It's the Great July Ebook Sale - 50% Discount!

 

Smashwords - the Ebook distributor I use to reach Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Scribd - starts its Summer Sale today running throughout July. As well as epub format, it offers mobi for a Kindle.

Great news! Many of my titles are included, offered at 50% discount.

Link to my Smashwords Sale Page:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lindaacaster
(50% Discount automatically applied at checkout)

The Mythic Time-Spanning Romance trilogy Torc of Moonlight is offered as separate novels, or if you want even more savings, as the complete trilogy in one long ebook.

For who prefer their reading with a little more of a shiver, there's plenty to choose from within my Chillers.

Thinking about writing your own fiction? How about a guide which does what it says on its cover - no waffle, full stories explained: 

Reading A Writer's Mind: Exploring Short Fiction - First Thought to Finished Story

That's enough to keep you going for ages. Check out my personal Smashwords Bookstore, and enjoy your reading:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lindaacaster 

Formatting the Trilogy into a Digital Box Set

Three novels, formatted to (almost) perfection, to be amalgamated into a single file for a trilogy box set. How problematic can it be?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. And it’s down to technology, or the incremental improvements in technology. During the period it has taken to write and launch the individual novels into the digital world I have changed computers twice, and the version of Word probably three times. Who keeps count?

The first flag came when I emailed the file destined for Amazon to my Kindle for a check. My shortened internal Table of Contents worked fine, but the bookmark did not connect with the Kindle’s Go To button to allow readers to link to it. Mmm.

Most of my titles are available on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, and Nook. However, as I don’t have a Mac computer and I don’t live in the USA, I use a distributor to intercede on my behalf for the last three. I use Smashwords. There are others.

So I altered the file slightly and uploaded to Smashwords. There were no autovetter flags and the mobi format transferred to my Kindle worked first time. Brilliant! Except within hours I’d had an email from Smashwords saying the ePub’s NCX list was not corresponding to the internal Table of Contents. Cue loud groan from me. Which was when I sat back to consider why I was having problems when I don’t usually.

Ah, changes in technology were inputting unseen code, probably countermanding one another. I could see only one option: Nuke the file.

The term comes from Smashwords’ own Style Guide – How to Format Your Ebook. No matter which digital retailer is used this free download is both extensive and written in the language a non-techy can understand.

The ‘nuclear’ option, when all tweaking fails or, as in my case, I’ve no idea what to tweak, is a fail-safe method of clearing all unseen code. The Word file is copied and pasted into Notebook, and from Notebook it is copied and pasted into a new, fresh, Word document. Then the formatting is re-applied via Styles. Say it quick and it doesn’t sound much, but for a trilogy it is time-consuming, to say the least.

And this is where I’m at. Having the old file and the new file side by side for guidance, all the indents, centres, emboldens, and page breaks have been reinstated, and I am halfway through reinstating the 927 instances of italicised text. Word is good, though. On the old file Enter italics into Search and Replace, tick Highlight, hit Find All, and it does just that, allowing me to slide through the pages.

Note to self for the next novel: Use fewer italics.

"Clean Reader" Censorship - Update on Post 14 March

Events never stand still and my original post on the Clean Reader app for use with ebooks needs an update. 

To recap, the app sanitizes words and phrases as innocuous as ‘damn’ with either a blue dot or a replacement word/phrase chosen by the app creators, whether or not these are a near fit to the context or meaning of the text. 

In the post I outlined my severe reservations about this app, how it can change the entire nature of a fictional work, and of my belief it would prove the tip of the iceberg in censorship as the app, and doubtless others like it, were updated and ‘improved’. 

After the post was written I discovered that the app was being facilitated with ebooks sold on the Inktera retailer site, a subsidiary of Page Foundry, one of the retailers my ebooks are available to via the aggregator I use – Smashwords. After deliberation, I decided to withdraw my titles from Page Foundry in my distribution stream, and as a matter of courtesy advised the aggregator of my decision. To give it its due, Page Foundry responded almost immediately to the update from Smashwords and my ebooks were removed from the Inktera site. 

Since then there’s been another flurry across the media. Yesterday I was contacted by Radio 5 Live for an interview which, as it happens, I couldn’t fulfil, and due to breaking news the entire segment was dropped by the programme. Almost at the same time a Google Alert popped into my Inbox through which I discovered that a sound bite taken from my post had been included in the online Telegraph in an article headlined by the author Joanne Harris, and then another to mark us in the MailOnline. 

As many others have, Joanne Harris wrote a post on her own website concerning this app. As I did, she chose not to concentrate on the fact that the app was replacing perceived profanities, but what exactly this did to the fiction as written by the author and where this was leading. And she did it much better than I managed. Being a celebrity author, a spokesman from the app contacted her, and she responded – see her second post. 

