All change!

Hello everyone – just a quick update so that you know I’m still here and still (albeit very slowly) writing the final Sam Plank book (“The Notes of Change”, due out on 25 February 2022).  The life of a self-published author is never dull: just when you think you’ve got a grip on some part of the publishing process, it slips away from you.

As regular readers will know, the very first bookshop to stock my physical paperbacks was my beloved Heffers, the university bookshop here in my hometown of Cambridge.  Their crime buyer – the renowned Richard Reynolds – is a great champion of indie authors, and he was kind enough to take a chance on “Fatal Forgery”.  It obviously sold well enough for him, as he took all subsequent books, and even invited me to take part in various crime fiction events at the shop – where I met people who (entirely unprompted by my pleading or their pity) called themselves “fans”.  Over lockdown, of course, things halted in the bookshop world, and when Heffers finally opened up again my books were (through no fault of their own – it’s a system thing, going purely on how long it is since a copy sold, and very little sold during lockdown) deemed to be “aged stock” and put into the sale.  No problem, thought I: I’ll simply get another order and take in some new copies.

But no.  In a bid for greater efficiency, Heffers has streamlined its book-ordering system and now does not allow its booksellers to make arrangements – like mine – with individual authors or small publishing houses.  Instead, all orders must be placed through the big book distributors, such as Gardners.  Now, I have jumped through the many hoops required to get my books listed on Gardners, and what happens is that a bookshop places an order in response to a customer order, Gardners passes the order to me (as the publisher of record), and I then fulfil it.  I know this, because I have once done it for Heffers – and “fulfilment” entailed me jumping on my bike and cycling it over to them.  I believe I fulfilled the order within an hour of it being placed, which surely is a record.

So come January – when I am a more full-time author – I will go into Heffers and find out exactly what I need to do to keep my books on their shelves: I want them to have stock all the time, waiting for casual purchase, not just when a customer orders a book.  I think it means changing my settings on Gardner, which will require a gathering of strength, a cold compress to the head, and industrial quantities of Jaffa Cakes.  Wish me luck!

The nitties and the gritties of indie publishing

Much as I love being a self-publisher author – or what is now called an indie publisher – there is a lot to remember.  Writing the books is really only a part of it; keeping up with all the publishing of those books is administratively heavy and can overtake me at times.

Yesterday, for instance, I was looking at my listings on Amazon and noticed that my free guide to the Sam Plank series – the little publication that offers the first chapter of each Sam Plank book as a taster and a lure – was priced at 99p, rather than free.  Nowadays you are not allowed to list items as perpetually free on Amazon (special offers only), but one way to achieve the same aim is to list the item for free on a competitor site and then ask Amazon to price-match that product.  My Sam guide is available on the Barnes & Noble website for just this purpose, and Amazon has always price-matched it on their UK and US sites.  But it seems that this is not a forever done deal, because – as I noticed yesterday – Amazon had unilaterally re-priced it to 99p (and $1.29 in the US).  Thankfully the mechanism for asking them to instigate a price match is now quite simple – there’s a template email provided in the KDP help system – but it does rely on the publisher (i.e. me) spotting in the first place that the price has been unmatched.  Anyway, email sent yesterday and price re-matched today, to zero.

Also yesterday, I went into my local branch of Waterstones to check that my titles are appearing on their ordering system, after all my efforts to be accepted as an indie publisher by Gardners.  And that was when I realised that I had failed to tell Gardners about “Heir Apparent”, which is therefore absent from their catalogue – and presumably missing out on thousands of orders up and down the land…  (For the record, I have yet to receive a single order from any bookshop via this hard-won Gardners route, but I am sure my day will come.)  I really must create a check-list of things to be done once a book is actually published, and stop thinking of publication day as the end-point – it’s only the beginning for the indie publisher!

(As for the title of this post, I once heard a speaker at a professional conference who was from France; his accent was divine, darlings, and my heart was completely won when he talked of having to adjust his bank’s procedures to take account of “ze nitties and ze gritties” of some new legislation.  From that moment on, the phrase has been a very welcome part of my vocabulary.)

Ups and downs

It’s Friday, and time to take stock of the first official week of “Heir Apparent”.  It’s not an exact science (well, it probably is, but I don’t understand it) but according to Amazon/KDP/Book Report, I have now sold twenty-one copies of “Heir Apparent” (plus the previously-reported nineteen to bookshops and four direct to friends).  I’m very pleased with that, and will have a celebratory Jaffa Cake or three.  So that’s the up.

