In the spirit of Thanksgiving and football, I advocate authors, in particular self-published ones, to take an opportunity to give thanks to their reviewers. Not for the positive reviews, and certainly not the Amazon single paragraph, five-star gushers, but rather the negative ones.
While assisting my day job’s charity committee with a company cookbook being published through CreateSpace, I discovered that after submitting the files and ordering a proof, and making changes, CreateSpace gave the option to opt out of having to order a second proof copy.
Wow! Has it really been 3 years already? Yep, today marks the day back in 2008 when I decided to start a review blog for Lulu.com authors. And look how we’ve grown in such a short time.
It’s been exactly one month since the release of my third book, Are You Sitting Down?.
December 1st marked the end of my month long give away over at GoodReads which I discussed in my last post. 974 people entered the contest to win one of the 5 copies I was giving away. And 159 people have added the book to their “to read” list. After the contest ended, I even received an email through GoodReads from another reader who was sad she didn’t win, and asked politely if I could spare another copy.
We received an interesting phone call today from a medical bookstore looking for “book panels.” Since we had no idea what that was, we asked the bookstore to ask their customer what a “book panel” was used for. She explained that it’s a sticker an author signs which can be mailed to a reader to put in the author’s book if the book isn’t present for the author to sign. The customer was actually talking about book plates!
Because the truth is that even in the digital age, old fashioned paper is still the most reliable medium for storing your memories.
Last week I reintroduced my POD Diary with a post about beginning book marketing for my most recent book, Are You Sitting Down?. Here’s a recap of how the first week went down:
June 8, 2009 was when I wrapped up my POD Diary here on LLBR, an online account of my journey into formatting, publishing, marketing, and selling my 2nd book, Stealing Wishes pretty much from the start to the end of the first year of the book being in print.
For $69, CreateSpace is now offering file conversion to prep your book to be uploaded to Kindle. CreateSpace will convert your trade paperback book* into an eBook format that maintains the formatting and design elements used in your trade paperback book. You will also receive a JPEG thumbnail of your book’s cover. Both files are [...]
This Fall marks the release of my own new book, Are You Sitting Down?, which is already available on Kindle. Unfortunately, the paperback edition is still weeks away, but at this point in the industry, I’m not rushing it. I’ve already made more of a niche for myself amongst E-Readers at this point in my writing career, more so than I will probably ever see in paperback sales alone. And I’m not alone. We’ve soapboxed enough about the Kindle, but in case you still aren’t convinced by the E-movement, then check out this story from author J.A. Konrath: eBooks and The Ease of Self-Publishing. Today marks the Kindle release of Draculas, a horror novel that he wrote with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson.
