THE MISSING IMPRINT

I took both my books (HOT STATUS and MAD MINUTE) down earlier this evening—and put them both back up at the same moment. I expect their listings will be gone for six or seven hours.

The annoying thing is, I may have to do it all over again tomorrow.

What's up?

I happened to read a blog by writer Lindsay Buroker about whether it's a good idea to list a personal imprint name when you Kindle your indie book.

I used one—on a whim. Just a small and very personal joke, really, decipherable by no living person.

On the Kindle publishing page, Amazon says filling in the Publisher box is optional. If you are the author of the book, they suggest putting your own name there. Or the name of your publishing company. They make no comment concerning "fake" publishing companies.

If you leave the box empty, when the book is published there is no listing for "Publisher" in the Product Details. Just the listing for "Sold by" (Amazon Digital Services, Inc). I presume if you fill in the box with your name it will say just that—Publisher: Your Name.

I was surprised by the comments of Buroker's readers. Many were vehemently opposed to putting a made-up publisher's name in that box.

They saw it as a fraud, a trick designed by evil and shameless writers to pull the book bag over the heads of potential buyers.

Apparently there are many readers out there who refuse to contaminate their eyes with the text of indie books. These sensitive folk check to see if a publisher is named in the description of the book in question. If there is none, they hightail it away, muttering "unclean, unclean!"

News to me...

The theory is this: Any publisher's name sanctifies the text, even a whimsical one you have to presume belongs to some whimsical—but nevertheless legitimate—small press. If a writer provides a bogus name, he or she is clearly perpetrating a fraud on the reading public.

Everyone knows publishers put out lousy books from time to time, but purists know any book not anointed by a real publisher's name is FAR more likely to be dross.

Using a fake publisher falsely suggests the book has been vetted by professionals, has survived the slush pile, has benefited from paid editors and proofreaders.

Folks, the stigma of self publication is alive and well.

Some readers of the Buroker's blog defended the imprint route, saying they intend to publish other writers beside themselves (eventually). And they remind folks they have just as much right to publish books as anyone else.

Let the market separate the wheat from the chaff, right?

Anyway, I decided to end my personal pattern of deceit by removing the fake publisher's name from my listing—and taking it off my title page image (which meant revising and re-sending the mobi file.)

The reason I might have to do it all over again is that I forgot to remove the information from the "Dublin core" section of the opf files. I have to wait until the books go live again to see if my "publisher" still lays claim to my books. [Update: There is no mention of the "publisher" in the Product Details section of the display page. Is it lurking in some secret spot? Time will tell...]

Whether or not I will ever create a "real" publishing imprint is up in the air. Now we're talking about starting an actual business. Government officials become involved. Money will have to change hands.

I hate all that...

MAD MINUTE IS LIVE

The bulk of the two-book series went up on Kindle today—along with a slightly revised version of HOT STATUS. This time I only changed the bonus material, making sure the sample chapters of MAD MINUTE will match the ones from the actual book.

I also added two chapter of HOT STATUS at the end of MAD MINUTE. Now both books promote one another.

HOT STATUS remains at 99 cents, which means I'm stuck with the 35% royalty. MAD MINUTE is starting at $2.99—the lowest price you can set for 70% royalty. It will be interesting to see if the cheaper book can drum up business for its higher-priced cousin.

When I entered the information during the Add New Book process, I fudged a bit. With HOT STATUS, the title of the "series" was "the prequel to MAD MINUTE."

This time, the title of the series was: "the sequel to HOT STATUS."

The purpose here is to load the parenthetical remark that follows the title of the book whenever it's mentioned. The books are linked together now and will always cross-promote each other.

In the case of a real series, it would be best to give the overall title, but with the number of the book added:

BLASTER (MONKEY-BOY - Book 3)

Still not strictly what Kindle appears to be asking for, but folks seem to use it (or abuse it) in this fashion.

Anyway, I've been too busy the last few weeks to look into the matter of promotion. I decided to wait until I had both books live.

I was also going to consider submitting to Smashwords, which would put the books on other markets. But I may hold off a bit on that—so I can consider Kindle Select instead.

