Be careful what you wish for

Tags

Amazon, cover, CreateSpace, Fatal Forgery, KDP, POD, print-on-demand

Last autumn CreateSpace – which I had been using for my print-on-demand paperbacks for nearly a decade – was bought out by the Amazon behemoth and absorbed into its KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) offering.  Monopoly concerns aside, I was delighted for two reasons.  Firstly, KDP customer service offers a call-back service to anywhere in the world (CreateSpace would call only US numbers, so I never spoke to them).  And secondly, whereas CreateSpace POD paperbacks were printed in South Carolina and it took ages and cost a fortune to have them delivered to the UK, KDP POD paperbacks are printed in (it turns out) Poland, which is much closer and therefore quicker and cheaper for delivery.  With a spring in my step and a song on my lips, I placed an order for twenty copies of “Fatal Forgery” with KDP on 29 October 2018.  And then it all went wrong…

• 29 October 2018: Order placed for twenty copies
• 12 November 2018: Order arrives – and eleven out of the twenty copies are trimmed far too meanly, with the title disappearing off the edge of the cover.  Using the fab new call-back facility, I explain the problem to a nice person at KDP and they tell me to return the faulty eleven copies for a refund and then place another order – which I do.
• 18 November 2018: The replacement eleven copies arrive – with exactly the same poor printing.  I speak to another nice person at KDP and explain the problem, and they say that the matter will be escalated to a manager.  After about a fortnight – with several chasing calls and emails in the middle – the manager finally confirms that the eleven replacement copies I received were the same ones I had returned…  Apparently the stock system was delighted to find just the right number of copies on their return shelves to fulfil a new order.
• 16 December 2018: The manager places a new order for eleven copies, and says that I can keep the eleven dodgy ones (otherwise, if I return them – well, you can guess).
• 24 December 2018: Four replacement copies arrive.  I chase the remaining seven copies and am told that the manager ordered only four and not the agreed eleven – this nice person at KDP orders another seven.
• 9 January 2019: The seven copies arrive – with two of them packed so badly in the box that their covers have bent and they are not suitable for sale.  I speak to another nice KDP person – they are all charming and seem genuinely saddened by the poor service I have received – and they order two replacement replacement copies.
• 18 January 2019: The two replacement replacement copies arrive.

Et voilà – it’s as simple as that!  A mere 80 days after placing my order for twenty copies, I have them.  Didn’t someone manage to get all the way around the world in that time?  I begin to dream longingly of South Carolina….

Shades of Forgery

Tags

Amazon, cover, CreateSpace, Fatal Forgery, IngramSpark, KDP, POD, print-on-demand, review

Matters are moving forward at a sedate pace in my quest to use IngramSpark as well as KDP for my print-on-demand paperbacks.  The cover of “Fatal Forgery” has been suitably tweaked to accommodate the slimmer spine of the IS edition (because IS uses thinner paper stock and over nearly 300 pages – 150 thicknesses of paper – it makes a difference), and I have today received my proof copy from IS and am happy with it.

I am now working out my next steps, which will involve (scarily) un-publishing my current KDP paperback and then republishing it with the new ISBN that I bought for the IS edition – all paperbacks of the same title, regardless of who actually prints them, must have the same ISBN.  This would be simply an administrative thing – unpublish then upload the files again – except that I am not sure what will happen to all the lovely reviews on Amazon that are associated with the current KDP paperback.  I certainly don’t want to lose them, so I’m investigating if/how I can get the reviews carried over to the “new” paperback.  It may be simple (if the reviews are associated with the title) or it may be awkward/impossible (if they’re associated with the ISBN).  Who knew that writing the darn book was by far the easiest part of the process?

