Some Literary Waves

Quite a lot has been going on in the indie publishing world as of late, with a couple of these things personally affecting my titles. First, the good news: Kindle Worlds is now making its titles available through Kindle Unlimited. Now if you are a KU subscriber, you can read Melody of Love and Haunting Melody for free! Just make sure to read at least 10% of the book so everyone gets paid. ;-)

Second, the not so good news: Inktera is temporarily suspending distribution of titles coming from Draft2Digital, so my books won't be listed there for awhile. Actually no one's books will--Inktera is revamping the whole brand, so until that's complete, their catalog is not available. Full disclosure: I never had any sales from this channel anyway, so it's not really going to affect my bottom line when it comes to royalties.

NaNoWriMo: If you're following my progress on the site, you know that it's kicking my butt this year, for real. I should be sailing closing to 30k right now, and I haven't even hit 20k. But I'm not giving up. I just have to pour some extra fuel on the fire and see how far it goes. No matter what, I'll still post an exclusive excerpt of the novel at the end of November on Patreon.

I hope your weekend will be filled with writing. I know mine will be!

Proud to be #PoweredByIndie

I was surprised to receive an email this weekend from Amazon telling me that my work is being featured in their celebration of independently published authors.

Being self-published isn't an easy job. Even with the changes that are going on throughout the publishing industry, it's still a label that makes some readers and most critics turn their nose up. You have to be courageous to tackle the challenge. You have to be strong. You have to put everything on the line to grab your piece of the publishing pie.

Truth is, I'm not very confident if you meet me in person. I don't like to talk a lot to people I don't know well, and small talk is the most energy-draining activity I've ever had to participate in. But when it comes to writing, communication comes much easier for me. I never saw another option for a career path other than writing because of this gap in my communication skills. So why put a dozen barriers in front of my goal?

Yes, traditionally published authors can have advantages over self-published authors. But I would rather take the reigns on what I see is the total vision for my work. Places like Kindle Direct Publishing let me be me. Whether that's good or bad is for the reader to decide.

And that's why I'm Powered By Indie.

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If you want to check out all of the self-published authors that Amazon's featuring this month, you can check out their Powered By Indie landing page. I hope you find something exciting and do your part to support indie authors.

Kindle Scout and Write On -- Can These Programs Help Indie Authors?

I pose the question in the title of this post for purely selfish reasons. I have two novels deep into the revision process and if I want to use Kindle Scout or Write On for either of them, now is the time to decide.

Kindle Scout
If you aren't familiar with either of these programs offered by Amazon to authors, here's what I know about them. Kindle Scout is is program where you can submit your manuscript (with cover art and all that other good stuff) and have a 30-day campaign to see if readers are responding to your book synopsis and cover. They nominate the ones they want to see published and at the end of the campaign, a select number of books are chosen by the Kindle Scout team to be given a publishing contract with Kindle Press. The terms include a 5-year renewable contract, a $1500 advance, an ebook royalty rate of 50% and marketing through Amazon. Sounds amazing, right?

There are plenty of drawbacks to this program too. First, if you have a huge following, you can get a ton of your peeps to nominate your book whether it's good or not. Although getting the most nominations doesn't guarantee publishing, it could sway the Powers That Be of it's potential sales. Then, you have to write to specific categories listed. They currently don't have categories beyond their bestsellers, such as romance, suspense and thriller.

Getting deeper into the guidelines and agreements, you have to give up exclusive rights to consider your manuscript for 45 days. And if chosen for a contract, Amazon has the discretion to shop the rights for foreign language translations, third-party licensing, any rebranded version of ebook and audiobook of your work, and other control you may not have known you had with your manuscript. The details provide a range of royalty rates that will be provided by Amazon for these other editions, but the terms of what they can do with these are not negotiable.

The biggest potential for any author considering this is probably the promise of Amazon marketing and promotion. Reading the fine print, your book may be eligible for this type of marketing, but nothing is guaranteed. Another part of this process that isn't getting quite as much hype is that if your manuscript is chosen, the Kindle Scout team does work with authors on editing to get the manuscript as great as it can be.