Can't do both.

BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

When I started this blog I was planning a radical procedure on a book: a surgery.

Not a trim, but a partition.

I had a book on Kindle for a while, but I took it down with the idea of breaking it into three parts. In the months that followed, I managed to excise the first chunk of the book and massage it for Kindling. Beefed it up 40 % and so forth.

Eventually, the book went back on Amazon under the name HOT STATUS.

I went to work preparing the second part.

In the meantime, I was researching other avenues of e-publication. That got me to look into Smashwords: an e-book distributor (to Nook, iBooks, etc.). It seemed a good way to reach the other 30 % of the market (after the behemoth Amazon).

Smashwords recently started accepting e-pub files—but only for those markets that accept e-pubs. They still want a doc file for everything else.

I read several books by the founder, Mark Coker. His style book, his marketing book, his "secrets" book. They're all free in a variety of formats.

As I was reading Secret #5 I ran into a problem with my plan to slice and dice my book.

Although the consensus of opinion is that e-books are running shorter and shorter, Coker says his best sellers average 80k words.

(He says the best-selling stuff are books in a series that can be read in any order; he says they should each be over 70k words.)

He says some authors try to cut corners and deliver a full-sized book in chunks. He says readers HATE this.

Made me rethink my plan.

The first chunk of my book was all back story, and I always debated including it in the "real" book in the first place.

Setting this chunk loose made this possible: a shorter book that can be priced permanently at 99 cents. That meant opting for the 35% royalty, which got me out of download or delivery fees. That meant I could safely add a gallery of images (of the Nike radar and missile set). Plus three bonus chapters from the beginning of the sequel.

In its present form, HOT STATUS would cost 18 cents to deliver, had I published it with the 70% option. An annoying amount of money to give up.

I've decided my first operation was a success—the book will stay.

Anyway, I'm working on the "sequel" to HOT STATUS, which will be put out under the title of the original book (MAD MINUTE).

There have been some glitches in the process.

Quite some time ago, when I first tested the waters of Kindle, the idea was to present a doc file to Amazon. Or, for more control, an html file delivered out of Word 03 or 07. My version of Word is ancient (97) and didn't provide the right html file. I hauled my rtf down to the library and used their Word 07.

Right away there were problems.

Smart punctuation came out as narrow black boxes—the same for left and right double quotes as for em dashes. Rewriting in the html file meant copy-and-pasting these boxes into the appropriate spot.

And I did a LOT of rewriting in the html code.

Since then, I've developed a simpler method of creating an html file (running the text version of the book through Mobipocket Creator, then opening it in Notepad++). At the vary least this gets me out of a trip to the library. Plus I can use macros to ease the rewriting process.

The problem now is that Word's auto-correct feature, which I used in the original writing, produced errors. The so-called em dashes created by auto-correct LOOKED like em dashes, but were NOT em dashes. In fact, even Word didn't know what they were. When I tried to convert em dashes back to double hyphens, only a handful of them were found and converted.

During the transition to a text file, these mystery items came out as question marks.

A freaking nightmare!

As I mentioned before, I will no longer use auto-correct when I compose new material for Kindle. I'll use double hyphens for dashes and three periods for ellipses (in both cases, without spaces around them). These are the easiest to find in the html version for find-and-replace conversion to smart punctuation—a process that takes just a few minutes.

Furthermore, I really need to get out of the habit of heavy use of either ellipses or (to a lesser extent) dashes in my writing.

Multiple ellipses in a single paragraph open you up to a variety of spacing in a Kindle—it looks sloppy.

And while dashes embedded inside paragraphs work fairly well (but with a similar irregularity of spacing), they can be a disaster at the end of a line.

I will now only use a dash at the end of a paragraph if that paragraph is less than 20 characters long—for short bits of interrupted dialogue, for instance. That way I don't suffer the ugly consequences of running up against the right margin (in any reasonably sized font).

Same for ellipses.

Anyway, now I'm proofing the remaining chunk of the book.