On a related subject, it has been very interesting to compare the look of “Fatal Forgery” as produced by the different printing presses:

On the left is the original version, printed by CreateSpace in (I think) South Carolina.  In the middle is the version that I now get from KDP (who took over CreateSpace, and moved the printing for UK authors to Wroclaw in Poland).  And on the right is the IngramSpark version, printed in (I think) Milton Keynes.  They all use the same cover file from the point of view of colour – it’s only the trim dimensions and spine width (and spine print size) that are different.  And yet, how different they look!  The cover designer said this about the trio: “The one on the right appears to be slightly closer to how it was intended than any other.  Somewhere between the one on the left and the one on the right (but closer to the right) would be as intended by me.  The one in the middle is much too bright.”  Thankfully very few buyers will see the difference as they won’t have all three versions, but I thought you might find it interesting – and it certainly shows that being too precious about precise shades of colour when designing a cover might not be worth the fuss!

Chaos behind the scenes

Tags

ALLi, Alliance of Independent Authors, colour, cover, CreateSpace, Gardners, Ingram Spark, ISBN, KDP, Niel, spine

I can imagine that you’re all thinking how lazy I am – no Sam updates, no new plot developments, not a bean.  But you would be wrong, as I am knee-deep in behind-the-scenes Sam work.  As you know, it is a dream of mine to get the Planks into every bookshop in the land.  I have tried to find out how to achieve this on numerous occasions but the picture is so confused and murky that I have always failed – until now.  (You may remember my short-lived excitement at getting myself registered as a publisher with Nielsen here in the UK – an achievement that has resulted so far in precisely zero sales.)  But then – thanks in no small measure to the advice and encouragement I have received from ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors, which I cannot recommend too highly) – the lightbulb has been lit.  To be order-able from UK bookshops I need to be listed with wholesaler Gardners, and to get into their catalogue I need to print my books via Ingram Spark (part of the Lightning Source family) as well as via KDP (CreateSpace-as-was).

Simple, you might think.  But there are a couple of snags – one I have solved, and one I continue to battle.  The solved one is to do with ISBNs.  When I first published the Sam books with CreateSpace (now absorbed by Amazon and part of their KDP platform) I chose to use the free ISBNs handed out by CS, rather than buying my own.  But IS will not print and distribute a book that uses a CS ISBN – and so I need to withdraw the original books and their ISBNs from sale and replace them with new books using new ISBNs that I have bought myself.  Buying ISBNs is easy but not cheap; I bought ten of them for £159.  And changing the ISBNs on the KDP books is simple: you just withdraw the old books and then upload the same files again but quote the new ISBN and the cover will be adjusted automatically.

Which brings me to my unsolved snag: the cover.  The cover files I have were designed for use with CS books and were created using a CS template, which was manufactured to the right specifications given my cover size and the number of pages.  People warned me that IS uses thinner paper than CS, which means that the IS books are slimmer than their CS cousins – which in turn means that the spine dimensions on the IS cover file will be wrong.  I enquired with my cover designer about adjusting the files to meet IS dimensions – and was quoted £75 per cover, for five books….  Not an inconsiderable sum (which would require a significant – and probably unrealistic – boost in sales to justify the outlay).  Could I get away with the original cover files, I wondered?  So I just tried it: I registered with IS and created a new title and uploaded the interior and cover files that I use for CS/KDP.  There was a bit of a hiccup when the IS system said that the interior PDF did not have embedded fonts, but an hour’s work sorted that out.  And IS seemed happy enough with the cover file – all looked fine with the online proof.  I went ahead and ordered a paper proof, and it arrived today.  Two things are obvious: the cover file is not quite right, and the colour is very different:

The colour difference looks worse because they are side by side (that’s the brighter CS one on the left and the duller IS one on the right) but it is disappointing.  And the spine will just not work (that’s the original CS copy on the top, with the slimmer IS one below):

My engineer husband has suggested simply adding some blank pages to the IS interior file, to bulk it up to fit the spine, and has offered to get out his micrometer to measure the page thickness and work out exactly how many cushioning pages I will need.  As they say, back to the drawing board.

