Selling your books on Amazon Kindle

If you want your books available on the Kindle ebook reader platform, you need to:
upload a PDF of your book on Amazon, and set the Kindle selling price. Ask your publisher for a PDF of the final book if you don't already have it.

Here's the hard-to-find link to the digital text platform upload area:
https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin.

Happy New Year ~ 2009

This blog has attracted over 4,500 readers in its first year. Thank you all for your interest. We're all happy to bid goodbye to a year full of sour news, bad weather and a sinking economy. Here's to a new President, a renewed hope in America, and good times in 2009 with friends, family, great books and movies to enrich our spirit.

Wherever you are, please remember to support your local economy. The merchants and stores support you with tax dollars, employ your neighbors, and invest in your community. Show your appreciation by supporting their business. And remember to support your fellow artists & authors in their endeavors. The entrepreneurial spirit thrives in America and around the world.

Read globally ~ Shop locally

Google Book Search

As you may be aware, Google created a book database, including generous excerpts of most author's works. On October 28, 2008 the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google announced the landmark settlement of Authors Guild v. Google.

If your books are available at google.com/books, you might want to go to the lawsuit settlement page, and fill in your contact information. That's how you'll be notified and compensated for any copyright infringement.


Read more about how the settlement works here.

Good excuse of the week...

This from Poynter.org:

The "best" of 2008's media errors and corrections


It's Regret the Error's annual round-up, with this year's "correction of the year" award going to Dave Barry for this explanation:

In yesterday's column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.

Ann Patchett essay in The Atlantic

EXCERPT:

"And then there’s this: if my house were burning down, the one thing I’d rush in to save would be my copy of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, which I had signed at the first author reading I ever attended, the year that I was 16 and the author was 70. I could discourse endlessly on why my books are in no way improved by my signature, and my words are just the same on the page whether or not I’ve read them aloud. And while I know better than anyone that I am no Eudora Welty, I know how profoundly I was shaken to see her, how I felt that my book had been transformed by the touch of her hands."

--- Ann Patchett

The December 2008 Atlantic has an excellent essay by Ann Patchett on book tours.

Taking Obama's "Yes We Can" to new heights

MediaBistro.com reports Obama Campaign Photo Book Is Pre-Sale Hit
The first printing of Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign, the book of Scout Tufankjian's campaign trail photos, is a pre-publication hit for powerHouse Books. The publisher reports that it has sold out the 55,000-copy first edition of the book nearly a month before its scheduled mid-December release date. A second printing of 25,000 copies has been ordered to arrive at the same time.

Self-publishing in a big way: Trader Joe's cookbook

Why didn't we think of this? A Trader Joe's cookbook.

A Wall St. Journal article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg notes:
"Two women who know their way around the aisles at Trader Joe's have borrowed the supermarket store's name and are making a splash with a cookbook that treats the retailer's offerings as a prep line for working moms who want to serve home-cooked meals.

Few self-published books amount to much commercially, but the authors say "Cooking with All Things Trader Joe's" has already sold 20,000 copies since its first printing in November 2007. Borders Group Inc. helped arrange for national distribution and stocks the title in nearly all of its 522 superstores.

Now the two authors, who met as undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have restocked another 50,000, of which they have shipped 15,000. They hope to strike it big this holiday season. Cookbook sales are primarily driven by chefs featured on the Food Network. The number of cookbook titles declined to 2,673 in 2007 from 3,062 in 2005, according to Books in Print, which is owned by R.R. Bowker, a provider of bibliographic information.

"People laugh at how many we printed, but we didn't want to run out," says Wona Miniati, who co-wrote the book with Deana Gunn. Both women have two children and live in California. The book was originally Ms. Gunn's idea; she initially shipped orders directly from her garage in Encinitas, north of San Diego.

The cookbook was picked up by Borders after it received a mention in the Sacramento Bee last December. Readers began asking for the book at a Sacramento Borders store, and the staff ordered some copies. When sales took off, news filtered back to company headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich.

It's unclear how many books are self-published in the U.S. these days, although Lulu Inc, a print-on-demand publisher based in Raleigh, N.C., claims to have printed 475,000 titles in the U.S. since 2002."

Another nice award for "Release Your Writing"

Release Your Writing was chosen as a finalist in the
National Best Books 2008 Awards,
Business: Writing & Publishing category,
sponsored by USA Book News!

