Pile ’em high

I promised to keep you posted about my 99p deal on the Kindle edition of “Fatal Forgery” – and in the two days since I launched the promo (thanks to all of you who distributed the link), I have sold eight copies.  This compares very favourably to the four copies sold in the whole previous month, so the promotion seems to be working.

In other news, I have now uploaded the interior and cover of “Faith, Hope and Trickery” to CreateSpace.  What happens next:

1. They (CreateSpace) do a review to make sure the book works in layout terms – this generally takes 24 hours
2. They instruct me to do my own proofread of the formatted version on screen
3. If I am happy with that, I order a physical proof copy – this is sent from America and usually takes about five days to arrive
4. If I am happy when I receive that, I press the big Publish button
5. The book will then appear on Amazon – this can take anything from eight minutes (the record, as far as I am concerned) to three days, a process which is probably not helped by my hitting Refresh on the Amazon website every four seconds or so, day and night
6. You can then order your own copies, and I can order my author copies for distribution to bookshops and reviewers – I can select one of three delivery speeds, depending on how flush I am feeling, but the speediest still takes a week, which is a killer.

Going goggle-eyed with editing

I know you think I’ve been lounging around in a silk kimono, watching Hollywood movies and eating bonbons, but in reality I have been editing like a demon.  And I can finally report that the finish line is in sight.

I have done my last edits – so if you don’t like the story the way it is now, that’s just tough.  I have uploaded the interior file to CreateSpace, so that it can calculate the number of pages it will need to publish the paperback (328, as you’re asking).  It has now told me how wide the book’s spine needs to be, and I’ve sent this vital statistic to the cover designer, who can then finalise the cover.  Once I upload that to CreateSpace, I can order my proof copy, which takes about a week to get to me.  And if I’m happy with that copy when I see it, I will press the big, red, flashing, honking Publish button – oh, how I wish it was that exciting a button, but it isn’t – and you will be able to rush to Amazon in your thousands to buy your own copies.

In the week’s gap while I wait for my proof paperback, I will return to the hell that is formatting, in order to create the various e-versions of the book – which means taking out all of the beautiful formatting that I have just put in.  Such is life.

But in short: we’re nearly there!

A week of promotion

Thanks to all who voted in the “which Plank should I submit to this competition” poll, and the winner (of the poll, not the competition!) is “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  So this weekend I will be preparing the first five thousand-ish words of that for submission, and then it’s fingers crossed until winners are announced in February 2018.

In other news, I have been working in Guernsey all week and so have had little time for writing, but I have managed about 600 words.  I’m still struggling a little with the plot of “Plank 5”, in that I have the basic plot but want more complication – you know how I like to have several strands to the story.  But I am reasonably confident that the additional strands will reveal themselves as I go along – they always have in the past.

On the promotional side of things, I read recently in a magazine that Sophie Raworth (an English news-reader on the telly) has a book review blog.  She seems nice and approachable, and so I tweeted her to ask whether I could send her a copy of “Canary” – it’s set partly in Langham Place, now the home of the BBC, and I thought that might appeal.  I have not had a reply, which perhaps is not surprising.  But I do try!

I have also taken my book of newspaper columns – “Susan in the City” – into the Cambridge branch of WH Smith (a large chain of bookshop/stationer/newsagents), to see whether they would be interested in stocking it on their “local interest” shelf.  The manager seems keen – he said that the sale-or-return basis of my offer was crucial – but he still needs to put the case to head office.  I’m hoping to hear by the end of next week.  As regular readers will know, putting copies in physical bookshops actually costs me money (in other words, it costs me more to order the books from CreateSpace and have them shipped from the US than I make from the eventual sales) but I see it as a promotional move, to get the books being read and – hopefully – recommended.  Although, as with all my promotional efforts, it is all but impossible to assess the success of the approach!