Hart’s and minds

Tags

author talks, CreateSpace, Hart's Books, KDP, money, publicity, sales, Samuel Plank, self-publishing

Is there anything an author enjoys more than talking about her books?  It’s certainly easier than getting on with writing the next one.  And yesterday evening was a great treat as I spoke to a small (I think we had eleven in total) but terrifically interested and engaged audience at Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden.  Hart’s – as a printer, stationer and bookseller – has been associated with Saffron Walden since 1836, and the current bookshop is part of the Daunt family but retains a very independent feel.  I’d had my eye on them for a while but I rarely look my best in Saffron Walden: it’s the usual destination for our Sunday tandem rides (there’s a local café that does a wonderful fried breakfast which is my reward for cycling twenty-five miles) and I’m always a sweaty, fly-dotted creature when I arrive.  Not the best image to persuade a bookshop that you are a serious writer of worthy tomes.  But one Sunday I just took a chance, and the manager Max was sufficiently impressed by my enthusiasm – or so desperate to get my pungent carcass out of his shop – that he agreed to stock Sam.  And when I suggested an author event, he kindly agreed.  And that was last night.

At such talks I am never sure which aspect is going to chime with the audience: the books themselves, or the history behind them (of policing and justice, or of London), or the writing process, or the self-publishing procedure.  And so I start with a general introduction – how I came to write the first book, why I wrote four more – and then (if the audience seems keen) open it up to questions.  Well, last night “keen” was an understatement.  I’d barely spoken two sentences before the questions started, and it didn’t let up for over an hour – fantastic!

I promised myself that I would always be completely honest in my answers, particularly when it comes to money issues – people need to know that it’s not the route to quick riches.  And in the spirit of full disclosure, I can report that last night’s event garnered me about £7.65 – that’s about 45p per book, and we sold seventeen.  (It’s not that the bookshop takes an enormous cut – their deal is to keep a perfectly reasonable 35% or 40% of the cover price.  It’s just that we self-published authors have to supply the books ourselves, so by the time I have ordered them from CreateSpace, sorry KDP – recent take-over – and paid for them to be sent from the US to me in the UK, and then given the bookseller his discount, I’m left with about 45p per book.)  As I say, not the route to riches – but just the most enormous fun and I wouldn’t stop doing it for the world.

A right royalty rumpus

Tags

Amazon, CreateSpace, KDP, Kindle, print-on-demand, royalty, self-publishing, tax

Part of being a self-published author is dealing with the money side of things.  I am extremely lucky in that, for me, writing is a hobby and so I do not count on it for my income.  (Just as well, considering it makes me £25 per week.)  I do hope that one day I will be able to rely on it a little more, but for the moment, it’s an enjoyable side-line.  And this is why I have never bothered getting to grips with the royalty situation.  (Isn’t that a marvellous word for something rather ordinary?  Here’s the explanation from etymologyonline, one of my most-used websites: “c. 1400, ‘office or position of a sovereign’, also ‘magnificence’, from or modelled on Old French roialte [12c., Modern French royauté], from Vulgar Latin regalitatem, from Latin regalis.  Sense of ‘prerogatives or rights granted by a sovereign to an individual or corporation’ is from late 15c.  From that evolved more general senses, such as ‘payment to a landowner for use of a mine’ [1839], and ultimately ‘payment to an author, composer, etc.’ for sale or use of his or her work [1857].”)

Don’t get me wrong: I have a fair grasp of how much I make from each copy sold.  (It’s a bit approximate, because it does vary according to country of sale, exchange rates, etc., but it’s about £1.10 per paperback copy sold on Amazon, and £1.10 per Kindle book.)  But what mystifies me is that every month I get five royalty payments.  Yes, five.  Three of them come accompanied by statements, while the other two sneak in alone.  The three statements cover purchases made in pounds, US dollars and euros.  But I have no idea what the other two payments are for.  On my bank statement all five payments say simply that they have come from “Amazon Media”.  And so I tot them up and bung them on the tax return.

