Troubleshooting Epubs with a View to Producing Audiobooks on Google Play. Louis Shalako.

A public domain image and a little effort. #Louis

Louis Shalako

Troubleshooting.

 

My 2,000 word short story epub, converted from a PDF, (saved from a doc), worked fine on Google Play. You have to have the epub to create the audiobook. Mushroom Magic is now live as an audiobook. All very well, but the longer story, 11,500 words, did not go. The epub was bogus or something, yet they'd both been converted by Convertio. I tried another service this morning, same shit, different day.

Opening the file, I checked the formatting line by line. (A gentleman on Fb suggested checking for hidden bookmarks). Converted again, no dice. Finally, I took the file to Lulu (dot) com, where I uploaded a docx file, (confused yet? – ed.), downloaded the resulting epub, and uploaded that to Google Play. Lulu wants a $4.99 distribution fee, which I did not pay. I have sold about three dollars on Lulu since about 2011, so my reluctance is understandable. I had also tried uploading to Smashwords’ meat-grinder, thinking if I could beat that, I’d have a clean file. Unfortunately, one of the links in the Table of Contents dropped out and clearly that wasn’t going to work. The ebook might need internal navigation, but the audiobook does not. I see on Google Play that the epub uploaded successfully, and I should be able to complete the audiobook at my leisure.

A Facebook friend was asking why I didn’t put it up on Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, Draft2Digital.

Yeah, but this is a reason—I want a good clean file before tossing that up across all available platforms, also, I have two stories, not one, in fact four if you count audio files…I’m an old man, I go pretty slow these days.

(Yeah, you're slow all right. - ed.)

And I do have my reasons. It’s a process, and I go step-by-step, thinking it through as I go along. Trust me, I will figure this shit out sooner or later. If I find a typo during this process, I only have to upload the corrected file to one platform…capiche?

While working on The Castaways, I scraped Mushroom Magic off of this very blog. It was experimental, a test-bed for the longer story. I hadn't published anything in a year, and a bit of review might be in order...right? Also, there are other stories that have not made it into the ebook, short-story list. Those all represent potential products. These are books and stories, they are products, there is nothing mystical about them. There is no room for fulminations, ruminations, bloviations about the sanctity of art. I'm too busy taking cheques to the bank, ah, figuratively speaking...

Beginning October 1, The Castaways took about eighteen days, from start to finish, and now I get a day off...

When I get a minute, I need to recover five accounts on Draft2Digital, now that they have been migrated over from Smashwords due to some sort of amalgamation of the two companies, and now, even I am beginning to get confused.

#cheap_hacks

I don’t know if this is a milestone or merely a first for me, but the cover, which admittedly, is not very good; for Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller’s new short romance and adventure story The Castaways was created using AI, artificial intelligence. I had the choice of paying $29.00 for two images from Shutterstock, only problem was that I only needed one image and I couldn’t find anything really appropriate anyways. Theoretically, each image would be $14.50, but you have to grab the second image within 30 days and why bother, if you have no idea of what you might write next, and you probably can’t find anything really appropriate anyways.

You can spend days, weeks, browsing for the perfect image and never find it.

Oh, and the enhanced license was $175.00 for one image, this for a book that likely won’t sell anything like that in the next twenty years. I have always tried to avoid vanity in publishing. It has never been about getting a handful of books into our local independent bookstore, and my once-in-a-lifetime story in a local news outlet. Local journalists and the advertisers love those kinds of stories, but then those nice folks went to a local printer, dropped a couple of grand on the table, got their hundred or so paperbacks, and learned nothing about the process.

The vast majority will do one, maybe two books, give it up as a bad job, and never get back to it again...a couple of grand isn't exactly chicken feed, and boxes of unsold books in the back of a closet tell a story of their own.

Whereas I have seized the means of production. And I have learned how to run it, too.

We had a little help from Dall-E.

