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.

Experimental. Artificial Intelligence and Audiobooks. Louis Shalako.

The ebook preview feature on Kindle Direct Publishing.

Louis Shalako

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen.

So, I am uploading and publishing A Stranger In Paris, Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #9, by Louis Shalako.

Those will be in multiple ebook formats as well as a couple of different sizes of paperbacks from print on demand publishing sites.

Things have changed in the six years since I last published a book in ebook and paperback.

It’s a bit of a learning curve, I have problems with a cover here and a glitch in the formatting there. A bit of a learning curve. (In other words, fuck, ladies and gentlemen. - ed.)  Like many such learning curves, there are the odd rabbit holes and unexpected opportunities that might be exploited. It is also possible to get side-tracked and confused, to lack focus and lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is to write books and stories, have fun, and if possible, make a bit of eating money...all these publishing platforms have preview features, and KDP revealed one line, Chapter Thirty-Three, that was in a different size and font. I do not want to publish an ebook or paperback with one line in a different size and font, ladies and gentlemen. I did manage to fix that…

We're in the quality control stage.

***

I downloaded 'TotalEbookViewer' and it's not very good. I signed into Nook, looking for Nook for PC. The site directed me to the Microsoft Store, who (or which) does not appear to have it. I had it at one time, maybe I should search my own computer for it. I don't know, it just didn't look very nice and I am checking quality control on a new book.

I also downloaded Kindle, epub and PDF files from Smashwords. The PDF looks good in Kindle Reader for PC. Kobo accepts various formats, unfortunately not PDF. I don't think Kobo has a preview feature for ebook uploads, which is unfortunate. (Turns out they do. - ed.) My POD text looks fine in the Lulu preview. Getting a paperback book cover through there may be a little more challenging, even though I have done a few before. I'm saving KDP for last, as they are the biggie and that is where the greatest sales potential is because of the vast volume of traffic. It is also where you have the greatest competition, which means the readers are swamped for choice.

This is my book on the Lulu POD preview. It looks okay.

***

When publishing, I like to preview every page, and I have provided some pics of what that looks like.

I just converted to an audiobook on Google Play. It sounded surprisingly good for what I take to be AI. I saw that new option when I went to upload my new book. Once I got that done, I went back and had another look.

Here’s the thing. I have one hundred and fifty titles on Google Play, novels, collections and short stories, under five different pen names and in all kinds of genres.

All of that potential...revealed.

All I really hoped for was to finish my twenty-third novel, which took three winters to write and over which I have slaved and sweated and yeah, whatever. All one has to do is to click on a few buttons. All one needs is a fresh ISBN number for each new audiobook. All one needs is to find the original ebook marketing image, which seems to work well enough for an audiobook. All of a sudden, one has doubled the number of products, all of them available for the occasional customer to take a shine to and maybe spend the money.

This is Artificial Intelligence, possibly exploiting me but also a bright, shiny new tool, one that however briefly, can leverage my own productivity.

Those books and stories are already written. They already exist—all I have to do is to pick a voice, set a price, listen to a few short sections, edit some of the front matter, which is repetitive and not necessary.

All I need is a bit of time, a bit of time away from the regular, part-time job and running errands about town.

We'll see what happens with all these audiobooks, ladies and gentlemen...

***

Smashwords has epub downloads in something called ReadAloud, and I did download that (A Stranger In Paris), and I did listen to it. It’s not very good, which is why Google’s voices (and you can choose from several), kind of surprised me. With a long list of titles, I can use a female Aussie voice, for example, on a Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller story and a young American male voice for an Ian W. Cooper story.

It looks like I have my work cut out for me, what with all those ISBNs and cover images crowding my desktop and filling up my file folders.

 

END

 

Poor old Louis is on Google Play along with some pen-names.

See his art on Fine Art America.

Check out this other story here.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Tell If People Are Reading Your Books.

Louis Shalako

There have been some recent studies conducted on how much of a book people actually read. With ereaders tied to an ecosystem such as Amazon’s or iTunes’, the device reports back to the retailer. The data is fine enough that analysts can determine at exactly which point someone might have abandoned a book. Armed with such data, a content provider can fine-tune their product to be more appealing, more interesting, more engaging.

