Smashwords will take your MS Word document and convert it to many eBook formats, such as HTML, Java, PDF, ePub, Mobi, etc. They will make your eBook available on their own website as well as distributing it to Amazon, Kobo, Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, and eReading apps for all mobile devices from iPhone to Blackberry to Android. The cost to do this is zilch. Author royalties range from 85% of net sales on Smashwords; 70.5% elsewhere. The catch: you have to go through the extremely tedious process of ensuring your manuscript conforms to Smashwords style guide. I am just about comatose from the process. Chocolate helped revive me, sort of, by this afternoon.

Although my brain injury necessitated reading and rereading the style guide over a period of weeks in order to absorb it, reviewing the steps and writing down which ones apply to me, setting SMART goals to get it done, being methodical in making each change, the process is a good one for anyone to follow because the task is tedious, and tediousness can lead to errors. I used to do this back in my consulting days when programming databases and debugging them. I’d look for one type of error or do one formatting thing at a time. For Lifeliner, I went through and fixed the double paragraphs and spacing (that is, look for double spaces, spaces at end of paragraphs) all at one time, then changed all the paragraphs as per the style guide, then worked on the exceptions, then changed the headings, and lastly changed the style of each chapters’ first paragraph. Because I used the NUCLEAR OPTION — I had only a PDF as the final version with all the proofing changes done, which I had to convert to basic text — I had to put back in all the italics and bold and centring. I did italics first, bold second. That way you don’t lose track of what you’re doing if you try to do italics and bold all in one go. The last thing I did was follow the steps for creating a linkable Table of Contents. My head hurt doing that, but the links worked when I tested them!

I have absolutely no idea if my methodical way has produced an acceptable DOC, I have yet to acquire a new eBook ISBN for it and submit it to Smashwords Meatgrinder, but at least I know the errors should be small (I hope!), I understand the process a little bit now, and I am one step closer to being able to create my own ePub. I will no longer be at the mercy of publishers when it comes to eBook versions of my work. Also, I used to do desktop publishing pre-injury; this is a natural extension of that work. I am not as interested in it as I was (in fact, not), but being able to do it is a good skill for an author to have.

Technorati Tags: Smashwords, eBook, Biography, Publishing, ePublishing

If you read my brief blog posts during the self-publishing phase of Lifeliner, you’d surmise I had a mostly good experience with iUniverse. There were a couple of odd things, like I wasn’t allowed to know the names of the editors who edited my book, but overall I found my Publishing Services Associate friendly, helpful, and professional. I liked how the editors helped me craft a better book. I liked that I had a chance to have Lifeliner‘s cover professionally designed. And I liked having the opportunity to have my book stocked in an Indigo bookstore in Toronto. After that though, things went downhill.

It all began when Author Solutions bought out iUniverse. My PSA couldn’t move with iUniverse to their new headquarters due to the burst housing bubble. My newly assigned marketing associate also left the company shortly after I contracted with iUniverse to use one of their publicists, and I wasn’t allowed to have her as my publicist (due to conflict of interest, they said). And in the midst of releasing and marketing Lifeliner, my lawsuit against the drivers who mucked me up emerged from one of its many long lulls into the final throes of resolution, which of course took months and months and months. Because I had little energy left over to market Lifeliner and to stay on top of the publicist’s and iUniverse’s efforts on my behalf, I relied on them to fulfill their contractual obligations, to do everything they said that they would.

iUniverse stated in their paperwork that they would do the following in their three-month publicity campaign:

The publicist…will contact the author the first day of the campaign to determine specific media target audiences and develop a plan.

A plan will be developed based on the following schedule:

Month 1

• Pitch magazines.
• Set up book events in author’s hometown and surrounding markets.
• Pitch to Amazon reviewers.
• Pitch to Top 100 Newspapers.

Month 2

• Continue to follow-up on all interested media pitched to date.
• Pitch to radio and television in local and regional area (talk, drive time, interview).
• Pitch to newspapers in local and regional area

Month 3

• Continue to follow-up with all interested media to date
• Pitch national wire services
• Pitch wire services
• Pitch all freelance writers

That’s pretty much the gist of the agreement. My publicist and I talked specifics about what kinds of magazines and because she was from the NE USA, I had to fill her in a bit about the media market here in southern Ontario, despite the fact that I wasn’t fully cognizant of all that is published round here. (Months later, when I’d recovered from the end of lawsuit, a quick Google search netted me a long list of newspapers, radio stations, and television stations in Ontario, a few in upper New York state, just across the border from Toronto.) My publicist didn’t set up book events because of my energy limitations but we did discuss one event that I set up myself, and she sent out an announcement to a couple of publicity places. It didn’t help that there was a problem with the timing of when to start the campaign because Indigo, to put it politely, bounced around the start date of when to stock Lifeliner in the World’s Biggest Bookstore (WBBS). I was also informed that Indigo would not tolerate me approaching them about having a book signing for Lifeliner, yet I suppose my publicist could’ve spoken to them, I don’t know. It didn’t happen anyway.

