be considered dangerous. Last night, on coming home from the office, since the wife was resting and there was no immediate need on either of our parts for supper, I went straight to The Dungeon and began tweaking my two latest book covers. The one for Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles about killed me to have to do, since it had been accepted on first submission. But the glaring typo right on the front cover had to be fixed. I also decided to add some quotation marks to the back cover.

I made the tweaks, saved it in three different file formats, and resubmitted it to CreateSpace. At the same time I resubmitted the interior of the book, which needed two typos corrected and a minor tweak to the margins. So here’s the final cover for TCEEA.

TCEEA print cover 01

After that, I went back to the cover for The Gutter Chronicles. Even though it’s an e-book cover (at this point, at least) and thus should be easier than a print book cover, I’m finding it harder. The problem is the text I’m pasting over the photo of the computer monitor needs to be put in a double perspective view. It’s tilted back from bottom to top and from right to left. This looks like it should be easy with G.I.M.P. You just select the text layer, call for Transform Tools > Perspective from the menu, grab the four corners of the layers one at time, layer by layer, and click Transform.

The problem is, my text is in several layers. This is because the normal spacing between lines of text in a word processor (and the G.I.M.P. text entering window is a simple word processor) is too great for them to look good. Printers call this “leading,” and so I put each major line of text into separate layers (text boxes) and move them closer together than a word processor will allow. But then, in doing the double perspective work, I need to do that with each layer of text.

That wouldn’t be a problem, I imagine, if I understood what I’m doing. when I grab the corners and move them, a table of six numbers changes, the numbers going from zeroes to other numbers, some positive, some negative. The numbers are to five significant digits, and control of the mouse is such that getting the edges of the text in the right place is difficult. Fortunately you can undo and re-do to your heart’s content.

Of the five text layers, only one seems to be in exactly the right spot. So I wrote down the six numbers for that one, and went to work on the others, but the mouse control to get the numbers on those other layers to be perfect is impossible. And you can’t just click on the table and enter the perspective numbers you want. Thus, I have five layers of text, one at a perfect perspective and four at odd perspectives. Here’s where the cover stands now.

TGC-Vol 1 Cover

You can see how the lines of text aren’t all at the right perspective. My name on the “nameplate” is good, but the others are all askew. I’m sure G.I.M.P. has a way to handle that. There are Path commands, which perhaps allows one layer to have the same attributes of another layer. Maybe there’s a way to get into that table of perspective numbers and enter them, and—poof—the layer will go to exactly the right perspective. I’m still learning, and have much, much more to learn.

But, for now, this is the cover. And, I just sold a copy! I posted the new cover and link to the Kindle version on Facebook, and one of the women in our Accounting Department bought one. We’ll see where it goes from here. I must get back to doing some writing, and set covers aside for a while, but more work in G.I.M.P. is not far away.

Hindrances to Writing

I had great plans to have my baseball novel done and published in time for the start of baseball season, or at least at the end of the first month of the season. Alas, I’m not going to make it. In fact, at this point I’d say I’ll be lucky to have it done by the first of August. So many interruptions, so many demands on my time. I have a new appreciation for young moms and dads who try to write when they have young children at home. I don’t know how they do it.

Here are the things that have prevented me from doing much writing on my novel this year. Some of these are writing or writing related.

  • Reading with my wife. She has wanted us to read aloud together in the evenings. So on about five evenings a week, sometimes more, we’ve been reading aloud from the Harry Potter series. Now, I know, I know, I need to spend time with her. But being gone for work for 11 1/2 hours, including commuting, fighting traffic, coming home and having to pull something together for supper, I’m not really in a mood to take an hour out of the few evening hours for reading aloud. [/rant]
  • Income taxes take a lot of time. Between our stock trading business, my writing business, and my mother-in-law’s taxes, it seems like weeks of my evening time between Jan 31 and April 15 are consumed by these d—— governments of ours. Even now, on tax deadline day, I get to the office with the m-i-l’s forms having been e-mailed here for printing, and I find one of the forms is blank. I also forgot to bring with me the copies of income statements I’m supposed to attach. So what do I do: drive 15 miles home and get the things I need, or file a quick extension? Either way I’ll have to go my my m-i-l’s place and have her sign something, then take it by the P.O. Last weekend lost tax documents that came in the mail couldn’t be found, so I had to generate the information from bank statements, taking hours for what should have taken 2 minutes. But, going home may be in the cards, because…
  • The wife is sick, and we have our 3-year-old grandson staying with us. Yesterday I received an urgent call shortly after 1:00 p.m. She felt really bad, and could I come home and help watch Ezra. So I did, getting home around 2. Had I realized I hadn’t filled out that one tax form properly, or that I had never stuck those other documents in my portfolio to take to work, I could have used the time for that, but I didn’t realize it. And, just now, the urgent call has come in for today. It looks as if I have to leave work again. She was interrupted by another call, so I need to wait until she calls back to know for sure if I have to head home.
  • Various publishing tasks have taken my time, mainly learning how to make my own book covers because hiring it done is too expensive, given how few sales I have, and one can only beg and borrow so many from people before you demean yourself. That includes a talented family member who could easily do them, but seems uninterested in my writing career. At least that’s writing related. Last night, in the few minutes I had to myself, I made another tweak to the cover for The Gutter Chronicles and uploaded it. Hopefully this time it will pass muster and the book will be added to the Smashwords premium catalog.
  • Tomorrow I conduct a live webinar for the International Erosion Control Association. I’ll have an audience paying to hear what I have to say about erosion control. That is taking a lot of my time, and gives me no flexibility during the working hours. If I go home today, I’ll have to work on it from there, getting my last presentations done.

I could say a few more things, but it will come off as worse of a rant than it is. Maybe the second half of April will be better than January, February, March, and the first half of April. And, while this rant mentions family members, since none of them ever read my blog, I’m going to let it publish as is.