Authors don’t really have access to this information—not yet anyways.*

So how do I know if people are reading my books, especially when I give them away in such numbers?

At the end of every book or story, I have a link to the blog of the pen-name in question. There is some background here. Smashwords’ founder Mark Coker (and others) have blogged about the importance of enhanced end matter. It might provide links to other products, it might be an excerpt from a future release. This is all very well, but iTunes and possibly some other retailers won’t allow ebooks in their stores if they contain direct links to other retailers. Some online retailers don’t seem to care. But when I upload a book to Amazon, that file might have a link to the author page on Amazon—not another retailer. At least with Amazon, with no outward distribution channels, I can fine-tune that end matter.

The issue was how to beat that limitation when using Smashwords, bearing in mind they distribute to iTunes, Barnes & Noble, etc. The simple solution was to use the blog address for that link.

On the blogs, there are links to free and priced products. However, those seem to be okay with iTunes. It’s a direct link to another retailer, within the actual product, that they object to.

Okay.

So when I’m giving away hundreds of ebooks, and if a reader really enjoyed the book, there is a very good chance that they will click on that link. That link is at the end of the book. 

They’re clicking on there to see if there is something else for free. They’re clicking on there to see if there is anything else they might like to read by that author.

Not everyone who gets to the end of the book will click that link. However, if I gave away a hundred copies of a book on one particular day, and within a day or so, that particular blog is showing a surprising number of hits…and if that particular pen-name hasn’t blogged in a while, the question is where are the hits coming from.

The only logical answer is that people, a good percentage of them, are at least finishing the books and stories. They enjoyed what they read and they want to know more.

Since I have a number of pen-names, some of whom publish irregularly, and there is some juggling of actual story production, I really haven’t tried putting an excerpt for an upcoming novel into the end matter.

That being said, it would be possible—certainly in the case of a series such as The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, to go back, modify a file, and re-upload it to all the platforms where it is presently published. Those excerpts would obviously be for other books in the series. If it was a numbered series, you would obviously try to suck them into buying the next book in the series.

The only thing there is time. The author would have to set aside a block of time and essentially do the work. Upload the file, check the formatting, and your product helps the readers to find the next book in the series.

END

The latest in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, How to Rob a Bank is presently free with price-matching from Amazon. It’s also free from other fine retailers.

Thank you for reading.

*Correction: on Scribd, books published thruogh Smashwords will tell you that a book received a 'ten percent read' and the same is true of some other platforms. I'm not a big expert on Amazon Prime, Kindle Unlimited or some other subscription services.

Exponential Growth.

Louis Shalako

Setting a rational sales goal, month to month, isn’t all that difficult. Making it happen isn’t all that difficult either, since it’s a rational goal. Here at Long Cool One Books, over the last three months, we’ve seen sales increases of ten percent or greater. It’s a kind of exponential growth, but like interest rates, whether you owe money, or you`re earning money on an investment, sales increases are compounded upon the previous month’s sales increase.

It is analogous and so the math works just fine.

Let’s assume you sold 100 books in December 2014. A ten percent increase would translate into 110 books as of January 31. That`s a straightforward, ten percent sales increase. By the end of February, you should be up to 121. It’s not ten more books a month, but ten percent more books per month. This results in sales of 132-point-something by March. There is a factor, and you can multiply Month One sales by that factor to project what sales might be in Month Twelve, if in fact you meet your sales goals, month-by-month, for an entire year.

The factor, using simple interest compounding techniques as a substitute for sales compounding, is 2.138428377. Simply put, if you can meet your ten percent sales-increase goal, month on month for twelve months, then you will be selling 213.8 books the next January for every 100 books you are selling this January. Ten percent increases are a form of exponential growth.

The math is pretty simple and here`s another link.

Beating Your Personal Best.

“Each week, her goal was to drop time in her races--not win, but beat her own personal best. Sometimes she only cut one-tenth of a second from her previous performance, but it was an improvement nonetheless and worth celebrating.”

This is exactly what we`re trying to do. This is why I go swimming, and try to see how far I can go. This is also why by the end of the season I can go farther than in the beginning of the season—I`m in training, and I`m keeping track accurately, and I`m trying to beat my personal best.

