YouTube videos give authors a great way to promote their books. My latest is a reading of the opening chapter of my latest 1980s murder mystery, The Glam Assassin. And here it is!
Monday, 27 June 2011
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Kindle Author's Pre-Publishing Checklist
I’ve just published my third Kindle book (this is the second novel in my ‘1980s New Romantic Murders’ series) and, once again, I realised that I had forgotten all the niggly little things I needed to do in order to get my manuscript ready for publication. To help me (and other Kindle authors!) remember in future, I decided to jot down some notes – and here they are...
I’m assuming here that you will be using Microsoft Word and that you’ve done all the obvious things such as proof-read your manuscript, fixed any grammar errors, spellchecked the text etc. I’m, also assuming that you’ve read Amazon’s Kindle Formatting guide in the Help section of their KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) site.
Right, so what next?
1) Check that the formatting is correct (for example, that there are no funny fonts that shouldn’t be there).
2) If Track Changes is on (in Word’s Review panel), make sure that all changes are accepted (Changes/Accept all Changes in Document). Forget to do this and you may end up with text that you thought you’d altered or deleted being included in your published book!
3) Add Page Breaks. After every chapter, make sure there is a Page Break (keyboard shortcut is CTRL+ENTER). You can verify the breaks are where they are supposed to be by viewing hidden formatting (either click the Show/Hide icon in the Home/Paragraph panel of the Word ribbon or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT-* being sure to use the * on the 8 key at the top of your keyboard).
4) Add a Table of Contents (see HERE for guidance).
5) Add start and toc bookmarks so that Kindle will be able to find the start of the text and the Table Of Contents.
6) Create a cover image – 600 pixels wide, 800 pixels height in JPG format.
7) Save as Filtered HTML, and create Kindle-format book using Mobipocket Creator. See: Kindle Publishing, First Steps. Being sure to add the cover image and guides to go to the start and toc bookmarks (see Step 4 above).
8) Prepare all the Book details you’ll need to enter when you upload the book to Amazon. These include:
Book Name
Serial Title (if there is one) and Volume Number (if this is a series)
Description – the ‘blurb’ that will be shown under your book on Amazon.
Categories (the sections of the virtual bookstore into which the book naturally ‘fits’ – e.g. Humorous, Crime, Espionage)
Search keywords: Up to 7 keywords or phrases separated by commas that may help potential readers to find your book: e.g. murder, mystery, crime, detective, thriller, romance, British murder mystery
9) Go to the Bookshelf area of Amazon’s KPD site. Upload eBook (Amazon’s KDP Help area has guidance on this) – Amazon states that the cover image for the Amazon site should optimally be 500 x 1200 at 72 dpi. However, that results in a weirdly long and thin image. I use the cover image that’s in the book itself- a JPEG at 600x800 and that works just fine. Fill out the title, description, search words and other information which you should have prepared in Step 8.
And that’s it.... (unless I’ve forgotten anything?)
I’m assuming here that you will be using Microsoft Word and that you’ve done all the obvious things such as proof-read your manuscript, fixed any grammar errors, spellchecked the text etc. I’m, also assuming that you’ve read Amazon’s Kindle Formatting guide in the Help section of their KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) site.
Right, so what next?
1) Check that the formatting is correct (for example, that there are no funny fonts that shouldn’t be there).
2) If Track Changes is on (in Word’s Review panel), make sure that all changes are accepted (Changes/Accept all Changes in Document). Forget to do this and you may end up with text that you thought you’d altered or deleted being included in your published book!
3) Add Page Breaks. After every chapter, make sure there is a Page Break (keyboard shortcut is CTRL+ENTER). You can verify the breaks are where they are supposed to be by viewing hidden formatting (either click the Show/Hide icon in the Home/Paragraph panel of the Word ribbon or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT-* being sure to use the * on the 8 key at the top of your keyboard).
4) Add a Table of Contents (see HERE for guidance).
5) Add start and toc bookmarks so that Kindle will be able to find the start of the text and the Table Of Contents.
6) Create a cover image – 600 pixels wide, 800 pixels height in JPG format.
7) Save as Filtered HTML, and create Kindle-format book using Mobipocket Creator. See: Kindle Publishing, First Steps. Being sure to add the cover image and guides to go to the start and toc bookmarks (see Step 4 above).
8) Prepare all the Book details you’ll need to enter when you upload the book to Amazon. These include:
Book Name
Serial Title (if there is one) and Volume Number (if this is a series)
Description – the ‘blurb’ that will be shown under your book on Amazon.