I've read plenty of first-hand accounts of the Kindle Scout process, and I think that the first book of my trilogy In Another Life would have the best shot at winning a publishing contract. And even though it seems small, that $1500 advance would go a long way in getting me back on track (and convince people that getting paid for writing does happen). I'm just not sure that I could rally a large enough group to nominate the book without totally spamming my social media accounts.

WriteOn
WriteOn is a bit different. I actually didn't know anything about this program until I received an email last week, although the program has apparently been around for a few months. The email was very short and kind of just said, "Hey, try this out." I looked and saw something that I've definitely seen before. WriteOn by Kindle looks a lot like Wattpad, however, it is a program that serves a different purpose. WriteOn is a place where you can essentially have a virtual writing workshop, but instead of trying to get feedback from other writers, you are getting feedback directly from readers. With Wattpad, what I have experienced is that people just want their stories read, not necessarily any criticism, no matter how helpful it may be. But to be fair, I don't spend a lot of time on Wattpad, so I may be wrong about that.

In theory, this is great--readers and writers are getting together to make the stories better. In practice, I still have a hard time showing what I think isn't my best work to a bunch of strangers to make it better. I also have a problem with anyone going to the site and being able to read it. Yes, there are protections in place so no one can copy it, but only the ability to comment requires a username and password. I do agree with this blog post that assigning the ASIN before publishing and connecting this service to Goodreads would make it much more helpful for writers and more accessible for readers.

I thought my currently untitled chick-lit novel that I'm revising would work well for this service. I still don't have much of a beta reader list, and this could be a great way to get feedback on the areas where I think a good beta reader could help. However, getting people to read it and give it well thought out feedback might be an uphill battle, especially since it still isn't a popular service.

As much as indie authors don't want to admit it, Amazon rules our world whether we use their services and programs or not. That is why I'm seriously considering trying both of these out because with my current book sales and promotional marketing efforts, what do I have to lose?

Have you tried either of these services? Would you put your novel to the test on either platform? 

The Secret Project Revealed: Are You Ready for a Little ❤ Romance ❤?

I can finally reveal the secret project I've been working on for the past month. I wrote a novella for Kindle Worlds. My contribution is Melody of Love and it belongs to The Callaways World based on the romance series by Barbara Freethy.



You don't have to have read The Callaways series to enjoy my novella--though if you like a little suspense with your romance, I definitely recommend reading them. All you have to know is this: Sean Callaway is a musician and owns Ashbury Studios. The ground floor is a music studio, and the top floor is a dance studio where the love of his life Jessica runs the dance studio. And that's where my novella takes place.

The process frayed a few of my nerves, but it's finally completed. I'm so excited that it was published tonight, because if it was kicked back to me again for some tiny little oversight I was about ready to give up. I actually had a pretty good rant about Kindle Worlds ready to go if I didn't end up publishing it... but it's best if we forget all that and just celebrate another completed project.

And a little heads up: I wasn't sure this would be published today, so I scheduled the ebook version of Unfolding Life to be available for free tomorrow. Sorry in advance for all of the promo social media posts for both books coming up. 😉

Go and Buy a Book

...because that's what Read Tuesday is all about! Dec. 9 celebrates writers and readers by giving plenty of discounts on ebooks and print books. If you want to see all the great deals available (including Unfolding Life *wink*) you can browse the Read Tuesday catalogs. There are different sections for Kindle deals, frees books and discount codes for print books. Most of these authors are indie authors, so go out and support them, and pick up a few gifts while you're at it.

In other writing news, I'm on schedule to finish the first draft (finally!) of In Another Life. I know I talk about this one a lot, but by the end of the week it will finally be moving on to the first round of revisions. Because I'm so pumped to publish in 2015 (this article inspired me a bit), I'm hoping I can get this one out there as soon as possible. You know why? SPOILER ALERT: It's going to be a trilogy. Stay tuned.