I couldn't go back to the Word 07 generated html, so I processed an rtf file I had tried to keep current with changes to the book file (html). I know there were probably lapses in this process (which made rewriting the book a genuine chore). At some point I need to compare the previously "published" version of the book with the current version. I'm not looking forward to that.

In the meantime, I'm proofing to find missing dashes and ellipses.

It's an adventure of make-work I hope to avoid in the future.

By the way, despite this botched business of book surgery, it might still make sense to write shorter books (Mark Coker not withstanding). I think the trend is there. Author K.W.Jeter says the future will be for "shorter, faster, pulpier" books.

We'll see...

I'll get back on track (promoting the e-book) in a later post.

PROOFING AND KINDLING

Before you can Kindle, you have to proofread your book. This can take awhile.

Remember, unless you send the thing out to be dry-cleaned, you are the final barrier between your nasty mistakes and a reader's outraged eyeballs.

So take your time. Get it right. Then take some more time.

Here's what I do:

I open the html file of the book in my browser (Firefox) and slide the right edge over until I have a window about five inches wide. I hit Control+Plus a few times to pump up the font size.

About this big is big enough.

 

You want to be able to spot the little stuff, like curly quotes going the wrong way, or straight quotes that have survived the transformation process. Especially if you've done some revisions in the html version of your book. It's easy to forget to convert the apostrophes (single right quotes) in contractions.

You could do this: in Notepad++, do a search for ' and " – just to make sure you haven't left any behind. Search also for double spaces and double periods that might have survived the conversion to the text version.

Actually, you really should have made those searches back when the book was in your word processor. And speaking of proofing in ms. form, it's suggested you put your book in a mono-spaced font (like Courier New) and boost the size for easy viewing.

You may already know that printing the book out makes some problems easier to see. In printed form, you can also read it backward—taking it a page at a time, but starting at the end. Keeps you from getting caught up in the story.

Some folks like to read their books out loud, if only to hear what their dialogue sounds like.

Another technique is to have your computer read the book to you. I use a text-to-speech engine called DSpeech. (There are others.) Believe me, when you drop the r out of through, you'll hear the difference.

(Okay, when I wrote the previous sentence I typed "head" instead of "hear". I'd have heard that error pretty easily. too.)

Having your book read out loud gives you the chance to pick up on unconscious rhymes and sound repetitions—some of which you might not be going for.

If you fix your problems in Notepad++, you might want to keep a window open with Word or another wp, so you can copy and paste new text there to make a quick check for spelling errors.

By the way, if you've used Notepad++ for a while, you will have noticed when you double click a word to highlight it, all other instances of that word are also highlighted. Might help you see when you've accidentally a word twice (not just in a row, but twice in nearby sentences).

When the book is perfect, give it a spin in your Kindle Previewer. Note that if you want to confirm all the buttons are working (for Tables of Content and cover), you have to Open the opf file, not the html version of your book (as you've probably been doing to see the book in your browser).

If you read my posts on punctuation, you'll recall I obsess about what will work in what version of Kindle and at what font size. Further experiments have given me to conclude you should ignore anything that happens in Kindle font size 7 or 8 (the largest), and in Fire in font size 9 and 10 (also top end). And you really have to go down to Kindle 6 or Fire 7 to find a reasonably sized text. Above that, all hell breaks loose.

Generally, ellipses survive pretty well in Fire, but at the highest fonts you can't count on so-called non-breaking spaces. Even WORDS get torn apart at the highest fonts.

In all fonts, when the text hits the right margin, stuff happens to dashes. Using a non-breaking space in front means the dash will not appear at the center of the space between words—which I find annoying.



I now use a regular space surrounding an en dash, and only in the middle of paragraphs. The dash is centered; I go away happy. (Em dashes may cling to the word on the left, with a space to the right. I find that annoying, too.)



In any font size, at the ends of lines you can lose the quote from interrupted dialogue (en dashes) or the whole dash-quote combo (em dashes). I don't want to show you the carnage: Test it for yourself.

I now only use the dash at the end of interrupted dialogue when the line is no more than about 20 characters. Same with ellipses at the end of dialogue. Both will survive in tact on that single line, though in the higher fonts the right margin looms close.