But now change is a-foot.  I have received an email from CreateSpace (the print-on-demand company that I use, which is – like almost every business under the sun – owned by Amazon) announcing that “CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing will become one service”.  KDP is the service I use to sell my Kindle books, and CreateSpace authors seem to have little choice in the matter (pick your battles, as my grandma used to advise), so I have pressed the button to migrate my CreateSpace titles to my KDP account.  On the surface, this seems like a good development: I can now go to one dashboard to see all my sales – POD paperbacks and Kindle books.  But I can’t help thinking that things might not be that simple…  For a start, I’m going to have to wait longer for my £25: “CreateSpace pays monthly royalties 30 days after the end of the month in which they were earned while KDP pays monthly royalties approximately 60 days after the end of the month in which they were earned.”  And those royalties might well shrink a little, as they are calculated after the cost of production is deducted, and “some low-page count books will see an increase in printing fees when they are printed in the UK and EU”.  It remains to be seen how low is low when it comes to page count…

Making a deposit

Tags

CreateSpace, ISBN, legal deposit, Nielsen, publisher, self-publishing

For the most part, self-publishing is a grand adventure and to be recommended.  But there are some regions of the publishing world that are very hard to navigate solo, and one of these is legal deposit.  Back in the mists of time (OK, it was January 2017), I had a brainwave: I would get myself registered as a publisher with Nielsen.  Nielsen is the key book distributor here in the UK, and when a bookshop wants to stock a title, they generally order it through Nielsen.  Nielsen then contacts the publisher and orders the copies to be sent on.  In theory, if I was listed as a publisher, a customer desperate to get their mitts on a Sam Plank novel could go into any bookshop in the country and place an order which would make its way from bookshop to Nielsen to me.  What could go wrong?  Well, I have indeed been listed as a publisher with Nielsen for eighteen months now, and how many orders have I received?  Not a single one.  Hey ho, as they say.

But it’s worse than that, my self-publishing friends.  My books – the five Sam Plank novels and the dozens of non-fiction titles that I produce in my day-job guise as an adviser on money laundering – are all published as print-on-demand paperbacks by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.  In South Carolina.  In America.  Not in the UK.  Here in the UK we have a regime called legal deposit.  It’s been around since 1662, and the current legislation – the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 – requires that “a person who publishes in the United Kingdom a work to which this Act applies must at his own expense deliver a copy of it to an address specified by any deposit library entitled to delivery”.  Fair enough.  But a few weeks ago I received an email from the legal deposit people asking for one of my non-fiction titles – which are, as I said, published in South Carolina.  In America.  I explained all of this, but they insisted and so I sent them a copy.  A week later another demand arrived, for another book.  I bleated “South Carolina” again, and this time they said that perhaps I should have a word with Nielsen, who supply them with their data on books published in the UK.

Heavens, Alex at Nielsen is a nice chap, and I got the impression that he likes nothing more than a mystery.  The two titles in question have ISBNs which show that they are indeed American publications – South Carolina, don’t you know – but the spreadsheet showed their place of publication as UK.  Hence the legal deposit demands.  Alex was on the case, and within a day emailed me to say that they had tracked down the error, worked out had gone wrong, and rectified it.  My publications now all show – correctly – as being American in origin and therefore beyond the grasp of legal deposit.

I’m not being mean about it, and of course I support the concept of legal deposit to preserve the nation’s published output (as the British Library would have it).  But if I have to source and supply a copy of each of my books “at [my] own expense”, that’s quite an outlay: each has to be ordered from CreateSpace and shipped to me before I send them on to the five legal deposit libraries – each copy would cost me about £15 in total, and I have nearly forty titles!  (Forty titles times five libraries times £15 is a staggering £3,000.)  It’s not something that occurred to me at all when choosing my print-on-demand publisher, but I’m now thanking my lucky stars that I opted for one in South Carolina rather than Southall or Southampton.

