Free book promotion: is it really worth it?

Yes, yes! It’s been a while since I blogged, but throw us a bone: in September last year, my husband took ill on holiday in Menorca when he went into hospital (twice) with critical hypertension, so I’ve been concentrating on sorting out his diet to control his high cholesterol and BP, not an easy task these days and it’s a headache every time I do a shop; then our cat Treacle was hospitalised after banging her nose on the fence when climbing to get on the roof; November comes along, and yours truly ended up in hospital with an infected gallbladder. I had that removed a couple of weeks ago (in the NHS, you have to wait a few months for surgery, even on the ‘emergency’ list) and I’m now in recovery, hence now I have the time to write this post. On top of that, I’ve been promoting my new book Tempting Fake, which, I’m happy to report, is doing quite well since it was published in October. On 7 March, World Book Day, I decided to put it out for free Kindle download, along with my other six books. I was chuffed to get 86 downloads, mainly from the US, and for some reason Epiworld came out top. I was disappointed, however, that only a few people downloaded from the UK, and one from Australia and another from Canada.

It got me thinking, though; my Kindle books are priced at 99 pence (UK) and 99 cents for Europe/US/Canada, so why aren’t people prepared to pay that for an ebook? Are free books what people really want? I haven’t sold a copy since. My titles are also available on Kindle Unlimited to get unlimited free books, although you have to pay a monthly fee for that privilege. Then, I began to wonder: suppose those who freely downloaded this time around intend to manipulate the files to put on illicit download sites?

Well, if that’s the case, they’re wasting their time! You’d be a fool to download from one of those sites if you don’t want to run the risk of installing a virus.

Look Out! Here Comes the The Kindle Spelling/Formatting Warning!

A few days ago I was on Twitter and I came across a tweet relating to this article:

http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/kindle-e-books-will-have-a-warning-message-if-they-have-spelling-mistakes-or-bad-formatting

‘Starting February 3, 2016 Amazon will begin showing customers a warning message on the Kindle store detail pages of books that contain several validated quality issues. The warning message will be removed as soon as Amazon received an updated file from self-published authors or publishing companies.’

It appears, on the face of it, to be aimed towards typos, words you misspell easily enough when in the throes of writing. That can only be a good thing, right? Typos are a pain in the neck, but easily done, so if the Kindle can pick these up during the publishing process, all well and good; however, I have an issue: Amazon is an American company first and foremost, and I don’t believe – despite assurances – that it will be able to recognise British spellings and more importantly, British-preferred variant spellings (like ‘ise’ over ‘ize’ ).

What about slang? Will it smack me across the face with a wet fish and say, ‘Excuse me, no such word as “bizzy”! Unless you spell it “busy”…’

‘Yes, there bloody well is!’ I will shout back. ‘it’s Scouse for “policeman” and no, you spell it “bizzy”!’

‘No such word as Scouse!’

(You get my drift! I can see me having a full scale row with it over ‘any more’ which is two words, not one! Better get my Chambers dictionary and urban slang dictionary links set up to email the Amazon know-alls with my evidence!)

I naturally jumped onto the comments and had my say. Some wag suggested I wrote two editions of my books, one for the British market and one for the Americans. Like I’ve got time to do that! I don’t want to and why should I, anyway? (The lexicon (glossary) idea is a classic and I think not! One of my readers asked for a glossary once of Liverpool slang terms: I said work it out!) Then someone else picked holes in the grammar of the article, and then I got abuse for misuse of a semi-colon! FFS! Is that going to be next? Will the Kindle then decide it’s not only the spelling that isn’t good enough, but neither is the grammar. Never mind that Dammymac (a character from Big Brother and that’s his nickname; will it let you off for nicknames?) from Liverpool doesn’t talk like Lord Muck, but by George, by the time we’ve finished with him he’ll make the Queen sound like her from behind the bar in The Rovers Return in Coronation Street!

The other thing that concerns me is that this idea seems mainly targeted at indie authors, judging by a conversation I had with someone on Twitter about it. It’s always been assumed that indie authors can’t spell, can’t edit and don’t have the commonsense to proofread their work, nor do they ask someone to do the editing and proofreading for them. While I recognise that a lot of indie books are poorly formatted and poorly edited, and are full of misspellings, it’s unfair to tarnish them all with the same brush. I’ve read traditionally published books that aren’t all that spelling-wise.

