Chris’s Comments (group member since Mar 30, 2017)

Chris’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

Nice work Dale! The sentiment in your intro paragraph was great. I hope you encourage more readers to do the same for us indies.

Hi Fellow Indies,

There was a small announcement today from print-on-demand service IngramSpark that offers a great new opportunity for self-published authors. I've done a detailed breakdown too big for a forum of that announcement that shows how it can impact the way you think about your book’s design. If you are making or are about to make a book, it’s well worth staying informed.

I hope it helps.

I like the art, although I would request a range of colour options for the title and play with the font, too. Probably a better option out there on both fronts. The font feels like a romance, rather than a sci-fi (although I cannot read the blurb, so that may be the case). You could consider & instead of and as well.

Hi Guys,

I've started writing a bunch of guides to pass on my experiences to other authors and to potentially start a bit of discussion. This one talks about story structure in a children's picture book.

I hope it gets you thinking and adds some value to your own journeys.

To add to this discussions, I have also noticed Ingram struggles to deal with lots of black. They must use cheap printers, as on cover art with large areas of full black, they get ink bleed. This is where the black kind of drags across the other colours, dulling them somewhat -making them muggy. I have not had this problem with the direct Amazon POD they started up.

Cool thread, don't know how I missed it earlier. This week I want to:

1. Finish the print design of my first book, The Little Green Boat. (It's been in digital form for two years)
2. Update the digital versions of The Little Green Boat to edition 2, which adds in a new character and a number of minor text and image tweaks.
3. Complete the first edit of children's book for one of our new authors.
4. Finish the image briefs for another one of our new author's books so I can get it to our illustrator.
5. Launch a parents survey in conjunction with six other authors.
6. Get sales picking up again on our sci-fi novel Adam Exitus.

Busy week ahead!

It gets more time consuming with each new entry in a series, too, lol. If you ever need help with design or subbing, or getting new designs for different formats, be sure to check us out - www.oldmatemedia.com

Best of luck!!

Hi Mike,

Just putting this out there just in case, but I advise having an ad to your first book to your second book, and vice versa. As in, you may want to resubmit your first book with the ad before you release the second one (certainly before you do any marketing). This is something we do in the book's we design and publish.

Chris

Unfortunately, in our experience, the printers that Ingram use are cheaper. The color bleed - especially with blacks - is far worse on covers for Ingram over Amazon's direct service.

If you want to train yourself up in Indesign, I recommend Lynda.com - they have some really helpful video courses there.

It has been a few years since I looked, but I never found an accurate voice-to-text dictator. If you mean just to take down notes as you think of them, I just use apps on my phone. iPhone has the Voice Memo app, which is great.

In regards to ePubs, I write all my books in word, but then design the books using Adobe indesign. This exports natively in the ePub format, and then I have tools to convert that to Mobi (which is Kindle's version of the ePub) as well. If you get stuck in the end and want me to take a quick look to give you a quick assessment of where it is at, feel free to email me at chris@oldmatemedia.com

I realise it isn't the cheapest option, but I would be remiss not to point out that designing a book as an ePub from the outset will give you the best result. No professional would ever convert from a doc - but I also understand not everyone has a budget to work with as well.

It was actually about 15 months ago. I found five different people - specialists in each language online somewhere. Potentially all through Freelancer.com

Also one of my books - which is not yet released - the artist was Egyptian. He then wrote a book and his English was not great. So we did a trade; he translated one of my books into Arabic, and I fixed up his English book. So potentially you can try and get an opportunity like that to happen for you?

I got one of my books translated into five languages, but have only released one at this point - a Spanish version of The Little Green Boat (https://www.amazon.com/Peque%C3%B1o-V...).

One piece of advice I can provide is to make sure that you don't just get the book translated. You need your Amazon Store description, testimonials and all those little extras translated as well. Even your copyright and author page and a dedication if you have one in the book. If someone speaks German, for example, having them land on an Amazon shop page with the blurb in English won't help.

(or help your search SEO)

Hello everyone, nice to meet you all! A quick introduction. I've been working as an editor and journalist in the magazine and website worlds for 20 years. I've 10 self-published books of my own currently available (http://oldmatemedia.com/shop/), plus I have begun publishing work on behalf of other authors.

In fact, I was pretty shocked by some of the figures indie authors were being charged for services I work with every day. So I've started a little publishing company, Old Mate Media, and have begun turning my 20-years of experience towards helping indie authors and illustrators produce world-class books. So we edit, design and publish books, and can also create illustrations and covers, as well as help with other parts of the marketing process (like building websites).

In short, we want to help people create great books that they own completely. There's more information on the site (http://www.oldmatemedia.com) as well as free guides and other resources to help indie authors with the book creation process. Feel free to drop by and email me with any questions.

Thanks for reading,

Chris