An Indie learns to publish on Kobo and Smashwords

Having made the most of the "Kindle Select" promotional offers with my latest book (In Her Mothers' Shoes) - the ones you can only have if your book is exclusive to Kindle - I decided the time was right to move onto other pastures, hopefully just as green. Kindle was my first learning experience in Indie Publishing, as they call it. I sweated for hours over my keyboard formatting the book for html; I nearly went mad getting the cover the right size; and I almost lost it trying to get the worldwide distribution settings right. But after a while, I got the hang of it so well I published two of my earlier novels on Kindle as well - and each time, it got a little easier.

You would think, then, that publishing my adoption-triangle novel In Her Mothers' Shoes on Kobo and Smashwords would be a doddle.

Not quite.

While Kindle requires you to save the book as "Web Page, Filtered" (html), Kobo needs it in epub, odt, mobi (whatever that is) and, thankfully, word documents. Smashwords, on the other hand, only takes older word documents but the formatting is much the same.

The only major difference between Kindle and Smashwords is that you can't have your paragraphs indented AND a 12pt (or any-sized) gap after the paragraph. It has to be one or the other. But it was only a moment's work to reformat the whole book without the extra space. How times have changed!
There is also a specific requirement for how you word your copyright on Smashwords, which I hadn't struck before (Published by Felicity Price & Associates at Smashwords, © Copyright 2013 Felicity Price).
For Smashwords and Kobo, you need to have a new ISBN Number (which you get when you apply first time round - one for print, one for Kindle and one for epub).
With those four things sorted, I clicked the "Publish" button and my book was up there in the Smashwords and Kobo stores.
Just how this will translate to sales, I have yet to learn. I suspect there is a secret formula somewhere but, unlike Kindle, there doesn't appear to be a special "Select" marketing programme that helps boost your sales up the rankings.
That's my next task. I'll keep you posted!

Top Ten Tips for Painless Publishing on Kindle

Even the most reluctant technophone can become highly savvy when the motivation is to get your book out there. And by out there, I mean read by people who don't even know you.
In the last couple of months, I've put two of my earlier novels - No Angel and Call of the Falcon - up on Kindle. They say that the more books you have in your author profile available for purchase, the more you are likely to sell since people who enjoy one book can then go back and buy another. So I've done all the right things like put a request for a review at the end of the book (with an appropriate link) and put a list of my other books for sale at the front (with their own links too).  It takes time, of course, but the more you do the easier it becomes. I recall when I put In Her Mothers' Shoes on Kindle last year it took forever to get the formatting right and the cover the right size and the rights all allocated correctly. Now I've done it three times, I'm becoming a bit of an expert. In fact, I even ran a couple of classes on the subject of digital self-publishing for the local branch of the NZ Society for Authors earlier in the year. Who would have thought it?! 
So, if you're thinking of doing this yourself sometime, here are my summarised top ten tips for a comparatively painless way of publishing on Kindle: 
1. Get your book professionally edited - and that doesn't mean friends and family
2. Get your cover professionally designed by a graphic designer who knows about what works on a book cover
3. Write a promotional "blurb" for your book of up to 300 words that will make its target audience want to buy it (and you do need to work out what sort of people your readers will be). This is a vital sales tool, as are the 8 "key words/phrases" you choose to help your book be found. (Don't use words in the title).
4. Get ISBN numbers from (in New Zealand) www.natlib.govt.nz. You will need one for Kindle, one for e-readers and one for print. They are free.
5. Log onto Kindle Direct Publishing, create a password, click to create a new book.
6. Make formatting your friend. Follow what KDP tells you to do, set fonts (only 3 are available) at 11pt, delete any page numbers, and save the document as HTML (Save as: Type: Web Page Filtered)
7. Upload your book following the prompts. Then follow the instructions to see how it will look on Kindle. If it doesn't look right, fix the errors and upload it again.
8. Upload your cover according to the size limits, and add your "blurb" and your 8 key phrases.
9. Decide on your royalty option, pricing, tick it is not in the public domain (unless it's an old copyright-expired publication), worldwide distribution, Digital Rights Management and available for lending. Royalties (for those of us not US residents) will come in the form of a cheque mailed when the amount due reaches over 100 pounds or 100 US dollars.
10. Click Save and Publish and in a day or two you will see your book, its cover, and its blurb up in the Kindle Store.
Good luck! I'm looking forward to seeing what difference it makes having several books for sale now. I'll keep you posted - along with any further tips for getting sales.

Top writers are ignoring top writers' advice

In the last couple of weeks, I've read two of the most highly recommended female writers of our generation - Anne Tyler (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant) and Rose Tremain (The Swimming Pool Season). There is no doubt in my mind that they are both exceptional writers; their prose is inspirational. But taken as a whole, their books - specifically their characters and their stories - leave me pretty cold. 
In neither book was there a single engaging character. In both books, the characters were either brittle and damaged, just plain difficult, or passive pushovers who never learned to stand up for themselves. In both books, there was at least one major character who was a nutjob. 
Both books also go into a tremendous amount of extraneous detail, building up as complicated a picture as possible. And the detail often lacks interest.  There are a lot of dream sequences (yawn) and several totally irrelevant scenes, with new, unusual characters added, that made me wonder if they came from a writing exercise or short story Tyler decided to throw in for good measure.
Dare I say it, AS Byatt does this too - adds page after page of diversion and detail - sometimes in the extreme.
Yet what about all that advice to writers - by some of the world's top writers - to make sure all your subplots and action contribute in some way to the overriding theme or story? Not to mention the advice about dream sequences - leave them out because they bore the pants off people.
Funnily enough, reviews in the Telegraph and Guardian often point out the extraneous detail and unlikeable characters in these books, but they still rave about how these writers are so good.
I don't get it!

Time to Write

What an unaccustomed luxury to have time to write. My first book, Dancing in the Wilderness, was published in 2001 and I wrote a lot of it after midnight, after the kids were in bed, after the after-hours work was polished off. From then on, writing was secondary to the day job, squeezed in between running a very busy business and looking after two equally busy teenagers. In fact it was the demands of those very teenagers, combined with the growing demands of having elderly, increasingly frail parents, plus the job, the community work and a badly behaved spaniel, that inspired me to write my fourth, fifth and sixth books, including the best-selling Sandwich Short of a Picnic. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AM7FHCC

I was a fully fledged member of the Sandwich Generation - sandwiched between elderly parents, teenagers and a career, all making demands on my time and leaving no time for me, let alone for writing. 
But as all authors know, you just make the time. You're driven to. There's something about that laptop, those characters, the sudden plot twist that overtook you the last time you typed out a chapter. You just can't keep away. 
In July this year, as a long-planned bucket-list move, my husband and I spent three months in Menton, in the south of France, where I had plenty of time to write - as well as eat a lot of cheese, drink a lot of wine and swim in the sea every day. My eighth novel sped onto the page. And now that we're back home and waiting for the right job to come by, there's even more time to write. I can't believe how much fun it is, sitting down at the laptop every day. Now I can be just like Stephen King, who sets himself a 2000 word limit every day. And without another job to go to, it's not that hard to achieve.
Like all good things it can't last forever. Like most writers, I have to have a day job. Besides, how will I get that real-life experience I can write about at some later date?