A few items of news relevant to self publishing authors arrived in my inbox this last few days so I thought I should share them.

Nook Opens in the UK

Barnes and Noble have made a move into the UK e-books market by launching http://uk.nook.com  only last week – a site where UK readers can buy e-books for their nook. At the same time the Nook is on sale in 2500 stores around the country. With Christmas fast approaching B&N are clearly making a bid for a piece of what will probably be the biggest digital Christmas with millions of Brits having Kindles, Nooks and Ipads for Xmas.

Apple ibooks move into fresh territories

At the same time Apple have opened up ibook stores in countries including Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, and New Zealand.  This brings many millions of new readers into the market for ebooks.

The easiest way to distribute and sell books to these markets is probably via Smashwords – the US based e-book  distributor which is ideal for self published authors to use.  You just set up an account, read the very detailed formatting document and then upload your books. Smashwords take care of the distribution to Apple, Barnes and Noble, Sony etc. The only store they don’t yet distribute to is Amazon and to be honest you are best formatting your own kindle books and uploading to Amazon direct.

You can read more about Smashwords here: Converting Novels into Various e-book formats

You can read more about formatting for Kindle here:  How to prepare a book for Kindle

I recently joined the Alliance of Independent Authors which is a group of authors in the US, UK and worldwide who share expertise and knowledge about the process of self publishing.  Their website and blog is stuffed full of detailed articles and advice for authors and I would recommend checking them out as a treasure trove of useful information.

http://allianceindependentauthors.org/

 Reading Agency and Alliance of Independent Authors pilot scheme in Libraries

One interesting initiative has been developed whereby self published authors are linked into libraries and readings groups. For a number of years traditional publishers and mainstream authors have been linked into Libraries via the Reading Agency scheme but a new  partnership aims to involve self published authors.

More on that here: http://selfpublishingadvice.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/alli-news-2012-novdec-final.pdf

Tom nodded and started forward, gathering his energy for moving them about fifteen feet up and across. Just as he was about to do so, Septimus grasped his shoulder and pointed to a window at one end of the top floor. The frightened face of a young woman had appeared at it. For a brief moment, she looked into Tom’s eyes and then turned away and disappeared into the building. Did he hear a male voice calling her name: calling “Mary”? Fleetingly Tom recalled the dream: now was the moment.

“Got it, mate, right let’s go!” Tom grasped Septimus’ hand and Walked them both upwards and forwards. In his mind, he passed through the raging flames that engulfed the ground floor and up to the first floor. There, he and Septimus appeared at the end of the landing. Tom heard voices and turned to see a family group standing facing away from him at the far end. He spun round looking for a hiding place, but then jerked backwards as his companion tugged him by his collar into a room at the front of the house.

“Hush, we must not be found,” Septimus whispered, holding his finger to his lips, “at least, not yet.”

Tom looked about him; they were apparently in the baker’s bedroom. There was a large low bed in the room with a cot at its foot, but otherwise it was pretty bare and Spartan; not even a rug on the bare floorboards. He thought back to his own room full of books, games, clothes and junk and was amazed at how little these folk had.

They heard a clattering on the wooden landing as the family came towards them, then halted at the top of the stairs leading down to the ground floor.

“What do we do?” A frightened woman’s voice asked; “We can’t get out. We will all be burned!”

There was the sound of children crying. They were terrified. No wonder, thought Tom – he was too. Then, a young man’s voice shouted out.

“Quick, out the back of my room!” and there were more running footsteps as the family moved away, searching for an escape route.

“Right, come on!” Septimus ordered. They opened the door and went back out onto the landing. At the top of the stairs in the rear wall was a door leading into another room. From it, they could hear the voices of the family. Moving quickly to the door and peeking round it, they could see the children being passed up to a young man who was outside the window, balancing on the roof of the next house in the row. Only then did Tom recall that in his dream Mary had called the young man Jack. The baker and his wife moved past Jack and up onto the roof. As soon as they were safe, he came back to the window and was now encouraging Mary to join him. She stepped forward, but then appeared to lose her nerve and backed away from the window.

At that moment, fire surged up the stairs towards the two Walkers. Septimus cried out, then stumbled and fell hard onto the wooden floor, pulling Tom with him. Weakened by the fire from below, the wooden landing collapsed and they both fell through the hole.

Tom managed to catch hold of a ceiling beam as he fell, leaving him dangling down into the room below. Septimus landed with a crash on top of the baker’s table in the middle of the room on the ground floor. Despite the inferno all around it the table was as yet intact. It was, however, smouldering.

“Septimus!” Tom yelled, but his friend did not respond and appeared to be out cold on the table below. The flames advanced on them both from all sides. Tom tried to Walk, but could not concentrate enough to focus on the Flow of Time. With a growing sense of despair, he felt the heat rise. His hair crackled and his shoes started to smoulder. Below him, one leg of the baker’s table caught fire. The table creaked then, with a snap, the leg gave way and the whole thing collapsed, throwing Septimus’ limp form onto the floor.

There was another roar and from the ends of the room two huge waves of fire swept towards them; at any moment it would surround them. This was it, Tom thought. Who would have reckoned he would die in the Great Fire of London? He braced himself, the muscles in his arm screaming at him to let go of the beam.

