As an author, what type of obstacles have you faced?

Posted by Ironspike on Apr 3, 2012 in General, Writing | 0 comments

When I was child (a very long time ago), I was socially awkward. Back then, I was labeled as hyperactive and super-shy. I preferred to be alone and for the most part was. A few other things set me apart from most of the normal kids. However, I kept my feelings and thoughts to myself.

Let us fast-forward 20 years later.

My oldest boy enters school and displays the exact same social awkwardness I did. He was having a very rough time in a social setting (class, sports, around people). I knew how he felt but did not know what could be done about it.

The wife happened to see a special on Aspergers syndrome and told me, “My god that’s you and your boy.” We had him tested to verify it.

She was right.

As for me, I have never been tested. Honestly, I do not have to be. Some things are just obvious.

Over the years, I have learned to deal with the social settings and being around people. I put on a good show but would rather just be left alone.

The ADD is another story.

I have never had a case of writers block. Once I have my idea, I can build on it. In this aspect, ADD is very good. I am always thinking of just about every part of a story. It is like have multiple people doing beta-readings for me.

Another good thing about ADD is the endless supply of ideas and topics. I have some great stories (at least I think they are) just waiting to be finished.

There is the catch – “waiting to be finished.”

The down side of ADD (in my case) is getter bored with a topic quick. I would pour out pages of material on something that struck me as great. Just to change topics a quarter of the way through and focus on the next big thing. That is why I switched to writing short stories instead of novels.

Thought I would share a little and see what other folks might have had to deal with.

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Blogging vs. Intrusive Self Promotion

Posted by Ironspike on Mar 26, 2012 in General, Writing | 1 comment

Let’s set a few things straight before I continue:

• I am not a blogging expert
• I am not a marketing expert
• I am not the trendsetters’ expert

I started www.bonesnap.com years ago. I switched over to a blogging format because of the ease-of-use content management system. Like everyone else, I tried various commercial tactics to offset the cost of running a website.

One thing I hate about websites is being bombarded with marketing ads. I am turned off by popups and scrolling ads that website owners use to try to make money. I wanted a less intrusive way – so I just added a footer at the bottom of my site.  I have since removed it.

I’ve been in the IT world for almost twenty years. I’ve dealt with large corporations and small corporations and thousands of users. One common and not talked about item is the art of the passive sale.

Companies figured out that they could sale more when they get a consumer intrigued enough follow up. Take www.Adobe.com for example, their web site doesn’t hit you in the face with that buy-buy-buy advertising.

Sure, they have advertisements but they are not very intrusive. Instead, they show you features or information to develop an ‘interest’ in their product.

Now, let’s focus on Self-Publishers.

During these final stages of editing my book, I had to do a lot of research for marketing and sales. One item is that is highly recommend, is for the self-publisher to create a blog.

In my opinion, the functionality of a blog is for ANYONE is the creation of a unique ‘BRAND’ for the blogger.

That means for a self-publisher –the function of a blog should be to create an author’s-brand. The end game is to spark the interest of a casual browser, turn them into a potential subscriber, and eventually create a brand loyalty – ending in book sales.

On any given hour, I will cruise around on Linkin’s various writers groups and see hundreds of links to author’s blogs. A vast majority of these links take you right to the book’s sales page. These pages range from sample material to count down timers.

That is to be expected. However, if this is your blogs HOMEPAGE, I think this is more detrimental than helpful.

First impression is everything. I am turned off when the first impression I get is “buy this.” I want to be lure in with a witty article, or how your writing changed your life, something other than a sales pitch.

There is nothing wrong with branding. There is nothing wrong with advertising and selling your wares – I just think it is shallow if that all you are doing.

I know we all want sales. We all want people to read what we have created. It is our passion and sometimes we are blinded by it.

Ask yourself:

• How many sites did I click on just to leave in five seconds?
• Why did I leave?
• Is my site like this?

Let me know what you think.

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A picture is worth a thousand words

Posted by Ironspike on Mar 22, 2012 in General, Writing | 0 comments

In all honesty, why do you buy a particular book?

For me, it’s all about the cover.

I know, there are OTHER reason you might pick up that book in the store or online. I know many people usually buy books that have been recommended by friends. Other folks buy because they have a particular author they like.

Yet, among the majority of books at Barns, Amazon, ½ price, usually the first thing we do is look for something that strikes us visually.

Let’s get a few things out of the way before I continue – we all know that you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover. I am not. This is not about judging a book.

WE ALL have picked up beautifully bound books, read the front or back matter, and realized, “Oh Crap! This is terrible!”

In turn, I have by bypassed poorly bound books that later when hounded to read, turned out to be good.

As a self-publisher, I want someone to notice my book. The first step, create something that grabs their attention.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

You can add-in all kinds of synopsis & descriptions on the meta data. You still need to create enough motivation in individuals so they will choose yours.

I’m speaking only for myself at this point in time. However, I assume there are A LOT of folks like me.

