THREE FREE DAYS - THE AFTERMATH

The last of my three free days (for HOT STATUS) was Sunday. Here's what I learned.

I had listed my book on fifteen sites. Five of them put the information up for the weekend.

Of the sites that declined, several appear defunct, on closer look:

Armadillo Ebooks loads up on the Web with a listing for April (2013) as the latest.

Book Deal Hunter shows March as the most recent post.

100 Free Ebooks kept giving me a 404 error: Page not found.

Free Book Dude is relatively current, but when I checked on Friday, the last posting was Wednesday. They didn't mention books going free over the weekend. (But I didn't go back and check Saturday.)

Frugal Freebies is current, and packed with all sorts of free items, including books and including HOT STATUS.

That Book Place turns out to be a Website for a book store in Madison, IN. No book listings, just information about a Book Fair from last month sometime.

The five places that listed my book were Book Goodies, Ebook Lister, Frugal Freebies, It's Write Now, and Sweetie's Picks. You can find links to those sites here.

Sweetie's Picks put up the most information: Book cover, description, my bio and photo, plus a link to this blog. They were the only one to request a photo.

One glitch I discovered at another site: When I submitted my book description to Book Goodies, the text showed up double-spaced. I was pasting into the form from Notepad, and this was only site to have the text go double-spaced. I decided it was just the way they did things, on their form. Wrong. The description came out double-spaced on the site, too. I'll have to watch that in the future.

So what happened during the free period?

Not a whole hell of a lot, it turns out.

A number of the listing sites refused to even consider a book with no reviews, and apparently ten of those who DID consider my un-reviewed book, said no.

Maybe that goes for picky readers, too. Folks not willing to click their mouse for a free book with no reviews listed.

Or maybe they just hated the very idea of the book. Hard to tell at this point.

By the end of the first 24 hours, I'd had 47 downloads from Amazon.com, five from UK, five from DE, and one from CA.

Fifty-eight total.

That went up another twelve over the next two days.

Maybe it's the weekend effect going on here, folks off doing other stuff, not haunting Web sites looking for freebies.

Or maybe you always get about 83% of the total on the first day, 14% the second day, and 3% the third day.

Law of Diminishing Returns?

I guess I need to try again, with the same book, during the middle of the week. I have two more free days for HOT STATUS coming.

Maybe a Tuesday/Wednesday combo. That would at least eliminate the weekend factor from the equation.

Time will tell.

Onward and upward, or something like that...

HOT STATUS IS FREE (FOR THREE DAYS)

Just a reminder my Kindle book HOT STATUS (the prequel to MAD MINUTE) will be free from now until midnight Sunday, Pacific Daylight Time (I think.) A single-click on the image of the cover (left-hand sidebar, second book down) should take you right to Amazon.

So rush over there and grab a copy before they're all gone!

Actually, I don't think that's how it works...

HOT STATUS is a kind of techno-thriller involving a now defunct air defense missile system called Nike Hercules. I worked as a radar mechanic at one of the many US sites in the late 60s. (Told you it was defunct.) The site was out on Sandy Hook, New Jersey, that appendix-shaped spit of sand that's aimed at the heart of Manhattan.

The sites in Continental US were all dismantled in the early 1970s, about the time the World Trade Center buildings were going up. If the 9/11 attacks had taken place thirty years earlier, could we have shot down at least one of those planes? I don't know for sure, but the guy headed for the South Tower passed over a plethora of air defense sites in Northern New Jersey on his way to the target.

And I have to tell you, we routinely checked our radars by locking up on commercial airliners...

BOOK PROMOTION

Okay, so you've written your book, you've formatted it for Kindle. You've proofed the stuffing out of the thing and put it up on KDP.

The book's live—you can visit the catalog page on the Web.

Now what?

Maybe you've got a blog hardly anybody goes to. You make an announcement, hope for the best.

You Tweet your little lungs out, hoping someone will hear.

Basically, you're looking for two things (not sales, that's another world altogether): you need to get traffic to your site, and you need reviews of your book—preferably good reviews.

Unless the book is free, potential readers like to see someone has already made the plunge and survived to tell about it.

I've read it takes 1500 paid downloads to generate a review.

And 2500 FREE downloads.

Makes my head spin, that last one.

There are Web sites where you can go to offer free copies of your book in exchange for a review. Google them.

If your blog has any readers, you could ask some of them to check your book out for free. Some writers have collected a cadre of beta readers, who see stuff in manuscript form.

Maybe you can find other writers willing to swap.

But be aware Amazon is squirrelly about writers reviewing another writer's works. They're afraid folks might organize mutual admiration societies to populate each other's catalog sites with glowing reviews.

