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

Fine-Tuning Our Virtual Publishing Machine.

Louis Shalako

Editor’s Note: the following may be heretical. The odds of Louis recanting would appear to be rather slim.

It was in April of last year when Shalako Publishing and Long Cool One Books underwent a massive system overhaul and quality control audit.

During that revamp, we found missing titles on a few platforms, and a badly formatted story or two. During the course of that month (as well as since then) we have upgraded many of our marketing images. We rewrote a few blurbs and checked all meta-data, some of which turned out to be not particularly well done.

Here is a link to the post on that Publishing Machine Overhaul.

One of our goals here is to build a powerful, personal publishing system that’s effective, easy to use and as profitable as we can make it.

We call it our virtual publishing machine. The only moving parts are the keyboard and the mouse on this desk...and, one must assume, the writer.

This machine takes no account whatsoever of anything that has ever gone before. It totally gnores traditional assumptions.

About last April, we noted that OmniLit has an iTunes distribution channel. Various writers on the industry have recommended being on every platform. Smashwords also has a distribution channel to iTunes. That’s the one we were using, basically because SW was here first and we started off with SW and Amazon four or five years ago.

When I looked into publishing directly through Apple’s iTunes, the first thing I noted was that they wanted me to download the app, which didn’t fit my needs. The PC I was using at the time was choked with stuff. 

There wasn’t enough space on the hard drive. The second thing I noticed was that they wanted a credit card number. That was enough to stop me at the time. However, now I have a new computer and presumably downloading the app won’t be a problem. My credit card is maxed so I’m not too worried about being robbed.

We’ll worry about publishing directly to iTunes later.

However, on Smashwords’ distribution channel manager, we un-clicked a few titles, and removed them from iTunes distribution.* We made ourselves some 1400 x 2100 marketing images and used OmniLit to distribute to iTunes. It takes some time, as Apple has an internal review, and OmniLit’s uploading process is more labourious. But those books made it into the Apple store just as well as through Smashwords. Those books will pop out into the new books stream for the second time. We can even un-click them from OmniLit and pop them out through Smashwords again.** Basically, we have built a new wrinkle into our machine, our system, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a little bit like price-pulsing, only we’re using the product itself.

You have to understand the market: it is a great, gaping maw, it’s hungry and it wants to be fed.

It likes nice, shiny, new little tidbits to gnaw on.

Around the same time we opened an author account on Kobo through Kobo Writing Life.

Using one pen-name, we uploaded three or four titles. Without any real promo effort, he had sold about three books over the course of a year, which was more than he had sold using the Smashwords to Kobo distribution channel (and no promo there either.)

It was only recently that we read the post on price pulsing. Honestly, I hate to brag, but I learned that one from WalMart. Their mushrooms were $1.27 one week so I went back the next week. The price was $1.49, or the same as anywhere else. The next week they were $1.86 and that’s when I started doing some thinking...

I also bought the mushrooms at $1.86—I didn’t feel like driving across town, only to find that the other store might have them on for $1.99. That was my great revelation in marketing. You have to drop that price and then raise it in a way that seems completely arbitrary. This is especially easy with ebooks because no one seems to know what the price should be anyway.

(What does the average consumer know about mushrooms except what they paid for them last time...?)

Writers are like mushrooms, aren’t we?

Keep us in the dark and feed us nothing but shit, right, ladies and gentlemen?

We will see about that, ladies and gentlemen.

Like any other tool in the inventory, no single thing is responsible for selling a book. It’s a whole combination of factors, but pulsing does seem to work to a certain extent. To change the price puts it into another category, where presumably a different class of shopper may see it. Quite frankly, I was shocked to stick a new cover on a $0.99 book, jack the price to $7.99 and sell one copy in fairly short order. I only wish it had sold two copies! But who knows what will happen if I dropped the price to $0.99 again.

The basic theory behind price-pulsing is that you try to move as many units as you possibly can at a lower price. The stated theory is that the algorithms don’t care about price, only ranking. Those algorithms create the ranking based on total sales. Once you have a higher ranking, jack the price, sell a few units, and then lower it again.

Giving away free books carries less weight algorithmically per unit, and getting Amazon to price-match a free book on another platform is always uncertain. They reserve discretion to set pricing policy and as it’s their store we can only push so hard.

