Category Archives: self-publishing

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Operation Lotus Sunday, self-publishing, The Candy Store Generation

My FB Ad Campaign

April 22, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

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.

I 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

Yes, 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.

Carlyle, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

More On Creating Book Covers

April 18, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

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.

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.

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.

self-publishing, Writing

Hindrances to Writing

April 15, 2014 David Todd 2 Comments

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.

Carlyle, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles

More on Learning G.I.M.P.

April 11, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

So I’m still working on learning G.I.M.P., and the whole process of creating book covers with graphics software of good quality, not with PowerPoint, which is borderline-suitable for e-book covers but not for print books. I downloaded the program, and at first sat there stunned at what I was looking at on the screen. Three windows, not touching each other, and no idea of what to do next.

As I’ve told people before, the only two things you really need to know about software is how to open the program and how to get help. I had the program open, and I had downloaded the user’s manual, so I opened that and started reading. The first twenty pages were about how the program came to be, who the creators were, and how to use it with various operating systems. Someone needs to know all that, I suppose; I just wanted to know how to create a book cover.

Eventually I came to some things I needed. How to create a new graphic image. How to manipulate the graphic once you had it open. I must confess to some impatience on my part. I didn’t read all that far into the manual before going back to the program and proceeding. I don’t know which way would have been faster for me. Normally I learn well from written instructions. The problem with these instructions, however, were they weren’t really explaining things. They assumed someone understood certain terms they were using. But I didn’t. So I decided to just dive in with the menu system and see what I could accomplish.

Slowly, mistake by mistake, my cover for the print version of Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles began to come together. Fortunately G.I.M.P. has very good “un-do” features (and re-do as well) that allow you to see exactly which step it was you did incorrectly and go back to how it was before that step. A lot of things I didn’t understand. Often I had to erase things I’d done and start over. Eventually I did ok, created the cover, submitted it, and CreateSpace said it met all specifications for a print cover. The first time! Yea!

Last night, with three-year-old grandson Ezra in the house (the third night now), I didn’t expect to get much done. But another cover I had to work on was for The Gutter Chronicles. Not a print cover right away, but an e-book cover. Smashwords didn’t like the one I had, and wouldn’t distribute the e-book to their premium catalog. Thus it won’t be for sale at places such as Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and others. The cover was this.

I had wanted to show a computer screen with a little bit of office showing around it, and the words of the book title and author name on the screen. I put the words on the screen, in the largest font possible, and took a couple of photos at high resolution. Unfortunately, the flash obscured the words on the screen. I should have figured on that. So I sweet-talked the Spiff Lady in the office to do that cover for me, and used it as a place-holder for a future cover. Since I’m learning G.I.M.P., the future is now. So last night, after Ezra went to bed, crying, I headed to The Dungeon and got to work. I had uploaded the photograph I wanted to use to Dropbox. My plan was to just paste the words I wanted over the computer screen, on a white background, to cover over the flash image and make it look like a computer screen. Of course, the screen was tilted backwards a little, and the camera was at a horizontal angle to the screen. This mean I’d have to put in something other than a rectangle, and that the words should also show this dual perspective.

That was both more difficult and easier than I expected. I thought I would have to jump through many hoops to make that happen, but a writer friend, Veronica Jones-Brown, who has created a couple of covers for me, said that this should be on the Transform menu, probably as “Perspective”. Sure enough it was. It took me a while to figure out how to use it, but I started to get the hang of it. I created the opaque white layer, sized it to match the computer monitor in the photo, dragged it to where it needed to be, and pulled two edges into the perspective needed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close. Then I typed the words, in five separate text layers so that I could drag them where I needed them to be. Putting them in the same perspective as the monitor turned out to be difficult, and I don’t have it correct yet.

The other problem I had was that the monitor was too small, relative to the size of the full cover, to hold all the words and make them readable at small size. They would be okay at full size, but not in a thumbnail. So I decided to pull my name off the monitor, and create a black layer under the monitor to serve as a nameplate. I pulled it into perspective—not quite exact yet—and pasted my name in and pulled it to perspective as well. By this time I was a little handier with this perspective thing and the name looks good. I saved the graphic, and exported it also as PNG and JPEG files, saving them all to Dropbox. Showed it to the wife on my Nook, and she liked it.

So, here it is.

It’s not finished yet. Tonight, or this weekend, as Ezra allows, I’ll have to tweak it in several areas. The white line along the right side isn’t supposed to be there, and I need to improve the perspective on most of the layers. But, at this stage of my cover creation “career,” I’m not unhappy with this.

One thing I decided to do, at the last minute, was add “P.E.” to my nameplate. Non-engineers won’t understand, but engineers will, and that’s a good chunk of my target audience.

Carlyle, self-publishing

Learning GIMP

April 8, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

PowerPoint works well enough for e-book covers, but not for print book. The reason is PowerPoint produces graphics that will print at 72 to 96 dpi (dots per inch), whereas a print cover should really print at 300 dpi. And it’s not a matter of creating the cover in PowerPoint, loading it into a good graphics editor, and printing it like that. The dpi won’t increase to print quality. At least that’s as I understand it.