Flying(ish) off the shelves

Tags

CreateSpace, Discovering Diamonds, Faith Hope and Trickery, G David, Heffers, Kindle, Plank 6, research, review

I’ve been a bad blogger, I know, but I have an excuse: I’ve been away on holiday.  I spent a week in Galle, in southern Sri Lanka, and I can report that – lovely though it is – Sam will not be visiting it in future books.  Although Ceylon was a British “possession” in the 1820s, I can’t imagine Martha being keen on her husband sailing off for distant tropical lands – and Galle was a pretty rackety place back then, with more formal policing confined to Colombo, nearly seventy miles to the north.

Now that I am back in Blighty, I can update you on the launch of “Faith, Hope and Trickery”.  After a tense time when my original order from CreateSpace nearly failed to show up before my departure on hols, the box of books finally arrived an hour before I left and my husband was roped in as delivery boy to take the reserved copies to my two local bookshops, Heffers and David’s.  Here they are in prime position in the window of David’s – note their wonderful promotion of me as an “local (award-winning) author”, referring to my Discovered Diamonds award for “Portraits of Pretence”!

A couple of lovely reviews – both stating that they think “FHT” is the best of the Sam series – have appeared on Amazon (you can get a taster on the Reviews page).

And I have just worked out my sales figures for the Kindle edition, and in March 2018 (the month of launch) I sold eleven e-copies.  Paperback sales are harder to calculate, as the CreateSpace website is not updated instantly, but I think we’re looking at ten copies sold via Amazon in March, plus the ten delivered to Heffers and the three to David’s.

Meanwhile, the withdrawal symptoms have started already, and I am turning my mind to “Plank 6” – I’m researching the history of the Cayman Islands, and of plant-based poisons…

All by myself

Tags

Cambridge University Library, CreateSpace, Faith Hope and Trickery, Fatal Forgery, Kindle, pricing, self-publishing

You know that saying, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”?  Well, I am really struggling today with that first part – accepting things I cannot change.  One of my reasons for publishing “Faith, Hope and Trickery” on the date I did was to have my own big box of books from CreateSpace in my grubby paws by today, because tomorrow I am off on holiday for a week (hurrah!).  In order to do that, I paid handsomely for super-duper-über-speedy delivery.  And I waited.  Last Thursday I had a little email from CreateSpace to say that my parcel had been dispatched, and giving me the UPS tracking numbers.  Of which UPS had never heard.  And – skipping over the boring bits – yesterday I heard from CreateSpace: “I researched your account and found an unexpected delay in the shipping process.  We’re working to resolve the technical issue and will ship your order as soon as possible.”  With the best will in the world, that parcel is not going to arrive today.  And breathe….

On the positive side, two bookshops have already said that they want to stock the book – one is taking three copies, and the other is taking ten.  I have three reviewers lined up, champing at the bit to get their books, and of course I want to stroke my vanity by submitting a copy to the hallowed archives of the University Library.  All of this, however, will now have to wait until CreateSpace remembers that its role in life is to print books and send them out.  I bet this doesn’t happen to John Grisham.

(On the matter I raised the other day – about whether to keep “Fatal Forgery” as a bargain Kindle book – one friend has said this: “My instincts around your 99p question is that if you price something too low, then people may cease to value it.  I find myself not buying really cheap books in the supermarket because I imagine they must somehow be ‘bad’ books if they are that cheap.  I am probably wrong in that assumption but it stops me buying.”  Any other thoughts?)

Pricing and promo problem

Tags

Amazon, CreateSpace, Facebook, Faith Hope and Trickery, Fatal Forgery, Kindle, pricing, promotion, Twitter

It’s an odd time, post-publication.  For authors with traditional publishing houses behind them, I daresay this is a period of frenzied promotional activity, with champagne-lubricated launches across the world and endless media interviews.  But for little old me, it means sitting here checking the UPS website every ten minutes to track the delivery of my books from CreateSpace in South Carolina, while occasionally looking at Amazon to see whether anyone has left a review.  I know that people are receiving their copies – thank you, Carol in West Row, for your wonderful photos of the grand unwrapping! – and here on my desk I have pre-prepared addressed envelopes ready to send out the review copies as soon as they arrive.