Amazon tends to weed them out.

Maybe fellow writers can appeal to THEIR fans for folks who would review somebody's new book. Worth a shot.

So, writers: Don't trade reviews, trade fans.

Writers without connections...should MAKE connections.

But barring that, another way to try goosing the process is to hold an Amazon giveaway. Go Kindle Select and get yourself on the FREE list for a few days.

That's what I'm about to do.

First, get the book scheduled. Go to your Amazon dashboard (aka, the Bookshelf), click a book, and select Edit book details. Click the Promotions Manager button in the KDP Select section.

From there you can type in a title and select start and end days. Confirm that information on the next page...

 

...and you're on your way.

So how do your get the word out?

Start by writing a blog about it, I guess. [viz: this blog post]

Then look into the many Web sites that will list your book for free—when it's coming out for free.

Some of these sites may be going away soon. Typically, these folk are Amazon Affiliates who get a piece of the action when someone clicks their way to Amazon from the promotion site.

Recently Amazon changed their policy, limiting the benefits for transactions that are strictly free, with no paid books.

Still, many of these free book list sites are still in business. They have a following to keep happy; they're looking for ways to stay afloat. Some offer services to writers: paid advertisement of books, "feature" positioning of books—if the author is willing to cough up some bucks.

There's even a site (ebookbooster) that—for $40—will register your book on nearly fifty of those "free books" sites.

Or you can visit the ebookbooster, harvest their list of promotion sites, and approach them on your own for free.

This is what I did.

I went through most of the list and added my book to 15 sites.

Now, the sites make no guarantee they'll select your book. (Actually, one site "guarantees" you'll be selected, for $5.)

Many of them have requirements I couldn't meet. They want your book to have multiple reviews, averaging 4.0 or better.

Several of them would like you to subscribe to their newsletter.

At least one of them REQUIRES a Twitter handle.

Here are twenty-five of the sites I visited.

First, the fifteen where I submitted a listing:

Armadillo Ebooks

Book Deal Hunter

Book Goodies

Free Book Dude

Frugal Freebies

Hunt for Freebies

Indie Book of the Day

Kindle Books and Tips

100 Free Ebooks

Sweetie's Picks

That Book Place

Ebook Lister

Freebooks

It's Write Now

Ereader Perks

My favorite site for submitting a book was Freebooks. You enter your ASIN, use their calendar gizmo to pick start and end dates, then Submit. Your book cover pops up with the free dates for you to Confirm. Done!

Other sites where I did not submit:

Digital Bookend – required a Twitter handle to submit.

Digital Book Today – required 18 reviews, averaging over 4.0.

Ereader News Today – required reviews.

Ebooks Free Daily – required at least five reviews.

Free Digital Reads – required reviews.

Free Kindle Books – wants a donation.

Free Kindle Ebooks – requires your book be free on Tuesday.

Free Stuff Times – a general listing of free stuff, including books; no covers or book description shown, just a list.

I Need Freebies – appears to be the same site as above, from another angle.

Book Pinning – seems to be just a site for submitting your cover image.

And a bunch of others I never got around to contacting. Check out Ebook Booster for the entire list. Or hire them to do all this for you.

Until the actual promotion dates, I won't know if any of the places that took my submission will actually list the book.

Another site (Indie Book Bargains) is a UK site that suggested my listing would be very low priority (for a lack of reviews). They offered to list me as an author willing to give a free copy of my book in exchange for a review. So I did. So far, without results.

And that kind of makes sense. There are a gazillion free books available out there, any one of which you can get WITHOUT the obligation to write a review after reading it.

Beyond Ebook Booster, you can Google "free Kindle books" and find more sites willing to consider listing your free book. Some also list so-called "bargain" books: books for 99 cents, or books under three bucks, in some cases. Do a search, see what's out there.

My book HOT STATUS will be free Friday through Sunday, next week (June 21 – June 23).

I'll let you know how all this turns out...

DROP CAPS IN KINDLE

Making an ebook work like a "real " book is the challenge we face every day in Kindle World.

Take drop caps.

It's often said, the closest we can come to a drop cap in Kindle is something one might more accurately call a LIFT cap: an enlarged initial letter that sticks above the first line of a chapter-starting paragraph.

But actual, book-like drop caps ARE of course available in Kindle Fire and Paperwhite, because they both use the kf8 version of Kindle, which pays attention to “float” and “padding” commands.

But what about the classic Kindle and the DX, both of which use the older mobi version of code? (As do the iOS apps.) How can you benefit from drop caps in Fire and not leave the poor relations out in the cold?