Aside from that item, the Month 1 obligations were fulfilled, well, except that 100 newspapers were not pitched to.

My publicist followed up on all her pitches over the three months of the campaign, and I received several Amazon reviews. I had had no idea book reviewers don’t just work for newspapers and magazines solely, but also post their reviews on Amazon and several other websites. Over Months 2 and 3, she also pitched to a few of the national newspapers and magazines (in addition to specialty ones in Month 1, including The Women’s Post, which was just not interested, sheesh), and to radio stations and Citytv in Toronto. The manager at WBBS told me that getting mentioned on CBC would help me sell books because their biggest customers listen to the CBC. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to pitch — though I tried on my own several months later — and my publicist was not familiar with how CBC worked, though she followed the website instructions. So that pretty much went nowhere. She pitched to community papers in Toronto but not regional newspapers in southern Ontario or upper New York state. I tried to do it myself months later but with my energy limitations and lack of knowledge, it was an impossible task. She did send out all the review copies I’d bought for the campaign to various magazines and reviewers. Of those, about 13% resulted in reviews of Lifeliner. I don’t know if that’s a good response rate or not.

The wire services pitched were of the web-based kind, not what I would consider national (like AP or CP). And if freelance writers were pitched, they were few in number.

With iUniverse in upheaval during this time, it was difficult to find out who my new marketing associate was and when I did find out, impossible to get a proper answer from her after our first e-mail exchange that I initiated in the brief moments of respite in the insurance company showdown. Of course, iUniverse had no problems billing me for postage for the publicity campaign. Even when I earned iUniverse’s Reader’s Choice award, no one e-mailed or called me to tell me this good news. I stumbled upon this fact when I was checking out my book page on iUniverse’s website. They again ignored my e-mails, even though all I wanted was the image of the RC logo to put on my website. You’d think they could at least respond to that.

Recently, I received a promotional e-mail from iUniverse. I was back in their good graces, I guess. And so that got me thinking again about the botched publicity campaign. I contacted the person who e-mailed me; she gave me the name of the guy who covers marketing for me; he, also a nice person, said he wasn’t familiar with my publicity contract, would look into it, and get back to me. Yup. You all know what that meant. Before we hung up, never to speak again, we also discussed getting Lifeliner into the Sony Reader Store (for eBooks) and onto Amazon Kindle. However, he said that would cost me. Apparently, iUniverse has a new deal where they’ll do the work for you, and you pay. Since I was already feeling like I’d overpaid for my less-than-promised publicity campaign, I wasn’t too interested in paying more. He never considered that he had a pissed-off customer who, being a writer, may one day grump about it online, and the best way to head that off was to make me happy by offering that deal for free as a make-up for my lousy experience. That kind of offer may also have upped the odds of me being a repeat customer. But clearly he was not too interested in resolving my issue and more interested in sending me regular promotional e-mails. Yup, great way to placate an unhappy customer.

Because of my previous posts on iUniverse, I heard from some unhappy iUniverse customers. One, distressingly, confirmed my 2008 experience of not being paid for books sold — basically, iUniverse under-reported sales. Because I happened to know just how many books sold through all
sources, I knew the numbers were off. iUniverse blamed a software
glitch. The same furious customer also informed me that iUniverse inaccurately reported how much they were discounting his book, meaning less royalty in his pocket, more in the retailers’. This was pretty much my beef about how they capitulated to Amazon without so much as polling their authors.

And so what began as a good experience, ended up with me feeling cheated, both on publicity and royalties. I have no intention of hiring iUniverse again, or, for that matter, any AuthorSolutions company. Jane Friedman in her recent blog post on AuthorSolutions says they are very focused on what their authors want. I beg to differ. Although when they do deliver, it’s worth it, I would advise any writer thinking of going this route to do it only if you’re a persistent little bugger who will not have any trouble sitting on them when they don’t deliver on what they promise. Meanwhile, I am going the trad route. For now.