Let’s drill in-depth here at Amazon.

If I go to the Kindle Book Store on Amazon and look at the first three in the Kindle Featured Categories – when I publish my book I hope it lands here too .

I’m using Google Chrome to view the websites. We see  An unexpected twist and Defending Jacob have large titles, easy to read fonts, we can easily tell who the author is. We might not know what the books but that’s why we click on them!

Let’s take the book in the middle – I can’t make out the author or title. I can tell you the picture is tie. However, I’m not sure a lot of folks would have actually known that. I’m a lazy human – I would skip over this book without second thought. There are millions of books out there and there is absolutely no way we can read the blurb about each book. Our first filtering mechanism is our eyes.

If we click on one of these, we are taken to the next listing.

Defending Jacob is still readable whereas the tie book is just that… a book I skipped.

I’m interested in this Defending Jacob so I click on it and instantly taken to its home page.

The book cover is easy to read. For comparison, I clicked on the tie book to find out its called “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E L James.

Now, I think this book’s cover still fails. Even on its home page, it is very hard to read.

Now we get to the nitty-gritty!

99% of the books I’ve bought on Amazon come from the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought listing. This is where most authors’ book covers – fail.

I was looking through some Horror book recommendations. A vast majority of these covers scale down horribly.

Would you pick anything above?

What about one of these?

 

As a self-publisher, the best I can hope for when it comes to exposure on Amazon is most likely at this level. I want to make sure 100% I make some sort of impact. In my opinion, not being able to make out a title, author, or the cover at this level – is a lost sale.

Now for comparison I did a look up on iBooks on my iPhone. Here are their respective pictures.

Even on the small iPhone screen this cover still looks good.

 

And this one is still hard to make out.

 

What do you think?

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ePub Format vs KindleGen (Mobi) – Part 1

Posted by Ironspike on Mar 7, 2012 in General, Writing | 0 comments

Self-Publishing is a lot more work than I anticipated.

Years ago, when I went down this path, I was using kindlegen. Since, I have an IT background; it was easy for me to use the compiler. I took my book at the time and converted it into HTML. This gave me a lot of power over the formatting. In all honesty, it is a long process.

I generated some more material and decided to look for an easier route. I followed Amazon’s suggestions and used MSWORD to create and edit the bulk of my documents.

Next step, save info as filtered HTML and shove it through kindlegen again.

The results were not the best – but a lot more manageable.

Now, instead of multiple HTML files I just had one big one. The biggest pro, was now I had the ability to easily find and correct errors. Everything was in one document. A few days ago, I was rapidly approaching the completion of my book. I decided that researching multiple streams of publishing would do nothing but benefit me. A majority of e-readers can use PDF files, but in all honesty, it seemed EPUB was the desired route. IPAD and Nook preferred method was also epub. I decided to start formatting my information into an epub project.

Let the nightmare begin.

To take my kindle project and convert it to epub looked fantastically easy. That is, until every time I tried to validate my epub file, the damn thing would crater. I begin to dig into this epub system and its validation. Compared to Kindlegen’s validation, epub is a joke.

The first thing I tried to use was a java code project called epubcheck. Here’s a link: http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/

This app drove me nuts. A majority of the errors it encountered cause the application to break. When it did not fail, it would return a message so cryptic you had no clue what it was referring too.

Next stop, Epubcheck online ( http://validator.idpf.org/ ).

I will give the online version a little credit since it would work. However, it still suffered horrendously bad, because again, it gave very little information on errors. The cool think about epub books is their structure; it is just a zip file with documents and directories. You can take the epub file for example Hose.epub and rename it to Hose.zip and view the contents. Anyway, before I did that, I started downloading free ebooks (epubs) and used the validator to validate them.

My thoughts were if I can get one epub to successfully go through, I could use it as a template. Imagine my surprise that out of the countless books I tried, all but one errored out. Once I managed to find a good template – the real nightmare began. I soon learned that my first foray into the eBook publishing with kindlegen and using multiple html files was the actually correct path.

I should not have strayed.

Last night I spent the majority of my time re-hashing out my kindle book in a more structure format – and yes – using multiple files. Now, I will try converting it to epub.

I will keep everyone posted!

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ePub vs Mobi

Posted by Ironspike on Mar 5, 2012 in General, Writing | 0 comments

I think self-publishing might be harder than I thought. Every time I think I am done with my book, I find more errors.

I should have paid more attention in English class.

The first book I wrote (not published yet), I worked with the KindleGen App. I wanted to read it on a kindle and this was the path to go. I figured out to create the .mobi files and apply what editing that was needed.

I am on the verge of releasing my book when I stumbled across something: ePub.

After some investigating, it seems that the iPad and other name brand e-readers are using it.

For a self-publisher, you do not want to limit your avenues of publication.

Now, I have to figure out how to create an ePub version of .mobi book.

Sheesh…

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