Createspace
This is one of the best companies to help self-publishers
and writers bring their books to life. Late last year I decided to publish my
next book 12th Man For Death with a new (to me) printing/publishing
venue. All my other books were composed and formatted in InDesign (text body)
and Photoshop (cover), converted to PDFs, and then emailed to a print-on-demand
(POD) printer in Los Angeles. They were very good, but the cost of shipping books
(at least three times) proved profitless. I needed a better way. And, for me,
Createspace is it. I know I blogged about this a month ago, but as you can see,
I am still excited about this company.
Simply, this printing house, owned by Amazon, takes my
files in the same formats as my old POD printer and makes a book of them. The key
is that, in association with your Amazon book site, when a customer buys the
book, the order is sent directly to Createspace, who fulfills it. The key in
any distribution channel (to save money) is to handle the product as little as
possible. This is a simple as it gets. And the buyer, not me, pays the
shipping.
The instructions are simple and direct on their webpage: https://www.createspace.com, follow
them, get to know the system and voila! You will have your proof copy for
review in less than ten days, make any corrections to your book, resubmit,
reapprove, then Createspace places the book directly into your book’s Amazon
site. To be honest I wasn’t sure about this, now I have placed all the Sharon O’Mara
Chronicles in the system. And from what I can see the quality is consistent.
And the author’s price for copies is a dollar cheaper than what I was paying
before.
Check them out, it literally costs nothing.
Smashwords Update
All the Sharon O’Mara Chronicles have been updated at
Mark Coker’s Smashwords site. This site, along with Amazon, is a must for your
ebooks. With your book here you will have access to iBook, Kobo, Barnes and
Noble, and most other outlets. Again go to their site, download Mark’s
manual on how to submit, and go for it. Again costs nothing until you sell your
hard work.
Book Signing
Last Sunday I had the privilege and honor to kick off the
2013 author’s season at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. It went
extremely well and almost thirty of my friends (old and new) attended. Read a
few pages from the new book (see left), and talked about writing. I have lined
up a few book clubs and other venues in the coming months, I will keep you
informed.
5 Reasons It’s
Hard to Market Indie Fiction and What to Do About It
Joel Friedlander, book guru and self-publishing Sherpa,
has an informative blog that he posts three times a week (or so). Often his
comments hit the mark on covers, book composition, and marketing. This week he
covers a thoughtful blog by Rachelle Ayala on Indie Fiction. Please check it
out, it’s a little long to repost here so please go to Joel’s site:
Update On My New
Novel
Wars Amongst Lovers is in rewrite,
this is an enjoyable process where you discover what you wrote eight months ago
actually still works. You find your story still interesting and that you also
lost or renamed characters, mixed some of them up, or started a story thread
and forgot about it. It’s all great fun. Every writer develops their own system
to straighten out their story and insure continuity. But that’s a subject for a
later posting. My hope is to have the manuscript finished by the end of March
and professionally edited by the end of April. Then publication. I'm offering a
chance to be a Beta reader, if interested, contact me at RPD@LMI.net.
So Happy New Year and remember, write every day, even if
only a thank you card.
More Later . . . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment