Sam’s hit list

I’m giddy with excitement – the text of “Notes of Change” is finally, well, finalised.  It has been through several drafts with me, corrections/suggestions from two beta readers, some plot clarification (which moved the chapter count from an irritating thirty-nine to a lovely round forty) and a final read-through yesterday.  Final word count is 75,672, which is about average for a Sam Plank book (as readers will know, he’s not a man given to florid description or overlong introspection).

And now that the creative part is done, I move into the phase of lists.  I have a list of the steps to create the paperback edition, one for formatting the e-editions (more on that in a minute), one for “pre-publication tasks”, one of “people to tell about the new book”, several of “book promo and marketing ideas” and other random sets of bullet points and reminders jotted in notebooks, sent in emails to myself and written on my phone.  One day, dear reader, this will all be amalgamated into a slick publishing process – but today is not that day!  Today is the day for formatting the paperback edition.

Ah yes, the e-editions.  For the past few years – can’t quite remember when I first did it – I have published my e-editions through the KDP platform (part of the Amazon mega-corporation) and opted for their KDP Select programme.  This means that the e-books are sold exclusively in Kindle format through Amazon, and not in any other e-format through any other seller (such as Kobo or Apple).  The benefits (this is over-simplifying) are two-fold: you get a better royalty percentage from Amazon than they would offer if your book was published “wide” (i.e. with other sellers as well), and they put your book into their KU and KOLL programmes.  KU (Kindle Unlimited) is where people pay a monthly subscription and then can indefinitely borrow up to ten books – as an author, I get a pro rata share of the “KDP Select Global Fund” according to how many pages of my e-books are read by those borrowers.  KOLL (Kindle Owners’ Lending Library) allows those who are enrolled in Amazon Prime to download one book a month – as an author, I get a share of the KOLL pot according to the number of downloads of my e-books.  And over the years, I’ve rather taken my eye off the ball.  Recent soul-searching (and bean-counting) has revealed that:

• The amount of money I make from my books being in KU and KOLL is insignificant to the point of invisibility
• Competitors to Kindle books are growing in number, and many offer good exposure, international coverage, decent royalties and a chance to diversify my risk
• There is an increasing number of readers who are going off Amazon, for all sorts of reasons, and looking for alternative places to buy their books.

In short, I have decided that the e-book of “Notes of Change” will not be going into the KDP Select programme and instead will be published “wide”.  The existing six Sam Plank books are stuck in the programme for a couple more months (auto-renew – a casualty of taking my eye of that ball) and then will be withdrawn and also published “wide”.  You can see why I need all those lists…

And breathe…

Just a quick update to let you know that I have heard from Roy the plot man, and the news is good.  He does have some (as always perceptive and excellent) comments, but his overall view is favourable: “I found this story most enjoyable… Also, I find that you have developed your factual storytelling to include more human emotion and this adds greatly to the overall readability.  In conclusion, a lovely book.  Possibly your best.”

I cannot tell you what a relief this is; when you’ve been writing a book in isolation for eighteen months, you definitely stop seeing it objectively.  For all I knew, it was complete self-indulgent drivel, and handing it over for the first time to someone else is terrifying.

The plan now is to spend the next few days incorporating Roy’s suggestions into “Faith, Hope and Trickery”.  I will then read it all again myself, then print it out for proofreading by my husband, who is a very slow and therefore observant reader.  Then it’s final checks before cutting and pasting the text into the interior template.  At this point I allow myself the fun task of choosing chapter names – at the moment, they’re just numbers and dates.  Then I will know the page count, which CreateSpace needs in order to generate the cover template for me to send to the cover designer.  Heavens, when I write it all down, there’s still plenty to do in just over a month – I’d better get on with it!

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.

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.

Plank on two fronts

Heavens, I’ve been so busy recently that I quite forgot to update you on my progress.  The crazy thing is that I am working on two Planks at once – the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” and the final draft of “Portraits of Pretence”.

