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

Rational Writing Goals for 2014.

Click > Free wanted posters.

by Louis Shalako

About this time last year I set some rational writing goals, which are different from business or professional goals.

That time has come again.

For 2014 I would like to write three novels in the 60-65,000-word range. If they go a bit longer, that’s not a problem. The first thing on the agenda is another science fiction novel. By May or June I need to start writing another mystery novel, Maintenon Mystery # 4, and that leaves one fluff project. I say that because it doesn’t need to be so deadly serious. I can go on a romp, or if I really did have a serious idea, then I could drop it in a heartbeat and so do the other one. Writing three books a year falls right in line with my long-term plan, which is to be a writer until the day I die.

I also want to make some money at it—real money.

Assuming that I am fortunate enough to live another twenty years, I will have an estimated seventy-two novels to my credit, and if I live another thirty years, maybe more than that. Our productivity tends to drop off at some point when we stop caring, or it no longer matters in the sense that it can no longer significantly affect our own personal outcomes…more on that another time.

In 2013 I wrote Third World, (SF) and Blessed Are the Humble, (mystery) and I’m 32,000 words into Whack ‘em and Stack ‘em, my bizarro thriller-parody. That one demonstrates the value of having some flexibility. I wrote 18,000 words back in the springtime before getting serious about Third World.

I still have six weeks to go and I know I can finish Whack ‘em etc by the end of the year, publish it, all that sort of thing.

What I did in 2013 I can do again. Also in 2013 I wrote a shitload of novellas for my pen-names, to the tune of something like another 100,000 words, plus a few shorts for myself and pen-names. Louis Shalako wrote twenty or thirty short stories this year, maybe more. I lose track at some point, in fact just the other day I found an un-submitted story in a folder. I just forgot it was there.

In 2013 I also blogged pretty regularly for all five pen-names, and I would like to continue that on a regular basis, say to the tune of another 3,000 words a week, maybe a bit more. (This blog post is about six hundred eighty+ words.)

So in 2014 I will write up to 200,000 words in terms of novels, say another hundred thousand in short stories and novellas, and Darwin knows how much in terms of blog posts.

What I do is to write fast, edit slow, and publish with attention to detail. None of these word-count goals take into account professional goals—to say I would like to make it into a professional magazine, or get a traditional contract, these would be related to writing goals but the word count is everything. The more stories I have, the more books I have, the more options I have. The more I write, the more opportunities it brings.

Practice is never a bad thing, ladies and gentlemen. Don't believe me? Ask Tiger Woods. And then go tell it to the Marines.

When I write a short story, I usually submit it to pro markets, semi-pro markets, and so on down the line until I get tired of it and then I can publish it on my blog. I can submit a novel to one of the top publishers in the world and then sit down and begin writing a mystery novel for my own Maintenon series.

If I feel like writing poetry, I would try and do as much poetry as I possibly could until I got sick of it and stopped. Then I would submit poetry until I'm blue in the face, and have stuff to publish on my poetry blog.

The plan is flexible, and complete.

I expect I will learn much by doing this.

When learning becomes play, then it’s really not work after all.

It’s just a whole helluva lot of fun.

END