Columns of columns

Well, here they are, at long last: my first batch of copies of “Susan in the City” – a collection of eighty of the 510 columns that I wrote for my local newspaper over the last decade:

I ordered these from CreateSpace waaaaaaay back on 17 March 2017 and (thinking to save the pennies) chose the slowest and cheapest of the three delivery speeds, being quoted an arrival date of 9 May.  I will never do this again: with the budget delivery option there is no tracking, and so – from the moment I had the dispatch notification on 26 March – I was looking out for the books.  And they never arrived.  The ones you are looking at are the replacement order that CreateSpace put together when I complained on 11 May and sent by super-über-speedy delivery to arrive on 15 May.  I cannot tell you the hours of angst I have had over this delivery, and so my lesson for today is: never order books without a tracking option.

As for the books themselves, I am delighted with them and their lovely, sunny yellow covers.  The interior is good as well: cream paper, clear font and plenty of space (I do loathe books that use every inch of paper and force their text to the edges, so that you have to practically break the spine to read to the end of the lines).

So what is their fate?  Five were donated to the local newspaper, the Cambridge News – where the columns originally appeared – to serve as prizes in a reader competition.  I don’t know whether this will lead to further sales (I never know whether anything leads to further sales!) but I did slip a Plank bookmark inside each, just in case.

And five were delivered yesterday to Heffers, the bookshop in Cambridge that has always been so supportive and encouraging of my Plankish efforts.  They hinted that “Susan in the City” – having local interest – might even make it onto the oak table.  The oak table is, as you might imagine, a large oak table and it is right at the front of the shop – in pole position, as Hamilton and Vettel might say.  Nothing I have written has ever appeared on the oak table, so I have everything crossed that the sunshine yellow might seal the deal.  If it does, rest assured that photos will appear.

Riches (are still) beyond my wildest dreams

At this time every year, I have to face learning whether I can retire to a glorious chateau somewhere and devote myself to my Art, to my Muse, to my Writing.  For non-UK readers, we have a bizarre situation where our tax year runs from 6 April of one year to 5 April of the next.  (It’s all to do with an ancient new year’s day being on 25 March, and then the Gregorian calendar getting involved.)  And so around the start of May I dig out all of my records to find out whether I have made any money from being a writer over the past year.  Last year, you may recall, I made a loss of £44.87 – in other words, for the honour of spending hours and hours and hours on writing and trying to sell the blasted things, I had to hand over nearly fifty quid.

Would this year be any better, I wondered?  I added up all the royalties I have received from Amazon, Smashwords and ACX (for the audiobooks), and the lovely cheques I have received from bricks-and-mortar bookshops.  And then I subtracted all the things I pay for in order to create these books.  (I should say that I don’t charge myself anything for office space, heating, lighting, printer cartridges and so on, because all of that is charged to “other Susan” for my day job.)  But I do include, for instance, paying for the design of book covers and bookmarks, and ordering copies of books from CreateSpace to deliver to those bricks-and-mortar bookshops, and subscribing to the Society of Authors.

And I can report – taxman please take note and pity – that this year I have increased my loss to a rather worrying £288.71.  I have gone a bit mad on the covers this year (two paperbacks and two audiobooks), but still, it’s rather sad, isn’t it?  What I shall do is divide it by twelve, and reason with myself that my hobby is costing me only £24 a month.  Ho hum.

New book on the block

I know: I have been a very bad author recently.  Well, to be fair, I have been a very bad historical fiction author, but a rather laudable modern non-fiction author.  Yes, my collection of columns from my decade writing for the local newspaper is just about ready to be launched on the world.

