Waiting For Amazon

(This is step #11 of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

One of the annoyances of publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing is that you must wait for about 12 hours from when you tell it to publish your work until the time it becomes available.

While you're waiting you can redeem the time by reviewing your plans for promotion and advertising. I'm by no means an expert in these areas. In fact, I really think my efforts in this regard have been substandard. So, listen to someone else about promotion and advertising.

In fact, I'm considering hiring out promotion and advertising next time I self-publish something.

So, let's talk about hiring work out. Nobody can do everything at an expert level. That's a real-life corollary of a couple of my earlier blog posts about writing about superlatives, and writing here and here.

Take a survey of yourself. Can you write? Can you copy-edit? Can you do art? Can you write advertising copy? Can you do video production? Can you write press releases and follow up on them?

(I hope you can write. Otherwise it makes little sense to self-publish ebooks.)

For each of those things you either can't do, or feel incompetent doing, or have others tell you you're incompetent at--you should consider hiring that work out.

I've talked about how I got an artist for my work here. But I also hired out video production, copy editing, and web-page design. I think that next time, I'm going to do some more crude cartoons and story-boards.

Consider this image. It's crude and ugly. However, it served its purpose admirably: to help figure out composition and colors.  I wish that when I was defining Finding Time's trailer that I had put together crude story-boards. Likewise, my web page FindingTime.Poling.Info would have come together faster had I created some crude drawings.

Next time, I'll draw up a lot of simple sketches on a white-board, photograph them, and send them to my friends doing the art, design, and video.

I think I could have more quickly and more surely communicated my vision for the following trailer had I created storyboards like this.

 

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Add A Title To Your KDP Bookshelf

(This is step #10 of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

Kindle Direct Publishing isn't particularly difficult to work with.

Let's suppose you have created an eBook and you've formatted it for the Kindle. Suppose further that you've shown this Kindle-formatted file to a dozen or so advanced readers. Suppose even further that the editor you hired and these advanced readers assure you that the eBook is flawless, perfect, and without any typographical errors, grammatical errors, or spelling errors.

You have to make sure the quality of your eBook is perfect, perfect, perfect, because it bears the stigma of being self-published. Self-published works are looked down upon by many readers. Traditional publishers want everyone to believe "self-published books are trash." They want to serve as gatekeepers. They would like you to believe this is to protect the reading public from a flood of low-quality self-published works.

I wish that were the case. They are simply businesses trying to make the most money they can for their shareholders. They aren't really running a conspiracy to bring in the antichrist or to persecute you. If they believed he could make them a lot of money, they'd publish the devil himself.

Truly, traditional publishers produce edited works day in and day out. But traditional publishers also exclude works from publication for other reasons:

• they pursue different markets, 
• they already have similar titles for sale, 
• they don't publish Commies, Whigs, or Delusional Paranoids.

It is the responsibility of the self-published author make a lie of the traditional publisher's aspersions about his work.

A thousand self-published works can be great, but all it takes is for the reader to get one low-quality work to vindicate the traditional publishers' propaganda.

Once you upload your eBook to the KDP Bookshelf, there's a chance you'll create that bad impression about self-published work. So, now is a good time for you to ask yourself for the last time why you are self-publishing and also to ask whether you're deluding yourself about your deathless prose.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Create An Account On Kindle Direct Publishing

(This is step #9 in my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

I'm only telling you what I do. If you prefer to publish on the Nook or through the iBookstore, write a howto for that step, let me know, and I'll link to it. If you prefer to publish on Smashwords, nag me and I'll write that up, too.

Getting an account on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is pretty simple. You will need to know a few things before you start, or be ready to do some scurrying to get the info at the last minute. Since Amazon will be sending money your way, you need to give them a tax ID number. So, have your Social Security Number available. (If Social Security is an entitlement, why is your SSN a Tax ID?) You'll also need to give Amazon a place to send your money. So, have your bank account's routing number.

I didn't say this earlier, but I should have. After you go to the County Clerk to register your business name, make a side-trip to your bank and talk to someone who can create a new account for your ebook money. You'll want a separate account for all your ebook income, and when you get that, you'll want to make sure you confirm the account's routing number.

If you're smarter than I am, you've established a budget for your ebook publishing venture. If you haven't established a budget, stop right now and plan one.

When you create the ebook account, just put that much money into this bank account plus some margin as working capital. If the account has a minimum balance, make that or 15% (whichever's larger) the extra margin amount.

If you're a genius savant with technology, you can probably create your KDP account while you're sitting in the bank and you've got that info at your fingertips. Otherwise, make sure you've got the paperwork at hand to answer the questions KDP will ask.

When you've got everything set up with KDP, you'll be able to publish your ebook. If you've already made your ebook's MOBI file and have put all their metadata in exactly the way you want, you're ready for the next step.

Otherwise, get to work with Sigil, Calibre, etc. and your ebook perfect.

You did proof it and run it past a dozen beta-readers, didn't you?

Here's another thing I didn't warn you about: You have to hire an editor. You need someone who isn't you to scour the ebook looking for typos, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and stupid stuff. The main thing that makes self-published books suck is the failure to take this step.

Oh, you might say, "I blew my budget on art work and have none left to hire an editor."

In that case, find another impoverished ebook writer, or the most pro-active of your beta-readers, and set up a barter arrangement. "You edit my book, and I'll edit yours... Or paint your bike shed. Or something..."

Just Make Sure Your Book Is As Close To Flawless As You Can Make It.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

A Word Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

#30    Remove things that “go without saying.”

Consider these sentences:

John removed his hat from his head.

Joan had never done something like this before in her life.

The reader can reasonably be expected to know that hats are worn on the head, as opposed to the knee, wrist, ankle, or elsewhere. Moreover, unless your story is about reincarnation, a person has no other lives in which to do something like that.

John removed his hat from his head.

Joan had never done something like this before in her life.

These sorts of accretions on your prose generally come about when you're dashing off prose. When you turn the words in your head into the words on paper, you can easily hold a couple things in mind where only one should be written down.

This is an easy thing to find and fix. The easiest and best editing is often done with just the delete key.

I think that well written prose is something like a Japanese painting where each stroke of the brush contributes to the picture with nothing extraneous added. Remove everything that is not needed and no more. You know what should be conveyed to the your target reading audience. That knowledge should reflect what you put on to the page.

Some readers need a few more clues than others. When I was in high school, I didn't appreciate the one Hemingway story I had been assigned because I hadn't lived enough to put it in its proper context. Sure I grasped the atmospherics of a gray Michigan weekend in late autumn, but not the alienation of breaking up with a fiance. (This is why you don't want to assign Hemingway to high schoolers.)

What went without saying to a serious adult was lost on a callow youth such as myself. Some cultural referents may be missing from your audience. What is obvious to an American reader may fly over the head of a British reader. or vice versa.

You may cut too much, but this is the exception, not the rule. If there are two things in your prose that support the same point, look for the one which best makes your point and cut the rest. If there's something your reader can reasonably infer from the rest, delete it. Every word must contribute enough to the story to justify the reader's time spent reading it.

Though you might cut too much, but you should cut nevertheless.