***

Somehow, I just clicked on Copilot, right here on the good old desktop PC, and saw something labeled ‘create an image’. What the hell, why not, right. And it really is as quick and simple as typing in a few key words, ‘romance’, ‘young woman’, ‘tropical beach’, ‘desert island’, and the thing produces the image in jig time. It’s not the most appropriate, in terms of what I would visualize myself, but at some point you have to make the compromise and move on to the next thing. The cover of Mushroom Magic used a public domain image of a classic painting, and it’s actually very good. Go figure.

What really pisses me off, like an ant climbing up an elephant’s leg, is the fact that I can’t seem to get back there. So, I got one free image and that’s it for the time being…as for copyright, who in the hell is going to steal my book cover—why, what for, what good is it to anyone else but me. Every bit of original work in my book belongs to me, and to no one else.

Period.

Neither story is going to sell a million copies and we know that going in, so in that sense vanity, ‘the fucking ego’, can take a back seat and let the intellect do a little work for a change…these are the folks that say you have to spend money to make money—then shit all over you for trying to make some money by sheer dint of hard work and honest effort.

Idiots, as we are all aware, can justify pretty much anything. It occupies their minds and keeps them busy if nothing else.

If you look at the lower image, you can see that we are coming up on one million blog hits, a rare achievement. It’s all incremental, over fifteen years. The most recent story has, in a week or so, 19 hits. Now that, is what I call incremental—

At this point, Google owes me about $25.88 for Adsense, which is about what it’s worth on some level. I had to shut them down. I will never see a penny of that, because the ads were a distraction, with two gigantic horizontal banner ads, identical, appearing right in the middle of my fucking text…the reader will sort of imagine what that looks like, but you have to admit, it’s a pretty nice blog. I can create my own ads, for my own products, in the sidebar. What do I need their shit for? Especially as it doesn't pay. The threshold for payment is $100.00, so there you go.

Click to enlarge.

So, why do it?

Right? Why even do it…

I enjoy the work, doing the audiobooks, partly because it’s different. I can listen to a voice read the text back to me, and it really does take things to a whole new level. Hell, I've even caught a couple of typos along the way. (Louis found and fixed three typos, which he found by listening rather than reading. Ebook corrections have already been uploaded. What is interesting is just how many times he'd already read the effing book, and somehow missed those. In that sense, his process of going straight to audio has its uses. - ed.)

It is, in the sense of classic radio plays from a bygone age, Theatre of the Mind, ladies and gentlemen. And I got to write the play...

Of course I want to hear it.

When I first began self-publishing, the word ‘greedy’ was used quite a bit, in rather oblique social media posts from people that really should have known better. Whether I do this as a hobby, or for fun, I sure as hell ain’t doing it for the money, and that is for sure.

If so, I would have been terribly disappointed.

It’s also no one’s business but my own.

It’s my money, and I’m the one having all the fun here.

"Be happy in your work."

Other peoples' perceptions are not my problem.

 

END

Be happy in your work.

Radio Drama, or Theatre of the Mind. (Wikipedia)

Convertio.

Free Convert.

Mushroom Magic, by Louis Shalako.

The Castaways, by Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller.

(I will put up a link when I get that done. Ah, Saturday at the latest, ladies and gentlemen. #Louis)

 

Thank you for reading, and for listening.

Update: Louis has uploaded Mushroom Magic to Kobo using a doc file, there are several file types accepted by Kobo. Downloading the resulting epub, and checking it using Adobe reader takes but a moment and it looks fine. Theoretically, we can now take the Kobo-generated epub, or any other nice, clean file, and publish that somewhere else. As said in the text above, it is a process.

So, he still has to upload The Castaways to Kobo, and then both stories to Amazon. The thing to do is to follow through, (finish what you start), admittedly while doing at least some thinking about his next little hare-brained stunt.

And we all know he will come up with something.

A Stranger In Paris: Formatting Ebooks and PODs. Louis Shalako.

An ebook marketing image does not have a 'trim area'.

Louis Shalako 

On formatting A Stranger In Paris, Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery, #9.