And I pretty much eliminate the use of ellipses in the middle of paragraphs. Mainly because I'm getting too annoyed at the variation of spacing (with the non-breaking space and period version). I already rejected the small cluster of dots created by the ellipsis code (…).

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Once your book looks as good as it can be expected in Previewer, you're just about ready to Kindle.

But first, write your blurb, figure out what your category is (you can pick two), and slap together seven key search words.

Now, if you haven't already done it, go online to Amazon and sign up for an account. Go to your dashboard and click the button "Add new title."

 

You first have to decide if you want to sign up for Select. If you do, Kindle gets your book exclusively for three months (and the option to go another three months is automatically selected, so beware). I think the main attraction here is the ability to give your book away for free for five days out of every three months. This might stimulate "sales" and boost your rating.

 

Next, they want some information about your book: "Book name". Also, if it's part of series, they want that name, too. (Series names appear in parentheses after your book title when the item comes up on a search. Some folks like to add the number in the series title, so that appears, too.)

Next, you can put in the name of your fake publisher. And paste the text of your blurb in the Description.

You might overlook "Book contributors," thinking there aren't any: You wrote this thing all by yourself, right? But this is where you need to go to put your name on the book, so you better click Add contributors.

English language is already selected. Input your publication date if you want, and your ISBN if you happen to have one. Tell them if the book is somebody else's (public domain) or all yours.



Next, Categories and Search keywords.

Then you browse to where your book cover sits on your computer and let them upload it.



Decide on Digital Rights Management, yes or no. There's a lot of debate over this one, so good luck. What you do here and now stays with your book forever—they tell me.



Finally, you browse to your book file and upload it.

Which brings you to another decision. If you've just used Previewer, and the book looked great, you should upload your mobi file, which was created by KindleGen when you clicked Open Book. You'll find it in a new folder added inside your book's folder called "compiled-content.opf." Open that folder to find the mobi file. If you've messed around here before, creating various (failed) versions of your book, check the date on the mobi file and upload the latest one. If that's the one you liked best. (If you mess up and upload the wrong file, you can always go back and update with the right file. Just hope a lot of people haven't already bought your book before you figure that out.)

If you click your html file, the book will have problems—no Tables of Content, and so forth. So don't do that.

And after going to all that trouble to perfect your custom-coded book, I doubt you'll want to give in and return to your doc file...

After the book is uploaded and "successfully" converted, you might want to check the truth of that statement by viewing the book. When I downloaded their mobi file, it wouldn't work in Previewer for Fire. And the online Previewer also blew up and said come back later. Is this important? Kind of depends on whether the book looks okay after it goes live. Unfortunately, except for the 10 % sample you can get for free, you'll have to buy a copy of your book to seek what it looks like in all its excellent glory.

Click Save and Continue...to continue.

On the next page you'll set your selling territories and select a royalty. Lot of things to consider about the second item. If you want to price the book below $2.99 (for promotional reasons), you'll have to go with 35%. (You'll also avoid delivery fees [fifteen cents per megabyte].)



Choose 70% and you'll have to select a price between $2.99 and $9.99. But remember, Amazon can set the price lower to match some other site's selling point, and your royalties are based on sell price, not list price. Plus, delivery fees will be added on.

Prices on foreign editions can be tied to the U.S. version, which makes life much simpler.



You'll be given a chance to put your book in the lending library. Books borrowed there get a pro-rated share of some big promotional chunk of money Amazon puts up.



Finally, they'll want you to assure them you really are the one allowed to publish and prosper from the sale of this book. Say yes to that and you're off to the races: Save and Publish.



When the button called "Go to my bookshelf" becomes active, click it. You're done.

In ten to twelve hours—more or less—the book will be live on Amazon. And you can start checking the Sales page. What fun.

Next time, some ideas about promoting your book.

HOT STATUS ARRIVES

If you've been following this blog, you know I've just put the first part of a two volume series of novels on Kindle (basically a prequel and a sequel).

I've placed the cover image on the sidebar. It's a link to the Amazon page where it lives now.

The second volume should be ready in a month or so.

Stay tuned.