“STOP!” yelled a female voice from beside him.

What happened next, Tom would not have believed possible, had he not been hanging there waiting to be incinerated. It was as if someone had pressed the pause on a DVD: the banks of flame just froze. From the roaring further back, it seemed this effect was very local but, for a moment at least, they had a reprieve. What, Tom asked himself, had stopped the flames in that extraordinary way? He looked round and saw that right next to him, kneeling on the landing and peering down through the gap, was Mary Brown. Her face wore an expression of intense concentration. Still gritting her teeth, she slowly turned her head and looked into his eyes.

“Cannot hold it … much longer,” she finally said, sweat running down her face.

Tom nodded. Explanations could wait until later. So, hanging on with one hand he reached down and pulled the long iron chain out of his belt and threw the end of it to Mary, who caught it and then stared down at him.

Tom yelled, “Hold this a mo!” and letting go of the beam he dropped down into the room below. The chain had enough slack so Mary could hold one end; the other end with its globe of water was still tucked in Tom’s belt. He felt the searing heat from the wall of flame, halted in its tracks, but beginning to waver. Bending down he grabbed Septimus by the lapel then reached out to the Flow of Time, relieved to feel its presence once again. Just then, Mary, overcome by fumes, gave a grunt and fainted to the floor, the chain still clutched in her hands. At the same moment, the fire surged forward once more, reaching the table, which now erupted into flame.

As Tom pulled all three of them away, the landing above them collapsed and showered the ground with burning rubble. In the nick of time they had gone from the seventeenth century, forward three hundred and fifty years, away from the Great Fire and into the present day.

Tomorrow’s Guardian is a Time Travel adventure for Young Adults:
Time Travel Sounds like fun until you try it.

 Watch the Trailer:

I was not long born the day my uncle stood on the battlefield, surrounded by the corpses of his men.

They had died defending this narrow gully through hills which blocked the approach to the city of Eboracum. The city lay to the east under a pall of smoke that arose from a hundred burning houses. King Aelle had taken the army there to capture it but, hearing reports of an enemy warband coming to lift the siege, had sent Cynric and his company around the city to the west to intercept them.

Eighty men marched through the night to reach this sunken road. They planted their flag in the ditch so it streamed in the wind, revealing the image of the running wolf emblazoned upon it. Then, they gathered about it and waited.

They did not have to wait long.

Soon after dawn, over three hundred spearmen came down the road and needing to reach the city urgently, attacked at once. The narrow confines of the gully funnelled the enemy and brought them onto the spears of Cynric’s men. Then, the killing began.

The enemy paid dearly for each step they took, bled heavily for each wound they inflicted and three died for each of our own men slain. But, in the end, it was not enough. One by one, Cynric’s companions perished and as the company dwindled, it was pushed back down the lane. Time and again, my uncle rallied his men and they charged back into the fray, regained ground and forced the enemy to retreat.

But now, as the sun sank and the sky turned a crimson red matching the bloodstained clay of the road beneath them, Cynric’s company were all dead.

All dead, that is, apart from my uncle, Cynric and the grim-faced Grettir. The pair stood on the road in front of their battle standard. Cynric: tall and fierce, with hair the colour of autumn leaves, which in the dying light must have seemed almost like flames; Grettir: shorter, stocky and muscular with black hair and bushy eyebrows.

Cynric thrust forward his great sword and pointed it at the shield wall. It was a magnificent weapon, forged from rods of twisted iron overlaid with the strongest of steel, crossed by a bronze guard and finished with an elaborately patterned pommel. With it he now gestured at several enemy warriors, picking out − or so it seemed − his next victims. Strapped to his other arm was his bright blue shield, which was dented and scuffed from a hundred sword and axe blows. Grettir had abandoned his and now both hands grasped the shaft of a fearsome axe that had already today slain a score of foes. Together, they glared down the lane and waited for the enemy to attack once more.

There in front of them many more than one hundred enemy warriors still remained and they, having now reformed their shield wall and seeing that only two foes were standing, came on again. Eboracum lay just a mile beyond this lonely pair standing beside their flag, which now hung limp in the still evening air. If the warband could reach the city they could swell the numbers of the beleaguered defenders and the city might hold. If that happened, more of the Eboracii tribesmen from the surrounding lands would come here. They would save Eboracum, then the Angles and Saxons − like Cynric and Grettir − who had risen up from their scattered villages and come here to capture the city, would be slain. Then, there would be no English city; no English kingdom here north of the Humber; perhaps even no English race anywhere.

All that was needed was to kill these two men and march on to Eboracum.

For Cynric and Grettir, this was equally clear. All they had to do was plant their feet on the bloody soil and survive just a little longer. Cynric glanced at Grettir and smiled thinly at him. Grettir just nodded back. Both men knew they would die here … it was just a matter of when.

The Amber Treasure

Historical Fiction in Dark Ages Britain
…all good stories are about a sword.

 The Amber Treasure is historical fiction set in Dark Age Britain –

597 A.D. Betrayal threatens the Kingdom of Northumbria.

It has been a while since I wrote an article on e-book conversion to Amazon Kindle and I decided to do another one having had a few questions on this subject. First up you will need an account on Kindle Direct Publishing so go set one up. There is another article here about that.

