The Proliferation of Independent Publishing Platforms.

5 x 8" Createspace POD needs title moved to the right.

by Louis Shalako

The number of publishing platforms continues to proliferate, even since I last researched this story under another pen-name. More on that in a minute.

A while back I signed up for Kobo Writing Life. I have only a couple of ebooks there. I’ve never really promoted it and probably haven’t sold a single book. 

It’s an experiment, and those books are also on Amazon. Those books I promote in some small ways. I can compare results of promotion versus non-promotion, also there is the theory of having your books in as many bookstores as possible. This works online as well as in the real world.

I also signed up for OmniLit a while back. I couldn’t get in past the section where you put your Canadian and U.S. tax ID, mostly because my Microsoft Internet Explorer browser simply wouldn’t do it properly. Google Chrome seems to have fixed that, and I’m all signed up. All I have to do is to click on the confirmation email and begin learning the system. That’s under a new publisher name, so what book or books I will actually load up there is still a mystery.

But it might be worthwhile to see what I have in romance or erotica, whatever categories they have over there. I can publish all five authors under the new publisher name—that’s using your head and thinking ahead.

Now, if you’re publishing on Smashwords and Kobo, you can unclick the Kobo distribution channel on your Smashwords dashboard, or you end up with a conflict, a double entry on your one author page.

Smashwords was recently named the number one ebook distributor in the world or something like that.

Pretty much everybody knows all about Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.

So if you sign up with some platform that has or is acquiring access to a distribution system, making deals with iBooks, Nook, Kobo, Sony, etc, then you have to decide if you even want to put up a book on different platforms. If you can get your book into a lot of channels, putting up a book in a unique new platform is still a good idea, the question is can you keep the book out of streams where it already exists. 

The platform might still represent one new, stand-alone store.

If nothing else, you can still get your books in that one new store—it’s a question of putting in the time.

Some of these new platforms have an upfront cost, $99.00 looks about standard for the low-level service.

As far as formatting goes, typing in metadata, handling the upload etc, that’s probably a fair price if you can’t do it yourself, have no idea what that means and aren’t interested in learning it yourself. You might have a daytime job, right? In which case free publishing might not be your top priority, although it is one of mine.

That being said, there are some free services, although the two-week free trial (on any platform) is pointless from my point of view because it’s just a come-on and you’re never going to see any results in that amount of time anyway.

Tablo: $99.00 service.

BookTango: says here that it’s free. Royalty system.

EBookLit: converts from DOCX files, says it’s free.

BookBaby: $99.00

Vook: ebooks and PODs. Paid service.

PressBooks: various plans available, trial offer.

Draft2Digital: claims no up-front costs, no risk, royalty split based on price categories. See, this one I might check out later.

Kobo Writing Life: no results as of yet on my own experiment, but it was easy enough to use and I do have books published separately from Amazon and Smashwords there.

ReadMill: claims you can interact with readers right in the margins of your book. (Now closed. -- ed.)

WidBook: another site where you can write onsite, totally mobile from anywhere in the world, and interact with readers, build or find an audience, etc.

Rhovit: looks like about ten bucks a month. Distribution platform for books, comics, film, etc.

Libboo: claims to use audience measurement algorithms to help authors ‘tune’ their works.

Authorgraph: allows personalized messages in ebooks, signed copies, etc.

Lelivro: another publishing platform, this is the author landing page.

WattPad: you can write directly on WattPad, click on folks who might follow you back and read your stories. I upload the first two chapters of books as excerpts, and I usually get quite a few reads, which is useful information to an author.

EBookPartnership: has a pricing page.

Nook Press: free to use, books appear in the Nook Store.

iTunes: sell your content. Since they have a Canadian store or a foreign platform, you might be able to avoid the withholding tax. I haven’t checked this one out yet.

Sony Publisher Portal: publish direct through Sony system.

Infiniti: publish in hardcover and ebooks. Ebooks $349.00.

With careful key-word search, you can find dozens of soft and hardcover print on demand book publishers, some of whom are or soon will be offering ebook conversions. The proliferation of platforms in this market is undeniable.

VistaPrint: calendars. POD.

How to sell ebooks on eBay.

There are places to publish your photographs, art prints, CDs, books and films, (for example on Createspace.) Other free POD places include Lulu, and there are dozens of others, most of which are on a paid service basis.

Before I publish anything on any platform, I want to know if they have provision for Canadian or overseas authors to avoid paying the standard U.S. withholding tax of 30 percent. (That's why I'm not on Nook Press.) Can I publish for free? How do I get paid? Do I control my prices? (On Kobo the minimum price is $1.99 and you can’t set it to free.) Are there additional distribution channels and should I take advantage of them, if they are free and if they go places I’m not already represented on? How does everything actually work?

Bearing in mind I have five pen-names, a load of titles and more coming, the time consideration comes into play—how much time is this going to take, and is there any real chance of some rational payment?

It’s only a matter of time before there are more free publishing platforms, ones with good services and good business plans, with multiple distribution channels and access to some new stores that I haven’t even heard of yet.