So my choices with regard to a cover for my current book I want to get into print, Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles, were:

– Do it myself; or hire it done.

– If I do it myself, use Photoshop Elements, which I have on our laptop; or buy a full-fledged graphics editor; or download a free graphics editor, such as GIMP.

– If I do it myself, with any of those three choices, I’ll also have to learn how to use the program.

Since I need to know how to do covers, and since my wife often travels with the laptop, or is otherwise engaged with it, I decided to download GIMP and use that to produce print covers. I’ve heard nothing but good things about GIMP, that it’s more than adequate for cover productions, and that everyone who’s used it has been please with it. But before, when I downloaded GIMP, I was actually at a site masquerading as GIMP, and got a nasty virus from it. This time I asked out I.T. people for a link to the correct site (since they have GIMP on their work computers, I knew they knew the right one). I downloaded it late last week, and spent a lot of time on Friday and Saturday trying to figure it out. Then last night I knuckled down, using the small amount I learned, and created a cover. Here it is:

I’m not saying it’s great art, or that it will win any self-published cover awards, or that it’s even the one I’ll use. I lost the “pedestal” from the e-book cover, as I don’t see how to do that in GIMP (something to learn at some point). But I think today I’ll create a PDF from it and upload it to CreateSpace and see if it passes muster. If it does, I’ll at least use it as the cover for the proof copy.

self-publishing

Book Sales in March 2014

April 1, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

Another month, another time to report book sales. I could go with the good news first.

The good news is that my book sales increased by 50 percent over February.

The bad news is that means they went from 2 sales to 3 sales. I was more aggressive in talking to people about my books, and as a consequence I sold one copy of Operation Lotus Sunday, to a woman in my writers group. I also availed myself of the $50 coupon Facebook gave me for running ads, and have put four ads up. So far I’ve spent a little more than half the budget, have had 43 clicks to one of the book websites, and have had one sale of the advertised books. Whether that sale came from the ad I have no idea.

So, here’s the two tables, the big one for easy viewing and a smaller one to link to in my self-publishing diary at Absolute Write.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Operation Lotus Sunday, self-publishing, The Candy Store Generation

My First Ad Campaign

March 25, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

Not too long ago, I decided to go through the motions of placing an ad for my books on Facebook. I went through the clicking process, saw what was involved, learned a little, then closed out of it. FB, of course, tracked my clicks. A couple of weeks later I received an e-mail from FB, saying it looked like I had tried to place an ad, and giving me a $50.00 coupon for an ad campaign, with a deadline of April 16.

I let this sit there a few days, not really believing it, and not having time to go back and figure the creating an ad process all over again. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I put writing tasks aside and decided to get on with using the coupon. I clicked on the link provided in the e-mail, and an appropriate page came up.

I decided to advertise Operation Lotus Sunday, it being my latest and probably my best novel. I also planned to use some of the coupon to advertise Doctor Luke’s Assistant and The Candy Store Generation. I did OLS first. A few clicks, with the budget set at $20.00, and I had my ad for OLS. Then I saw I could have multiple images for it. So I started adding images to the ad. I went up to five, but did something wrong with three of them, and so had only two. That was fine with me. I had the front cover and the photo of the Stone Forest from the back cover. So I clicked to place the ad, had to wait a few minutes while FB approved it, then went to see what I had done.

Then I realized I had actually created two ads! Oh no, I thought, what have I done? Moreover, what have I done to my budget, which was $20 out of the $50 coupon? I couldn’t really tell. Since I had to enter credit card information, even though I was using a coupon, I figured the worst that would happen was I might use up $40 on OLS instead of $20. Again, no problem. So I went ahead to create an ad for DLA, using the other $10. It was fairly easy. I entered links and words, and clicked to go to the next page, which would be the budget information. Except, it didn’t go to the next page; instead it brought up the page that said thank you for placing the ad, it would be reviewed by FB within so many minutes. After those minutes the ad showed up with a budget of $20.

I thought “Now what have I done?” I figured the worst that could happen was I would be billed $10 over and above the coupon. So I decided to place the ad for OLS, and did so going through the same procedure. Again it didn’t ask me to set a budget, and the ad went live with a budget of $20.00. So was I potentially going to be out $30?

I went to the ad analytics page, and learned a few things. FB took the budget as an ad campaign budget, not for a single ad. And the two different images on the OLS ad were indeed considered two different ads. So in fact my budget was too low. I quickly changed my budget to $50 for the campaign.

So, my campaign is off, now in its third day. FB gives quite a few analytics to look through. So far I’ve spent $6.11, based on the number of clicks on the ad and click-through rate to the book pages at Amazon. At that rate my ads should run for eight or nine days. But I’m going to make a couple of changes. On the second OLS ad I’ll change the image from the Stone Forest photo to the entire book cover, front and back. And I’m going to add an ad for Documenting America. Might as well.

