Tag: Publishing

Why I don‘t rely on Amazon (Pt XXIII)

(Actually the Pt XIII is probably an underestimate)

My latest book is published in three editions: hardback with a dustcover, paperback, and ebook. None of these editions was produced through KDP, and each has my own imprint (j-views Publishing) and ISBN assigned to me.

Why did I do everything through IngramSpark?

Typically in the past I have used IngramSpark (IS) for print editions, using InDesign as my interior formatter, and a mixture of Illustrator and Photoshop for the covers, using the IS templates to position the design elements correctly. Ebooks were a matter of exporting the InDesign text to DOCX format and then running the file through Vellum, a foolproof way of producing good high-quality ebooks from Word files (even if the formatting choices are a bit limited). EPUBs went to Smashwords for most ebooks (Apple, Kobo, etc.) and KDP for Kindle. A number of reasons for the change:

  1. IS has dropped the price of production for print and ebook editions to zero. It was never that expensive to start with, but zero is a nice round figure. Makes accounting simpler as well.
  2. I upgraded my computer recently, allowing me to use the latest version of InDesign. This allows for much better EPUB export, allowing me to use the same file for all editions, and keep the text in sync (InDesign also includes a conditional text feature, which makes it easy to maintain different editions in one file).
  3. Amazon now want an EPUB as the input to create their Kindle files. Need I say that Amazon’s rendering of EPUB files in Kindle is primitive and lags behind others (Apple, Kobo, etc.). This meant going in with Calibre and doing tweaks galore to the rather over-engineered files from InDesign.

The hardcover was a labour of love – I really didn’t expect to sell that many, but it went on sale on 1 October and it’s had a few buyers. I have set the release date for the ebook to 15 October, and for the paperback to 1 November.

And now…

Here’s how Barnes and Noble show it. All well and good. Correct release dates are being shown. Now let’s look at Amazon (US):

Amazon, on the other hand:

  • seems unable to find the front cover for the hardcover edition
  • the Kindle edition is not linked to the printed editions

But of course, in authorcentral, the story is completely different:

All right, I’ll give them 72 hours to try and get things right. But if B&N, who don’t pretend to be a technology company, can manage it, why can’t Amazon?

But when you look at this sort of thing, you have to question Amazon’s ability to compensate authors with the correct amount for their sales. When the two different parts of Amazon are clearly unable to talk to each other, you have to wonder.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Book promotions

business plan schedule written on the notebook

If you have written a book, or several books, you are likely to get quite a few messages offering to promote your book, putting your title and your name in front of several tens of thousands of Twitter followers, likers of Instagram accounts, etc. I get one or two of these each day.

Once in a while I go for the cheapest option on the offerings of these people (typically there are Silver, Gold and Platinum options, sometimes worded differently), and the Twitter feeds appear together with a link.

And the results? Almost nothing. In fact, I ran a week’s worth of these Twitter ads with a link, not to a direct sales outlet, but to my book page here. I can check where clicks to this page come from – and none, repeat none, came from the 300,000 (or whatever the number was) followers of this Twitter account, Instagram or Facebook entity.

So I look at another one which promises to do more – they will actually write reviews, promote a book as “Book of the Month” or even “Book of the Year”. All for a fee, of course, but on the face of it, quite a good deal. So, just for fun, I checked the Amazon sales rankings of a recent Book of the Month. In both the UK and the USA, they were actually lower than On the Other Side of the Sky. The book actually had quite an interesting premise, the cover was a far cry from the topless over-muscled male torso that seems to find its way onto the cover of so many titles now. The Look Inside feature showed me that the style was at the very least competent, if a little wooden and pedestrian (in my opinion, of course; others might like it).

So what had this author got from paying a reasonable sum for a review and the chance to become Book of the Month? Perhaps half a dozen sales? I don’t believe this is untypical of these sites.

Now there are more reputable sites around, BookBub being one of the largest (reviews/ratings very welcome, please), and Reedsy now offering a Discovery programme, in which On the Other Side of the Sky was featured by a reviewer who picked up both the good and the less good points of the story, ending up with four stars (read it here). There’s also Kirkus, where you can pay for a review, but is that really going to get you anywhere?

So… are these smaller autotweeting book promotion sites simply an extension of the vanity press industry? You have to wonder sometimes. But if anyone knows a good cost-effective way of getting your titles noticed by purchasers, I’m very happy to listen to what you have to say.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Was it really 14 years ago?

airport bank board business

I’m referring to the large financial disaster, which brought about the demise of some of the largest financial institutions in the world, and affected the lives of many. At the time I was living in Japan, where the crisis caused by the securitisation of bad loans was known as “The Lehman Shock”, Lehman Brothers being one of the most prominent casualties of this seismic event.

