distribution | Meredith Mansfield, Author

Posts Tagged ‘distribution’

Writer’s Nerves

Posted in writing, tagged distribution, fantasy, marketing, series, writing on May 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »

It’s an occupational hazard. We can’t help it. We obsess over things.

I had no sooner pushed the publish button for BECOME: BROTHERS on Pronoun,

Brothers

than I noticed I had gotten a three-star review on it on Amazon. And, of course, that makes me all kinds of nervous about this being the book I’m leading off with in going wide.

Now, this isn’t a rant about that review. It’s a fair review, based on that reader’s experience and expectations of the story. And, to be honest, I knew I was taking a bit of a risk leading off with a novella to start an epic fantasy series. That’s not usual. It’s just what seemed to work best for this story, for two reasons.

All my attempts to shoehorn this part of the story into the bigger story line just didn’t work and
I really believe that the relationship between this brothers is crucial for the main story–which will involve a certain betrayal of the trust they built in this novella.

Fortunately, there’s something I can do about that.

The Dual Magics series will need very little formatting work before I can upload that to Pronoun, too. THE SHAMAN’S CURSE

will need very little work before I can upload it, too. Really just change the links from Amazon to universal links and a couple of other quick things and then compile the .epub and .mobi files. In fact, as of tomorrow, the first three books in the Dual Magics series will be out of Kindle Unlimited, so I can proceed with that. Though the rest of the series will have to wait until the end of June. Considering that readers on Amazon had to wait a whole year, one month doesn’t seem like it’d be too long.

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Going Wide: The Choices and the Trial Run . . . Maybe

Posted in writing, tagged distribution, fantasy, marketing, research, writing on May 28, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Okay, so it’s time the rubber met the road.

The choices for going wide are:

Do it myself everywhere. This unquestionably gives me the most control. It’s also the most work–from having to upload to five major platforms, maintain the same changes on all platforms, and deal with accounting from all five platforms. Add to that that it’s very difficult to impossible to get onto GooglePlay this way at all. And, again, very difficult to upload to Apple iBooks at all without a Mac. So, this one’s a non-starter.
Smashwords. This one would be easy. About half my books are already there, where I unpublished them when I decided to give Kindle Unlimited a try. Smashwords would get me in everywhere but GooglePlay with one click, plus a host of smaller retailers and potentially libraries (ebooks). But, you can’t get around the meatgrinder. And I’ve been trying to do more professional formatting for my ebooks, most of which would likely be lost.
Pronoun. Pronoun currently only distributes to the five biggest retailers–Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks, GooglePlay, and Kobo (no particular order, except Amazon is still top dog in this market). They can even get better royalties for ebooks priced outside Amazon’s preferred $2.99 – $9.99 price range.
Draft2Digital. D2D distributes to all the major markets except GooglePlay and a few of the smaller ones (though not as many as Smashwords). Unlike either Smashwords or Pronoun, they will pay by direct deposit rather than through PayPal. (I had a bad experience with PayPal years ago and I’ve been a little leery of it ever since. I have an account, but it is very deliberately not linked to my bank account. I’d probably have to change that if I start making more than nominal money in those other markets–unless I use D2D, of course.)

In the end, the only real way to tell is probably to give it a try. So, I started yesterday trying to publish BECOME: BROTHERS

through Pronoun (because it’ll probably always be priced lower than the level at which Amazon allows 70% royalties–except through Pronoun.) At first, of course, I’d have to publish everywhere but Amazon through Pronoun and eventually switch over there, too.

I still haven’t managed that. A certain amount of reformatting was to be expected. At the very least, I expected to have to remove all links to Amazon. Pronoun wants to supply your title page, copyright page and table of contents themselves. They provide all of six “professional” formats to choose from. None of which really fit epic fantasy and none of them appear to support a two-level table of contents, either. They do, however, allow you to bypass this by uploading your own .epub and .mobi files.

There was an unexpected blip when their processor objected to the file name of the embedded font I used for chapter headings (the same font I used on the cover) because it had spaces in it. With some help from Facebook friends, I got past that. But I have no idea what they are doing–or not doing–with the .mobi file. Only that they don’t acknowledge that I’ve uploaded it–five times–and won’t let me publish without it, even though they won’t be publishing to Amazon through them initially. And, there’s no support until Tuesday, because this is a holiday weekend.