I have page numbers for the text, none in the front and end matter. I have the simplest of headers. I may fool with the size, font, and in previous books I have had that in dark grey rather than black. I may make the page number bigger or bolder. It took some fiddling, as I hadn't done page numbers in about six years. Now that the fucky part is done, now I go through and justify right by scene and chapter, without disturbing the centering of chapter titles and scene breaks. The bulk of the formatting is pretty clean, as the ebook file made it through the Smashwords Meatgrinder on the second try. Ebooks have flowing text, which automatically justifies to the left, with a ragged right edge in your .doc file.

The next stage would be to size that in 5"x 8" and then in pocketbook, (using page size features in Word), which works out to 4.25" x 6.88" approx. The biggest effing challenge is to modify the cover image so the text does not stray into the trim area in the Print On Demand (POD) product. This is not so much of a consideration with the ebook product.

I take the ebook and 'save as' StrangerPOD5x8, for example. (You can have spaces in there, but I never do.)

Close the ebook, open up the new file and that's the starting point for the print product.

Always, at the end of a work-binge, email the latest copy to yourself, this includes covers, blurbs, the original, clean marketing image. All that stuff. You will thank me someday, if you can remember…with Lulu, you can download your original file, with Smashwords as well. 

Very handy when the computer has a meltdown…

It gets to the point where I am edging the text a little further up, a little further down, a little closer to the spine and the edge of the page using 'margins' and stuff like that. The old Createspace viewer had dotted lines showing the printed area. If the text was very much smaller, you were wasting paper on some level, and also producing a funny-looking book with a tiny block of text in the middle of a pretty big white sheet of paper.

The text must never extend beyond those dotted lines.

You are basically just trying to make it look nice and professional.

In a subtle form of protest, I do not use block paragraphs at the beginning of chapter and scene. My first six books were unpublished but heavily-rejected manuscripts and quite frankly I never even noticed. I was doing ebooks exclusively at first, all my own works.

There was no customer to keep me honest or to point out the mistake when I went to do paperbacks.

Pro tip: go to your bookshelf and look at the formatting of a good quality book. Once I realized the error, I just kept doing it. My revenge for 1,168+ rejection slips. In a paperback, I will need to remove the page of links, internal navigation for the ebook. I will need to insert blank pages, but that's pretty much it.

Chapter One should be page one—sometimes you have to mess around with it. I had to choose ‘zero’ for the starting point rather than ‘one’, which will not be immediately obvious to the person doing the formatting. You have to turn off ‘link to previous section’, otherwise front or end matter will have page numbers and my book would begin on page four. That’s just dumb, ladies and gentlemen…

The ebook is loaded up but not published. Why not release them all at once, if I can possibly do it, to Lulu, Amazon, wherever I can get them in print, or ebooks on Kobo and Google Play, for example. Smashwords and Draft2Digital are one company now, and Smashwords distributes ebooks to a number of platforms including Scribd and iTunes.

A blank page to put your autograph on. Okay, that’s a joke, but a sheet of paper has two sides. An ebook can have an odd number of pages, a paperback or hardcover cannot. (An odd number of sheets will still have two sides and add up to an even number of printable pages, blank or otherwise.) I will insert two blank pages, have a title page, the back of that can have the copyright stuff, (front matter), two more blank pages and then it’s Chapter One/page one.

Same thing more or less at the end of the book, which must come out to an even number of pages. I don’t know if this is much help to you, but it actually was of some help to me—after all, it has been six years.

 

#Louis

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, as well as the sites mentioned above.

See his works on Artpal.

Check out this other story.

 

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon, Price-Matching, Passive Discoverability and Advice, Bad and Good.

Louis Shalako

Amazon and its price-matching are a real pain in the butt sometimes.

I know we’re not supposed to get angry in this business, but there are times when it gets real personal.

What happened was that one of our authors had a story that was actually selling on Amazon. 

It’s an ebook, and it’s in a specific category. If romance has ten million titles on Amazon and fantasy five or six million, (just a wild guess), the category this one is in might have had a few thousand titles. It might have had half a million titles. It stood a better chance to begin with. It’s in a smaller category—that’s all.

We’ve all heard a little too much about passive discoverability. We’ll get to that in a minute.