I was working on the fringes of the financial world, having worked in two major non-Japanese financial institutions, and working for a Japanese bank at the time, but I was minimally affected, though I lost out on a contract to pre-edit Bear Stearns’ investor prospectus prior to the issue of a Japanese version.

However, several of my friends within the financial services industry were affected, and I came to learn of the hardship caused by the dishonest practices of the lenders who took advantage of their clients to earn a fast buck. Michael Lewis’s The Big Short is an excellent introduction to all this (the movie, not so much, in my opinion). In any event, it spurred me into writing two books. Here’s something about the first one.

At the Sharpe End

This was my lecture at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, of which I subsequently became a member, where I introduced the book to a number of people, both Japanese and foreign residents of Japan. It’s quite long, but I think it’s worth watching.

I started to write this some time before the 2008 crash. It was based loosely around what I knew of the financial industry from my own experience, and the experiences of my friends.

It concerns a freelance consultant living in Tokyo (I always say that the protagonist, Kenneth Sharpe, is not me, but I could not have created him without my experiences) who finds himself in possession of a secret technology that allows him to make money in large quantities (technologies very similar to this technology actually exist now – fiction prefiguring fact).

(You can find the book for sale here)

Anyway, for the plot to be interesting, the hero can’t just waltz off into the sunset with his pockets bulging with cash – there must be something to hold the reader’s interest. In this case, I really wanted an external catastrophe that prevented the technology from doing its thing, and so guess what I chose? I was living in Japan, a country with frequent earthquakes and a reliance on nuclear power for much of its energy needs.

March 11, 2011

Yes, I chose an earthquake which wrecked a nuclear power station. This was in 2007/early 2008, several years before the Fukushima disaster. I don’t claim enormous credit for predicting this. I’m not a prophet. The Hamaoka power station, which was the one I described as being wrecked, is situated on the junction of three fault lines. In my opinion, a bloody stupid place to build a fault line. I also did not take account of tsunami action. Incidentally, I was convinced at one point that my wife and I, along with thousands more, were going to die from radiation poisoning. We were lucky that was not the case, though I probably have absorbed more radiation than if I had been living in the UK at the time.

However, after writing this section, along came the Lehman Shock, which made my earthquake rather redundant. I therefore had to change the story a bit, and also, given the time of the year, had to change some of the details in the story to reflect this (heaters went off, air-conditioners went on, etc.). I also incorporated some of the conversations that I’d had with my financial friends in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, where I launched the book (always nice to talk about your book in the places featured in the book – happened to me twice now).

The first edition didn’t incorporate the quake, but used the Lehman shock but when I republished with Inknbeans Press in 2012 (post-Fukushima), I added the parts that I had originally written, and the current editions also have .

Anyway, a lot of readers have found it to be a very convincing and authentic look at life in Japan for non-Japanese, as well as being a well-written thriller with lots of twists and turns, and some interesting characters.

Next, I’ll be writing about my other book that came out of the subprime crisis – Balance of Powers.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Bad blurb?

I’ve just received a list of the nominees for an award. The blurb below is for one of these, and it’s written by an established author, and published by an established firm. On Amazon, it has over 4,000 ratings, averaging four stars. This is clearly a book that people enjoy, but with this blurb, I don’t really understand why people are interested in it (names redacted).

A****, F****, E*****, and S**** are still young — but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

OK, so young people are aware of time passing. And they have sex and worry about it. And yes, young people are not perfect, and their relationships (sexual and other) ebb and flow. And they worry about all these things.

Why should I wish to read about these people? What makes them interesting or different? Is this the aim of this pedestrian blurb? To make me want to see why 4,000 Amazon readers think this is such a good book? I’m sure that a better blurb would sell more copies.

“Standing in the last lighted room before the darkness” – it’s a beautiful phrase, and one that many people will relate to. I think many generations feel that they’re the last hope of humanity, whether it be battling the evil Hun in the Great War, or the Nazis in the continuation of that conflict, or marching and protesting with CND about nuclear weapons, or even superglueing themselves to the M25 to raise awareness of climate change. So why are these four young people different? I’m not interested.

A book’s blurb blurb needs to show us why this book is so different from so many other books on the market (Amazon carries over 10,000,000 titles). This prose above just makes my heart sink, and excites me as much as a half-finished bowl of cornflakes.

https://i0.wp.com/freebie.photography/office/pen_notebook.jpg?resize=561%2C373
Time to start again with a blank sheet
Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Oops! False start…

Apologies.