Alas, as of an hour ago the ads had resulted in no sales reported by Amazon. I sure hope something sells in the next eight or nine days.

Carlyle, critique group, poetry, self-publishing, Writing

Acquiring an Editor’s Eye

March 21, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

My time in the poetry wars, as I call the days I spent at Poem Kingdom, was my first time to begin to acquire what I recently termed an “editor’s eye”. At that site I critiqued hundreds of poems, first as a participant, later as a moderator and still later as an administrator. That actually wasn’t my first time and place to do that. I had already been critiquing at Sonnet Central for a few months, and had been in a writing critique group for a couple of years.

After Poem Kingdom there was Poem Train (with it’s critique forum Café Poetica), Poem 911 (which died in the whole EZ Boards hacking fiasco), and Absolute Write’s Poetry Critique Forum. In all of these I’d estimate that I critiqued somewhere around 1,000 poems. No, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I copied off a bunch of them, but not all I’m sure, and have them in notebooks, preserved for posterity and research, should I become a famous author who someone ever wants to research.

A thousand critiques at an average of perhaps 300 words each is 300,000 words. If anything I’m probably short with that. That’s a lot of time and effort given to critiquing. What I did was analyze the poem as a work-in-progress. Literary criticism—whatever that is exactly—was not the goal, but rather helping the poet bring the poem to a state of completion as the best poem possible for the subject matter and desires of the poet. In short, it was to be an editor. Not a cheerleader. Not a critic. But an editor.

During the years, ever since around 1998, I’ve also been in writers critique groups in real life, and one time on-line. It was the same thing: look at works in progress and consider how they might be made better in the writer’s quest for publication. These weren’t written, or at least not type-written and posted for all the world to see. A handful of us sat around a table and marked manuscripts in pen/pencil and gave oral crits. Still, it was the same type of editing, it seems to me. Sometimes I was most concerned with what is essentially proofreading. At other times it was line edits: looking at grammar and sentence structure to see how the writer’s intent can be better communicated. Still other times it was structural edits. I remember critiquing one piece at an e-mail critique group where the woman described a character as timid. Then she had the girl go up to a fellow student she knew of but didn’t know and offer help to her. It was completely out of character. I pointed that out; I’d call it a structural edit. Still other times I’d do a big picture edit, such as is the plot interesting? Are there holes or conflicts in the plot? Those kinds of things. Different types of edits as the situation arose.

Now I’m editing my next publishing project, a book titled Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. These are public domain articles that I found in five different places, plus a few notes that others have written about them (explanatory notes, not critique). I know I’ve written about this project before. These twenty-one articles have never been gathered before, so I decided to do so and add it to the Carlyle bibliography. I pulled the publisher’s note and editor’s introduction from the 1897 re-printing of sixteen of them, and pulled some references to them that Carlyle made in his own letters. But I knew I needed to write an introduction of my own. So I did. Last night I sent the much-critiqued Intro to my critique group, which meets next Tuesday. We’ll see what they say.

But I’ve had other things to do as well, things that an editor would do. Such trivial things as deciding how much info to give about each article. How the text should appear on the page. Whether to break up long paragraphs (I didn’t), whether to modernize archaic punctuation techniques (I did). How to make lists and tables work best in modern typesetting and e-book formats. I suppose some of this is book production, but it feels like editing to me.

So through all of this I’ve been acquiring my editor’s eye. They (that is, various experts and claimed-to-be experts) advise that one who self publishes should hire an editor before ever publishing their works. I think that’s good advice, in general, but a very expensive practice. Simple line editing for an average length probably costs $300 dollars. Add proofreading, structural edit, and big picture edit, and you will have a large editing bill. I don’t know about others, but I don’t have $500 or $1000 to pay for editing. Therefore I just have to do the best job of producing the book with the skills I have.

So maybe all my editing work through the years, even that from before I realized I was editing, is helping me with my self publishing. I’d like to think so.

self-publishing

Book Sales, Jan-Feb 2014

March 5, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

I didn’t report my book sales in January. There wasn’t much to report. Nor is there much more to report in February. But I don’t want to hide this information, so here I’ll post it, and comment after.

Yes, that’s right. Two sales in January and another two sales in February, four all together. The best news is they are of four different books. One was a print book, the other three e-books.

I still don’t do much by way of marketing. Occasionally I make a post on FB, or tell someone individually (online or in real life) that I have books for sale. At some point, perhaps next year, I’ll have to quite taking all of my writing life time for writing and instead use some of it for marketing.

Below is a smaller size of the table, for linking to from the Absolute Write forums.

Carlyle, self-publishing

3 Years of Self-Publishing

February 13, 2014 David Todd 1 Comment

T oday is the third anniversary of when I put my first self-published item up for people to buy. It’s been a wild ride. Not exactly successful, nor can I say, I suppose, unsuccessful. I have another year to go on this experiment before I make some hard decisions.

Also, I’m going to insert here a small image of the draft cover of my Thomas Carlyle book, so that I can link it at the Absolute Write forums and get some critique on it.

David A Todd