This morning I picked up a note from the ebook aggregator Smashwords I use, as do many small publishers world-wide. The use of this app has evidently been under consideration. According to the post on the Smashwords site (25 March) Smashwords deems that Page Foundry via Inktera contravened its Terms of Agreement. A request was made to remove all ebooks emanating from Smashwords from use with the app, and this has been fulfilled. 

Which is great news for authors and publishers using Smashwords as an aggregator. 

Until, as the saying goes, the next time.

Update 27 March 2015:

What was I saying about events not standing still? I find this morning that Page Foundry has put out a Tweet saying that its catalogue has been removed from Inktera. Except it's worded more like a damage limitation exercise:

"In support of #authors #readers #books everywhere, the @Inktera bookstore system has been pulled from @CleanReader, effective immediately."

As I say, until the next time.

Goodbye Sony eBook Store

An announcement has just been made that from 20th March the Sony eBook stores in the USA and Canada will close, and that their business, and ongoing customers, will be transferred to Kobo. It is part of a wider re-structuring in the company, but I'm still sad to see it happen. Sony was a pioneer in providing an e-reader platform and an ebook store, and helped open the retail industry to independant authors.

Its problem, though, was that it couldn't keep up. I know of only one acquaintance with a dedicated Sony ereader; I know of no one owning a Sony tablet who purchases their ebooks from Sony. My titles are distributed to Sony's Reader Store via Smashwords but sales can be counted on one hand. According to the update from the Smashwords blog, I'm not alone.

This is a warning for writers as well as retail sellers. We need to stay close to the head as the market writhes.

Read an Ebook Week - 50% Discounts!

It's that time of year again - Read An Ebook Week. Not all distributors take part, but Smashwords does, providing ebooks in all formats, from Kindle to Nook to Kobo to iPad.

I'm offering all mine at a 50% discount, except for my ebook of short fiction which equates to a FREE read. The discount code is applied at the checkout. But don't delay - Read An Ebook Week finishes on 9th March!

What better way to pick up Book One in the 'Torc of Moonlight' trilogy. Or if you've already got that one, links to all my ebooks are offered in the left column of its Smashwords page.

Updates - Am I Bald?

There's nothing quite like having a laptop go belly-up for causing sheer panic. It didn't die, exactly, the Windows Installer file was deemed corrupted needing a Recovery return to factory settings. Cue a mad session of archiving to an almost full free-standing hard drive.

Recovery itself was fairly painless, as was reinstalling the files. It was the sheer hassle of re-installing the software that caught me unawares. I'd forgotten they, too, would all return to factory settings, needing passwords and all sorts of odd input. The amount of hair-tugging... it's a wonder I'm not bald.

However, as the saying goes 'these things, too, shall pass', and they did. Or, to be more precise, they are. I still have to reload Dragon Naturally Speaking, and for the life of me aren't sure where my 'profile' will be saved, so I may yet have to reteach it all my idiosyncrasies. And we were getting on so well.

Despite the set-back,  there is news:

Dead Men's Fingers is now live at Smashwords for those wanting ePub or other formats, and has already been placed on a reader's Favourites list. There is still a bit of tidying to be done with the admin for this alter ego of mine, like figuring how to run two Google usernames from the same account, but I'm getting there.

The Bull At The Gate, the second in the trilogy of contemporary paranormal thrillers which started with Torc of Moonlight, is finally rising through the gears after far too long a suspension. It feels good to be home.

Ebooks: Royalty Rates and Sales Figures

Last May I took my first tentative steps in the ebook market, indie authoring one of my rights-reverted historical romances Hostage of the Heart. From scanning the body text into a digital file that could be edited to ease the flow of prose, to formatting and adding in the external links, to - shock-horror! - creating a cover that was no more appalling than the one with which the mainstream publisher had blessed it, I did it all. And uploaded it, and sold copies.

And guess what? The sky did not fall in. So I did it again, and again, and again. Why? Because readers bought them. And guess what? The sky still hasn't fallen in. 

So today I read two snippets of reported news:

--- that publishers and agents differ over ebook royalties - publishers consider 25% is good, agents consider 50% is better.

I have news for them both. Up to 70% (Amazon kdp for Kindle) or 85% (Smashwords for Nook, Ipad, Sony) direct to the indie author is better still.

--- during 2010, for every 100 paperbacks sold by Amazon 115 Kindle books were sold (as opposed to freebies given away). 

And this surprises who, exactly? Pity we don't know how many of those were by indie authors. Now that would make both publishers and agents take notice.

Teleread
Amazon announcement 27 Jan 11