To backtrack a bit, so you’ll have some context: awhile ago Amazon decided to improve its own business performance and that of BookSurge, a print-on-demand printer it owns, by demanding that companies like iUniverse use BookSurge only to print all books sold through Amazon and, as well, that they reduce the wholesale price for Amazon. The story is long, the authors massively pissed, some companies outraged, refusing to be bullied. But not so for iUniverse. Actually, I didn’t know what precisely iUniverse’s response was to being bullied. AuthorHouse, which bought or merged with iUniverse, issued a statement back in April, and that was the sum total of iUniverse’s communications with their authors. At the time, it sounded like so much nothing wrapped up in words, and I got caught up in other, more immediate problems and forgot about it. I would have expected AuthorHouse /iUniverse to muscle up with other POD publishers, but apparently not only is communication with authors tough for them, but also working with their rivals in order to defeat a bigger enemy is as well. Reading their words now, after at last seeing my monthly sales history, I realise they essentially said, “We negotiated alone, and we caved to Amazon’s demands.”

“We do not believe that it is ever in your interest to limit choice.”

In other words, “we did what we thought we had to in order to continue selling your book on Amazon.”

Whatever. When I saw how little I’d earned on a six-book Amazon sale, my
eyebrows rose. I compared the September sales history to old royalty
statements. I frowned. I calculated the per book income from Amazon
versus from Ingrams or iUniverse itself. I gasped. And then I picked up
the phone. The unfortunate who answered never hung up or ended the
call, never pushed back, well, maybe once, politely. When I vented to the suffering associate that perhaps iUniverse’s software snafu conveniently hid the full extent of their capitulation until things had calmed down, he replied that I was being a bit extreme. Maybe. I noted that they neglected to inform authors of the downward change in Amazon sales income, neatly avoiding a massive backflash from authors. Still, why would they keep silent on a 27 percent decrease in income from Amazon? Surely they’d expect the pig waste to hit the fan when authors started reading their royalty statements? Or perhaps they were counting on the notoriously bad business sense and lack of math skills of the stererotypical author?

Ultimately the associate could do nothing about it. And as I told him, I’d learnt that one needed exceptional persistence to reach and to get anywhere with management, so I wasn’t going to bother. I’d just blog about it.

OK, he said. (Like that would make any diff.)

So here I am blogging, the equivalent of yelling into a moving tornado, telling you how iUniverse now sells my book to Amazon at 47% of the cover price, while they continue to sell it to distributors and other retailers at 64% of the cover price, wondering if that will make any difference to where you shop for books. Amazon’s sweet deal means that although my royalty percentage remains constant, I receive less in absolute dollars from Amazon sales.

This tactic is how Amazon has increased its annual revenues by $4 billion from 2006 to 2007 and continues to increase it this year: on the backs of authors like me. While this booming company now saves itself $2.85 each time it buys a copy of my book — giving itself wiggle room if they want to sell it for less than the competition, but in reality having increased its profit margin by that amount as you, its customer, does not see that discount –  it has robbed me of 57 cents per book. And I got zippo say in this drop.

The guy on the phone tried to mollify me by saying that the figures on the monthly sales reports are not the final say and are subject to change on the quarterly royalty statement, whatever that means. Because let’s face it, iUniverse isn’t about to renegotiate its contract with Amazon back to the fairer deal or pay me what I had contracted with them to receive. This is the final straw for me. Ever since the buyout/merge with AuthorHouse, iUniverse has become noncommunicative and its specialty associates here today, gone tomorrow. And now this! I really cannot recommend iUniverse to any author musing about self-publishing nor will I use them for my next book. I will, in fact, actively recommend against AuthorHouse and iUniverse to anyone who is thinking about self-publishing. I am extremely disappointed in both iUniverse and Amazon. But as Kassia Krozser on Booksquare wrote, “Businesses are not nice, fuzzy creatures that cuddle with you in the dark of the night and believe in fairy tales.” Not even when they’re supposed to be your partner in publishing.

I could click Historical Sales, but it’s stuck at July. Yup, very useful to be up to 3 months behind in my sales numbers when trying to decide if my current marketing methods are working or not. The only feedback I have is the Amazon sales rank. If the number grows smaller, then I made some sales, but whether 1 or 10 copies I have no idea. If the number grows larger, then I know the book is not selling. Meanwhile the copy at Book  City continues to sit in the Biography section as people go in, can’t find it, and walk out again without asking the very nice sales people for help in finding it. The sales folks at book chains don’t bite you know, unlike small bookstore owners. But my book isn’t in small bookstores.