We’ll keep our ears out and see what we can pick up.

 END

Challenges.

(Morguefile photo.)

Everyone has a different challenge, but we all have them.

Here are just a few of the challenges I face in the next few months. Yes, I have a plan, and I will win, in the long game.


Royalties.

In order to get royalties from Smashwords without paying a thirty percent withholding tax, I need an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, (ITIN.) To do that, I need a birth certificate. Then I can apply for a passport. Then I can properly identify myself to the IRS and fill out W8EN forms, etc. Smashwords would be happy to put money into my Paypal account (next quarter,) but I don’t want to pay the withholding tax.

I have some qualms about mailing a passport and birth certificate to the IRS. There must be a better way, but that’s my immediate interpretation of their letter.

I’m very stubborn, incidentally.

Of course on an Ontario Disability Pension, finding $35.00 for a birth certificate application, $15-20.00 for a passport photo, and $80.00 for the passport may be challenging. That’s because I live 35 % below the poverty line and I’m already performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes on a daily basis as things stand now.

Why I don’t use Kick-starter to get some marketing images.

If I received a gift or series of gifts via ‘Kick-Starter,’ the ODSP would see it as income. They would allow the first $100.00 and then take fifty cents on the dollar in income penalties. They are notoriously ignorant when it comes to allowable expenses or investing back into a business. They make a ruling, and then I can appeal. It takes a year to get a hearing. I do not trust the process, which takes up an inordinate amount of time and you can’t get any justice from them anyway. If I can’t pay the rent, (65 % of my income,) I end up on the street. I find that sort of thing very disruptive to my work.

Getting the electronic funds transfer capability to get small royalties from Amazon is another challenge. The threshold is only $10.00 a month, but of course banks have monthly fees. The trick here is to get an account with access to U.S. banking. The royalties have to be more than the fees, and at some level it’s just not worth it. There’s not much point in getting that account, and paying fees, until I have the ITIN, and qualify under tax treaty for no withholding tax.

Marketing Images.

In order to get marketing images, I can’t get images without money, and I can’t get money without selling books, also subject to ODSP rules. Bit of a vicious circle, eh? That’s why it’s hard to break the cycle of poverty. Unpopular subject, so let’s move on.

Pen Names.

There’s not much point in opening up four or five more Smashwords accounts, and using a few more e-mail accounts, as long as the marketing images aren’t up to snuff. But I do see a point, hopefully not too far off, when I will probably do that. I would have a pen-name for the mysteries, that makes sense, and maybe one for the WW I parody memoir. Do I really need a pen-name for horror, fantasy and science fiction? Argh. Do I get more Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and pretend to be four or five different people? Argh. More workload—that’s what I see here, with a crappy old computer and not enough band-width. Everything takes forever.

Write more books and stories.

While suffering from a singular lack of motivation, and battling strong depression, I need to write more books, taking it on faith that somehow I will find the marketing images to give them an even chance in the world. Also, I would be taking it on faith that people will do the right thing by these books, by purchasing and reading them. Otherwise it would be pointless, as selling a half dozen copies a month is a waste of time, especially if I can never see any hope of improvement in sales or even getting what small monies are due. There’s not much point in getting angry. It is a waste of time.

Submit more stories to pro magazines.

Yeah. While attempting to back up all my work on a disc, due to the incipient and imminent computer crash that I expect will happen any day, I somehow locked up all the stories in my science fiction folder. What that means is that the stories are there, I simply don’t have permission to open them. I think this happened because one folder was just too big for the disc, and yet for some reason there was no way to back out of the process. While I can recover any story e-mailed by clicking on ‘sent’ in my e-mail box, I have never e-mailed anyone my list of submissions. What this means is that I have no idea if I have submitted a given story to a given market. I would prefer not to re-submit a story someone rejected previously, as it looks like sheer cussedness or ignorance, or not being able to take no for an answer.

I guess the answer here is to write more stuff.

When I get a minute.

Less serious is the fact that my document, ‘Titles,’ just a bunch of ideas for stories that I may or may not have gotten around to doing, is also gone. Again, I’ve never e-mailed that to anyone, so it’s not backed up in the e-mails. There may be a copy of that on a disc somewhere, but like the list of submissions, which was up to #700 last time I looked, it won‘t be up to date or complete.

I suppose any idea I had once I can have again. However, there was one incomplete story in my folder, and that one had never been e-mailed either. ‘The Deposits,’ the story in question, was sort of inspired by Robert J. Sawyer, but the world may have to live without such a tribute or parody for the foreseeable future. If you would like to know what that one was about, you’ll have to pay me $1,000.00 because I’m tired of people reading my blog and then running off with all sorts of ideas, and never even giving me a mention. You know who you are.

Over the next little while, I will be using my paint program to enhance my marketing images. Adobe CS6 requires a Pentium 4 chip to operate. I'm doing the best I can with what I have.

You'll notice I don't have a 'donate' button. If you seriously wanted to help in the success of this enterprise, the best thing anybody could do is to buy a book.