Apparently smart self-publishing decisions: giveaway

At least for the moment, creating the giveaway on GoodReads.com seems to have been a smart decision.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Good Cop, Dead Cop

by Jennifer Petkus

Giveaway ends August 08, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Stupid self-publishing mistakes I have made: ISBNs

I should have either bought a block of ISBNs from Bowker or just used CreateSpace services to get my ISBN. What I did instead was just buy one ISBN from Bowker and now nickel and dimed my way into spending too much for a book that’s sold less than 30 copies so far.

Stupid self-publishing mistakes I have made: Incremental release

I started researching self publishing in advance of my book, My Particular Friend, in the event that I could not find an agent or publisher for it. Along the way, I decided that I could experiment with the book I had already written, Good Cop, Dead Cop. And so I learned how to format the book for the Kindle, and then the Nook, and then Lulu and iBooks and finally for CreateSpace as a real paperback.

Check your exported PDF!

Just a word of warning, I’d been creating PDFs from my Word document to send to CreateSpace. If you don’t already know, CreateSpace is a print on demand service that was bought a while ago by Amazon.

Checking your work: Validation

Unfortunately there are a lot of pitfalls on the road to creating an EPUB and some of those pitfalls are not very obvious, thus the need to check your work with with a validator. EPubCheck is the best way to see if an EPUB is valid (although Sigil has a built-in validator, it can miss things that EPubCheck will find).

Checking your work: Kindle Previewer for Mac and PC

One of the major difficulties about creating books for ereaders is that you probably can’t afford to buy a Kindle, a Nook, a Sony, an iPhone and an iPad. You might have one of these, but probably not all. So it’s very nice that Amazon offers Kindle Previewer for Mac and PC.

Tools of the trade

NOTE: I proudly work on an Apple Macintosh, but almost everything I say here will apply to both Mac and PCs. (I also use Parallels Virtualization to run Windows on my Mac.)

My proof reader

Editing and re-editing your own work can make you hate it with a passion you reserve for spammers and people who kick dogs. And after a while you just start glossing over the text, not noticing that a question ended with a period or that a word is repeated.

Quickly publishing on Amazon

It’s not that difficult to publish a book on Amazon, but of course I did it the hard way, submitting an actual MOBI file rather than a more straightforward Word document or PDF. In fact, if you just created a book  using a Word template, creating a table of content by using Word’s hyperlinks to Word bookmarks, you could probably be publishing in a jiffy.

To buy or not to buy an ISBN

First, what is it. Well, it’s the 10- to 13-digit number you find on the copyright page of that Harry Potter or Twilight novel you just bought. The International Standard Book Number identifies your book so that bookstores know that they just ordered the large-print, paperback version of your book published in 2007 versus the audiobook released in 2009. In other words, it’s necessary if you want to get your book sold in bookstores because they order based on the ISBN.

Applying for a copyright

There are many who complain about government bureaucracy, but you’ll find little about which to complain when you apply for a electronic copyright at the U.S. Copyright Office. It only costs $35 to file a copyright for an ebook and the process happens very quickly, although there are a number of forms to fill out. And I suspect the application process would work during a government shutdown.

How to publish your ebook

I’d been busy writing My Particular Friend, a book that combines Jane Austen and Sherlock Holmes, when my friend Lee asked why I didn’t publish my first novel, Good Cop, Dead Cop, on the Kindle.

It was a sore subject because I’d put a lot of hard work into GCDC, only to fail to find an agent or publisher. The whole experience was so painful I locked it all away and devoted my time to other pursuits. But when Lee asked her question, I thought, sure, why not sell the book through Amazon? And while I’m at it, I could sell it through Barnes & Noble and even Apple’s iBookstore. How hard could it be?