So what's next? Tackling the pages in the official red revision binder with my red pen. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's torture. We'll see how the next session goes. ;-)

Victory is Mine!! #NaNoWriMo14

Well, I did what I set out to do--I won NaNoWriMo this year! I wasn't too excited when it first happened because it was 6:30 on a Sunday morning. But I caught up to the greatness of my victory after my daily caffeine fix. I'm glad that I was able to do it, and by proving that to myself, I know that I can continue writing for the rest of my life without worrying about taking time away from the money-making process. That's because I realized that 1667 words per day can happen in just three or four 20-minute writing sessions. This does not break the time bank whatsoever. I will now hold myself accountable for at least 1500 per day from now on. No more excuses and no more guilt.

Revisions? Well... those will probably have to be long weekend projects. Once I start that, I usually can't put it down for hours. Today is the only day I'm taking off before revisions start, so I have to get organized and find the best way to do it. I'm not going to revise this year's novel because it's too short of a turnaround. I need to get some space from this project. Instead, I will revise last year's novel. I didn't finish that one in a month, but I did finish it so it will be ready for Phase Two tomorrow.

I'm also celebrating because I saved Amazon gift cards for the past few months (I somehow seem to win a lot of them online...) and was finally able to get a new Kindle Fire HD 7. It came in today, which made it seem like a prize I awarded myself for all of my efforts. I'm a happy camper all around.

Amazon's New Kindle Unlimited Program

While I may have had a rant about cover letters scheduled for today, I decided to scrap that and talk about the new program from Amazon called Kindle Unlimited. You get to learn about this new program, and I get to spend more time crafting really good cover letters for my next career adventure, so everyone wins.

I received an email from Amazon on Friday introducing me to this new program. While on the surface it may look like just another way for Amazon to get your money, for the savvy reader it can be an affordable option to read like crazy without paying $25.99 for a new hardcover.

The program lets you pay a monthly fee of $9.99 to download and read an unlimited number of books onto your Kindle device. Amazon says that you have a choice from more than 600,00 titles. The Kindle Unlimited Page lists quite a few bestsellers and current popular titles, most of which are price between $8-$15. Not a bad deal, right?

Those who will see the best benefit from this program are the readers that are exclusively or almost exclusively using a reading device. It is also beneficial to readers who can devour at least 3-5 books a month. At just $9.99, the Kindle price of many popular titles will pay for themselves even if you just read a single book a month. However, if you are like me and don't necessarily want to be forced into reading a specific amount a month to justify the cost, you may want to skip this program for now.

The program is also great for Kindle authors. If an author chooses to enroll in KDP Select, their book is automatically enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. The benefits for writers include being paid a royalty for the download, but the catch for this is unlike the royalty from the Amazon Prime Lending program, to get paid the Unlimited royalty the reader must read at least 10% of the title, otherwise the download does not constitute a payment.

Good news: my book is part of KDP Select, so you can take advantage of reading it if you sign up for Kindle Unlimited. But please, for every independent author's sake, read at least 10%. It costs you nothing but a few minutes of your time and you may discover a great read. 

You Don't Need a Kindle to Read a Book

...even if they are Kindle books! As a new author I'm hearing all the excuses, including the easiest way for people to get out of an awkward situation when I ask if they've bought my book yet. They say "Oh, I would but I don't have a Kindle. Sorry!" Mmm-hmm. An amateur might believe that, but I know what's up.

Instead of accusing people of dodging the book bullet, I'm simply going to assume that you do not know about all of Amazon's Kindle reading apps. So let me tell you right now--you don't need a Kindle to read a Kindle book! Kindle offers a FREE Kindle reading app for a TON of different platforms. This includes iPhones, Android phones, Windows phones and even Blackberrys. Also, you can get it for your Mac or Windows computer, iPad, Android tablet and Windows tablet.

What? You don't own ANY of those devices? That's okay. I know if you are reading this, you have access to a computer. Well, Amazon handles that too--you also have the option to read instantly in your browser.

Now you are telling me you don't have an Amazon account. Well, if you are going that far to make an excuse, at least I know you care about my feelings just a little bit.