The Easy Way

Smashwords.com is a US based E-book retailer. It is possible to upload your e-books to them and they will convert to all the various e-book formats including phone apps. They will distribute to Apple, Sony, Kobo and Amazon. So if you want to use this route, it is the easy way in. I recommend it.

Smashwords have a Style Guide. If you are converting ebooks  then I suggest you download and print off the Style Guide.

Work through the guide with your book open on a screen and the Style Guide next to the PC. If you follow the guide to the letter you really can’t go far wrong.

Then when you have the word doc ready to upload to Smashwords you will find that SAME document is basically ready  (almost) for uploading to Kindle. However there are a few tweaks you still need to make.

What follows is a walk through of starting from your original manuscript, processing it as per the main parts of the Smashwords Style Guide and then the final preparation of the Kindle File. If you are following the smash words guide you can skip to OK lets get the Kindle File Ready (The KDP issue) (although you may still need to add in a table of contents if you want)

What I have here is the process I follow when making a kindle file.

Horses for courses

The first thing you must realise is that your carefully laid out manuscript that you prepared for your paperback version (assuming here that you are self published), is basically far from ready for e-book conversion. The paperback will have fixed page sizes, margins and page numbers. E-books have none of that. IN an e-book reader – YOU THE READER – determine font sizes, lines per page etc and so the file must be formatted without  anything which will muck that up. Likewise blank pages are hated by e-book readers and you need to remove these. Gaps between lines are an anathema and even double or more spaces between words dont go down well.

Word contains all sort of hidden codes that can make a mess of your ebook. Thus we are going to have to do some work to get it ready.

Why not use a Pdf I hear you ask. Well you might be lucky. Amazon Kindle WILL accept a Pdf BUT it is a lottery as to how they turn out and usually are horrible when converted.

He’s got style

Firstly I create a empty book which I am going to make sure has the right styles set up. Word often contains ODD formatting in its styles. Styles are applied to word as you type. If you do nothing the NORMAL style template is applied. It is best if this style is basic. BY basic I suggest you set it to Times New Roman and font size 12. You want to remove all funny fonts from this ebook. Styles are accessed from top right of word. Right click Normal … modify and then change the set up. Save as “myebook.doc” BUT NOT DOCX.

Rip it up and Start Again

What I do when converting e-books is to start from totally plain text. So I open up the word doc of my finished paperback document.

TWO choices:

1. You can save the doc as a plain text txt file, close it down and then reopen it.

OR

2. What I prefer to do is SELECT ALL (CTRL-A) and COPY (CTRL-C) and then paste it into NOTEPAD. Notepad only handle plain text.

So now with a wimper I have destroyed ALL my formatting. I then PASTE the plain text into “myebook.doc” which I earlier set up.

Hopefully you will have a document formatted to Font size 12 Times New Roman.

It should not have any page numbers and should be standard A4 size or US letter size.

The  Show/Hide Icon- your helper

This icon is something that authors should be familiar with. You use it to show the hidden little symbols that show where you have spaces, new paragraphs etc. Having it selected when formatting your e-book should be routine.

DONT TOUCH THAT TAB BUTTON

OK we are about to tidy up our ebook. One thing to remember is NEVER use the tab key. It has NO ROLE in ebook formatting.

When you start a new paragraph in an ebook you have  a choice of two methods. ADD an extra line (I will come to that) OR use the ruler to control the indent.

Keep an eye on the ruler

I use the ruler tool in word a lot. You can make it vissible by an icon on the RT side of the programme.

When running it shows you 1) Where the margins are set (used in the paperback) and 2) The current indent for new paragraphs. You can drag the little triangles to the relevant locations.

So when I have my ebook open I CTRL-A to selecet it all and then drag the number 2 triangle accross a few characters to create the same indent for teh whole book.

Then as we go through we can always modify the indent for specific locations.

OK Lets work through this document

Before we start I will select all and makse sure it is LEFT+RIGHT justified. So we now have a WORD doc formatted to Times New Roman font 12 with an indent at the start of each paragraph.  We now work through it formatting as we go.

Front Matter

I usually highlight all the front matter and CENTRE Justify it. I might reduce the Font side to 10 or 11 for the “small print and copyright stuff”. Make sure all the website links to Author Pages, Publishers and anyone else have a hyper link set up by selecting it and clicking insert hyperlink.

At the end of each Page of the Front Matter I insert a page break after the very last line. This will mean that Kindle will start each part of your front matter on a new page. So I have:

Title Page / page break

Copyright page/page break

Dedication/ page break

Author page/ page break

etc etc.

Spaces between lines

Do you notice that I had a larger gap between some lines in those pages? How did I do that? Well I DID NOT do it by just hitting the enter key. You should NEVER add an extra line that way.

Use the Line Spacing icon from the home screen. Make sure the cursor is flashing at the end of the line you want to add extra space afterwards. Choose line spacing options and then set the AFTER setting to say 6 or 12 pts. This will now leave a larger space before the next line.

Table of Contents

In a non fiction book you will want a table of contents. In a fiction book you MIGHT want one. It is not essential. If you decide to put it in have a  page with somthing like:

Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

etc

I will tell you how to link this in later.