Categories (the sections of the virtual bookstore into which the book naturally ‘fits’ – e.g. Humorous, Crime, Espionage)
Search keywords: Up to 7 keywords or phrases separated by commas that may help potential readers to find your book: e.g. murder, mystery, crime, detective, thriller, romance, British murder mystery
9) Go to the Bookshelf area of Amazon’s KPD site. Upload eBook (Amazon’s KDP Help area has guidance on this) – Amazon states that the cover image for the Amazon site should optimally be 500 x 1200 at 72 dpi. However, that results in a weirdly long and thin image. I use the cover image that’s in the book itself- a JPEG at 600x800 and that works just fine. Fill out the title, description, search words and other information which you should have prepared in Step 8.
And that’s it.... (unless I’ve forgotten anything?)
Monday, 20 June 2011
New 'super Kindle' on its way
Amazon will shortly launch a new 10-inch color Kindle tablet that will support streaming video and sell for around $399, according to a report recently released by investment firm Detwiler Fenton.
Code-named Hollywood, it is said that the new Kindle tablet will include a promotional video service with Amazon. Read More: CNET News
Monday, 13 June 2011
Paranormal Romance - Broken
Just heard that David H Burton has published a new paranormal romance, Broken, which you can download and read right now! David's a pretty prolific writer so if you get hooked on this one, be sure to check out his other novels too.
Anyhow, here's the blurb...
Anyhow, here's the blurb...
Three days before her twenty-fourth birthday, Katherine Gregory receives a letter from her deceased mother. It details a faery curse in which the eldest child in each generation will die in their twenty-fifth year.More info and links to the book on David's Blog.
Three days before her twenty-fourth birthday, a new love interest comes knocking, and her first love has returned - neither men are what they seem, and Katherine may have to choose between them.
Three days before her twenty-fourth birthday, Katherine must decide if this is all real, or if the strange visions she's been having are just a figment of her imagination.
The race to unravel the mystery begins, and Katherine must solve it - for any day after her birthday could be her last.
Friday, 20 May 2011
Cheap Kindle Books - How to find them!
There are lots of good value books available for Kindle, but just how the heck can you find them?
One simple way is to use the Jungle-Search advanced Amazon search tool at http://www.jungle-search.com. This lets you search the Amazon US, UK, Canada, German and France stores. You can select a category from a menu (for example click Kindle Store then Kindle eBooks) and search for eBooks within a specific price range, with a certain user rating and containing specified keywords.
So, for example, if you search in the category Kindle eBooks/Fiction with keywords “new romantic mascara” and a price range between 0.99 and 3 you will find my New Romantic Murder Mystery, ‘Killers In Mascara’... Hurrah! you are now (no doubt!) so overjoyed at your discovery that you immediately buy it and spend the next week happily reading it and recommending it to your friends. Well, I can hope, can’t I....?
Let’s suppose you now do the same search by replace the keywords with “dickens”. This time you’ll find various Charles Dickens Collections at bargain prices (he’s a pretty good writer too – though, curiously, he didn’t write much in the way of New Romantic Murder Mysteries).
At any rate, if you are looking for Kindle Books, this search tool may help you find what you are after more efficiently than the default Amazon search.
One simple way is to use the Jungle-Search advanced Amazon search tool at http://www.jungle-search.com. This lets you search the Amazon US, UK, Canada, German and France stores. You can select a category from a menu (for example click Kindle Store then Kindle eBooks) and search for eBooks within a specific price range, with a certain user rating and containing specified keywords.
So, for example, if you search in the category Kindle eBooks/Fiction with keywords “new romantic mascara” and a price range between 0.99 and 3 you will find my New Romantic Murder Mystery, ‘Killers In Mascara’... Hurrah! you are now (no doubt!) so overjoyed at your discovery that you immediately buy it and spend the next week happily reading it and recommending it to your friends. Well, I can hope, can’t I....?
Let’s suppose you now do the same search by replace the keywords with “dickens”. This time you’ll find various Charles Dickens Collections at bargain prices (he’s a pretty good writer too – though, curiously, he didn’t write much in the way of New Romantic Murder Mysteries).
At any rate, if you are looking for Kindle Books, this search tool may help you find what you are after more efficiently than the default Amazon search.
Amazon Kindle book sales overtake print titles
The digital-reading revolution is more than just a flash in the pan. It really does seem that ever more people prefer to read on the Kindle than on paper...
"Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books," Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement,"We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly," Mr Bezos added. "We've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years."
"Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books," Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement,"We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly," Mr Bezos added. "We've been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years."
See: Amazon sales of digital books for Kindle overtake print titles for first time - Telegraph
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
UK general title digital book sales soar to £16m in 2010
Sales of digital books are soaring in the UK, figures from the Publishers Association show. The association said that in 2010 sales of e-books and audio book downloads in the "general titles" category, which includes novels and consumer titles, shot up from £4m to £16m.Full story: BBC News
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