Regina Glei's Blog, page 49

Self-pub Nikki 8

A lot of things happening suddenly

13oct11,

Got news from CreateSpace that things are on the way. I will receive a "proof" = a test-hardcopy within the next week or two.

Now comes the daunting task of taxes! Since I am a non-US citizen I have to fill out some whatever forms to get TIN numbers and tax waving and and and… horrible… I feel like I'm being subjected to a modern form of torture! (laugh).

17oct11,

I received the proof copy already and it looks great. It feels very good to have these 400 pages in hand now. I approved the thing via the CreateSpace homepage and suddenly things were going quickly.

In a burst of activity I set the price, activated the CreateSpace e-store sales channel and the Amazon sales channel and "created" the CreateSpace e-store homepage.

Unfortunately it doesn't look exactly brilliant. There is only very limited stuff the author can do with that page. I tried to install a banner, but a banner photo needs to be of a certain pixel size and I need to get some proper photo formatting software onto my new computer first.

Other than that you can only choose a background color and a font color and that's about it. Unfortunately the book description and the author bio overlap each other a bit and the page's layout thus looks a bit weird. Well, at least a photo of the book cover is on the page.

As for pricing: A print copy of Dome Child costs 9.66 $. The royalty schemes for the CreateSpace e-store and for Amazon and for what they call the "extended distribution channel" are all different. The author gets the most royalty when a customer buys the book via the CreateSpace e-store (no idea why that is so) and the least royalties when going through the extended distribution channels, where, in principle, bookstores etc. can order your book. I have no clue yet whether these extended distribution channels will be worth it, but you never know, right?

Now the thing is that if you choose the extended distribution channel you have to set a relatively high price, since those channels require their margin. That means you need to meet their minimum price, otherwise they don't even allow you to distribute through these channels. If I want to go via the extended distribution channels I need to set the POD Dome Child version price at 14,99 $ or so, which is rather high for an independently published book, I think.

So what I did now is to price Dome Child at 12,- $ so that all my friends and relatives can buy the book for a cheaper price and end of November or so I will increasing the price for a while to get access to the extended distribution channels after the Kindle version is out.

The system said that it would take another 3 to 5 business days until the Amazon page will be up. Once that one is up, I will announce to everyone who wants or doesn't want to know that the book is available. It is in fact already now via the CreateSpace e-store, but since it looks a bit odd I am not so eager to advertise it. But anyway people can buy Dome Child via the CreateSpace e-store already now.

Another thing is the Amazon distribution: I asked the CreateSpace guys whether I can also sell Dome Child via for example Amazon Gemany, Amazon Japan and Amazon UK. I promptly got the answer that this is not possible, since Amazon US has no such contracts with the other Amazon entities. If I want to distribute via them too, I have to contact them all separately. Don't know yet if I will go this route, or better to say whether it will be worth going this route. I will investigate and give it some more thought, but for the moment it looks like the POD version will only be available via Amazon US.

The kindle version is a different story though, there the system asks you automatically how you want to receive royalties from the US, UK, Germany and France (only possibility for someone not living in the US is by check). So the future Kindle version will be available via those four entities. Unfortunately not Japan though, where you still will have to go via Kindle US.

So, the POD version journey has just begun, the Kindle journey will follow and I'm thrilled about where the journey will go!

And by the way, I didn't know that the day when you approve your proof-copy is the publication date. You can choose another one manually, but I thought, what the heck, so the Dome Child saw the light of day on the 17th of Octobeer 2011. Happy birthday!

19oct11,

The journey continues with the Kindle conversion of my book. I got an email from CreateSpace and instructions on what to do next. I already set up my Kindle account and had to decide the following now:

a) Whether to upload the Kindle file myself or whether to let them do that. I chose for them to do this, since I have no experience with this and don't want things to go wrong. For this purpose you need to tell them your Kindle account email.

b) You need a new ISBN for the Kindle version, meaning it has to have its own, you cannot use the paperback ISBN. There are two options, you buy your own ISBN or you can let CreateSpace assign an ISBN for you. I chose the latter version, since so far I have not bought any ISBNs. I might consider doing that in the future.

Now CreateSpace will start with the conversion of the file to Kindle format and it means waiting time for me again. They said it would take some two or three weeks for the kindle file to be ready. They are outsourcing stuff like that I presume.

Trying to "upgrade" the blog

Gosh… this is difficult… I'm trying to find my way around widgets and stuff and to make them work and to make this blog more blog like… not as easy as I thought. Gimme a bit of time, OK?

Report on the 5th Japan Writers Conference 2011

For the fifth time this year, the (English language) Japan Writers Conference was held on the 15th and 16th of October in Kobe, Japan. Our host was the Kobe Shoin Women's University up the hill in Rokko with a fantastic view over the Kobe town and port. We occupied three classrooms and two lounge areas and had great programs running for the two days, ranging from poetry workshops to tips on indie publishing as well as fun workshops of guns in western fiction and how to write plausible aliens.

Saturday started with a workshop of writers on writing where a friend of mine from the Tokyo Writers Workshop let us benefit from her dayjob, in which she is a Reuters reporter, and has done many interviews with famous and upstarting authors. She summarized those interviews looking for common threads and what impressed me most was that many authors she interviewed said they did not really outline, or better to say considered their first drafts as outlines.

The next seminar I attended was a fun session on "writing plausible aliens", which, as an SF and fantasy author, was of course of particular interest to me. The presenter built upon earth's evolution, on possible and impossible things and it was fun to know that something like King Kong or Godzilla is actually not possible, their bones would crush under their huge weight…! The diverse nature of life on earth is still an author's best bet for a plausible alien, for example basing an asymmetrical alien life form on the fiddler crab, as Larry Niven has done in one of his books.