There is a plus side: it could be seen as a way to get free proofreading for authors before they put their books into print format.

It will be interesting to see what happens when I upload Episode to Kindle this year and when I do I’ll report back.

My Bookie Wooks on Nookie Nook

As my readers will know, my books are in paperback and on Kindle, and recently I thought: high time I made them available for Nook e-readers, too.

For those who may not know, Nook is exclusively a Barnes & Noble e-reading product, the same as Kindle belongs to Amazon, For a while, however, you couldn’t buy a Nook e-book in the UK or Europe until recently. There is an online store for UK readers now. Great! No need to keep giving Kindle the monopoly on my titles, so yesterday, I began with Epiworld; Goalden Girl and Abbie’s Rival are already in the B&N Nook Store, but I didn’t put them there, my publisher did. They’re overpriced, so I’m going to fix that and I want  to make them available in UK and European stores, too. You can’t download a B&N Nook book to a UK/European device because B&N is a US store.

So how did I do it? I began my turning my .docx into an .epub and for that I needed an easy converter like Draft2Digital. This is an excellent conversion site which converts documents suitable for Kindle, Nook, iBooks and Kobo e-readers. With D2D you can go all the way. It will publish and make your book available on the necessary stores. You can preview your book in Mobi for Kindle and Adobe Editions for the others, if you can get on with them. You’re ready to go.

Except there’s a problem: if you see an error in formatting, you can’t make any modifications, you have to go back to your epub, and D2D doesn’t appear to like a re-uploaded epub, it tells you it’s modified it. Also, the previewers they recommend worry me. I never got on with Mobipocket for Kindle (I prefer to use Kindle’s own site previewer) and I tried downloading Adobe Editions, but it wanted me to faff about and download Microsoft .Net in order to use it, and I thought can I be arsed? No. I’d sooner use Nook’s own previewer; however, what I didn’t know was would the Nook upload accept an epub file? Kindle will.

And how do you correct your epub? You need a program like Sigil. Seriously, you cannot go wrong with this program. People scream Mobipocket for Kindle, well, I have to say I’ve used Sigil for Kindle and my books look great, thank you. It’s simpler, whereas Mobi is all over the shop for me. In Sigil you can make corrections in formatting. Your cover, title page, dedication page and so on are separated into ‘chapters’, and it recognises your long book chapters as separate entities. You have a code view for basic .xhtml corrections (I had weird page breaks on my By The Same Author page which must have happened during conversion in D2D) and you can neaten things up.

I registered with Nook Press and found to my relief I could upload an epub. Good. You upload that and your cover as a separate file. Then you go into an editor where you can see the chapters are listed as they are in Sigil, though there is no code view. I found a sentence with an unwanted break and corrected it, deleted something called the Start chapter (some page with a broken icon in it, what, I don’t know), saved it, and viewed it in the Nook Previewer…

And the deleted chapter and weird sentence break were still there!

After about a hundred frustrating edits and saves, I asked on the Nook Forum, as the best expert is usually an experienced user who has come across such problems. Seems the editor in Nook Press is a bit naff and basically doesn’t work. So I went back to the epub, found out why that annoying sentence break was in there and re-uploaded the epub file. I deleted the Start chapter again, but it was still showing in the Preview and the end of the book was missing, too (though not in the editor!)

Meh!

I couldn’t download Adobe Editions and I don’t have a Nook reader…bugger it, I thought, I’ll download the Nook app for my android phone, publish the stupid book and buy it to see what it looks like on my device. I priced it at £1.99 (UK), $1.99 for US and Euro 1,99 to compete with the Kindle prices, and published…

The process is far faster than Kindle’s twelve hours. Within an hour it appeared on Barnes and Noble and the UK Nook store and it looks fine on my phone (though better viewed on the rotated screen). That weird Start chapter has gone. My only gripe is my chapter headings aren’t centred as they ought to be, but I can live with that. It may look different on the proper e-reader.

So, that’s Epiworld on Nook. Look out for the other titles coming soon!

Oh, yeah: will they appear on Kobo? Goalden Girl was published there until this happened; so the answer’s no. Sorry. Kobo and its mate WH Smith can get stuffed.