In about three weeks we sold sixty books in the U.K. and thirteen in the U.S. And then one day the sales were gone. I peered at the Kindle Digital Publishing dashboard and realized the bastards had started price-matching.

They’ve given away two hundred and fifty-four copies of our story. After a brief exchange of sharp words, (on my part, because they just don’t care and can afford not to take it too personally as they get some kind of weekly minimum wage), they put the price back on it.

I have serious doubts about that book picking up its previous momentum. Many people have remarked there is no real sales bump after a free giveaway. I still find the more books I give away, the more books I sell. This was, in fact, our best month ever—although that’s not saying very much.

But it seems Amazon, presumably following their own best interest, took the wind right out of our sales on that book. What is especially irksome, is that you can rarely get them to price-match when you want them to.

Countless times, I have taken a link from one of our free books on a competitor’s website. I have gone to the Amazon page for the exact same book, clicked on ‘report a lower price’, and pasted it in—all to no avail. Do that a few times, get no result and there is your answer.

What they tell you is that they have sole discretion in terms of price-matching. If you don’t like the terms of service, you can go elsewhere. No one ever does, because Amazon is the biggest player, they have the traffic. They have the readers and the buyers.

Pricing is a powerful tool. Amazon is the only retailer at present who doesn’t allow the author or publisher to set the price of a book at free. I can set a book for free on any other website. In places such as Google Play, that change is reflected instantly. Price-pulsing is a useful and recognized tool for making sales. Traditional publishers have admitted that they do it too. 

Who wouldn’t use it if they could? On Amazon, there is that eight or twelve-hour delay. And you can’t set it for free, and there are an estimated thirty-three million titles on that website.

There is no such thing as passive discoverability on Amazon, (and please listen carefully) because we are unknown, not previously published authors. We are not disgruntled ex-mid-list authors who were dropped for poor sales numbers, a change of editors, or their previous publisher going bankrupt.

We do not have an established following. We start off with one book, no back-list, no experience, and no readers. It takes a long time to build readership, and that’s true whether you can write, spell, edit, proofread, publish, or not. That’s one reason, after five or six years of assiduously reading blogs on writing, the industry, or ‘how to attract a literary agent’, we no longer listen to the advice. It was simply inappropriate for us.

It might have been more useful to others, and it’s only fair to say that.

On OmniLit, and some other platforms, I can give books away for free all day long. I can go there at night, set up a title with a price, and sell a couple of books. Before I go to bed, I can set it for free again, building up some heat in those pesky algorithms. We can’t do it for all the books, but some books do sell. That is the thing that really grips the imagination.

Imagine me—some guy no one ever heard of, selling books across a number of genres, getting reviews, making a little money and learning our way around this, the independent side of the business.

For our purposes, some of the advice was really bad, and we wish we hadn’t taken it.

On Smashwords, changes appear instantly, but this is one of our poorest-performing websites. 

We sell very few books through SW, and their distribution channels do take some time to reflect price or other changes. Some changes never go through including that all-important metadata, new covers, etc.

When you have a hundred and twenty titles, it is a real pain to go through a half a dozen sites and see if all your changes have gone through.

Speaking of passive discoverability, traditional publishers realized that back-list is pure gold. It was a bunch of free products that they didn't have to pay for, except for royalties already negotiated and rates set. They don't have to pay until they sell a book.

What they did, when they realized this was a whole new revenue stream, one that they had pooh-poohed and completely ignored, was to grab and upload as many back-list titles as they possibly could, before the rights reverted back to the authors.

A lot of those authors had no time limit on their contract. In some contracts, the publication of a new edition, say a translation in Spanish of an English-language title, extends the license for a stipulated number of years. In the contract I saw, (but did not sign), a two-page contract, what was left out was more troubling than what was in it. Each new edition would have extended a two-year license for an additional two years. That part was in there, at least. I at least understood some of the implications. With all due respect to the party in question, it would be fairly easy to put a machine translation, (arguably proofread by a native speaker) up in Swahili, and extend the license of a book that might have been doing all right in English.

What do they care if they sell two books a year in Swahili? What do they care if the product, published under a subsidiary name and imprint, in another language, was a bad translation? 