I uploaded the EPUB version of On the Other Side of the Sky to the Amazon Kindle convertor and all seemed to be OK. No error message, EPUB looked great on my Kobo. I don’t own a Kindle and none of the pieces of emulation software seem to do their job on my computer.

However, when I could finally see the preview on screen following the release of the book (KDP offers an on-screen preview, but never seems to allow you to see the results of your latest upload, taking you straight to the pricing page once you’ve uploaded the new version) – all my fancy fonts had been stripped out (with no warning – thank you, Amazon) and so the nice little squiggly doodles that I’d carefully inserted came out as M and u.

In addition, it seemed that the InDesign TOC creation process had fouled up, putting Part headers at the end of the preceding chapter. Even going into the source code with Calibre, and cutting and pasting (and editing TOC files and the CSS files) didn’t seem to fix it.

So… start again with Vellum. A pain, but it works. Export from InDesign to RTF, open in Word, save as DOCX and import into Vellum, tidying up all the chapter and section divisions as I go. So as of today (December 1) the new edition is with Amazon having passed the initial checks. With luck you’ll be able to get it tomorrow. Same with Smashwords (Kobo, Apple, B&N, etc.).

On the Other Side of the Sky

A novel combining history, adventure, and more than a little touch of the arcane

Paperback (Amazon)
Kindle
Apple
Kobo
Paperback (B&N)
Nook (B&N)

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

How big should a book be?

I don’t mean “how many pages?”, but “how tall and wide should a book be?”. One problem that I’ve seen with a lot of books recently, especially self-published books, is that they’re too big to fit comfortably into a pocket or a bag.

Sometimes, this seems to be done in order to reduce the number of pages in a book, and therefore bring down the cost (the people who do this are probably the ones who use as small a typeface as possible in order to save space, and who also take the print right to the edge of the paper).

The printers I use for my books, Ingram Spark, happily have a wide range of trim sizes (the technical term for the page size of a book. Not every kind of paper is available in every size (there’s a choice between white, creme, and now something called “groundwood” which I’ve used for my latest, which has come out really nicely, and most of these sizes are paperback only, a few with hard covers and dust jackets. KDP, Amazon’s self-publishing service, offers a subset of these trim sizes.

Now, the cost to me of a hard cover is twice that of a paperback, even before I’ve paid the setup costs, and by the time I’ve factored in the very hefty discount that retailers demand, there’s really no incentive other than vanity for producing a hardcover for adult titles (but see below with regard to children’s books).

However, since I can choose the trim size, I’ve avoided the almost ubiquitous 6″ x 9″ and 5″ x 8″ options (sorry, since Ingram is an American company, they work in antique units for the most part) format which seems to be common to many books. I also, for the most part, tend to avoid the DIN A series of paper formats (1:1.41 ratio) which are OK for paper sheets, but don’t, IMHO, work for books.

When I started to produce On the Other Side of the Sky (at the top of this page) I decided to make it as close as possible to a “standard” or “classic” paperback size, whatever that might be. So I carefully measured up a Penguin, and designed around that. One thing about Ingram Spark is that they ask for a margin of 36pt (3p or 0.5″) on each side of the text block, so if you make your trim size small, remember to knock 72pt (6p or 1″) off each dimension for the text block.

Even so there are two of my titles where I felt that it was a good idea to make a minibook: Unknown Quantities, and my two Untime stories bound together in one volume:

And the reaction has been really positive. The people who have seen and handled the two above seem to love the small size – “a book you can take with you”. And for On the Other Side of the Sky, those who have seen advance copies have said about the paperback that it is a “real book, isn’t it? I can read it in bed”. Perhaps slightly insulting to an author who took many months to produce it, but flattering to the designer who took the words and set them in print. Very gratifying to have these decisions endorsed by readers.

But sometimes it’s a good idea to go slightly odd. For the hardcover of the anthology of our Sherlock Ferret series (hardcover comes into its own for children’s titles (the purchaser the reader is not always the reader and children’s books get a lot of wear and tear), I decided that a square page format would be eye-catching and practical, given Andy’s wonderful illustrations which need to be shown off to their best advantage, rather than being tucked away in a corner.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Feels good…

But it will feel better when they’re in the hands of readers and reviewers.

All ready for the gig on the 25th – if you’re in the Lichfield area and you are interested, take yourself off to the Erasmus Darwin site, and book your ticket now. Places are limited (COVID).

If you can’t make it, consider placing a pre-order on Amazon or even asking your local bookstore to order it (ISBN 9781912605750).

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

It’s coming together

On the Other Side of the Sky is coming together nicely. Currently going through it with the assistance of a friend, weeding out all the typos, and also minor details of plot and character which don’t seem to hang together very well.

