Thursday, September 22, 2011

Self Publishing on Smashwords.com,and Amazon.com

Available from Amazon.com
Although it is early days yet to form an opinion, I would like to share my thoughts and experiences on self-publishing. Yes, I took the plunge and published a novel, Gogga op ‘n Harley on both Smashwords.com and Amazon.com.

The novel is in Afrikaans so I didn’t expect a lot of sales from the onset. The Afrikaans market is very limited to say the least and although many South Africans are living abroad, it is a minute amount of people interested in reading Afrikaans compared to the rest of the English-speaking world.

First of all, it is scary to say the least, to let your baby loose on the world without the backing of a formal publisher that does the marketing and editing for you. I suck at marketing. So, I published on Smashwords.com first.

Self-Publishing with Smashwords.com

Smashwords.com makes it laughably easy to publish your work on their web site. They provide you with a style guide that, if followed to the letter, helps you format your work for acceptance into their premium catalogue. This means your book is automatically distributed to booksellers like Barnes and Noble, Sony, Diesel, Apple and Kobo.

The other advantage of using the style guide is that your book is 99% formatted already for publishing at Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing. You get to upload a cover for your book and if you are not up to creating your own, Smashwords.com even provides links to people that can assist – for a fee naturally.

Publishing is the easy part, just as writing is the easy part of a book, but marketing your book and getting it out to the general public is quite another thing. If you are mostly a hermit like me (according to my children), engaging in social media is very difficult. Using it to promote yourself, is quite impossible. Besides a few friends and family, I find it difficult to self-promote and tell everyone: “Hey, check out my book. I think you’ll like it!” That is just impossible for me to do. I hate salesmen and I detest sales pitches even more. So how on earth do you do it?

The honest answer is that I don’t have a clue. It’s not that I don’t believe in my book – I do, but I’m a writer, not a salesman.

Well I digress, publishing at Smashwords.com has the advantage that your book is published in a multitude of formats. Not everyone has a e-reader and not everyone can afford to sit for hours in front of a computer reading fiction. Smashwords makes it easy in the sense that you can download a PDF file and print it if that is what you want.

Another thing I like about Smashwords.com is that your book is not DRM locked. Nothing is worse than wanting to buy a book in a format you reader doesn’t support and then finding that it is DRM locked and you can’t convert it.  While I understand the reasoning behind the locking of the books, I don’t support it – I trust my readers to use and not abuse the literature I spent months (sometimes years) to create.

With all these plus points, it is thus with a sad heart that I have to confess I haven’t yet sold one book on Smashwords.com.


Self-Publishing with Amazon.com via Kindle Direct Publishing

Just after I published at Smashwords.com I read on a forum that one should consider publishing through Amazon.com as well. I was a bit intimidated, being from South Africa at how the payment structure would work. At Smashwords.com you get paid via Pay Pal, which suited me fine. At Amazon.com, if you are from another country, you get paid via paper check – and only once you reach the minimum pay out level of $100. I didn’t really anticipate any sales so the pay out problem would be well and truly in the future and I decided to go for it.

Publishing with Amazon.com (KDP) was a breeze. I had already done everything required for publishing on Smashwords, so the process was painless. Then I sat back and waited. It takes a couple of days for your work to be indexed at Amazon.com and after it went live, I was like a junky. I checked a couple of times a day if there were any sales.

Wow, to my amazement, the fist day I had sold 2 books. To say I was excited doesn’t even begin to cover the feeling I had. A stranger had bought my book without any solicitation from me. Then I started chewing my nails. Would it be good enough? What if they don’t like it? What if . . .  I had to laugh at this point.

How many books have I read that I didn’t like? Quite a few, but I never held it against the author. I just didn’t buy any more books written by him/her. And then I worried some more. Point being, in three weeks I managed to sell 14 books on Amazon.com and none on Smashwords.com. I think Amazon.com is just more visible than Smashwords and gets more traffic.

So bottom line- publish on both platforms to give your book a fair chance to be discovered and utilize all the writing tools you can to get your work read.

Above all, always keep writing.


Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Tips to Improve your Writing

Every writer needs tips on how to improve their writing. Whether you are just stuck at a certain point or need general ideas on how to edit you writing, we all need help sometime.

I found an excellent article today on how to improve your writing. Several different authors contributed to the article, which, in my opinion, only makes it better.



In essence, the article provides twenty-five helpful hints on how to improve your writing, including tips on what to do when you are stuck and the scene refuses to flow, where to find inspiration for your writing and several self-editing tips. The problems the writers state in the article are not new, but some of the solutions are quite engaging. Imagine talking to your piece of writing when you get stuck. Would you have thought of that? I never considered the possibility for fear someone might overhear and think I finally lost all my marbles. At least now I have an excuse by saying I read in an article that it might improve my writing.  

So although some of the 30 minute solutions sound a little (maybe more than a little?) crazy, I can whole-heartedly recommend the article 25 Ways to Improve your Writing in 30 Minutes a Day. You never know, someday you might be stuck and one of these solutions might just work.

Please read the article and tell me what you think. Do you think us beginner writers need more articles along these lines? Do you think that experienced writers could also benefit from the article? 

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

My First Book on Smashwords

Today I managed to publish my first Afrikaans novel on Smashwords.com. It was a long road before I finally managed to have the courage to attempt this. Smashwords.com publishes mainly English books, but I felt that people should have a choice to read some Afrikaans as well. 

Smashwords.com makes it easy to publish with them and if you follow the style guide they provide, you can format your book with relative ease. Hopefully I will be able to publish more of my novels there in the next couple of weeks. 

Sample or purchase Gogga op 'n Harley: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/82039

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

How to Blog From Your Desktop to Blogger

Most writers need to do more than fiction writing in order to keep the wolf from the door. One of these methods it to blog. Some choose to write blogs on an established site belonging to other people, but others choose to have their own blog from where they try to supplement their income.



If you want your own blog, there are plenty of sites offering free blog space like Blogger, which is powered by Google. The advantage of having a blog hosted by Blogger, is that you get indexed in the search pages of Google relatively quickly.

The problem I had until recently is to update the blogs hosted by Blogger from my desktop and include pictures in the update. A lot of software allows you to update the text directly to Blogger, but the photo’s remained a headache. That is until I found Windows Live Writer.

The program allows you to update blogs from your desktop after a minor setup process. The real neat feature is that your pictures are displayed as you put it in the text and up to now, I haven’t found any date being corrupted by the update from Windows Live Writer.



With a host of features for hyperlinking, editing photo’s, adding tables, maps, video and much more, this is a program which should be considered by any serious blogger. It also works perfectly with self-hosted web blogs.