I’m a Procrastinator!

I was supposed to go through the edits for Highest Lord yesterday and then again today at work, but for some reason haven’t been able to bring myself to. Maybe it’s because I got the book back as my cat was dying—

Oh, yes, that happened and now I’m all alone and the only ‘downtime’ I’ve had from writing (because you’d be surprised how much attention a loner cat needs) has been haunting the local shelter sites looking for a new fur baby

—because I can come up with no other reason that I’d be avoiding this book. I always have the edits gone through before I get a cover, it’s never been any other way.

So yesterday, I procrastinated and I was just so bad…

I formatted Sit Pretty and Dark Spirits for CreateSpace and added Trouble to an expanded distribution. Gee, I hope this all pays off because I need a new laptop. First my back button broke off and now I can’t seem to get the ctrl to work all the time.

The laptop is three years old, normally it’s on fire in the backyard at this point so losing a few buttons I (often) use isn’t as big of a deal as say, the screen dying and taking the hard drive with it.

Anyhow, yes, I spent all of yesterday formatting the two books. The first six hours doing Sit Pretty and the next three hours doing Dark Spirits. The thing with formatting (the inside) of an ebook for CreateSpace is that you can easily do it yourself. Having someone else format it for you can be expensive, but by all means go that route if it’s your cup of tea.

The inside of Sit Pretty actually went pretty good. Until I submitted it and the cover, and realized that the chapter starts weren’t starting partway down the page like I had made them in Trouble. The two books also have different fonts on their covers, which I use for the chapter headings. Trouble’s was kind of neat, but Sit Pretty’s was just Times New Roman, which is what the inside of the book is.

I like Blank Slate‘s titles, done up in some B-named font that’s all scrolly and floofy and definitely not going to be mistaken for part of the story.

Dark Spirits is done up in Times New Roman as well, so by the end of the chapters I was yawning.

My cover designer for the first three books gave the option of doing the CreateSpace cover but also allows authors to make their own, which is great. So I made my own for all three. Which was really just a dark background for Trouble and Dark Spirits.

Sit Pretty has a bit of a different cover, so I tried something a little different. I’d show you, but it’s a pdf and I don’t know how to turn it from a pdf into an image for the blog.

I’m savvy and know my way around a few things, but that is something that’s beyond me.

This morning I checked on Trouble on Amazon and discovered that the “new” books were up to 3 on hand and there was a “used” line. Because I did the expanded distribution.

Expanded distribution does spread your name further, but the royalties are almost nil. It’d be much better for a reader to pay the same price on CreateSpace, where the royalties are higher, but that won’t help unless you spread around your CreateSpace “storefront” so I’ll be adding that to the blog and a few other places. Let’s call it an experiment and see where it goes from there.

I did some research and it seems the “used” isn’t actually used, it’s third-party distributors who pay to carry a book as used, even though it isn’t. Trouble is currently going for 6c less than the new books on Amazon’s page.

… and there’s a fourth book listed under new.

Okay, I clicked the button. There are new books listed from the original price ($10.99) right on up to $14.36. Well, I’m glad they think the book is worth that much, but I won’t see more royalties from them selling it for higher.

The other thing with these “used” and new booksellers is that they don’t purchase the book from CreateSpace until the book is bought.

… so… it’s not used… and an author isn’t paid for the book until a buyer (such as you, dear reader) decides to purchase it. Which still brings me back to the original perfect royalty purchase for an indie author, selling from the CreateSpace website itself, in order to gain the most royalties.

But selling through there would also lack Amazon’s ranking system, which can help get a name out there more. So it’s really half of one, six of another.

Ah, well. Back to not doing edits for me. Maybe I’ll finish the third Blank Slate book in the mean time.