Audiobook first.  This is now published, and you can buy it all over the place – well, on Amazon, Audible and iTunes.  So far we’ve sold four!  A friend who is very big in the charity sector suggested that I should get it listed in the Talking Books catalogue for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, so I am finding out about that.  The narrator (known technically as the producer, as he did all of the fancy stuff with the audio files) has received his ten free download codes from ACX and is busy promoting them.  I am waiting for mine, and plan to use them to tempt reviewers.  I’ve not dealt with audiobook reviewers before, but I am going to assume that they are like all book reviewers: they have too many books to review, and you need to convince them that yours is worthwhile, so choosing the right reviewer who likes your genre of book is crucial.  (For instance, I was considering one until I looked more closely and realised that s/he reviews mainly erotic audiobooks – one of the questions is “How steamy does it get?”.  Sam is many things, but steamy he ain’t.)

Now for “Portraits of Pretence”.  Well, it’s been a busy weekend.  I’ve made the main edits suggested by Roy the beta reader – a mixture of typos, better phrasing suggestions, and actual alternations and clarifications.  I have registered the book with Createspace: at this point, all I have to give is the title, and this means that I can get the (free, Createspace-issued) ISBN.  I need to quote this inside the book as well as on the cover, so it’s good to have it.  I have cut and pasted all of the plain Word text into the book template, so that “Portraits of Pretence” will have the same interior look and feel as the other three.  This is a painstaking job that required a whole bag of chocolate buttons.  I have given a title to each chapter – this is a fun job.  I have worked out the (almost final) page count (334 – about twenty pages longer than “Worm in the Blossom”) which enabled me to set up the Createspace cover template that the cover designer needs and I have sent that to him.  (Until you have the page count you can’t calculate the spine width.)  So I have done all I can to facilitate the cover, and my remaining (big) task is to do my final read-through of the formatted text.  Thankfully my husband is away on Thursday and Friday, so I will have a mini-retreat for that.  In short, Sam and I are on track.

No longer the new kid

I am very proud of being a self-published author – or an “indie”, as we are often called.  I look at my books on the shelf – my own shelf, or, even better, the shelf of a bookshop – and marvel that I created them.  But I can’t rest on my laurels: recent statistics suggest that 30% of Amazon best-sellers are now self-published, so I can’t rely on being unusual or ground-breaking.

Being a business-savvy author requires you to keep up with trends that will influence how you publish (and, for some authors but not me, because I’m ornery and stubborn like that, also what you write).  And in the self-publishing world, the two big trends seem to be these:

• DIY is the name of the self-publishing game – those “assisted publishing” businesses that offer to do some of the legwork for you are losing ground.  I was never tempted by them, because I like feeling that I’ve done it all (apart from designing my covers, of course – left to my artistic abilities, we’d end up with something made out of macaroni and glitter).
• People are reading more and more on their phones.  Not me, as my aging eyesight needs print about the size of my thumb, but I do see all the youngsters on the tube reading on their teeny tiny screens.  This development favours the clearly formatted, shorter book – so Sam is ahead of the curve on this one.

The net result seems to be that readers – and to some extent, bookshops – are starting to care less about the publication route.  As long as the book looks good and is well-written, its self-published status is no longer an obstacle or even particularly noteworthy.

Cold stops play

I have just come back from a three-day mini-break in Berlin and brought home with me: (a) four chocolate-covered marzipan sticks (like fingers of Fudge for the serious chocoholic); (b) some pasta shaped like the Brandenburg Gate; (c) an increased fear of the Stasi; and (d) a filthy cold.  Thanks to the last of these, my 2,000 Sam words are just not going to happen today – my brain feels like it’s sharing my skull with a large sneeze-generating cloud.  But rather than waste the time, I have rugged myself up on the sofa with a large glass of Ribena to hand (for non-UK readers, that’s a blackcurrant cordial much beloved of my generation, apparently full of vitamin C) and my laptop on a cushion, and I am starting the research for the cover of “Plank 3”.