Formatting the body of the Text

We now move onto chapter 1. The chapter heading should be selected, justified centre and the indent removed (drag the triangle number 2 so it matches triangle number 1). I usually change the heading to Font 14 and Bold. I usually add an extra line after the title using the method I mentioned before.

Finally I remove the indent at the start of the text itself as the start of a chapter or section should not have an indent.

The body of each chapter should be nicely formatted now but you may wish to add extra space at the start of a section in the middle of a a chapter and to remove the indents.

Finishing the Table of Contents (TOC)

As you work through the book highlight each Chapter Heading and insert … bookmark. Call the bookmark Chapter 1 or whatever. When you have all the bookmarks in place go back to the TOC and highlight the line for chapter 1 and then insert hyperlink and choose the bookmark CHapter 1. Repeat until you have linked all chapters into the TOC.

Images

If you have images in the ebook when we converted to plain text they will have gone.

Before you add any images to the book it is best to format them to greyscale and resize them to a maximum of  500 wide by about 600 high so they fit on a screen.Go through the book adding them back in. Then highlight each image and select format picture … compress … web/ screen to Reduce File size of the final e-book file – which is best for fast loading etc.

OK lets get the Kindle File Ready (The KDP issue)

I assume you have set up an account on Kindle to upload to. Go to kdp.amazon.com if not and get one set up

With Kindle direct publishing you need really to upload a HTML file for best results.

If you just upload the Word doc NO IMAGES will show and all sorts of naff word code gets dragged in. So convert it to html first.

The best way to do this is to open Word and click file…save as.. webpage … web filtered

Save as Web page filtered

Doing this removes a lot of rubbish WORD code from your book. If you don’t do this you end up with a document for instance with spaces between each line throughout the entire book.

BUT when you save as a web page – as a HTML file – the images are stripped out and put in a folder which is referred to by the main HTML file.  If you just upload THAT HTML file without the images folder you will find the images dont show up and all you get is little warning icons !!!

The Solution

The answer is to zip up the HTML file and the images and upload that to Kindle DP. This is how:

1. Create a folder on your computer. Call it anything you like e.g. myebook.
2. Open the word doc of you book (the one you have formatted for Smashwords and then edited ready for Kindle.)
3. Save it as a web page filtered and save it INTO that empty folder you created in 1.
4. Open the folder and you will find a HTML file called booktitle.html AND a subfolder called booktitle files.
5. Take  look in that book title folder and you will see all the images from your book probably called image01.jpg etc
6. What you do is now come out of everything then find that myebook folder. RIGHT CLICK on it and you will get  a list of options.
7. One of the options is send to. If you select that you will get further options  one of which is send to compressed (zipped folder). Select this.
8. You should now see a file called booktitle.zip in the same location the myebook folder was in.
9. Its THAT zip file that you now upload to Kindle.
10. When you have set up your book in Kindle DTP and you get to the bit asking for the book file use THAT zip file.
11. To check all is ok open up the preview and you should see images in it. Go ahead and publish the e-book
12. When the book is setup download the kindle book and check it out.

That’s it.

RT click the Myebooks folder and choose send to Compressed (zipped) folder

Assuming all goes well you should get a nice greyscale image on your kindle:

I recently followed this procedure to upload my new Kindle version of The Last Seal – my historical fantasy set in the Great Fire of London 1666.

Do me a favour and check out the FREE sample on Kindle.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005CC4RSC

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CC4RSC

Getting Images into Kindle Books

by Richard Denning

Portcullis symbol marks end of a chapter

So you have written your masterpiece and want to publish it to Kindle. Maybe you have done what I suggested and first got the manuscript prepared for Smashwords and uploaded it and it was approved so you are happy it all works and looks good.

Smashwords will take your whole document and convert to mobi, edpub etc and include all the images.

That is fine BUT now you want to publish to Kindle and get the book on Amazon. You wont want to just use the Smashwords mobi file as for starters it will have a Smashwords copyright page. It is best to start from the Word doc you got ready for Smashwords and that you know is formatted well.

How to publish on Kindle is covered here BUT in that piece I did not say how to get images into the book.

Reduce File size

When you format the document for smash-words if you follow the style guide it will tell you how to compress your images in Word. This reduces the size of the final e-book file – which is best for fast loading etc.

The DTP issue

With Kindle DTP you need really to upload a HTML file. The best way to do this is to open Word and click file…save as.. webpage … web filtered

Save as Web page filtered

Doing this removes a lot of rubbish WORD code from your book. If you don’t do this you end up with a document for instance with spaces between each line.

BUT when you save as a web page – as a HTML file – the images are stripped out and put in a folder which is referred to by the main HTML file. If you just upload THAT HTML file without the images folder you will find the images dont show up and all you get is little warning icons !!!

The Solution

The answer is to zip up the HTML file and the images and upload that to Kindle DTP.