“Susan in the City: The Cambridge News Years” is the final title, and it has a really eye-catching yellow cover.  The cover designer came up with two options – the yellow, and a more serious, almost-Financial-Times pink one – and I had a little poll on my Facebook page, and asked anyone else who would listen, and the yellow was the runaway favourite:

So where am I in the self-publishing process?  I have finalised, formatted and uploaded to CreateSpace the interior file (as a PDF, which must look exactly as you want it to look in the final book – so every bit of formatting, page-breaking, header-and-footering and so on must be just to).  Today the cover designer sent me the finished cover file (that’s a PDF as well, created based on a template generated by CreateSpace using the book size and number of pages that I have specified), and I have uploaded that too.  I have filled in all the other details required – description for Amazon and other catalogues, key words for searching, etc. – and accepted the free ISBN offered by CreateSpace (I’ve never seen the point of paying for my own).  And then I’ve sent it all off to CreateSpace for review, which takes about 24 hours.  When it comes back, I will use their online proofer to check one last time, and then press the big “Publish” button.  And order my own copies.  And wait for the sales to flood in.  Hah.

But in a spare few hours today, I also created the Kindle version of the book.  I wasn’t going to do one, but the nerd in me triumphed again.  So this involved taking out all of that careful formatting – particularly the page breaks, page numbers and headers and footers – as it just interferes with whatever settings people have on their e-readers.  Everything needs to be as plain as possible to maximise legibility.  I then uploaded that very plain document as a Word file – that’s the format they favour, over at Kindle Direct Publishing – along with the JPG file created by the cover designer to work best with e-books, and copied all of the search term and book description stuff.  And finally, I set the price.  I then clicked “Publish”, and KDP said that it takes a few hours for the Kindle book to appear.  But it was there when I came back from lunch, so that’s already published.  Once again, I shall sit back and wait for the sales to roll in.  And once again, hah.

Review blues

“Blossom” (I am trying hard not to call it “Worm”, as several people have suggested that Martha would not approve) has been out for about six weeks now.  Sales through Amazon are going well, so thank you to whoever has bought there, and stocks are falling in the bookshops, all of which is good.  My first task every morning, when I fire up the computer, is to check sales through CreateSpace (where paperback Amazon sales will show) and Kindle (for the e-version through Amazon), and then I turn to the book listing on Amazon to see if any new reviews have appeared.  And this, ungrateful creature that I am, is what concerns me.  In the six, perhaps seven weeks, since it has been out, “Blossom” has attracted only one review – a fab five-star one, for which I am extremely grateful, but only one.  And in the same period after publication, both “Fatal Forgery” and “Canary” had about five reviews.

I don’t think I have done anything different with “Blossom”: I’ve been publicising like a demon (radio, newspaper, blog, general harassing of complete strangers – you know the drill) and have sent out six review copies to people who said they were happy to receive them.  Several people have contacted me to say they’ve read it and will be reviewing it, but nothing.  And I’m starting to worry that the reason they’re not putting up their reviews is that they’re not very good (the reviews, I mean – not the reviewers).  Maybe they didn’t like “Blossom” but are too polite to say so…  To my face people say that they loved it, that the books keep getting better, and that they can’t wait for “Plank 4”, but then, if I met the author of a book I hadn’t enjoyed, I doubt I’d tell them.  Plus, of course, Amazon uses reviews – numbers and star ratings – to determine the list order of books when people do their searches, so “Blossom” is losing out.

To take my mind off it, I am having the morning in the University Library, looking at more old books and auction catalogues that I am not allowed to bring home – what a chore that is, sitting in a glorious building stuffed with knowledge and having a cheese scone for elevenses.  Poor, poor me.

Piles of Plank

As regular readers of this blog will know, I self-publish my novels through an American firm called CreateSpace.  And when I order copies, they are printed in America (South Carolina, I understand, which conjures up all sorts of images of decorous Southern ladies sipping mint juleps on lace-fenced verandahs – although it’s almost certainly a cavernous factory in the rough part of town) and then shipped to me.  And, with international postage, volume is the key: buy more, and you pay less per copy for shipping.  So I try to save up my orders and do them all at once.  Which means that this happens:

What you are looking at here is the “spare” desk in my office, now groaning under the weight of one hundred copies of “Worm in the Blossom”, thirty of “Fatal Forgery” and thirty of “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  Aren’t they lovely?

