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.

 

 

 

 

 

Digital Publishing: Control.

Louis Shalako

One of the great selling points of digital self-publishing is control.

This is one of those dichotomous statements. Which is different from a dichotomous question.

Control can be quite illusory.

On one website, only about half my titles, published through Smashwords, actually appeared. Days or weeks had passed since OverDrive had come on stream as a Smashwords distribution channel.

On another site, Txtr, all of my titles appear. They all have current covers. Recent price changes appear to have gone through within 24 hours. The same is true of iTunes. The covers looked up to date and the price changes went through.

For the OverDrive issue, I contacted SW staff a few days ago, and let them know about the problem. 

They said they would re-ship the titles. Checking a couple of days later, there didn’t seem to be a change. I went back tonight and there is still no change. They might ship in a day or two and they might all go through, so anyone who reads this at a later date may find a significant change.

It might be safe to say that one channel has more control than another. When you click a button, everything works.

Since SW began a few years ago, at least one distribution channel disappeared, (Scroll-motion as I seem to recall), and Sony pulled out at a later date. If I check Diesel Books, I discover that I am listed as Louis Bertrand Shalako. I changed the metadata to Louis Shalako a long time ago. The Louis Shalako page only displays eight titles. Only a few titles appear on the first search, mixed in with other books in other genres. Louis Bertrand Shalako displays seven titles. That’s it. What’s interesting is that they’re all paperbacks. There are no ebooks there at all as far as I can determine. So once again, we have an issue of control. Basically I must contact SW staff and find out what’s going on—because I really don’t know, and without data we really don’t have much control. That’s not to say anything is beyond solution, but it does take time, follow-up and the occasional sort of audit of all your distribution channels. Basically, we go out there and have a look at all of them. One experiment I am currently making is to simply opt a title out of one of the distribution channels. It’s not appearing anyway—so no harm is done. A couple of weeks later, maybe by opting in again, they will appear in their proper state. This sort of bypasses SW staff, and would give me that option, i.e. more control.

As the number of channels grows, the need for the occasional channel-audit increases in proportion.

The fact that there are paperbacks on Diesel is not necessarily a bad thing. Those books suffer all the same pitfalls and tribulations as an ebook.  If your product is produced through Createspace, or Lulu, they also have their distribution channels. The longer those channels get, especially if a reseller has a few channels of their own, the possibility of breakdown increases. This is certainly true in the case of the Louis Bertrand Shalako metadata.

There are other cases.

I am referring specifically to Kobo distribution, whether directly from Kobo or via Smashwords. 

Kobo distributed (at one time, I don’t know if they still do) to Angus and Robertson or somebody like that in Australia. The books never had covers in the whole time they were up there. They are still listed on the website (last time I looked), without covers and listed as ‘unavailable.’ This doesn’t help the reader or the writer at all in terms of passive discoverability—and I am not likely to post or promote such a site because it would just be idiotic, right?

This is not so good for the passive discoverability, speaking specifically about the reader that knows my name and has a Diesel account, or an Angus and Robertson account and just happens to be going through there.

The customer has some other reason to be there—whether they went looking for something else, or they were just browsing. Each transaction or non-transaction is one very specific case.

If you have ever looked for a used car, or a new apartment, at a later date you may kick yourself for not asking enough questions.

Digital publishing is a machine. It has lots and lots of little buttons to peck away at.

Our job is to teach ourselves how to use it effectively.

Control over such a machine takes knowledge, and that’s what modern digital publishing really is all about. It’s all about knowledge.

It’s a big machine, and learning how to use it takes time and study.

It’s fascinating, it really is.

That’s one of many reasons why five years later, I’m still here.

That fascination is another selling point, for one such as I.

END

Kindle Select Results, Caveat Auctore.

Louis Shalako

To keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results is a form of insanity.

I forget who said that, but it’s true enough.

I wanted a better fate for my new novel, The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue. 