1. Create a folder on your computer. Call it anything you like e.g. myebook.
2. Open the word doc of you book (the one you have formatted for Smashwords and then edited ready for Kindle.)
3. Save it as a web page filtered and save it INTO that empty folder you created in 1.
4. Open the folder and you will find a HTML file called  booktitle.html AND a subfolder called booktitle files.
5. Take  look in that book title folder and you will see all the images from your book probably called image01.jpg etc
6. What you do is now come out of everything then find that myebook folder. RIGHT CLICK on it and you will get a list of options.
7. One of the options is send to. If you select that you will get further options one of which is send to compressed (zipped folder). Select this.
8. You should now see a file called booktitle.zip in the same location the myebook folder was in.
9. Its THAT zip file that you now upload to Kindle.
10. When you have set up your book in Kindle DTP and you get to the bit asking for the book file use THAT zip file.
11. To check all is ok open up the preview and you should see images in it. Go ahead and public the e-book
12. When the book is setup download the kindle book and check it out.

That’s it.

RT click the Myebooks folder and choose send to Compressed (zipped) folder

Assuming all goes well you should get a nice greyscale image on your kindle:

I recently followed this procedure to upload my new Kindle version of The Last Seal – my historical fantasy set in the Great Fire of London 1666.

Do me a favour and check out the FREE sample on Kindle.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005CC4RSC

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CC4RSC

If you are already selling ebooks via Kindle and Smashwords you may be interested that you can sell your e-books via Goodreads.

Goodreads has been called ‘Facebook for book readers’. It is a large community of people who read, write and review books. As an author – whether self, indie, Print on demand or Mainstream published you need to be on there and to create a profile. Make sure all your books are listed.

When you set up an account you can invite Facebook Friends to join as well. Just like Facebook you can reach out and make new friends. Ther are many groups and forums just like with Facebook so if you are into Sci-Fi for instance you can join any of several dozen groups. You can then ‘join the conversation’ on any topic you wish – generally book related.

When reviewers give your book a review many will automaticallypost here but if not you can send them a link to your book’s listing at Goodreads.

E-books

As an author you can apply for Librarian status which means you can edit book listing, add images and other editions etc. You have to agree to be honest and accurate in all you do. Once you have obtained Librarianship you can then upload e-books.

Your options are to upload a pdf which can be read FOR FREE by all members or upload a e-Pub file. ePub files need to be created from your original word document. See my post on how to go about doing this.

Once you have the file ready go to your dashboard in Goodreads and under each book will be a link to add an ebook. It is then a  doodle to work through 2 pages. One page asks for the file and is where you set up how much of the book to allow readable for free. Then you can set the price (in $). Payment is by paypal so you need a paypal account. You retain full copyright to the book.

That’s it – give it a go.

I am Richard Denning. I am a Young adult sci-fi, historical fiction and historical fantasy writer. See more at www.richarddenining.co.uk

What I learnt on my first Virtual Book Blog Tour

by Richard Denning

From 31st January until the 17th of March I embarked on a Virtual Blog Tour. Now it is over I thought it might be worthwhile feeding back some thoughts on how it went. Here then is a quick guide to what I did.

1. Finding the blogs. Tomorrow’s Guardian is Young Adult  Time Travel Fiction so What I did was to google terms such as Young Adult Fiction Blogs , Sci Fi book blogs etc. So firstly you need to identify your target audience. There is no point having the blog tour take in gardening books blog sites if it is Sci-Fi as the readers of those sites wont be interested. I then trawled through the sites looking for appropriate ones that matched the sort of book I was promoting.
   TIP: There is a useful site that lists Blogs willing to review books. On the site he lists many blogs but also sells a 99cents pdf which is well worth the download as it  contains a nice little reveiw of each blog with an idea of their policies and numbers of followers. http://www.stepbystepselfpublishing.net/book-reviewer-list.html
2. So now I looked over the sites and established how many followers they had. I had no problem doing a blog on a small site or new site as I saw it as me helping them as well as them helping me BUT it makes sense to focus your tour on sites with hundreds of followers (or more). Many of these sites list the numbers of followers they have on Facebook and Google Friends or Twitter.
3. Find the policy page. Most blogs will somewhere have a page that states what their policy is on doing book reviews, giveaways, hosting guest posts etc. They may also say whether they have any problems looking at self/independently published authors. Some get snooty about this. Others are open to looking at anything. Some will say that they are busy at present and can’t take new books till they clear their backlog. If in doubt locate an email address and send them a query. This can at times be hard as some blogs make it difficult to contact them.
4. Email the Blog. I sent a press release about the book with short blurb, cover image and if possible some existing reviews or links to the Amazon page if it has reviews on. I politely asked about the possibility of them reviewing the book. Then I offered to take part in giveaways (ebook giveaways cost you nothing if you have done your own conversion, paperbacks cost you a few quid but I see this as an advertising expense) and also to provide them with content by way of a guest post. Most blogs will lap up guest posts. Make them interesting but linked in some way to your book.
5. You can tell a lot from how quickly they respond to the email and if you send a follow up query how quickly they come back on that. Some site owners just put up a site, review 2 or 3 books and loose interest. Some owners agree to review your book and then fail to post a review or even to reply to emails. There is no easy way to pick this up apart from trial and error and I have already started drawing up my own list of good sites and bad sites. Once you do have communication going back and forth I offer a few dates to the blog owner. Try and give them at least 4 weeks notice and probably more like 2 months. Everyone has busy lives and people need time to read and review a book. I also agree about giveways, deadline on any guest post submission and also try and get an undertaking for the reviews to go up on Amazon and Goodreads as well as the owner putting it out on facebook.
6. I collect the various blog dates into a tour itinerary and when it is fairly full publicise the dates. Get that on your website, Facebook and Twitter.
7. Write all your guest posts. Try and get them done way before the actual tour itself. Tuck them away and when called for email the Blog owners. They will often come back and say “all set up and scheduled to run”. A few days before each blog post/ visit I email them and check all is ok.
8. On the day of the post I see that it is up and then link to the PERMALINK. That is the actual individual address of the post NOT the Blog’s own URL. Usually if you click on the title of the post and save that address this will be a permanent link. I put that link on my website as well and now drop in a mention on Facebook and Twitter.
9. I follow up the visit with a thank you email and keep the channels open for a return visit.
10. Ideally I would then make some notes about each site so I can remember what went well and what not so well. Sometimes a Blog NEVER appeared on the agreed day. I usually follow that up with a polite “hope everything is OK” type message. If I hear nothing I send another similar message. Then I drop it and leave it to them to come back and make a note not to use them again.

