SFF stories, plus squid (self-publishing diary)

Polenth

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It's been a long term plan of mine to self-publish short story collections. Most of my shorts are fantasy and science fiction, and some have been previously published. My first collection, Rainbow Lights, is well on the way. I have some formatting things to sort, and then the Kindle version will be up (probably by the end of the week). And Smashwords and a paperback some time later.

It contains 35 stories and poems and is the length of a short novel, as I wanted it to be closer to the size of collections in book shops. This is a path less trodden in self-publishing land, so it'll be interesting to see how it does.

I did most things myself or had family/friend volunteers. The costs involved a piece of white card (for the cover) and postage to send off paperwork. I'm in the UK, so needed an ITIN to stop Amazon withholding tax money from the royalties. For the future, I'm also likely to license a font for my paperback interior (the cover font is donationware, so the license is free for now... but I'll donate to charity as requested if I earn monies).

I've blogged about a few things related to it. Most recent was the cover reveal:

rlkin300.jpg


Later, I plan to release some longer shorts as standalones. I've got a steampunk novelette that's mostly written, so should be out some time later this year (I have some other non-self-publishing projects to work on too, so it won't get all of my time).

And in this thread, I will waffle on about sales and what's going on with it. But at the moment, it's just me and the squid.
 
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Polenth

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It's now live on Amazon and I've signed up for Author Central. The official announcement on my blog will be after I make my launch cupcakes (I have my priorities, and they mostly involve sugar).

I hit a few issues when formatting. One was auto systems for turning straight quotes to curly quotes don't understand words with a ' at the start, like 'tis, and use the wrong direction of quote. It's not something any formatting guides I read mentioned. I manually went through and changed those to the correct mark.

I have some poems and some unusual story formats. I think I've got it as close as an ebook can get. One problem area was laying out words in columns, which I ended up doing with a pre tag (it mostly works, but older Kindles shift the lines a little).

So far, it's all gone pretty smoothly.

The squid is gorgeous!!!! <--- Never thought I'd say that about a squid!

Yay!
 

Ann Joyce

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Merri's right. That's a beautiful squid! Congrats... looks like you're off to a good start!
 

Polenth

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May sales stats: I sold 7 copies on Amazon. It wasn't a complete month, as the book came out on the 23rd.

What I did: Promotion was very basic this month. I made sure my social networks knew (a blog post and messages on Twitter, my Facebook author page and Google+, plus cover and word cloud posts on Tumblr). Someone contacted me on Twitter to say they'd brought the book. A few reblogged my Tumblr post of the cover. Google+ and Facebook didn't do much as usual, but it's not as though it took me long to do.

I updated my website, so the cover and link to the book detail's page were on the opening page. My blog also has a cover link in the sidebar.

On outside sites, I made sure the Goodreads page for the book was updated. I also signed up for Author Central on .com and .co.uk, and filled out the profile with a bunch of photos and things.

I've submitted the book to three review sites so far. There aren't as many that take short story collections as novels, so I'm not expecting too much there. Another site has three of the stories, as I won the reviews in a charity auction.

And so ends May.
 

sarahdalton

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I love the cover, it's gorgeous. Is it an illustration or image manipulation? I can't tell from that size.

Also congrats on the sales! 7 in one weeks is really impressive.
 

Polenth

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I love the cover, it's gorgeous. Is it an illustration or image manipulation? I can't tell from that size.

It's an illustration. Chalk pastels and charcoal. The texture is created by layering it up (with a coat of fixing spray between each layer).

LOVE the cupcakes!!! I sold 7 books my first month of self-publishing, too! Here's to many more sales in the months to come.

Thanks! I'm expecting sales to drop off next month, partly because I have a lot of other stuff to focus on. But once I get these other projects wrapped up, I can get the steampunk novelette out.
 

Polenth

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June sales stats:

Amazon: 1
Smashwords: 1


The random small stuff:

After going through all the reviewer lists I could fine, I submitted to four blogs in total (so I only found one more since last time). A novel would do much better, as I could have sent it to dozens if I had a novel.

I also started a LibraryThing giveaway for 23 copies, which'll end in a few days.

In positive news, I heard from a reader who'd read the whole collection. 'Dead Meat' was their favourite.


Smashwords epub beta:

Sorting Smashwords was my big task this month. I'm using their beta system where you upload an epub directly, which means I can't offer other formats there yet. Which is a pity, but I'd rather that and have an epub I'm happy with go out to the other distributors. The rest of this section is some of the technical stuff, which might be useful for anyone else going this route.

Smashwords uses an older epub validator, which has a bug. The bug is it won't take all of the allowed values for a certain attribute - preserveAspectRatio. The solution to this (as I'm using Calibre to convert from html) is to go into "EPUB Output" when setting the conversion and tick "Preserve cover aspect ratio". This changes the value in preserveAspectRatio, and Smashwords is happy.

If you're coding your own table of contents, rather than letting an automated system sort it, the name attribute shouldn't be used for epubs. Instead, the anchor should be marked with id. So instead of something like:

<a name="chapter1"><h1>Chapter One</h1></a>

It should read:

<h1 id="chapter1">Chapter One</h1>

I wish I'd known that before I made my initial html file, as I could have saved time by coding it that way from the start.

I also did what I should have done before, and ran my basic pre-conversion html file through the W3C validator. It picked up a couple of small mistakes, which caused random issues with the epub validator after conversion.


Future stuff:

I aim to get a few related blog posts out next month, which'll give me something to tweet about.

I've been working on the cover for the steampunk novelette. This mainly involved taking pictures of rusted metal. Next up is taking apart some old clocks. August is a likely publishing date for that project.
 

Blenia

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Just wanted to add that I too love your cover. Such an elegant and easy to read font choice and the illustrations gorgeous. Best of luck!
 

Polenth

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July Sales: No sales this month.

I sent out the copies for the LibraryThing giveaway. One person (out of 23) responded and added it to their library. No reviews currently.

Someone I follow on Twitter wanted happy news for a week of joy. I figured you couldn't get much more joyful than a rainbow squid. So I have an interview over there.


The Future: The steampunk novelette, By Means of Clockwork Selection, is written and I've had the notes back from my critique partner. I also have a finished cover (it's from photos of an old cuckoo clock, farm machinery and a graphics card):

csl350.jpg


It's the first in a series of linked short stories. Different characters and places in each, but all set in the same world. I can write these between bigger projects, so they'll be good for keeping up the release momentum.

The plan is I'll put the book up after I get back from climbing mountains. But I won't announce it immediately, as I'm going to set some free days for the official launch, and need enough of a delay to let the places that list the days know. This means it should be announced in late August, if all goes to plan. It'll be 99 cents when it isn't free.
 
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Fruitbat

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I agree, cool cover!