The author would never know. All the author would know is that they had sold two books in Swahili and a few thousand or so in English, and that they were never going to get their intellectual property back. That’s because two years later the publisher could conceivably publish it in Dinka, or Urdu, or whatever. When you consider the literacy rate in some of these third world countries, native speakers might have a hard time reading the book, but then they might just assume that it’s beyond their reading level. Even they might not know it’s a bad translation, unless and until some educated person reads it and reviews it.

The really interesting thing is that the book that was selling used the exact same type of book cover as the books that were not selling. We had the exact same editor, the exact same formatting. The whole thing kind of put the boots to the people who give the same old advice every time.

Write a good book. Use a professional cover, use a professional editor. If you can’t spell, can’t proofread, can’t be bothered to turn on spell-check and grammar check, then absolutely—you need an editor. In our own case, our editorial skills are more than adequate. 

What they really want you to do, of course, is to load up your first novel with five or ten thousand in costs before it’s ever published. They want you to go broke, quit the business and never come back.

Understandably, they’re a bit shy about telling you that part.

***

My mother asked me a good question the other day.

“If someone who had never done this before came to you, and asked for your advice, what would you tell them?”

For one thing, it really wouldn’t hurt to submit your first few books around. We had about a hundred and twenty-five rejection slips before we ever published our first title. We also had three contracts offered to us, which we did not proceed with, as my initial impression was that it was a vanity press.

We’ve submitted hundreds of short stories around and managed to place a few of them. 

Somebody else decided the thing was printable. In the early days, this offers both reassurance to the newbie author and some small measure of credibility. The money never hurts either, when you are building up your writing business.

My number one piece of advice is figure out what you want from all of this. Want to attract a literary agent? Read up on the query letter. Want a traditional publishing contract? By all means pursue it, and yes—listen to those people who have experience and knowledge of that side of the industry.

But if you want to explore independent publishing, those well-meaning folks might not be giving the best advice for you.

And yet that advice might be extremely relevant to somebody else.

Be very, very careful who you listen to.

Don't take my word for anything, Do your own experiments, learn the business and just keep going.

END

The Most Beautiful Trolls: On Reviews.

Johh Bauer, 1915.

Louis Shalako

'Look at them, troll mother said. Look at my sons! You won't find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon.' > John Bauer.

Sample Reviews for Heaven Is Too Far Away.

A great and epic read.

An awesome, epic read. I wasn't so sure if it was a work of fiction because What I felt so real. What a ride.... enjoyed every page. Great book. > Barry Burch.

One of the best books I’ve ever read.

First of all, let me restate the title of this review: This is by far one of the best books I've ever read. The story is great, the technical aspects of it (flying, gunnery, etc) can be held up next to the many WWI flying memoirs I've read, and I haven't loved a literary character this much since Bernard Cornwell introduced me to Richard Sharpe (there are a lot of similarities between the two).

The writing style is that of a memoir, written in the first person from the point of view of what I imagine is a much older WIll Tucker reflecting back on his days in the RFC. The writing is so well done I could almost picture listening to Tucker telling his old flying stories. The plot and his irreverent commentary are seamlessly entwined together and the result is an absolute joy to read and immensely quotable. As for the plot, I thought it seemed a little far fetched at first (assassinating the Red Baron?) but Shalako made it work and well.

All-in-all, any enthusiast of the Great War and WWI aviation in particular should give this book a read. You won't be disappointed and for the price, what have you got to lose? I'm already reading it a second time and it's just as good. > M.J. Thomas

***

as long as you don't read it as factual this is an entertaining read with the first half being more entertaining than the later chapters which drag somewhat. > Lee Whitfort.

I agree with your comments regarding the use of the modern idiom and the shaky style. Somewhat entertaining but could probably profit from the use of a competent proof reader. > John Cameron.

Okay, here are some sample reviews for The Handbag’s Tale.

A purse is found next to a dead man in an alley. He had been at a party with drugs, gambling, sex, and alcohol. There a many suspects - but which one? This very short (31 pages) book follows two police detectives as they piece together the facts. A lot of story in a little book with a surprise ending. > Quanita’s Reviews.