I could click Royalty statements but they’re only updated way back at Q2 (April, May, June). So how are my sales going? Don’t know, but I do know that if people pass on their copies instead of recommending to others to buy Lifeliner, then there are no sales. And I do know that without aggressive marketing on my part, which requires lots of energy and good health, then there are no sales. So I’m going to try and very slowly send out press releases to attract radio interviews. And I also have on my to-do list to do some sort of Christmas marketing effort. In the meantime, I’ll try not to get frustrated with the book business expecting me to be paid months and months later and to work in a vacuum of information.

I’ve been waiting with great anticipation for when Lifeliner will be stocked at my Indigo bookstore of choice. They asked me for my top three choices, and this week I finally got the good news!

Lifeliner will be stocked at Indigo — Bay & Bloor, starting Tuesday, February 19! Whoo hoo!! Now, all I have to do is encourage people to go to Indigo in the Manulife Centre at 55 Bloor Street West, starting after Valentine’s Day, to buy Lifeliner. Easy? Nope! But a good challenge!!

Meanwhile, to fill in that wait, local bookstores are supposed to order Lifeliner for you upon request. The operative word here is “supposed.”

One person I know called several Indigo or Chapters stores about ordering a copy of Lifeliner, and to a one, they all said order it online. This replicated the experiences of several others who’d tried to request it through their local bookstore. Now yes, my book is self-published and yes, it’s POD, which means the bookstore cannot return it once ordered, but it is also available through their wholesaler, just like any traditionally published book. And if someone requests a copy, especially at this early stage in the book’s release, they’re not likely to leave it at the counter. But bookstores are used to being able to return their merchandise and are hesitant to order nonreturnable books. They like the comfort of being able to return books that do not sell; but nonreturnable books serve an author well because each sale (to a bookstore) is final and each sale generates a royalty that won’t be reversed down the road, which can happen to authors with traditional publishers.

In the end, the decision to order a book upon request or not comes down to the bookstore manager. I’d heard that Americans had different experiences with different Barnes & Noble stores — the equivalent to Chapters Indigo in the States — depending on the manager. Some managers welcome iUniverse authors and will happily order their books for customers upon request, whereas others are not too pleased to see them. Here in Canada, the same holds true. Whether or not a Chapters or Indigo store will order Lifeliner for you is up to each manager; to compound the problem, the managers won’t even know that my book will appear in an Indigo store as my title has not yet been submitted to the chain’s buyer.

So my best advice at this point is that if you or someone you know would like to buy a copy of Lifeliner, go with your favourite online bookstore and click on its link in the right sidebar.

I waited in hyper anticipation for that e-mail; finally it came. That e-mail asked me to confirm where to ship my author copies. And now it’s just a matter of waiting patiently for the shipper to transport my copies across the border to my place. Only when I rip open the box and hold a copy in my hot little hand and verify (I hope!) that there are no printer errors is the book ready for sale.

At one point during this very long process, I never thought I’d see this day, and suddenly it’s here.

The spelling of the award Judy received really challenges my brain. I have to check the spelling every single time I see the word, and when I think I finally have it right, it’s wrong! That was error #1. At least it was spelled correctly in the chapter title, but I couldn’t believe somewhere along the line it had become misspelled in the text and I hadn’t caught it earlier. Well, we’re all human, eh? Even me!

So after I decided to let that go and not request iUniverse to fix it, I came across error #2. And this one was truly aggravating. I had asked the proofreader to remove the periods in the degrees after one of the doctor’s names, to be consistent with the style for all the other docs. Hmmm…I’d better back up a little. iUniverse sends you this nifty proof form where you type in the page #, paragraph #, and line #; then the way it looks now; the way you want it to read; and lastly explicit instructions on what you’re changing. You can use the form in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect. Both there programs are very helpful in the same way, that is, they automatically change “(C)” to a copyright symbol. Except I didn’t want a copyright symbol after the degrees, I wanted (C). I changed it back. The program changed it back somewhere along the line, and I missed it. And so that’s what the proofreader did — removed the periods and changed the (C) to a copyright symbol. Arrrrrrggggghhhhhh!

I’ve calmed down now. My PSA, Mike, came to the rescue and arranged to have the changes made with no huge hit on my wallet. So the book is off to production, and the next time I hear from iUniverse, it will be to see the final thing, the actual book. Exciting!!!

iUniverse sent me PDF files for the paperback cover, the hardcover, and the book block (the internals). They looked very good. I was impressed with how they styled my chapter titles and harmonized the spine and back cover with the front cover. They made one small change to the front cover — my name is now in dark blue instead of black. Much nicer.

Now, I just need to finish off the marketing plan. The pressure is off though because I’m hiring a publicist to promote the book for me. For 3 months anyway.