Does it cost?

Well the short answer is “it depends”. There are a number of sites that now ONLY take e-books. If you have done your own e-book conversion it costs nothing other than your time. If you need to supply paperbacks to say 20 sites then that will cost a bit BUT just think a moment. If you place a single advert anywhere you will spend quite a bit of money. £7 to £8 to post a paperback to some one (including the book cost) should be seen as advertising expense in my opinion. I treat giveaways the same. Keep the numbers manageable though. I usually offer 1-2 paperbacks and 5 e-books.

So was it all worth it?

Time will tell. I have had reasonable (if not stellar) sales of paperbacks and e-books during the blog tour. Reviews you gathered and guest posts sit on the internet and provide ongoing advertising for you.

TIP: set up Google Alerts. You can specify various words and phrases such as “Tomorrow’s Guardian” or “Richard Denning” and then each day you get an email telling you if and where those terms come up. Many are not relevant but I find I pick up on many mentions of topics I want to know about and find reviews and comments and even forum posts and discussions. That way you can automate some of the monitoring of the internet but still keep an eye on what is going on.

Promoting and selling books is an on going and very hard task. The new world of publishing that the internet and ebooks allows has made it possible for small press, independent authors to get their books out there. But we need to be onto everytrick there is to help that process. Doing a Virtual Book tour is one of them.

Check out my own tour here:

http://www.richarddenning.co.uk/blogtour.html

Try out some ebooks for free this week

This week is Read an Ebook week on Smashwords. If you are an author looking at reaching a larger audience or a reader who likes free stuff (and don’t we all!!) you might be interested in finding out more about this.

Firstly what is Smashwords? Well its a US website that allows authors to publish Ebooks. It converts your word DOC into multiple formats and offers them for sale at a price you set. Smashwords takes a cut but the author does earn a decent ammount of royalty from each sale. Smashwords will also distribute ebooks via Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and other sales points and passes on a share of sales income to you.

Smashwords is actually pretty easy to use once you have learnt how to format the document best for Ebook readers. There is a superb Style Guide available. If you follow it to the letter you wont go wrong.

You can read all about how to use Smashwords in a blog I did a few weeks again:

Converting Novels into Various e-book formats

Smashwords allows you to offer the whole book for free or samples too. This week they are hosting Read an Ebook Week. As an author you can give various levels of discounts right up to 100%. Why would you participate?Well mainly to try and get new readers and possibly reviews. One option is to offer this discount on the first book in a series but not the second. Or some books but not others. You hope readers will enjoy the books that are free enough to buy books which you charge for.  The biggest challenge to a writer, doubly so for new writers or selfpublished, is getting ANYONE to read your stuff.

This type of activity does just that.

This activity is so successful that usually Smashwords crashes a few times during the week such are the numbers of hits they get. Again this is all traffic which helps get authors some attention.

You can get my books for free this week (and they only cost $1.99 at other times) on Smashwords by following these links:

Tomorrow’s Guardian
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9247

The Amber Treasure
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/6485

Richard Denning

How to self publish your own e-books – a brief over view.

In many ways 2011 is the year when e-books will come of age. Last year saw record sales of Kindles and Ipads and other readers and also saw e-books outstrip hardbacks on Amazon.com. Sales in the UK are not yet at the same levels as in the States but it is likely that this next year or two they will only increase. If you are an author – published or self published – you need to be aware of these little devices and be looking to get involved in this revolution.

My previous post talked about how to make your book into a Kindle format e-book and how to go about uploading it on to Amazon Kindle. Kindle’s are only one of the formats available and so it is important to be able to get your book into various file types and to make sure they look good and work on the readers.

A word about formats

There are many e-book formats out there. The main ones are:

Making your E-books The Easy Way – Smashwords

Smashwords is one of the most important routes into E-book publishing

Based in the States, Smashwords is a way to get your e-book out there. It is an online site that will take a word document and convert it into multiple formats. It then houses all those ebooks on a page for the author. The author can set the price of the ebook, offer discount coupons if they want and decide which of various distribution channels to use. Via Smashwords you have access to Amazon Kindle, Apple ibook, Diesel, Kobo, Sony and Barnes & Noble. Any sales on those sites for your book eventually materialise in royalties to you. Likewise any sales on Smashwords itself earns you income.