***

A murder is committed in a Paris alley. This is just the latest of eleven reported over the previous three weeks. This time the victim is a well known and universally liked banker with one fatal shot between the eyes. This tale is presumably set during the dawning years of the twentieth century. Forensic science is in its infancy and large city crimes are solved by interrogation and luck. As lead detective Gilles Maintenon interviews an avalanche of humanity, slowly a picture comes into focus. Like a French Sherlock Holmes, he shifts through the witness statements, picking out bits and determining the facts from fiction. The brevity of the story and the search for a red haired woman (I’ve always been partial to redheads) keep me ponderously reading on. This story would have probably rated higher by me if more attention was given to details. It reads like a summery and doesn’t add anything to really grab the reader’s attention. Like a play, the narrative is divided erroneously (as each section has multiple settings) into three scenes. I will use a quote from the book that nicely sums up this author and his works: “Prior history is the best indicator of future behavior.” I must say that the redhead was eventually found so let me end this review on a positive note (with another quote from the book): “No honest effort is ever wasted.” > Thom Swennes

Here are a whole slew of Goodreadsreviews and ratings with no additional comments.

In the case of Heaven Is Too Far Away, the reviews seem to contradict each other. When I read the first review, my initial impression was of a troll review, using a bit of reverse psychology as it seems very unlikely that a first book by an unknown author could really be ‘one of the best books I’ve ever read.’ That, I think, is the benefit of multiple reviews. The truth probably lies somewhere in between two extremes.

In the case of The Handbag’s Tale, the first two reviews I ever got in my life, were lovely, four-star reviews by people who clearly enjoyed the book. They seemed knowledgeable, and appreciated the fact that there was some experimental aspect to the story.

Then, one day I opened up Goodreads or Amazon, I forget which, and saw a whole slew of one-star reviews, where it appeared the reader had purposefully set out to slam an author they knew nothing about, made sure to point out they hadn’t actually read the book, etc. (In other words, trolls. – ed.)

I can honestly say that my blood ran cold. My body tingled all over, it sort of flashes over you in that adrenalin-rush. The fight-or-flight instincts are fully aroused in that moment.

As authors, we all know the facts. The best thing to do with troll reviews is to ignore them. And of course, that’s very hard to do.

The worst thing is the sense of psychological rape, that sense of absolute powerlessness.

We know there’s nothing we can do about it.

The real fear of course, is that the same people will keep coming back, and make a real science of hounding you, and slamming your books. We all hope to be successful, and we all hope to make money. We see this as having a real impact on other potential readers. The real trolls want to scare you away. They want you to be paranoid or something. The funny thing is, after a few years, they’ve moved onto someone else. I still get readers. I had three novels and one novella out at that time. It really does feel like the end of the world. Hell, fourteen novels later, I’m still not sure if I can really write or not. It’s not like some of us have massive sales numbers to back up any claims or simply to give us confidence.

Five years ago, I had no reviews at all. Not a one.

Perhaps that is the difference.

Now we have dozens, maybe even scores of reviews. We still get less-than-glowing reviews. Every so often, a troll stops in and pisses on our gate. Every so often, someone takes the time out of their busy day to give us an honest opinion of the book.

The simple fact is that 99.9 % of readers never review a book in their lives. Those that do often confuse it with a book report from elementary school. The best reviews excerpt memorable passages from a book. In the case of criticisms, the reviewers really ought to give an example, but again, they’re not professional readers. They’re just people giving a quick thirty seconds out of their day for whatever reason. Without amateur reviews, I probably still wouldn’t have any reviews at all.

We may never get a professional magazine review in our lives, and that's probably the case with the majority of independent authors writing today.

We learn quite a bit about books and reading and readers when we get reviews. It’s important to listen to them, and to try and understand from their perspective what we did right or wrong, without letting it cripple or embitter us.

It goes with the territory, and it is best to remain philosophical. We will basically manage our own attitudes and perceptions, and let them manage theirs.

It's their dime, after all. As far as this writer is concerned, the trolls are beautiful people.

END

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