Author victory over Google

There's money coming your way...

Similar to Amazon's 'search inside the book feature,' the ambitious people at Google have been busy making electronic copies of OUR books, and making them available for full online searching. It's part of their very aggressive program of digitizing all the print content, from the British Library Archives, to Harvard, to our books. Having Google creep toward becoming THE repository of all printed matter makes many of us uncomfortable, but now the courts agree they owe us something for the rights they "borrow" to our works.

This from ASJA.org
"Some of the books were in the public domain but many others were not. Google digitized the lot, without so much as a nod to authors' copyright protections. The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and several individuals filed suit to stop this blatant piracy.

Yesterday the parties announced a settlement that will serve both writers and Google. Terms of the settlement still have to be approved by the court, but assuming it happens, writers who own the rights to scanned books should get at least $60 per work, depending on how many authors make claims. (The total settlement amount is $45 million.)"

Details on how authors can file claims will be available in a few months. In the meantime, it's all good news for us.

National Novel Writing Month is upon us

The fun never stops over at nanowrimo.org - that's the home of National Novel Writing Month and that's where you should be if you really want to write. The month of November is dedicated to helping writers write, by logging your daily production and racing through the month. Can you write 50,000 words by the end of November?

While the goal is to write a nove, you can use it anyway you wish - an article a day? outline for a non-fiction book? character development? It's waiting for you ... Give it a try... Release your writing!

Does your book need a "do-over" for 2009?

One advantage of print-on-demand (POD) is that you can change your book if you wish. You might want to issue a new edition, correct a serious problem, or re-do the cover. POD offers you that flexibility. Depending on the firm you use, you may incur a new set-up charge, and of course, you'd pay a small fee for a new cover layout. But if you feel you're missing your target audience, it's better to spruce up the book than have regrets. By using POD you're not locked into a 2,500 copy print-run, or sitting on a lifetime supply of a book that doesn't address the market's needs.

Keep in mind, your book was issued with an ISBN, the number which makes it a unique registered object. So you can not alter these features under the same ISBN:

title
binding size
trim color
interior color

Also, if you change text, move or replace chapters, or change the cover, it is considered a new edition requiring a new ISBN. With most POD firms, the cost of the new ISBN is included in the set-up fee.

What will you be known for?

There are a lot of famous writers in the world, known for outstanding works, but one obituary in the Chicago Tribune today cited a writer for quite a distinction.

Mr. [James] Crumley published eleven books, the best-known of which is "The Last Good Kiss" (1978), whose opening line has been widely called the best in crime fiction:

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

Those 38 words, according to Crumley took him eight years to write.
So before we all leave this world, let's take the time to make our writing memorable.

Track your blogs & books

Do you know which words and phrases will drive traffic to your blog or website?

You can find out by using www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com to see what results come up when people search for sites like yours.

If you want to come up with a new domain name that will be readily found, or even better - if you are choosing a book title - use this free service to see how well it would rank.

I've been told again and again that I did the right thing by having a domain name and book title match: Release Your Writing and releaseyourwriting.com works double-time driving traffic to my web site, to this blog, and to steadily growing book sales.

To use www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com, type in the search phrase you expect people would use when looking for your site. It then calculates the average number of expected searches on that term per day.

More options for self-publishing and print-on-demand

This excerpt is from the 9/03/08 New York Times. I've placed a link to the full article below.

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: September 3, 2008

Hundreds of small, independent publishers will have easier access to digital book technology under a new service offered by Perseus Books Group, the result of agreements between it and more than a half-dozen technology companies, Perseus is expected to announce on Thursday.

The new service, called Constellation, will allow independent publishers to make use of electronic readers, digital book search, print-on-demand and other digital formats at rates negotiated by Perseus on their behalf. Unlike large publishers, small ones typically lack the resources to use digital technology and as a result often bypass it altogether.

David Steinberger, the president and chief executive of Perseus, said that by using Constellation independent publishers could make their books quickly available in several digital formats, allowing them to compete on the same technological level and with the same speed and flexibility as larger companies. Many publishing analysts see digital technology as one of the few major growth areas in the book industry.

Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com have features that allow consumers to read or search inside a book, and such tools are known to improve sales; digital printing technology allows publishers to produce books when they become suddenly and unexpectedly in demand.

... read full article