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BB eBooks Newsletter – May 23, 2013
Dear Friend,
How’s your writing schedule been this month of May? Don’t forget that the summer reading season is coming soon, so it’s a great time to publish those books so your fans can enjoy a nice read during their vacations.
Digital Book Signing
At BB eBooks, we have been working very hard on developing a new platform that will allow our clients to personal inscribe eBooks. It is not quite the right time to officially announce the grand opening ceremony, but we promise to have something ready for you soon. The reason why we want to offer this to you is we would like to maximize the potential in your brand (yourself as an author) and product (eBooks). With our new platform, it will be a one-stop solution to bring you closer to your fans. According to Digital Book World, dedicated readers love digital book signing so they can post signed eBooks on their social media pages. Your digital autograph can build a “valuable relationship” with your reader.
Serializing Your Novels
Launching serialized novels can give you flexibility to manipulate “revelations” that entice readers to wait for your next eBook. Brondt Kamffer logically adjusts his eBook prices that start from $0.99 to $3.99. His sixth book on Amazon manages to climb the bestseller. Hugh Howey set another great example, his Wool Omnibus series, of collecting materials to write a full-length novel for public audience. Red Phoenix, bestselling erotica author, succeeds in serializing her Brie series into different novellettes. BB eBooks is very proud to have her as a client.
If you would like us to split up your big novel into smaller eBooks (novellas/novellettes/short stories), this is very simple for us and can be done with a very small fee. Please contact us so that we can help you in this endeavor.
Genre-Tweaking Your Way to the Bestseller List
Looking for a way to get onto Amazon’s bestseller lists? David Gaughran explains how you can tweak the genres to accomplish that goal. If you are stuck with your native genre and the sales are not exceeding your expectations, perhaps it is time to do something. David proposes simple logic behind tweaking your genre so that you stand a higher chance to be discovered in a less populated genre. This sound advice is doable to mobilize your slow sales report. However, a rule of thumb is to stay true to your genre and not go beyond what is not your style.
Preventing Formatting Errors
To prevent minor formatting errors from ruining your writing, we’d like to point out certain grammatical errors authors should avoid. Incorrect use of spaces, em dashes and hyphens, straight up and down quotes, double periods can lead to undesirable reviews. Our full guidelines are published here, and we use some programs we wrote in our shop to help track down these pesky snafus when we format your eBook for you. Although, if you have the budget, we highly recommend you hire a professional editor to make sure your writing is perfect for readers. We recommend Prof. Brennan Kraxberger, one of our clients who recently launched a professional editing service, to help get your book looking like a million bucks.
Draft2Digital Review
To clarify lots of questions circulating Draft2Digital, we got our hands dirty to test their free publishing tools. Our initial impression is D2D seems to have a lot of potential to compete with the other major eBook aggregator—Smashwords. The latter belts out nasty error messages that discourages indie authors from publishing eBooks. Although they recently announced direct EPUB submission in December 2012, many problems still exist. D2D might fill this gap of lifting technical difficulties from authors’ chest. Setting up your profile is a breeze on the platform but the smooth transition ends when the first conversion result comes in. Dead links in the Table of Contents are the first unsatisfactory outcome that will spell further problems when you upload to Amazon for sales. The payment method is very generous for international authors as they can be paid their royalties directly through their bank accounts or PayPal. We tried to convert a Word .docx to EPUB and PDF-and the problems were aplenty. Luckily, you can upload an EPUB directly to Draft2Digital to distribute to iTunes, Kobo, and Nook. Please check them out here.
For our clients, the EPUB that we send you as part of your conversion package will work great on Draft2Digital. There is no need to add a dull statement about “Draft2Digital Edition” on the title page like you do with Smashwords.
Stephen King’s Print-Only Decision
Last and most certainly least, Stephen King’s latest decision to release a print-only version of his latest novel is not warmly welcomed by eBook readers. Although the debate whether print or digital reading medium is better still continues, it seems King’s experimental decision is contradictory in itself. He wants to support the brick and mortar shops, but his latest novel is already on Amazon for pre-order so that they can further offer 40% price reduction to compete with physical bookstores. Unsurprisingly, certain readers will attempt to jailbreak the limited offer and read the book in digital format (scanned copies of the print version will most likely be on torrent sites within hours). Time will tell how he will respond to the situation…
While we hope all of you reach the fame and fortune of Stephen King, we do advise not making “political statements” with your publishing. Rather, we recommend publishing both an eBook and print book edition. BB eBooks is happy to help you with both of these options which will satisfy all possible readers.
Yours sincerely,
The BB eBooks Team
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