This is what my Smashword page looks like for Tomorrow’s Guardian.

Good Points: You format your book once and Smashwords does the work converting it into all these output files. You can set the price you want, offer discounts etc. There is a free sample (you can decide how much of the book to allow for free) which allows readers to try the book. You can add videos and reviews and links to where your physical book is sold.

Bad Points: You do need to be able to handle the technical instructions of the Style Guide – a pdf you can download. I printed this off and worked through it next to my screen. You have to be able cope with changing various settings inside Word, removing formatting and cleaning the file. You have to be patient. This takes time. But if your file passes the Smashwords Premium Catalogue requirements you have access to those distribution channels AND what is more your can be sure the same file will be acceptable on Kindle etc if you want to have ebook sales direct from your own site. There is a strong argument for starting with Smashwords, getting the ebook out there and then maybe moving on.

Another issue is that Smashwords is in the US and if you are outside the US it will hold back a big chunk of Tax. To get this back you will have to apply for a US tax number (a whole other subject but which involves much paperwork). This is only worth doing if your have substantial earnings. IE Not me!!

In conclusion you REALLY need to be on Smashwords. It is the portal to the world of e-book retailers. BUT it is not the only option. There are other e-books sites and it is a good idea to have a look about but you cant go wrong starting with Smashwords.

Making your e-books the Harder Way – DIY.

It is not actually that hard to make your own e-books but it takes time and involves using different programs to make it all work. You may have to experiment with different options and try out conversions multiple times until it works. For example I struggled to get images into my file and I also found some of my books added spaces between paragraphs.  So there is a technical aspect to this which will not suit some. There are companies who you can pay to do this BUT if you are confident with PCs and happy to experiment it is certainly possible over a few days to get your e-books converted.

So here is a starting point: you will already have a properly formatted e book version of your word doc because you have worked at it in order to get onto Smash-words.

Option 1 Take that document and load it onto a free to use online converter called http://www.2epub.com/. This is really easy to use and will output Mobi, ePub, LRF and other files.

Option 2 Save the Word DOC as HTML (TOP TIP: save as web page filtered. This cuts out many Microsoft Office tags in the HTML code and for example is what fixed by extra line between paragraphs issue).  Save the HTML file in its own folder where you know where it is. This HTML file can now be read in a browser and is one of the formats you may want to offer anyway. Now download and install a programme called Calibre. This is also free.
http://www.calibre-ebook.com/

Calibre is great because it not only converts to many many formats but it also acts as an emulator of pretty much any e-book reader. (See later)

Your screen may be a bit different - depends on the version but the buttons will look like this

Once installed you click add books and go get your HTML file. (If you have internal images I advise that you zip the HTML file AND the accompanying folder with the images in that you will create when you saved that word doc to HTML. If you saved the HTML file in its own folder like I told you two you should find a sub-folder alongside your file which has all the images in. Then add the zip file to Calibre.

Once you have the book added you can click on the metadata button and make sure all the info like author and title are correct. Now click on Convert. At this stage add your cover image. (You want to make sure the use source file check box is UNCHECKED and browse and add the cover file for each conversion you use. Otherwise the cover file does not get added) Select the output format (Mobi etc) on the right hand side and the ebook is created. You can open the ebook and it will look like it should in a compatible e-book reader. In fact you NEED to open the book and take a look at it. This is important Make sure it looks right before you publish it. That said it is not a disaster if you find errors later. You can republish the file and let your buyers know a new version exists.

Now save to disk.

Selling the book

This is a whole other subject but what you now need to do is setup a webpage with Paypal Buy now buttons on. When the buyer goes through Paypal you can set it up so that they will get forwarded to a hidden download page upon which you put your ebook files. Here is my buy page with that button on: http://www.merciabooks.co.uk/buying.html#TGebook

and here is the page you get sent to from paypal:

This is a shot of my own download page. You can configure Paypal to direct you to the download page.

I will do another more detailed article on the subject of selling the books along with marketing them.

I am the author of 2 ebook versions of my novels:
Tomorrow’s Guardian
and
The Amber Treasure

Further Reading:

I would suggest buying a very detailed guide on this subject:

A self help guide to publishing your e-book on the World’s biggest bookstore.

A few days before Christmas 2010 I put my first two e-books on Amazon Kindle. As I have been asked how you go about doing that I thought I would do a short “How To” guide.

E-books sales are rapidly expanding. Sales in the US are booming and in fact in July, sales of e-books there outstripped sales of Hardbacks for the first time. Paperbacks still have the biggest market share and many people would find it hard to believe that e-books will replace paperback versions BUT the trend is towards e-books.

In the UK e-books sales are still at a much earlier stage and only about 5% of ebook sales are mainstream fiction. Most e-books sold are academic books. This however is likely to change with many retailers reporting bumper sales of Kindles and Ipads this Christmas. As there are far fewer e-books titles than traditional books available there is a much smaller market for authors to compete in.

Whether we like it or not e-books are here to stay and authors and publishers need to adapt to the new marketplace it creates. One thing it does do it make publishing even easier for self publishers.

