P.H. Solomon's Blog, page 336

8 Milestones Met This Week

This week has been one for milestones as a writer – some big and some minor. Here’s a list:

Available at Amazon, Smashwords and All Major E-Book Vendors!

1. Published my first e-book, The Black Bag as a complete DIY project. The book is on the premium catalog on Smashwords and now available on Amazon. I think those are several milestones there.

2. As part of my first DIY project I created my first coverart.

3. Also as part of my DIY project I formatted my first e-book.

4. In preparation for my upcoming crowdfunding campaign for The Bow of Destiny, I created my first video which is still a WIP.

5. As a minor milestone, I passed 1000 tweets.

6. Also another social media milestone will be passing 500 followers on Twitter.

7. I started my Pinterest account this week so I have begun pinning some of my work there like the cover artwork for The Black Bag and the video for The Bow of Destiny.

A picture included in my trailer.

8. I’ve also had a milestone with the blog. If you’ve seen my older posts they had no pictures. With my book out and the trailer I am now able to use a few related pictures which improves the quality of my posts.

That’s all for the week. Now I need to get busy organizing my crowd-funding campaign and completing my current revision – not mention submitting some short stories.

What milestones, goals or accomplishments have you had this week? Share a comment below and also consider following this blog via email for a FREE copy of The Black Bag. I’m on Facebook, Twitter (@ph_Solomon), Pinterest & Google+ (ph@phsolomon.com).

Thanks for reading,

PHS

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Filed under: Creativity, Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Indie Publishing, Marketing, Planning, Self-publishing, The Bow of Destiny, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged: Announcement, Book Trailer, Coverart, Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Facebook, Indie Publishing, IndieGoGo, Launch, Marketing, P. H. Solomon, Pinterest, Pinterest Tips, Planning, Social Media, The Black Bag, The Bow of Destiny, Twitter, writing, You Tube

Crowdfunding: The DIY Video

Photo from the book trailer for The Bow of Destiny

See the final version on YouTube as posted today!

I’m working on my crowd-funding campaign for The Bow of Destiny to launch just after the Fourth of July so I’ve been making a video. It’s still in progress but I present it here for viewing and reviewing so please offer comments.

I’m running on a shoestring for the trailer until I raise enough money to commission some artwork and then official details like a trailer, web and social media banners, etc.

I made this with Movie Maker Live over a few hours with some photos and illustrations from iStockPhoto.com and music from Incompetech which offers royalty free music for posted credit in the video.

The name of the piece is “Dark Fog”  by Kevin MacLeod (Twitter: @kmacleod) which seemed to hit the right tenor of mystery and intrigue that I need. Kevin, thanks for offering royalty free music, I’ll drop a donation on you soon! I’m likely going to add a short clip of my own appearance at the end for the campaign value.

Here’s the link on YouTube where you can see the video now. UPDATE: Re-published on YouTube (6/30/2014).

I have more to share later today so I will post a second blog with that – stay-tuned for more!

Please leave comments below, follow via email for a FREE copy of my short story, The Black Bag. I’m on Twitter @ph_Solomon and you see my FB link above.

Thanks for reading!

PHS

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Filed under: Creativity, Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Indie Publishing, Marketing, Planning, Self-publishing, The Bow of Destiny, Writing Tagged: Announcement, Book Trailer, creativity, Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Indie Publishing, IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, Launch, Marketing, P. H. Solomon, Planning, The Bow of Destiny, writing, You Tube

2 Lessons From DIY Self-Publishing

Available at Smashwords and All Major E-Book Vendors!

I just published my first e-book entitled The Black Bag which is on Smashwords catalog now. But I had a limited budget on which to complete this project. Since it is a short story I decided to publish it entirely as a DIY project.

Now many people might gasp and say that I needed professional services to produce this e-book and I agree regarding larger projects. However, I wanted the experience of doing the whole publication myself.

So what did I learn? For starters, Mark Coker’s Style Guide is extremely helpful to authors. But there are two aspects of the process that taught me what to expect from hiring other people to do some of the work. Here’s what else I learned.

1. Formatting isn’t that hard. I would feel completely comfortable formatting a full novel based on what I learned from the Style Guide. I was able to create styles and clean up errors in my short story with ease. The only mistake I made was using a template title page. It ended up having a table embedded which was not friendly with Smashwords converter (The Meatgrinder). This was easily remedied by deleting the table along with the text and creating a style after which I re-created the title page so that the problem with conversion was cleared.

2. Coverart is tricky but doable. I used a photo purchased from iStockPhoto but I initially added the text onto it with PowerPoint. Even though my photo was initially large enough, PowerPoint compressed the size so Smashwords did not consider the cover large enough. In the end, I downloaded Gimp and got the text added after which Smashwords accepted the correct size.

Conclusion: due to need I will hire and illustrator and commission my artwork but I may do my own formatting. For this size project it was worth my effort and time to do it myself. Now the question is whether the e-book is good enough. Well, take a look at the cover and the sample to see that all the internal links and formatting are correct. If it finally passes the litmus test with Smashwords and is distributed over the premium catalog then I’d say I did a pretty good job on this small project. NOTE: The e-book has passed muster for membership on the Smashwords premium catalog.

Have you every tried self-publishing as a DIY project? If so, what problems did you have and how did you rectify them? If you haven’t, what’s keeping you from trying?

Please leave comments. Also you will receive a coupon for a free copy of my short story by subscribing to this blog via email. Finally, follow me on Twitter @ph_solomon.com or on Facebook.

Thanks for reading,

P. H. Solomon.

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Filed under: Creativity, Indie Publishing, Marketing, Planning, Self-publishing, Writing Tagged: Announcement, Coverart, creativity, Formatting, P. H. Solomon, Planning, The Black Bag, writing