The Title is Here!

If you follow my Facebook page, then you may have already heard the news, but I finally have a title for the haiku book. It is going to be called UNFOLDING LIFE. Since I notoriously struggle with titles for all my writings, I'm glad that this one came to be pretty quickly and immediately felt right in describing the collection.

I'm also glad that I'm nearly done with the formatting. It wasn't a difficult process, but it certainly is tedious to get everything to look the way you want it to. And this process provided me with a new skill that I can easily freelance with, which hopefully means more work in my future.

Today's task is actually the most difficult in my opinion--rewriting my author bio so that I sound cool. That's going to be some significant time and effort to get it right. ;-)

Into the Second Phase

Life has slowed down a bit here. Actually, it's more like a standstill. There's the huge dump of snow that we got yesterday, but there's also a lack of work. I actually haven't had a single job 2014, though not for lack of trying. That's what I get for raising my standards. If I don't work for chump change, I apparently don't get to work.

For now, I'm still smiling. But by the end of the week, I may be in pre-launch for panic mode. Even though I'm snowed in, I'm probably staying afloat emotionally simply because I have big dreams. The dreams themselves won't get me anywhere, but if I find the right next step to take, the world's mine. Right??

But I'm not down and out completely yet. I still have my current writing project. I tried to drum up some mystery around it with last week's Instagram post, but I'm ready to reveal what it all means. These seemingly random numbers correspond to haiku. Lots of haiku. In fact, last's year's goal was to write one haiku each day for the year. I managed to write about 345 before my time was up. Out of all those, I narrowed it down to 100 to put into a manuscript.

These 100 (I deleted one so it may only be 99 now) are going to be published as a collection. I plan to self publish through Kindle Direct Publishing because I have never heard of a single publisher that buys haiku-only manuscripts. But if you exist, come talk to me. ;-) KDP also gives me a lot of publishing flexibility without any cost. Soon, it will be available through Amazon as an ebook. And remember, 'soon' is a relative term.

At this point, all of the poems are edited. I just need to complete the formatting, draw (or have someone else draw) a few of them to break up the monotony and then figure out what I want to do with the cover art. I'm a little nervous because I've tried to publish a poetry collection before, and cover art/artwork is where I got stuck last time. We'll see what I can do.

Kindle Matchbook: The Early Verdict

Today, Amazon launched its new program Matchbook. If you are already familiar with Amazon's Autorip program for music, Matchbook does the same thing, only with your previously purchased books. Matchbook provides Amazon customers with Kindle versions of the print books they previously bought. At today's launch, the company estimates 70,000 titles are available, with more being added all the time. However, unlike Autorip, these Kindle books are given at a discounted price instead of free. While some titles will be available for free, most will be reduced to prices that range between $0.99 and $2.99. Books available include those that have been sold on the site since 1995, when Amazon first started offering books.

Each Kindle edition available from the Matchbook program will come with all the perks of any full-fledged Kindle book including Whispersync delivery, X-ray and much more.

Already, there are some issues with the program that avid readers just don't like. First, hundreds of thousands of titles are still not available--and they may never be available. That is because publishers are able to opt in and out of this program, and many publishers are not on board yet. Readers are also not happy with the fact that they can get free MP3s with an Autorip purchase, but will still have to pay a price for a digital copy of a book they already own. Many are asking why anyone would want to buy a second copy of a book they already own. While it may help someone who has lost or misplaced a book they want to read again, most serious readers would not purchase the digital version unless it was available for free, or they really wanted to have multiple versions of a book available to them.

As to the choice of books that are available, I went to the sit today to see what I would have available from my library. I was provided with five titles, all but one priced at $2.99. There were none available for free, even though I'm sure I bought some print versions of classics I already know Amazon publishes in a free ebook version (though probably through a different publisher). Knowing that I have my printed copies readily available, I won't be purchased any of these digital copies.

However, if you were the publisher or the author of a printed book, would you be willing to opt in to this program? Do you think that it would boost your sales overall, or no make much of an impact?