A friend from the USA has suggested a glossary, to provide a little background information on people and topics that may be unfamiliar to some readers, so I’ve been busy with that.

I now have a design for the interior of the book, and several graphical elements, all of which are meant to evoke something of an 18th-century feel to the book, and which I should be able toinclude in the ebook as well. It’s going to be a very pretty piece of work indeed (in my opinion).

The photo is a mockup of the cover (printout of the design, and wrapped around a book of roughly the same thickness (just under 2.5cm, with 380 pages). In fact, I’ve slightly changed the spine from the photo above, so that it stands out a bit better:

The other books are there just to provide a comparison of size and of other designs. The back blurb is basically there – I don’t see it changing very much:

And the print and ebook editions will be available on the same day – December 1, 2021.

Price for the ebook will be £4.99 and Amazon US has it at $6.82 for pre-order. The US Amazon has some more information about the book and its writing than the UK site. The paperback will be available for pre-order soon.

There’s also a very new Facebook page about this book, where I will be writing bits and pieces about the content.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

Cover up!

I enjoy mocking up covers for my stories, even before the stories themselves are ready for publication. Sometimes the covers help to crystallise my thoughts on how the story needs to be refined, and help me focus on key elements that I highlight in the cover.

I’m no artist, but I flatter myself that I know my type and have a reasonable grasp of the Adobe tools.

In this case, the aspects I want to emphasise are:

  • the protagonist, Jane, who is a little weird
  • the wild countryside of the north Midlands
  • the looming presence of those from the other side of the sky
  • and some hints that it is not contemporary
This one came closest after a preliminary search.

There are other elements in the story, but I don’t think they would catch the eye to the same extent. I wanted a face and a figure. People respond to faces on book covers. Looking through royalty-free photos, I found nothing I really felt was suitable.

But the problem is that it was too modern. That’s not an 18th-century face. It stares at you and grabs you, but doesn’t go with the long subtitle.

The single eye seems a bit odd to me as well. So I went searching.

Neither of these worked for me. Note that I decided to move the title up to the top of the page, and expanded the subtitle. But in the end, I decided a photograph was not the right thing to use. I discovered a portrait by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who was one of the great portraitists of the 18th century (IMHO – you can keep your Greuze and all the other French artists of that era).
LeBrun self-portrait

So, Wikipedia has a lot of her paintings, including this delightful self-portrait:

And also this:

Unnamed young girl

And this is what I came up with:

I made the image monochrome other than the eyes, which I made very saturated green, and placed it to one side, with a good deal of transparency.

But it still didn’t look right to me, so I moved the title and increased the font size.

Probably not the final version

Almost certainly it will not be the final cover, but it does give me inspiration to continue and get the book out. Here’s a little bit of what the book is about:

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

La Lucia

As all fans of E.F.Benson know, Mrs Emmeline Lucas, by a process of Italianisation, was universally known as “la Lucia” or simply “Lucia”.

I’ve previously written two short novellas featuring Lucia and her rival, Elizabeth Mapp, for the social leadership of Tilling, but I decided that it was time that some of her earlier adventures made their way into print.

Herewith, I present to you the introduction of La Lucia, which will be available in print and ebook formats from November 1 (make a note in your diaries).

Continue reading “La Lucia” →

Posted on by Hugh Ashton

A new book! (well, not that new, really)

As my regular readers (both of you!) will know, I am working with Steve Emecz of MX publishing, and Steve White to produce audiobook versions of some of my stories.

I’ve taken one of my favourites – The Hand of Glory – and turned it into a radio/audio script, which has now been narrated by Steve White. Before it can go onto Amazon, though, apparently the text must be made available on Amazon as a book or an ebook (I don’t pretend to understand the details, or the reasoning behind them).

So, here is the script of Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Hand of Glory as a Kindle title, priced as low as possible.

Mary Devereux tells Sherlock Holmes that her stepfather has obtained the corpses of two executed criminals, and is storing them in an outbuilding of the family seat in Warwickshire. Unknown men visit the house on Friday nights, and depart mysteriously in the family carriage, driven by her stepfather, who also appears to be making significant inroads into the family fortune.
She implores Holmes to investigate, and as he and Watson explore the sleepy market town of Luckworth, they encounter dark and macabre secrets that shock them to their core. Along the way, Holmes loses his left canine tooth in the waiting-room at Charing-cross station, as mentioned in “The Adventure of the Empty House”.

For a very short taster of what is in store in the audiobook, try this:

By the way, you can look up the Hand of Glory on Wikipedia, but it might spoil the story somewhat if you don’t know it already. If you have read the story, and you want to know more, then by all means look it up – it is definitely a macabre and dark subject.

Posted on by Hugh Ashton