Hello, Everyone! Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy with family, writing, and moving! But here’s a great article I read today–I think you’ll like it, too!
Source: Quitting Social Media
Category: Self-Publishing/Marketing
Update on Self-Publishing, Part 3
Hello family, friends and poetry lovers! Sorry I’ve been away so long. I’ve been editing/correcting/illustrating/polishing my picture books and middle grade novel for Book Expo America 2015. Held at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC May 27th – 30th, it’s the biggest book fair in the US. Agents, publishers and book buyers from all over the world will attend and (hopefully) buy foreign and translation rights to hundreds (thousands?) of new books. The country of honor this year is China, which is really exciting. It will be fun to see what the Chinese think of American writers!
What makes this especially exciting for me is that it’s the first time any of my books will appear there. And, since my books are self-published, it’s wonderful to have an agent representing them. This is a boon for all self-publishers, because it shows the publishing community is finally starting to recognize them. Woo-hoo!
I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, happy spring, everyone!
Lessons from a Failed KDP Select Free Promo
Useful Tips for Self-Published Authors
In the new year, I used three of my KDP free days to promote the first book in The Conjurors Series, The Society of Imaginary Friends. I was determined to put everything I had into the campaign in order to maximize downloads of my free book and hopefully convince readers to continue with my series. I’ve been exclusively selling my books through Amazon since I began self-publishing, and have been toying with the idea of making my books available with other retailers (and thereby enabling the first book in the series to be perma free). This promotion was my final push to see if I could get a serious number of downloads of my free book using Amazon alone.
I’ve never spent more time (or money) promoting my free days, than this round. I submitted my book’s info to more than 70 sites that list free ebooks, and paid for placement on…
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Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part 2
Greetings, friends, readers, and fellow writers. Just wanted to let you know I’m still trying to publish my picture books on amazon’s createspace. So far, I’ve exported the files from my IPAD–where I created them as epub files on Apple’s Book Creator–to my I MAC. At first I exported them as PDFs, but this didn’t work well because once I imported the files to createspace, the images turned out to be less than the 300 DPI CS recommends. So I asked my son to help me increase the resolution on my books. He was able to do this, but I’m not sure how. I think he used Adobe Acrobat Professional to convert the raw epub files into PDFs that were higher quality (more DPI) than the PDFs I’d exported directly from BookCreator on my IPAD.
The first book–Isabel Plum: Ichthyologist–looks good now, but it has a couple of mistakes/typos/misaligned words I have to fix. Problem is I don’t know where to fix them. Surely not on the PDFs (they’re inalterable, right?). So I need to find the raw epub file he uploaded to adobe acrobat before converting it to a PDF. Sure, I know where the epub file is, but does this mean I fix the original, resend it to my Macbook and then ask my son to reconvert the whole thing to a new PDF using adobe acrobat to produce good quality (at least 300 DPI) images?
I hope this makes sense to you, fellow readers and writers. If it does, you probably know more about these technical issues than I do. I just hope that by writing about my difficulties those of you with similar problems will feel encouraged. I’m NOT gonna give up. I’m not. I just wish this stuff weren’t so hard. I want to get back to writing, to illustrating, to actually completing my books.
Goodbye for now–and happy weekend.
Hello, friends–getting ready for Festifall!
Julie Krantz 