Say what you like about the zon, I don’t care what day it is or what time of day, you can get support from someone. Might not be the most senior person, but there’s someone there. And, once, I had a technical problem with Smashwords on a holiday weekend. I sent an email through the contact form and got an answer from the president of the company, since everyone else was out of the office. So . . . there’s that.

I’m more than a tiny bit frustrated. The next step appears to be to take the next book on the conveyor belt, BLOOD WILL TELL,

give it that promised brush up, and see what happens with D2D. Then I can fairly make a choice between the two.

At the least, I’ve now got universal links for all my current books. So, I accomplished that much. (By the way, that service, Books2Read, is offered by D2D.)

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Motivation

Posted in writing, tagged distribution, fantasy, first drafts, marketing, research, Writer's Block, writing on May 17, 2017| 2 Comments »

Right now, I seem to be suffering from a severe lack of motivation concerning my writing. I’m not entirely sure why.

It could be the dismal reports from Amazon, lately. If I had any doubt that page flip was eating me alive, this chart put them to rest.That’s page reads as a percent of my royalty income (in the U.S. only). For months the number stayed in a small range. The upward swing corresponds to the release of WAR OF MAGIC. Then, after December–when, perhaps, people got new reading devices that were page-flip enabled–page reads from Kindle Unlimited start to drop like a rock. This is why I’m pulling my books out of KU. Yeah, that could have something to do with my motivation.
It could be related to the struggle I had finding my way into this story. I still believe in this story, but it’s true that it took me longer and more tries to find a way to tell works–I hope. I tried telling it chronologically, but that just took too long to get to the main story line. I tried using flashbacks, but that was distracting–and still took to long to get to the main story line. I finally settled on starting with the novella to get in the story of the relationship between these two brothers which is going to be important to the rest of the story. But I am still just a little nervous about starting an epic fantasy series with a novella. That doesn’t exactly comport with reader expectations for the genre.
Or, it could just be burn out. That happens. The good news is that it’s always temporary. But sometimes we all do need to take a break, even writers.

Or, of course, there’s nothing preventing it from being a combination of all three.

And, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter which it is. What matters is breaking through it. And, one thing I know: the only way to do that is to write.

So, here are my options:

Try to power through on BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.
I have another epic fantasy series on the back burner, currently titled MAGE STORM. It should be a four-book series. I could work on that.
Something altogether else, like my Cinderella retelling.

Also, since I’m pulling my books out of Kindle Unlimited, I still need to research exactly how I’m going to go about taking them to a wider distribution.

Then too, because of the complications of the boxed sets, the first books that will be ready to go wide are the Chimeria series.

But I want to run another editing pass through them first. So, there’s that to work on, too.

Now, all it takes is a bit of discipline to get back on track.

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Next Steps

Posted in writing, tagged distribution, epublishing, fantasy, marketing, research, writing on April 26, 2017| 2 Comments »

Busy day, mostly because I had to reschedule things I would normally do tomorrow. But there’s something extra I have to do for work tomorrow. So . . .

The next logical step in planning to remove my books from Kindle Unlimited and go to a wider distribution is figuring out exactly how I’m going to do that.

When my books were available widely before, I mostly used Smashwords for distribution other than at Amazon. There are other options for the same service now, but the main one is still Draft2Digital, just as it was then. There are pros and cons to both services and I have to delve a lot deeper into that before I make my choice.

Of course, the other option is to handle the distribution to fewer, selected markets myself. That means formatting for each different market. Tracking sales and payments in several different places. And, for the Apple iBookstore, which is probably the second biggest market after Amazon, finding a way to deal with an interface that is built to only work with Macs from a PC.

Then, of course, there’s the whole complexity of how to manage and coordinate promotions with so many different markets. There’s no question Kindle Select makes that easier. But it’s just not feasible to stay exclusive with Amazon anymore. Not with page flip intentionally under-counting page reads–and therefore payment to authors. And yes, I’ve seen too much circumstantial evidence to doubt that that’s exactly what’s happening.

So, in addition to trying to move ahead on BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING

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