Previous science-fiction novels such as Third World were essentially published and died. The same day.

I would be hard pressed to claim even ten copies of that book sold.

And yet I have always resisted the Kindle Select Program. Part of that was pure dogma. It is my opinion that authors and readers alike are served best by a healthy ecosystem, where no one party is dominant. But Amazon is dominant. At some point I just had to admit that and take appropriate steps. One reason for being slow to do that, is that I really wasn’t selling all that many books on Amazon to begin with. The same could be said of Smashwords, Kobo, iTunes, Google Books…the list goes on. Barnes & Noble is my best platform—a platform that Joe Konrath says will die very soon now. If that happens, then I guess my sales are dead as well.

You can read all kinds of blog posts about how Amazon  will destroy literature and take over the world.

Some of that comes from  traditional publishing, and some of it comes from places like the Smashwords blog.

I owed it to myself to find out what would happen. Normally, I publish a book on Smashwords, Amazon, Google Books, OmniLit, etc.

Okay. So on my first free day, I gave away a grand total of 35 books through Kindle Select, in the U.S. I gave away four in the U.K., one in Germany, etc . I had one sale, through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s new subscription service.

Using another pen name, I published another title. This one is a short story of 12,000 words, literary fiction, and it’s not the most exciting thing in the world. I would say that a book on friendship is not as enticing as a book about vampires, werewolves, thrillers, or the like to the modern reader. Romance books will beat that one every time.

Another challenge is how to promote any book these days. People rapidly tire of link after link on your Facebook feed, and there are so many voices on Twitter, your tweet quickly disappears, drowned out by fresh links.

I’m not real good about seeking reviews, providing advance reader copies, or anything, really.

When I’m done writing a book, I publish it and move on. If passive discoverability works, then it really ought to work here! The only positive news here is that Heaven Is Too Far Away, my WW I memoir/historical parody, sold four books in June through Createspace’s Expanded Distribution. Since I have no real way of promoting that book, it must be passive discoverability.

For what it’s worth.

As far as promotion on Kindle Boards, for whatever reason, I had never bookmarked my KB-Amazon Book Pages. I got rid of Internet Explorer, and then Google Chrome. It’s hard to even find them again. I don’t know how to upgrade my marketing images, the ones in the signature and on the book page itself. 

When I raised my prices last year, the novels were no longer $2.99, but $4.99 and up. You can only post free, or books up to $2.99 on Kindle Boards. Basically, I just stopped going there. That’s one less promotional tool to work with; and some say it is an essential tool.

So it is my own mistakes and my own lack of knowledge that really kills any attempt to promote any book. 

Low sales, low incentive to learn, I guess. And yet learn we must, or die.

So here’s what I learned from Kindle Select.

If your book is not in a particularly popular genre, your results will reflect that. If your cover is not that good, if your blurb is not that good, Kindle Select cannot save it. The date you choose has an effect. For whatever reason, I chose a holiday weekend in summer. I have three more promotional days for The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue, and another two and a half months of exclusivity before I can publish it elsewhere. This is the price of knowledge, one might say.

What’s really interesting is that when Amazon price-matches your book on another platform, (Kindle Select Titles are exclusive and I’m talking about other titles) your monthly result in terms of giveaways can be far superior to the Kindle Select exclusive promotion.

I know that for a fact, because I’ve given away 173 copies of The Shape-Shifters in the first four days of August. That book is not exclusive to Amazon. You can get it for free on any number of sales platforms.

Whether it’s caveat scriptor, or caveat auctore, (writer beware) all I can say is that unrealistic expectations and a distinct lack of skill in the promotion can kill a book pretty darned quick.

That’s why I try to write and submit short stories as much as possible. A sale is a sale, and it’s a ray of hope as well. As to whether I will write another novel and begin submitting to traditional publishers again, I don’t know.

For that you need the motivation, but more than anything you need patience—and some shred of hope that it will be picked up.

Who knows, it might even change my life.

END