In traditional publishing it is impossible for small press publishers or self publishers to compete on price with big companies who can print thousands of books at a pound or two each when Self Publishers are printing a few hundred at maybe £4 each. When you consider the discounts that you need to offer book traders and the 60% discount you give to Amazon, this pushes the price of the books (Its R.R.P.) to £10 or more. When most paperbacks are about £6 or £7 this makes it hard to get your foot in the door of bookshops.

With e-books, the playing field is more level. It costs little or nothing to convert your book to a Kindle ready format. You also get to select the price of the book. In the case of Amazon you must choose 35% royalties or 70% royalties. Selecting 70% means the minimum price for a book is higher than at 35%. In either event 35% or 70% represents a much high share of the sale price than would expect from a paperbook. Amazon might reduce the price IF it finds it cheaper elsewhere.

How to do it
So then how do you go about getting your book on Kindle? Firstly you need to make sure this is your book of course. If you have a publisher it is they that should be doing this. But if you are self published like myself and you have full worldwide rights to the book then you can put it on.

1. Go to this site (The digital text publishing site at Amazon):
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin
You can login using your existing Amazon account or create a new one.
Once logged in you will at some stage have to check and set up details such as name and address and how you want paying. At present DTP will only send cheques to UK users but in the US you can be paid electronically. As Amazon advantage (used to sell books) and associates (Used to be paid for any Sales on Amazon originating from links to products you place on your site) both pay electronically then hopefully soon DTP will do so.

2. Take a look at this control panel:

At the top of the page for DTP there are links to
a)Bookshelf – where you add books and maintain the ones you have
b)Reports – where you get to see sales and income.
c)Community – forums and guides to what you need to know.
The guides on DTP are pretty easy to use. They do rely on some techie knowledge but certainly if you have setup websites, mucked about a bit with HTML (the language used in web pages) you wont have too much difficulty. I had a problem with a map not appearing on The Amber Treasure. I went into the FAQ and found under IMAGES the info I needed to fix that.

3. If you click on bookshelf you get the screen shown above. You will notice that I have already put on two books. You get updates here on the status of the books. Tomorrow’s Guardian is online whilst The Amber Treasure is ‘publishing’ – in this case updating since I made that change to fix the map. To add a new book click on “add a new title”.

4. You then get this screen:

Add new title

which carries on down:

Add new title continued

You now start typing in all the metadata stuff – book Title, author, description, language etc and then upload the book cover file. Finally you upload the book (see below).

5. Uploading the book.
You need to now work on your book file. There are extensive notes on how to do that within DTP but the bottom line is you need to forget much of what you learnt when setting up your paperback. Paperbacks need margin sizes, gutter widths, mirrored pages and page numbers. E-books need NONE of that because you can change the font side yourself in a Kindle (and other readers). So rip out the page numbers and headers and footers. You are best completely removing formatting and going back to plain text and then reformatting using only the formatting types Kindle likes. Don’t have too many fancy fonts. Don’t have blank lines. Use page breaks to separate chapters and fiddle with line spacing in the paragraph formatting controls to create spaces between for example your title and the first sentence, or sections of text.

There are professionals who will do all this for you at a charge BUT to be honest it is not that hard if you have patience, are happy to read help files and spend a few hours formatting. Actually it is not a disaster if you muck it up. All you do it download the file, edit and upload again. This is the beauty of e-books.

Now, DTP prefers to use a HTML file. Ideally this should be a zipped file with any internal images and tables all zipped together. It CAN handle word. I found that it lost my paragraph indents when I just uploaded word. When I went into word and saved it as HTML and uploaded the HTML file I was ok. If it is NOT OK download the HTML file, open it in an editor like dreamweaver and edit the HTML code (TECHIE ALERT!). You can try editing in WORD but if you can’t see the code you can’t see what you are doing wrong. I would suggest bringing the file into a HTML editor so you have more control over the code. DTP has full files on permissible code.

DTP will take pdf, mobi and other file types but warns that formatting might not be good. Best to use WORD and save as HTML.

6. Once you have uploaded the file you have the ability to preview the book or download the HTML file if you wish to (enabling you to edit it). You then go on to set the price:

Set the price

You will be able to decide WHERE the book is sold and whether to take 35% or 70% royalties.
You might think you would always take 70%. However the minimum price is higher with 70% Royalty (Amazon wants its smaller share to be a smaller share of a bigger price). So if you want to put up a nice cheap book at say 99p you will only be able to set this at 35% royalty.

7. Save and publish. OK now you hit the save and publish button and in 24 hours the book will be online on Amazon. You will then want to go on to DTP and perhaps add more details to the book description and also go onto the Amazon page and add tags which enable users to find the book. Tags are phrases like “Sci-Fi”, “Historical” or “Teen” that people might type into the Amazon search box. There is more you can do to enhance the page and once you identify yourself to Amazon as the publisher or author you can go on and add more details and reviews if you wish.

8. Now try and get some reviews on the book. Adding reviews on Amazon helps it show up on searches. You want these to come from OTHER people and not you. However you could add a video to the page of you doing a reading.

To see how the book finally appears on Amazon take a look at :

You will see I still need to get some fans to review it!

9. Promote the book. A whole subject but get out on the net and research book promotion.