So what we are doing now is to unclick titles from the Kobo distribution channel on Smashwords. We’re uploading directly to Kobo now, and if we make a sale, then we simply get paid by Kobo as opposed to Smashwords.

When we uploaded our first few titles to Kobo a year or so ago, the lowest price that you could set for a book was $1.99.

Now you can set it anywhere from free, $0.99, and up. This makes the platform much more amenable to the hot-shoe driving of it.

You can set books for free, and watch them go out the door. Publishing from Smashwords, either Kobo didn’t report free books ‘sold’ or maybe we simply didn’t get any. But we uploaded old titles to Kobo and saw at least one sale almost immediately. That was in the Philippines, another first for us. We’re giving away free books in a number of countries and that’s a first for the Kobo site as far as we can determine.

There is more to what we are doing here than just price-pulsing. We are adding in dashboards and control points, and diversifying our revenue streams.

When you publish a book, it pops out on a website’s front page shortly thereafter. If it does not sell at least one copy, it may never have a ranking.

One wonders how passive discoverability would ever have a chance to work in such a case.

Those books were already on iTunes and Kobo. They just weren’t doing anything, and in fact this is a good reason to go back and sign up for publishing directly through iTunes, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Press if they ever make provision for Canadian authors and ITINs and no 30 % tax withholding.

This is why it’s important to sell a book—it improves the odds of selling another one greatly. We have titles on Amazon for example, that have never sold a single copy. Those books have no ranking at all.

Giving away free books means that the customer has indicated a preference, and they will likely be presented with more of your titles, especially if you keep writing them and the customer is not so displeased that they give the book a bad review.

We’re not doing any practical harm to Smashwords when we do this, because those titles weren’t selling through the channel anyway. Now they stand a much better chance, and it’s because we can fine-tune the machine. We can price-pulse (or toggle back and forth from zero to $0.99) using an individual platform, essentially giving us more control, and a greater likelihood of selling a book on any given day. We’re going to learn Kobo’s strengths and weaknesses in a way that was just not possible by going through Smashwords.

With something like a hundred titles and a few other products, including PODs, you can only spend so much time on it. I can’t toggle a hundred prices a day on eight or nine different platforms, it simply isn’t possible. In that sense it is still limited by the number of hours in the day and the need to write new material. If I could get a bunch of trained monkeys or build a bot to do just that, I would switch prices every day. Every damned day, because that’s what WalMart does, ladies and gentlemen.

I just don’t have the time.

We all have to eat, to sleep, perchance to dream.

***

The other day I read a blog post where the author felt it was ‘dishonest’ to use giveaways to achieve a high ranking and then claim a bestseller.

I do not claim to be a bestselling author. There is nothing like that in any of my blogs, it does not say that on the cover of any of my books, or anywhere at all.

Number eight or twenty-seven on a free list is just that: number eight or twenty-seven on the free list.

But what really struck me is that I was being judged by someone else’s standards, and obviously we will always fail such tests, because they are based on a set of someone else’s assumptions. And having failed their test, they now have the right to condemn us as ‘dishonest.’

Obviously the person sincerely believes that traditional publishing is the only real way to go.

This is certainly true in their case. I cannot recommend anything else for them—this advice is offered without prejudice and without further comment.

As for me, I am building a machine that simply ignores traditional publishing in this one particular author’s life.

I never have to submit a book or story again if I don’t want to.

You are comparing apples in a basket to a man in boots and coveralls who just picked out a fine parcel of land and he’s sticking apple seeds in the ground. You have a basket of nice shiny apples and he’s building something that will be totally awesome at some point in the future.

It’s a difference not so much of opinion—we both consider each other’s opinion irrelevant, but in our basic set of assumptions.

And the whole world is built on assumptions, isn’t it?

END

*Smashwords tells you not to un-publish your books. If you do, you will lose any ranking those books have on any given platform, for example iTunes or Kobo. If you’re not selling any books on those platforms, you have no ranking to lose. You can still keep the rankings in the SW store and in any other platform where you have sold books.

**iTunes’ internal review and time-lags at the aggregator end sort of stymies this to a certain extent. This actually helps to make the case for publishing directly via iTunes—once the titles are up, you should be able to price-toggle, (or instantaneously change covers with some confidence that changes will actually go through), to your little heart’s content.

I can’t really state that with any certainty, as I haven’t actually done it yet.