So our goal here for the month of September isn`t so much to attract a literary agent. Our goal here is not to make the New York Times Bestseller List. We know very well we`re not likely to release a novel and sell 100,000 copies. We`re unknown, but we`re also independent.

It is our greatest strength.

We don`t give a shit about any of that. What we want to do is to take last month`s (August, 2015), sales total and increase it by ten percent. That`s all, ladies and gentlemen. That`s all, ladies and gentlemen, month after month. We just have to keep going—that`s all.

In July, we sold 362 books. In August, 395 books. For September, we`re hoping for about 450 book sales across a bunch of platforms, all of which have strengths and weaknesses, and which must be treated on an individual basis. It is true, that a traditional publisher wouldn`t be interested in these kinds of numbers. They have a long tooth-to-tail ratio. For every book I sell, they would have to sell a thousand, maybe even ten thousand books just to break even.

They are no better at business than you or I.

The thing is, after twenty years on a disability pension, I really can`t succumb to that sense of entitlement and turn my nose up at a couple of hundred books a month. Especially since I`ve been seeing sales grow lately, when everyone else is blogging doom and gloom, everyone else is writing about the Top Ten Thousand Mistakes You Amateur Newbie Author`s Make, and WHY YOU`RE NEVER GOING TO BE VALIDATED BY SOMEONE IMPORTANT.

(There really shouldn`t be an apostrophe there in authors, Louis. – ed.)

(Point taken. P. S. Fuck off. Louis.)

So, you`re no doubt thinking, how do we achieve these ten percent increases in sales.

The simple answer is that we work ten percent harder, or for ten percent longer, or do our jobs ten percent better. WE WRITE TEN PERCENT MORE BOOKS. These are our own personal algorithms that we are gaming, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Here at Long Cool One Books, we could write our product descriptions ten percent better. 

We could make our book covers ten percent better, okay, that sounds silly when all of art is so subjective. But merely working, pushing ahead at a constant rate, becoming better-skilled and more professional every day, probably helps.

Producing more products, each and every month, probably helps.

Becoming a better writer, and learning more about what people read, probably helps. Writing the sort of books that people want to read, might not actually help—that`s because those product categories are already extremely crowded by people following a trend. Finding a niche that is underserved, or badly-served, might help quite a bit.

Here at Long Cool One Books, reading the rules set down from on high for other people has been very illuminating for us. They`re the ones that told us to raise our prices to where we can make a living at it—which would price our books at about a hundred and eighty-five bucks each; and no one would ever buy one. They`re the ones that told us not to check our accounts, when that is a wonderful source of data and feedback. It will just depress you, or so they said.

They forgot to mention just how much it will empower you.

(They`re the ones that told us never to use a semi-colon. – ed.)

(Point taken. Now fuck off again. Louis.)

Here`s an interesting point. Let`s say you are lucky enough to land a traditional publishing contract, signing up, in your very first contract, with a small press. It looks like a lucky break. 

Someone else believes in you. They believe they can make money off of your work, the only question is why you don't. But how big is that advance. A couple of grand, five or ten grand tops. They`ll print up anywhere from 750 copies, (selling at forty bucks in an independent, brick-and-mortar store) to maybe, if you`re lucky, 2,000. You will never earn out your advance. You will likely never see a royalty cheque, and it takes years for the contract to revert. And you`ve sold somewhere between 750 and 2,000 books. The only street credibility you get is that you`ve been published.

This is the way to attract an agent. Or so they say. This is the way to make the bestseller lists—or so they say.

We`re going to continue to buck that trend, to reject all such advice, and just keep on doing what we`re already doing well. For one thing, we`ve distributed well over a hundred thousand books in five years. It`s taken that long to get where we are now. But you could submit books forever, without actually getting anywhere. That`s why so many people talk about luck in this business, when it`s really art and science that will get you to where you need to go.

Fuck them, anyways. I don`t have time for that shit.

To hell with the rest of the industry. But I will promise you this: guys like me are going to take a billion-dollar bite out of this industry in 2015. And next year, at least one-point-one billion. Maybe even one-point-one-one billion.

It`s called thinking outside the box, and they`ll lecture you on that too.

If you don`t believe it, just sit back and watch. Sit back and listen to them bitch, and whine, and piss and moan.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen.

End

Another article.

http://shalakopublishing.blogspot.ca/2013/09/production-goals.html