The cover of “Fatal Forgery” (aka “Plank 1”) was entirely the brainchild of my marvellous cover designer at Design for Writers.  I gave him the outline of the story and – this was great fun – examples of book covers I liked and disliked, and he came up with that (well, almost that – in the first version Sam had a moustache, but we changed it to side-whiskers).  I loved it the instant I saw it.  When I wrote “FF” I didn’t know I was going to do a series, but then I fell in love with my characters and couldn’t let them go.  So along came “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, and by the greatest stroke of luck we found that the original “FF” cover could be adapted to give a series feel.  Each book needs an outline figure and a background document relevant to the story – two elements for me to research – and then the title.  And to foster the series identity, on the cover of “Canary” we have the strapline “A Sam Plank Mystery”.

My plan for today, therefore, is to look for appropriate images.  Given that prostitution will be figuring significantly in “Plank 3”, I shall have to be careful with my search terms…  I shall then send them to the cover man, and he can look into copyright, licensing, etc. and let me know what we can actually use.  He will also suggest a colour in an appropriate “antique-y” shade – I’ve had great compliments on the “FF” teal and the “Canary” old gold, so there’s plenty to live up to.  Perhaps I should take inspiration from my red nose and the purple Ribena and go for a pleasant shade of Regency puce.

E-nough e-formatting!

I do rather envy Jane Austen, you know.  When she was writing “P&P” and all the others, she simply sat in a sunny room in Hampshire and filled pages of parchment with lovely curly writing, then sent it off to London and someone turned it into books.  For me (note how I subtly compare myself to Jane Austen…), once the story is finished, the work is only half-done.

I do love self-publishing, as you know, for the many opportunities it offers, but it really is blooming hard work.  You may think that there is only one “Canary”, but I know otherwise: there is the paperback, then the Kindle version, the Smashwords version, the Kobo version, the iBook version and the plain PDF.  Each is subtly different (in formatting, not in words), and each has to be carefully prepared, checked and uploaded, with each publication route asking for different interior and cover files, and for slightly different information about book category, pricing structure, distribution rights and so on.  As my late nan used to say (alongside “a dulage of rain”), it’s a mindfield out there.

On the plus side, it’s all done – hurrah!  Now I’m just waiting for the various e-formats to appear on their sites in time for the Big Launch on Friday – although the Kindle one is already available (thanks to reader Graham for spotting it – too exciting!).

The Killer Blurb 2

I’ve had another go at this blurb, in response to some comments – what do you think?

“In this new mystery, Constable Sam Plank’s financial curiosity is once again awakened as he struggles to find the link between a suicide, an embezzler, an arsonist and a thief. No corner of Regency London is untouched by these crimes, as he travels from the aristocratic mansions of St James Park back to his own boyhood haunts among the dank alleyways of Wapping. But with his steadfast wife becoming involved in his investigations, and a keen young police officer under his command, is Sam leading them all into a confrontation with something far more ruthless and brutal – and familiar – than even he realises?”

I thought I would also add some reviews, like you see on the back cover of paperbacks, so how about these (of course I don’t have any reviews of “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, so I have chosen general ones from “Fatal Forgery” – or is the second one damning with faint praise?):

“The Regency period is brought vividly to live through picturesque descriptions and believable dialogue; I could almost hear and smell London.”  (The Kindle Book Review)

“Susan Grossey weaves a tale of mystery and suspense through what could be a very dry subject.”  (Historical Novel Society)

Fluffing the canary’s wings

I have just spent the day formatting “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” – which consisted of taking the final formatted version of “Fatal Forgery” and then cutting and pasting “Canary” into it.  I want the books to look similar, not least because several readers commented last time that they thought that the font and layout of “FF” were both elegant and easy to read.  So I have gone back to the lovely American website that sells templates for books (Book Design Templates) and paid my extra fee to use the same template again.  (Yes, I could have done it without them knowing, but (a) that’s illegal, and (b) I’d be angry if someone just copied my book without paying for it, so they deserve a fair payment for their hard work in creating such useful and beautiful templates.)

So now it is all printed out and ready for another proofreading.  This time round I discovered a marvellous setting on the print dialog which basically stretches the page to fit an A4 sheet – obviously a book page is much smaller than A4 – so I can do my close proofreading without my eyes getting too tired.  I will try to get that done this week.

But my major task now is writing the back cover blurb for “Canary”…  This is such an important task, and I’m going to ask for your help, so I will finish this post now and start a second one devoted to The Blurb.