The next session I attended was an eye opener for me and one of the most practically useful in terms of book marketing: The secrets behind a successful blog… I learned quite a lot of stuff in that seminar that I will implement for my own blog here over the coming weeks to make it more interesting, worthwhile and "professional" too, starting from such stupid things as correcting the fact that I don't have my email address anywhere on the blog site, or that I'm not linking back to my website and so on… It all seems so obvious, but nevertheless, so far I failed to realize or do these simple things. Thanks to the presenter for this one!

The next seminar started with a bang (literally), in which the presenter's Japanese friend shot a gun (with fake ammunition of course) to wake us all up. This fun session was about guns in the writing of Westerns and that nothing is more annoying than the author not getting his details right. We also did a little writing exercise during this session which had to have a gun in it and I think I came up with a fun piece that I will boil down to a lit_tweet soon (smile).

The last seminar of the day was surely a highlight in terms of fame. Vikas Swarup, of "Slumdog Millionaire" fame, (the title of his novel, on which the movie is based, is "Q & A") is actually the current Consulate General of the Indian Consulate in Kobe, and therefore currently based in Japan.

Mr. Swarup read from his two published novels "Q & A" and "Six Suspects". He has a very animate and fun reading style, and it was a pleasure listening to him. After his readings, the participants grilled him with questions, about the novel vs. movie, about his dayjob vs. writing, about how "Q & A" got published, how he found an agent, etc.. Although he must have been asked these questions a million times already, he answered them as if for the first time. He is a great speaker and a fun, open and humble guy. Thanks to Mr. Swarup for coming to our little conference.

One thing that sadly amazed me was that he said it was so relaxing and pleasing for him to be speaking in Japan in front of an audience that understands English. – Why do so relatively few Japanese speak decent English…? This is one of my big concerns as well. The Japanese are, in my opinion, at serious risk of being left behind by their Korean and especially Chinese neighbors who seem to have much fewer problems learning and speaking English…

A party at an (excellent) Persian restaurant close to Sanomiya station closed the day, including a short reading session in which seven people read from authors under the motto "in my secret life I would be…"

I read a passage from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". I've loved Poe since my early teens and he was one of the reasons for why I wanted to learn English: so that I could have the pleasure of reading his work in the original as opposed to the German translation. I was quite happy to get a few nice comments from conference goers who said they appreciated that I had read Poe; they hadn't read him since high school days and forgotten about how good he is. Mission accomplished, I'd say.

The second day of the conference was more about self-publishing, though not entirely.

For lack of other sessions that interested me, I sat in a discussion about English textbooks for the Japanese market, which was quite interesting in its own way, since I know nothing much about this field. Apparently, more or less all English textbooks for Japanese schools are set in Japan and foreigners living in Japan instruct Japanese kids in English to make the setting more familiar to Japanese school children. Maybe the Japanese Ministry of Education should change that policy and have Japanese kids go abroad in these books to encourage more exposure to the rest of the world…

During the following Synesthesia workshop, the best thing was, of course, the exercises: We wrote about a character inspired by a piece of music, and about a situation inspired by a painting, and then combined the two. It was great to see how easy it was to come up with a piece of fiction in a few minutes through such association.

The next seminar was the first of the day about self-publishing. Great informative stuff about how to license photographs and quotes, get an ISBN and other technicalities. Thanks to the presenter for some good tips!

One more literary seminar about settings in foreign countries followed. Research was the key-word here and it is of course best to have been/lived in the foreign country you write about, however the key is not to drown in too many details. What the writer needs is "necessary" detail, not the whole broadside. For the SF and F writer this is of course a bit off the point. Our settings come from worldbuilding. You can build any world you like, but in that world, you have to be consistent and stick to the facts and rules that you created.

The last seminar of the conference that I attended was another session about indie publishing and I learned quite a few things there for my own project. So far I am only going the Amazon CreateSpace route, but I will explore other, alternative routes as well, like SmashWords etc. from now on. One cannot have enough distribution channels. One thing I can already state now – it is great fun to have full control over your project…

All in all it was a superb conference with a steep learning curve and I will definitely be at the one next year in Kyoto as well and a big thanks to the tireless organizers!

Self-pub Nikki 7

27sep11

After asking CreateSpace on the previous weekend what's up with my "Dome Child" book, since I hadn't heard anything from them in a while, I got the reply that the interior changes are "with the vendor" and I'd get a reply in the next few business days. I am not quite sure what that means. Sounds to me like they were outsourcing the interior design.

I also asked for a jpg of the cover page only (without the spine and back-cover attached) for promotional purposes (putting it on my website etc.pp) I received that one promptly and am wondering now when to put it on the net.

On the 27th then, I received the next version of my interior and something funny happened. The two misses from last time were corrected, but a miss from the first round of corrections was now corrected for a second time and one sentence was suddenly doubled… I wonder where that comes from.

I took the opportunity to ask for two more mini changes, a spell miss I discovered and a formatting miss. So it's now three tiny mistakes to be corrected and I am wondering how long that will take again. In my opinion that is a job of 5 minutes (as was the correction of the two misses in the second round). The two misses of the second round took some 8 working days to correct. I only hope that the new three tiny misses won't again take another 8 working days…….

The process is a bit nerve-wrecking at the moment and I wonder why it takes so long.

08oct11,

Unfortunately it took again about a work week to correct three tiny mistakes. I finally for the interior back on the 6th of October (Japan night time = already the 7th for me)

I finally got the chance to look at the stuff on the 8th and didn't find more glitches, meaning, I finally approved the interior and now the ball is back with CreateSpace. I am actually not sure what is going to happen next. In the project list it says "complete setup". Guess they will now combine the cover with the interior and I have to approve that. We'll see.