Here's a trick you can use.

Add code to the style section of your HTML file that divides the action between Fire mode (kf8) and the Kindle "classic" (mobi):

   @media amzn-kf8
   {span.dropcaps
      {font-weight:bold;
      font-size:338%;
      float:left;
      padding-right:0.1em;
      margin-top:-0.35em;
      margin-bottom:-0.35em;}
   }

  @media amzn-mobi
   {span.dropcaps
      {font-size:2em;
      font-weight:bold;}
   }

Getting the big letter to play nicely with the body of the paragraph will take some fiddling with the padding and margin specs. (And, as always, these big letters will look better in some font sizes than others. Nothing you can do about that.) It will probably turn out you need different specs for different letters. You can call out those differences by creating a separate span name and applying it to the appropriate paragraph in your book. Some letters may share specs, and can be clumped up in one listing in the style section, with the names separated by commas (.dropcap_a, .dropcap_e, etc.), below which you need only give the changed spec. You are unlikely to need every letter in the alphabet for a given book.

The code deploys like this:

   <p><b><span class="dropcaps">T</span>his particular morning</b>, ten-year-old Trevor Blake [etc].</p>
 
In the screen shots I've got four parallel paragraph starts. The first uses italics and bold to highlight the first few words. The big initial is based on <big><big>...</big></big>.

The second is the drop cap, the mobi set at 2 em, in bold italics.

The third uses <big><big><big>...</big></big></big>, highlighting in bold and roman type.

The fourth uses the dropcap code, in roman; again: 2 em font-size.

First up, Kindle Fire, font size 1:


Paperwhite looks pretty much the same.

Now here's a look at original Kindle in font size 6 (the largest reasonable-looking font for this device).

This shot just reveals paragraphs three and four. At the top, the result of three <big> tags. Below that, a 2 em capital from the "dropcaps" span for mobi. As you can see, the 2 em capital appears identical to what you get with three levels of <big> tags.

By the way, going above 2 em in the mobi font size gets you nowhere. Kindle, DX, and iOS all ignore larger fonts. According to Kindle Previewer, anyway.

Which brings up something that makes me nervous. I adapted my code for drop caps from the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines, the official source of often difficult to understand and potentially misleading information.

In their version of the code, they use "3 em" for the alternate mobi font-size. Does that mean they don't know 3 em is no bigger than 2 em? Or does it turn out 3 em actually IS bigger than 2 em—in a REAL Kindle?

The last case would be bad for me—and by extension, you—because I'm basing all my conclusions on the ability of Kindle Previewer to give me an accurate picture of what happens in the various machines.

I believe that when it comes to using the <big> code, two levels are optimum. It's large enough to be noticed in all versions and at every reasonable font size. Four or five <big> tags WILL get you a bigger first letter, but there's a tendency for the line spacing to get out of whack. The gap between line one and line two expands noticeably as you add more <big> tags. Spacing between lines two and three, and so forth, appears unaffected.

As a consequence, before I got to messing about with actual drop caps, I might have suggested you use two <big> tags in the HTML code of each and every book you present to Kindle Direct Publishing.

Now we see the split-code technique gives one the equivalent of three <big> tags for mobi files, plus actual drop caps where available.

So here's the question: Should you use THIS code for everything?

Not necessarily.

I simply don't think drop caps are called for in most books. They seem old fashioned, a remnant of an earlier time. I can see them used for high fantasy novels, for children's fiction, for classic literature, perhaps, but not for most other fiction.

And probably not for non-fiction at all.

And there’s another problem: If your opening paragraph is only a word or two long, you have no proper place to put the “pocket” for the drop cap. The next paragraph sort of nestles right in there, hugging the bottom of the big first letter of the previous paragraph. Might be, the reader could miss the fact a new paragraph just started. It's an issue I think you need to consider.

In general, for these exotic creatures to look at home, every chapter-opening paragraph in your book would have to run at least two an a half lines long in the smallest possible font.

Is it worth it to rewrite your book just so you can use a feature that only shows up in some versions of Kindle? Up to you.

They do look pretty cool, though . . .

I think the take-home message here is that you can write code that operates differently depending on which version of Kindle the code finds itself running on. You may be able to use the kf8/mobi split-code method to resolve other compromises in the never-ending quest to make your ebooks look as good as they can.

Actually, further tests revealed you don't need to split the code to get mobi apps to go to 2 em. They go there all by themselves, in an effort to make it all the way to 320%. The rest of the code is foreign to them and they ignore it. But that doesn't mean you should forget about splitting the code. There are a lot of other compromises to address.