Monthly Archives: September 2015

by Ana Spoke | September 5, 2015 · 2:16 pm

It’s alive!

I mean, live! Isa Maxwell’s come to life on Amazon Kindle

Thank you Dr. Meg for checking and letting me know, otherwise I would have been sulking for hours…

Thank you so much, everyone, it’s finally happened. Have a great day/night, I’m off to buy a lottery ticket!

60 Comments

Filed under Self-publishing and marketing

Tagged as Amazon, first novel, kindle, self-publishing, writing

by Ana Spoke | September 5, 2015 · 11:58 am

Almost there…grrrr!

I have hit “Publish”! Slightly anti-climatic, because now I have to WAIT FOR 12 HOURS!!!

I think I’ve read about it before, but chose to forget that the title does not appear in Amazon instantly. They’re probably checking it for profanities (check!), drug use (check!), and smut (not really, but certainly sex references). Not sure why, considering the stuff that gets published these days. I would probably give it a PG-13 rating.

At least I get to show you my slightly improved (I think) cover:

I have given up on adding color to my name – every single one I’ve tried made my last name completely disappear from the thumbnail. Finally I decided to go with “simpler is better” and made it all white. I’ve played with the whole thing for a couple of hours, but the only other change that’s happened is the title font. I’ve ended up printing the cover, and then tracing the name with a flat-tip marker, hopefully giving it a bit more “handwritten” look. Then it was a matter of scanning it in and changing color to white, and bam! My own font 🙂

Ok, so it’s once again “T-minus 12 hours and counting.” Damn it!

50 Comments

Filed under Self-publishing and marketing, Shizzle, Inc.

Tagged as book cover, cover design, first novel, kindle, self-publishing, writing

by Ana Spoke | September 5, 2015 · 1:21 am

T-minus 12 hours and counting! Plus some random Kindle formatting tips..

Today I’ve uploaded Shizzle, Inc text to Amazon. My whole body was shaking as I did it. About half a dozen times.

Turns out that my premonitions about formatting mishaps were true. There were not that many, and I resolved everything in a space of a couple of hours, but here’s what I’ve learned in the process:

First, the good news:

Uploading your book to Amazon is RIDICULOUSLY EASY. Fear not if you’ve never done it before. Assuming you already have an Amazon account you’ve used to purchase books. Otherwise you have to set one up, and it would probably take twice as long. It’s literally a couple of pages and takes about 10-15 minutes. You can preview your text, make any changes in your Word file and upload the new version (takes about a minute).
Note: you can’t have multiple accounts with Amazon. If you use a pen name, it would be a matter of setting up an author page under the pen name, which I’m yet to do.
If you are a first timer, like me, use Word to write your book. I can’t really talk about Scrivner since I’ve never used it, but why complicate something that is already complicated enough? I credit the relatively easy conversion of my text with the fact that I’ve used good ol’ Word.

The not so good news:

I’ve spent an exuberant amount of time fussing over the drop caps and inserting them into text at the beginning of chapters and then again at scene changes. I’ve previously used asterisks in the middle of the page to signal a change of scene. Finding and replacing them was a lot of work, so you can imagine my disappointment when in Kindle they displayed so far below the first line, they looked like “buried caps.” I tried googling solutions, but the consensus was JUST DON’T DO IT. So I spent more time going back and trying to figure out how to highlight the first line/first letter. In the end, I’ve decided to do nothing.
You don’t need to stress over the fonts because Kindle will translate whatever carefully chosen font into its own standard. This could even be considered good news, if IT WAS BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION LAST WEEK, before I spent hours researching, changing, trying out, and changing the font again.
Make sure that you use the style “Headings” for your chapter names and not “Chapters”. Otherwise your table of contents will be empty. Hey, it’s an easy mistake to make! I actually decided to take “Chapter XX” out altogether in the end, and I think it makes for a cleaner, simpler presentation.

The most amazing news:

The text has been uploaded! No more editing! (Unless of course one of you points out a really stupid mistake and I fix it, but let’s just keep it between friends, okay?). This is what it will look like on a Kindle device:

I could have published it already, but I just have to have one more fiddle with the cover image. I’m going to bed now, along with all other Australians, but will be up bright and early to finish it up. That’s if I can sleep at all 🙂

34 Comments

Filed under Self-publishing and marketing

Tagged as Amazon, Book, kindle, kindle formatting, novel, self-publishing, writing

by Ana Spoke | September 3, 2015 · 11:43 am

T-minus three days and counting…

First of all, thank you, everyone, for your advice and thoughts on whether I should buy my own ISBN and/or set up my own publishing company. After coming off a major adrenalin rush, reading your comments, and making a call to my local Australian Bowker, I had a plan.

I’ve decided not to bother with a publishing company, because, as someone pointed out, people “in the know” will know right away. Several comments even stated that self-published authors may get more support, or that some readers may even seek fresh, new books by indie publishers. All that, plus I really can’t handle more “unwriting” work right now. My little engine is sputtering as it is.

I did, however, buy a block of 10 ISBNs. One of the reasons was vague concern that I will be stuck with Amazon and Amazon only (to be honest, I’m not at all clear on this yet, information overload). Another one was that it turned out Australian-purchased ISBNs are cheap as chips! This will be probably the one and only product that costs significantly less in Australia (I still can’t get used to the price of shampoo and houses. Or food. Or cars. Oh, America, how I miss your cheap prices…). Anyway, if you go to the American Bowker site, you have to shell out a cool $299 USD for a block of 10 ISBNs. But go to MyIdentifiers AU and you can get the same exact ISBNs for just $84 AUS, which is about fifty American (plus a one-off first-time publisher registration of $55 AUS). I’ve called them up and asked if I can use the numbers to sell in the US and they said yes, the key being “International” SBNs. I’ve already assigned one of the numbers to Shizzle, Inc as a forthcoming novel!

The ISBNs allowed me to register Ana Spoke as the publisher, so I’m all set there and even added the two numbers (ISBN-10 and ISBN-13, whatever they are) to my copyright page.

I’ve also been busy with the very last, definitely final, absolutely, positively final text polish. It’s amazing that after at least a dozen self-edits and three professional edits, I can still find things to tweak and improve. Today I’m about to buy a year’s subscription to Grammarly. At first I was all like “I’m not paying $139 after $3K of professional edits”, but after installing the free version for my browser, I’m sold. Grammarly is checking this post as I’m typing it, and I can’t help but think that it’s doing a better job than sometimes-retarded Word. I may decide to get just a trial month, but then I was thinking of how many documents I have to write for work, including constant job applications. Grammarly very well may make me a better writer.

Speaking of polishing, I’ve also finished (I hope) formatting the text. Here is the “before” shot:

And here is the same one with hair and makeup:

I’ve done just a few things:

Set up headings and a proper Table of Contents, which is supposed to translate easily to Kindle, with live links to chapters. Time will tell if it’s so.
Changed font to Verdana. It’s on the list of recommended fonts for Kindle and one suggested as the easiest to read on the phone.
Dropped caps, like they’re hot! Very easy to do, go to Insert – Drop cap or read this for a step-by-step guide: How to Create a Drop Cap.
Offset paragraphs. I was reluctant to do that, I prefer the blockier office look, but when I looked at a few fiction books, they all had offset paragraphs. Here are a couple of very thorough guides on all steps you need to take in order to format your book for kindle: Amazon’s own guide, Format Book in Word blog (dedicated to book formatting) and CJ’s easy as pie Kindle tutorials.

Thank you once again for all your help. I will try to stick to my self-imposed deadline of this upcoming weekend. Look out for a buzzing, over-exuberant, tear-stained email in your inbox!