Deciding how many to order was half-calculation, half-wishful thinking.  I had pre-orders for eighteen “Worms” – fifteen for bookshops and three for friends who don’t like using Amazon and can’t get to my local bookshops.  Then there’s my almost-a-launch-event at Toppings in Ely on 26 October – I don’t know how many they will want, but let’s say at least a dozen.  And I have talks booked at my local library and for the Rotary Club next spring.  And of course the bookshops will want re-stocking (that’s the wishful thinking kicking in, right there).  In the meantime, I’m getting hard stares from my husband who now has no desk space for wrapping parcels, doing crosswords, etc.

A sort-of launch event

You have all been very patient as I vanished on holiday and trundled around eastern Europe on trains of varying degrees of decrepitude – at one point we were overtaken by a horse and cart, so that says it all really.  But now I am back, and we’re very much in the final straight heading for the publication of “Worm in the Blossom”.  So just what am I doing in this last month?

Well, I suppose I should be honest and say that I have here, in my sweaty little paw, my very own first copy of “Worm”.  I always order a proof copy to check for paper quality, cover colour and so on, and I am very pleased.  The reason for ordering so far ahead is that, as with much of self-publishing, you have to count backwards.  I am publishing officially on 16 October, which means that on that day I want to deliver copies to the bookshops that so kindly take Plank onto their shelves.  In order to have those copies in time, I need to order them from CreateSpace (the publishing people), which means having them delivered from America.  Postage is killingly expensive, so I try to avoid the top-rate speedy delivery and go instead for a slower – cheaper – service, which means ordering further ahead of time.  So although “Worm” is to all intents and purposes now finished, it’s not yet “published”.  In order to buy my own copies, I have to publish – but then I sneakily do not make it available through any sales channels, so no-one else can find it.  And in this final month, I also get cracking on the e-book versions – basically a rather painstaking formatting exercise – so that they too can be launched as close as possible to that 16 October date.

And the sort-of launch party?  Well, Toppings – a wonderful independent bookshop in Ely, with a fabulous programme of events – is giving me a whirl on 26 October, which is pretty close and I think counts as a launch event.  Click here to see details – but be warned that my face is VERY large!

Helping Sam to storm the bookshops – or not

As you may know, I had a Major Triumph last week when Toppings in Ely, a fabulous independent bookshop with perhaps the best views from its windows, agreed to stock “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  Buoyed with enthusiasm, I decided to think a bit more about real bookshops as well as online ones.  One of my real bookshops is G David in Cambridge, and as we were chatting they suggested that I could try to get my books listed on Hive, which – bit confusing this – is a website that lists books in local bookshops.  You can buy them online, and then collect them from the bookshops.  An interesting hybrid approach.  But Hive also stocks books on their own account, and – as they are obviously imaginative people – I contacted them and explained my plight.  Is there any way, I asked, that my CreateSpace self-published books could be listed on Hive, with me personally fulfilling any orders that come in (and passing on a commission to Hive, of course).

And back came this reply, which I am sharing with those of you who have also been bitten by the self-publishing bug, as it is the clearest explanation I have read of the current situation for self-published authors here in the UK (or, at least, not in the US): “CreateSpace is a publisher that is based in the US that has not yet set up a UK based distributor.  This means that we are unable to consider any title published by CreateSpace because we are simply unable to source CreateSpace titles at this time.  Currently there’s only two ways that we can purchase CreateSpace titles:

1. You buy copies from them, list yourself on Nielsen as the distributor and then our orders would come directly to you.
2. You reprint using a new ISBN, list yourself on Nielsen as the distributor and then our orders would come directly to you.”

Neither of those options appeals to me at the moment (the first would definitely knock out any profit I could make, what with postage from the US and then postage on to buyers, while the second would cause confusion with two ISBNs per title), but it is certainly useful to have a clearer understanding of the distribution (or non-distribution) of self-published titles in the UK at the moment.  What we need, of course, is a CreateSpace UK – which has been promised for years.