Some collected tips, hints, and tricks to get your book written & published.
I just published yet another book, this one a collection of interviews and writings on writing I had laying around, or had published earlier in some other format.
And it led me to a growing list of tips and tricks which I hadn’t put in any book or told anyone in particular about writing, publishing, and marketing books. These are in note form and may or may not flow from one to the other. (They might even seem to repeat…) I’ll post this when thing quit “bubbling up” – so you have the complete collection.
Tips:
Just stumbled on this recently – in LibreOffice, don’t create an index (table of contents – or TOC) before you port to epub. This makes you do a lot of hand-editing in Sigil to get it up to snuff.
Sequence on that line up should be:
- Create the ebook version first.
- ebook version has all the links necessary, always linking back to your main web page for other resources.
- I write the ebook first, then create the web page. On occasion, I’ve gone ahead and published before I had the web page ready – in that case, it pointed to my root page. But it always pointed somewhere.
- Save As your print version, then add the header, footer, index, back ads. Keep the links for the PDF version.
- Have a link on the footer for the PDF. It’s something like “Visit http://midwestjournalpress.com/ for more material.” But you see it actually goes to a specific page. So the print version gives them something to copy into their browser.
- KISS tip – make the pages mirrored. Put .62 on the inner margin for binding – and .5 all around otherwise. (Unless your text is very, very short.)
- I put the book title in the top along with the page number.
- Headers and footers are ads which keep repeating that same message.
- If you need a different print version, then save as a new version. Don’t do the mistakes of having to re-edit versions back to where you had it before. (Ahem.) An example of needing a different version would be a “study guide” version which is printed on letter-sized paper with wide margins for notes.
- Be sure to update your index every time you resize the pages or add/substract a footer/header. Page numbers will change.
- Ebooks don’t need page numbers
- Lots of books are in the public domain and have fallen out of circulation. The more popular ones exist all over the place.
- Consult some legal beagles on this, but the key part is to add something new to the text so you can put your own copyright on it and charge money.
- One approach, if in doubt, is to simply link to where you found a free copy. (Hoping that they don’t move the original on you. Find it via Internet Archives and link to it there.) Internet Archives Note: “open source” isn’t public domain. Watch for creative commons licenses there as well.
- Amazon, Smashwords, and Scribd don’t like public domain. Amazon wants you to have a minimum of 10 images added to it. Smashwords simply won’t accept it – or PLR. Scribd has what seems to be a duplicate content checker which kicks back your book (and keeps a tally, saying that you’ve just violated someone else’s “copyright”.) Lulu (which includes/ports to iTunes, B&N) and Kobo don’t mind if you do. Frankly, since my books sell better on iTunes/Nook, I don’t care. If it’s completely original, I’ll ship it to Amazon as well.
- (There are some PLR books on public domain which I’ll need to publish at some point…)
- Fastest route for publishing public domain/PLR books (or anything) is through Lulu and Kobo. That gets you to 4 main distributors right off. Lulu is posted instantly, Kobo in a few days, iTunes/B&N can take weeks. The great part about Kobo/iTunes/B&N is that the sales will pick up right away if you’ve got something worth buying.
Amazon is a crap shoot for unknown authors. From my own studies, they’s shot their KDP-Select scene to hell. A recent book shows that it no longer works to bump sales once the “free” time is done – you’re getting freebie seekers who are loading up their Kindle, not reading the stuff. The .99 specials which Locke and Hocking used still work (although Locke cheated with padded reviews). Using Coker’s recommended “some free” strategy (and others have verified) will bring you some traffic. If I were trying to make my living from original content, I’d post most all my books to start with at .99 on Amazon and raise the price after a couple of months gradually. (Since I re-publish a lot of other author’s material, and don’t yet have time to slow down and drop in images, I skip Amazon for most of my books at this point – although I can come back and revise all my bestsellers later.)
A little research will show you whether it’s worth anything to publish that PLR as your own with that title. Note that Amazon accepts print versions of books when they will block PLR ebook versions. (Guess they don’t want to have to scan those pages to do their dup-content checking.) Which means you could have a short ebook which points to the Amazon print version that has PLR filler material (to be blunt.)
Lulu pricing tips. When you port to iTunes or B&N via Lulu, getting your price changed is difficult – if not impossible. You should be able to do a new revision, and then they adjust those prices. Hasn’t happened for me. The reverse of this is to have your book at a regular price to begin with and when these two other stores finally pick up and publish the book, you can change your price on Lulu easily – which is how you can give people a limited-time discount price. (Or use Kobo for that.) iTunes is for MAC users, who may or may not be savvy about epubs. Amazon is for Kindle users.
An old tip is to get Amazon to give away your book for free by setting your prices everywhere else to zero. (My book was .99 there at first – when the algorithm kicked in to lower the price, I then went back to “raise” it – which makes it look like a greater value.) Having both the paperback and hardback edition available on Amazon (you can print through Lulu for very little cost) will then show your “free” download to be even a better deal.
Related Sites:
- How Frances Hwang Became a Writer « ph.d. in creative writing – This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer …
- How Amina Gautier Became a Writer « ph.d. in creative writing – This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes. Each writer …
- Mermaids | Currents – Indiana University South Bend – I. The birthday girl begins her day with a question: “Do wishes really come true?”She is using a plastic knife to spread blue icing along one side of her cake. The birthday girl’s mother, at work on the other side of the cake, wonders why she asks …
- Guest Blog Post, Elane Johnson: So You Want to Be a Writer… | s [r … – Your post reminds me of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer” in which the first line is: “First, try to be something, anything, else.” Reply ↓. Elane Johnson on March 31, 2013 at 3:21 pm said: Hi, Mai-Quyen- Thank you!
- Lynn Trimble | Curtain Critic – “When I decided to become a writer, I first went to the Burton Barr Central Library and I picked a book off the shelf…it was something like, How to Become a Writer…and then I went to the racks that had magazines,” Trimble …
- How Valerie Sayers Became a Writer (& how she’s trying to get her … – This is the next installment in the How to Become a Writer interview series, which will post here at Ph.D. in Creative Writing every other Sunday (or so) until I run out of writers to interview, or until they stop saying yes.
