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.)

A Proposal For Improving eBooks

Every book can have typos. Sadly, the rate at which typos occur--especially in ebooks--has increased at just the time when it might be easiest to report them. Books today are written on word processors with spell checking, but even the best spell checker won't catch a substitution of one valid word for another valid word--like there and their, or where and wear. And repairs

There are systemic reasons why ebooks often have a higher rate of typos than conventional books. This can be traced to the workflow of typesetting and printing that catches typos without propagating fixes back to the writer's original manuscript. This file is in turn converted to ebook formats.

I think we should turn the workflow inside out. Let's produce ebooks first, put them in front of a lot of alpha-readers' eyeballs to find typos, then propagate bug reports back to the writer to fix before typesetting and printing.

The trouble with the last paragraph is that it can be tedious to mark a typo in an ebook and report it back. I think technology can make this a lot easier and it can streamline reporting. Amazon could tweak their Kindle software to do this fairly easily, and if they get the @author thing working, it might be turned to this purpose. However, since Jeff Bezos doesn't take orders from me, I think we should modify an open source reader program--since we have the source. Pick one that runs on any Android device--cell phone, rooted Nook Color, or tablet. Maybe a Kindle Fire if Amazon doesn't get in the way.

To this application a programmer could add code to mark a word or words, where it appears in the text, what the problem is, and who the reporter is, pack it up in a well-formatted message, then transmit the message via the web to the writer. Bonus points for macro commands for the writer's word-processing program that will position the text at the location of the error as indicated by the report. And the reviewer's notes inserted as a comment.


The publisher could circulate advanced review copies to alpha/beta readers who'd use this system as indicated to improve the work's accuracy.

Since I'm a programmer all this seems very feasible to me. But I've learned that if I'm the only one interested in making something happen, progress goes very slowly. Does anybody else think this could be useful?

Leave a comment if you think so. If enough votes are in favor, I'll see about next steps.