Now for the down – or maybe it’s an up, but I can’t quite tell.  Last Saturday I went to London to take part in the People’s Vote march (we’re campaigning for a vote on the Brexit deal, in case you’re wondering).  By chance, the friends I was meeting had decided to gather on Piccadilly, outside Hatchards.  Now, Hatchards is among the spiffiest of bookshops: it’s been selling books since 1797 and sitting at the heart of Piccadilly for over two centuries – and although it is now part of the giant Waterstones family, it still retains its elegant independence.  Suffice it to say that I would love to see Sam and Martha swanking about the place.  Back in my more innocent days, I breezed into Hatchards and spoke to the manager, saying that – as Sam is a local – the books definitely belonged on Hatchards’ shelves.  The manager kindly explained that he could stock them only if they were listed on the Waterstones buying system – which of course they were not.

Nothing daunted, I decided to get them on that system – how hard could it be?  Now pay attention.  In order to be listed on the Waterstones system, a book has to be available through one of the book wholesalers with which Waterstones deals, such as Gardners.  So I contacted Gardners and asked to be put on their system.  They explained that they don’t deal with authors – only publishers, and only publishers recognised by Nielsen BookNet.  So I contacted Nielsen and asked how I could be recognised as an independent publisher.  It took some time and lots of forms, but I managed it.  So now: Nielsen recognises me as an independent publisher, which means that Gardners is listed as my wholesaler, which means that the Waterstones catalogue (both internal for stores and external for customers) features my titles.  Hurrah!  And if anyone orders my book through Waterstones, the order goes from them to Nielsen, and from Nielsen to me (as an indie publisher).  I pack up the books and send them to Gardners, who deliver them to Waterstones, who get them to the customer (or put them on the shelf).  Simple.

Back to the march last Saturday.  There I am, standing outside Hatchards and gazing through their lovely window, when I spot the manager standing alone at his till.  I wander in, all casual-like, and go up to him.  “You may not remember me,” I say, “but you once said that if my books could be ordered through your system, you would give them a go”.  “Are your books marvellous?” he asked.  “They are,” I confirmed, and he went to his computer and ordered – he said – two each of “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  I was floating on air for most of that march – Sam and Martha, in Hatchards!  And to think, she couldn’t even read much apart from bottle labels until she met Sam.

This week, I waited patiently – hah! – for that order to come in from Nielsen.  And yesterday I contacted them, and Gardners, to check that I hadn’t misunderstood the process.  But no, no trace of any order from Hatchards or Waterstones – not a one.  After pondering what to do, I’ve gone passive-aggressive: I sent an email to the manager saying “I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that my books will be on the shelves of Hatchards – I shall tell all my London friends to come in and buy them”.  So near, and yet so far…

Keep buggering on

I’m a big fan of Winston Churchill – one of life’s great over-achievers (soldier, journalist, politician and artist) – and in particular his repeated exhortations to just stick at it, variously “Never, never, never give up”, “If you’re going through hell, just keep going” and, of course, “Keep buggering on”.  I too am one of life’s plodders: I’m not given to flights of fancy or flashes of brilliance but I am a great sticker-at things – including the marketing of self-published books.

I try – some weeks more successfully than others – to do at least one marketing activity per week.  I keep a list of ideas and suggestions in a little notebook and when I have time I try to cross off, or make a little advance on, one of them.  They vary in size and complexity – from “contact events person at local Waterstones” to “get to grips with how Amazon ads work” (there’s a project…) – and, as with pretty much all marketing initiatives, it’s all but impossible to know which will bear fruit and why.

On my list at the moment are these:

• Once the IngramSpark versions of my books are finalised [nearly there – paper proof copies are on order] update all the ISBNs on Amazon and elsewhere
• Wait several weeks – it seems to take about six – for the IngramSpark catalogue to update in the Gardners system so that bookshops can order the books, and then think of ways to get them to do that…
• Contact events person at local Waterstones – no point doing this until they can order the books (see above)
• Consider running a BookBub promotion – general consensus in the indie writing community is that this is a good idea but hard work as you need to jump through dozens of hoops before BookBub will take you on
• Consider releasing a “box set” of the first three Sam titles in Kindle format – this has been recommended by a writer friend
• Get to grips with how Amazon ads work

Today I have asked for a quotation from my cover designer to create the new image I would need for Amazon for a box set.  And now I am going to read some of the thousands of blog posts out there which discuss Amazon ads and the black magic that seems to underpin them…  It’s not glamorous and it’s not much fun, but then neither was being sent to Bangalore with the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars in 1896 – if Winston can keep buggering on, so can I.

Chaos behind the scenes

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.