In the meantime, I wanted your opinion on the special price reduction I have done on the Kindle edition of “Fatal Forgery”.  I did it as a way to draw people into the series, just before the appearance of “Faith, Hope and Trickery”, and the initial uptake was encouraging.  I reduced the price to 99p (99¢ in the US; 0.99 euros in the EU) on 7 March.  Between 7 March and 9 March – when I suspect you were all kindly passing on the good news, and I had links on Facebook and Twitter – I sold twelve copies, but nothing since then (I suppose the promo links have fallen from view).  Should I return “FF” to its normal Kindle price, to fit in with the others – that’s about £3.62?  Or should I keep it at 99p permanently, as a sort of entry-level drug to get people to sample the series, and do more puffs about it?  Amazon does occasionally promote its 99p Kindle catalogue and there’s a chance “FF” could appear in such a promotion – but I suspect that’s for books with higher sales figures already.  (What I do know is that it definitely won’t appear in a 99p promo if it’s priced at £3.62!)  Complicating the issue is the fact that Amazon – of its own volition – has created a Kindle bundle of the first four Sam books, and that includes “FF” at 99p.  I don’t think anyone has bought the bundle – my current sales info shows no sales in recent weeks of any of the middle books in the series, which it would if the bundle had sold.

So, dear readers, what do you think?  Leave it at 99p, or put it back to the higher price?  (I suppose you need this info: if it sells at 99p I get 35p royalty, and if it sells at £3.62 I get £2.09.  But that’s only if it sells!  So lots of 35p is better than no £2.09…)

Amazed by Amazon

Tags

Amazon, CreateSpace, Faith Hope and Trickery, Fatal Forgery, KDP, pricing, self-publishing

As I recover from self-publishing my twenty-seventh book (you know about the five Sam Plank novels, but in my day job I have self-published twenty-two “piggy” books about anti-money laundering – so-called because of the piggy who features on the covers), I thought that I had pretty much come to terms with how Amazon does it all.  Compare and contrast, if you will:

• First self-published book: Upload to Amazon and then refresh their website every four seconds or so for the next three days (and occasionally at night, so great was the excitement), before collapsing with nervous exhaustion when “the book” finally appears in the Amazon catalogue.
• Twenty-seventh self-published book: Upload to Amazon and then go about my daily life, until husband comments in passing, “Did you know that the purple one is on there now?”

Because I started self-publishing some years ago, I find myself following a system that a new, self-publishing author might not choose – in short, I publish paperbacks through CreateSpace and Kindle books through Amazon.  Now that Amazon offers paperback publishing as well, if I were starting out today, I might combine the two.  But as mine are uploaded separately, I always get two Amazon listings: one for the paperback and one for the Kindle book.  This used to concern me…

• First self-published Sam book: Upload paperback files to CreateSpace and Kindle files to Amazon (via KDP) and then refresh, etc., as above.  Spot that there are two separate listings and spend hours on user forums to understand what is going on.  Email a very detailed request to Amazon asking them to link the two listings.  After 72 hours the two listings are linked.
• Fifth self-published Sam book: Upload paperback files to CreateSpace and Kindle files to Amazon, and then forget about it all for 72 hours until the two listings are linked automatically.

So I consider myself something of an old hand at Amazon.  But no: they have surprised me.  I logged in this morning to check that the two editions of “Faith, Hope and Trickery” have been linked – they have – and what should I spot but a special offer.  Of its own volition, Amazon is offering the Kindle editions of the first four Sam books as a bundle, for (on the UK website) £12.96.  I wonder whether this was prompted by my special 99p offer on “Fatal Forgery”?  (I know I said that I would run that only until “FHT” was published, but I’m going to let it ride until Sunday.  Since the start of the 99p deal, I have sold twelve Kindle copies of “Fatal Forgery”.)  So there it is: an Amazon-generated offer on my books, complete with a fabulous “group portrait” of the covers.