Who knows without reports?

My reports from KDP are odd. Google says KDP is "experiencing intermittent functionality
issues " - to me that means faults - the KDP platform is operational but authors have
reported books getting stuck in the review/draft phases.

There's also delayed reporting which is my major concern.

Google reports faults and complaints across the whole KDP platform. I know one or two of
their data centres have suffered bomb damage during the raids on Saudi and Bahrain and I can understand that would cause problems.

They may not be operating 100% but at least I am not losing money - except for royalties
which I may not have earned anyway. Who knows without reports?

My cynical side

  New Year is the time for Book Lists.

Books we should have read in the past year, and books we should look out for in the coming year.

I have to confess I almost never find anything on those lists that I have read or will likely read. I don't know who puts these lists together but I suspect it may be  people who a) work in the wide book world b) wish to promote certain books that suit their taste but not that of anyone else. I am pretty sure it won't be put together on the highest number of book sales. It may well be put together on how much a publisher is willing to pay to have it listed but that's my cynical side showing through.

Does anyone find strange things happening in the IT world? My heart has skipped several times over this holiday period when going to a site I use almost daily I found it has changed it's format. Sometimes it has stayed in the new format and sometimes it has reverted to its normal form after a day or two. Either way it is distressing  (not to a life threatening degree!) - perhaps I should have said annoying, which is more true to my feeling at the time - because then I have to spend time figuring out what has changed and how to deal with it. If the site deals with statistics then it is doubly annoying because years of figures can be lost. 

I've found that changing the title of an e-book on KDP means loss of sales reportage, reads, everything  prior to the date the change was made.  Had I known that I would have taken precautions, might not have made the change at all. Perhaps I ought to have realised it would happen. But I didn't, so I thought I would warn others.

Matho never went to Hampton Court

 

Re-branding completed on the Matho Spirston Saga! Fair Border Bride is now officially the prequel to the trilogy, and is now priced at just 99p. Good news for anyone who likes reading historical fiction.

Matho never went to Hampton Court but he may get there in the future. Not that I think Henry VIII would be pleased to see him. Perhaps he'd better stay north of the border now.

Working on a new murder mystery and trying to disentangle all the threads I had. I started it some time ago and got myself in  a muddle, so left it alone for a while and wrote a romance which happily is doing quite well. This new book may well be called Saturday Morning Murder.

Christmas is almost upon us, and everything is likely to go quiet for a while. Either that or the internet will explode! Whichever it proves to be - Have a wonderful Festive Season!

Hints and tips on publishing a book with KDP

This is an aid memoire for me in case I decide to do it again, but i thought others might be interested, which is why it is here on my blog. Of course, by the time I decide I want to do it again, the KDP structure might have changed….but currently, this is the link to the User Guide:
https://tinyurl.com/y7ecsj4d

 You ought to read it before you start! 
By using the headings function on your computer you can format every chapter heading as Heading 1, and this makes it very easy for the system to produce a table of contents for you. You need the cleanest story before you commit to KDP - checked for mistakes and for basics such as the same font throughout, correct  punctuation, paragraph spacing.  Load Kindle Create to your computer from the KDP site and copy and paste your story into it. 

Be patient and wait for it to do the basic formatting. Then have a look at the style choices. There is not much in the way of instruction, but the system works quite well if you use trial and error. There are 4 options for a basic style, and once you have chosen the one you prefer, your story will be formatted in that style. It isn’t fixed in stone. You can choose again and again until you decide which is the one for you. 

You can make more decisions about font and size, dropped caps, separators (scene break symbols). It is fun to see what you can do, but eventually you will be ready to move on; once you are absolutely certain you have everything as you intended,  press the PUBLISH button and you get a version saved into your files identified by a brown circle. This is what you upload on the normal KDP site - the one you may have used before to self publish. Upload your cover separately, as you used to, and they will be matched together. This had me puzzled for a while until I understood the cover still went through separately.

Now for the paperback. Once the Kindle is complete, KDP offer to do your paperback as well. Take the offer, as it makes it easier than doing it from scratch. Not all the e-book style formats are available, but a good few are. You can still have dropped caps, but the separators revert to ***. 

Doing the content is fairly straight forward, but it is best to decide the page size before you begin. A 6”x9” paperback is popular these days. Remember the margins will dictate the number of pages in your book, so you may need to fiddle with them on your original file until you get what you want. The number of pages dictates the size of the spine (and also the cost!) when it comes to the cover, so that is important, too. My last effort had margins so wide my paperback looked like a large-print version.

You don’t need a Contents page in a paperback, but you do need page numbers. Leave the front matter pages unnumbered; make a section break on the final front matter page, do not link the sections, and then start numbering on the opening page of your story so you will have Chapter One, page 1.

Some people like to put the author name and title in headers on alternate pages, but I don’t think it is necessary, and offers more chances for things to go wrong!) I add in my other titles list, and how to contact mein either the front matter or the end pages. I contemplated adding in a cjapter of the next book, but since I don't hae one ready, I let the opportunity go this time. 

Once you are happy with the content, upload it on the KDP site. You will be told if there are spelling errors or other glitches and given the opportunity to check and OK them.

Then comes the tricky bit. You need a cover. Not just a front cover as for Kindle, but a front, back and spine too. All in the size you have chosen for your book. I used Photoshop to do mine. Download the KDP template, which looks like this 

~ in the size you have decided upon for the cover, 

It took me a while to discover that the template size is not fixed; I was required to resize it in Photoshop from 13.27” to 13.47” before it was accepted. It seemed a tiny change, but it was necesary. Ensure your cover pics reach right to the edge of the red zone. Remember your spine cover size depends on the  number of pages in your book. 

If you want to add an ISBN (purchased by you) you will need to use a barcode generator like Bookow.com and get the barcode e-mailed to you; transfer it to your cover and place it bottom right, very close to the spine fold. It took me some time to realise they wanted a “real” barcode; in Createspace I think I only had to input the barcode number and they added the barcode.  It is probably easier to ask them to add one for you, but I already had the (expensive) barcode and was determined to use it. 

If you are happy with your cover, save it at 300dpi in PDF format and upload it to KDP. I learned the hard way to save it in Jpeg format as well, in case alterations were needed. In my case, they were!

You might get the cover thrown back at you a few times. They will tell you where you are going wrong with it, and you must correct the original and try uploading it again. And again. It takes patience and a lot of time, but is well worth it. 

Self-publishing loses it s appeal

The saga of publishing a paperback copy of The Queen's Letters goes on and on.

After receiving a proof copy I have redesigned the inner content, and thought all was done. Set to Publish. Back comes an email saying I have loaded the barcode in the wrong place. So I redesign the back cover, which means rejigging the whole back, spine and front cover and carefully re-position the barcode and send it off. Now they are telling me the barcode is not there. What do they want? I can't stick a real barcode on the cover when I'm working online, now can I? It seems an impossible task.

I don't recall having this problem with Createspace. And now this morning they have decided that I need to update tax information because I have relocated from Createspace to KDP. Suddenly self-publishing loses its appeal.

Poblems, problems

Deeply immersed in updates to a Createspace paperback about to go to KDP;  been working on it for days now.  I had decided earlier this year that there were one or two updates needed, and I decided to go ahead and do them while I made the change from one site to the other. Everything is good to go except for the cover.

I changed the design, front, back and spine. I downloaded the template and fitted everything exactly. Six time now KDP have come back to me with faults that need to be rectified. The final fault is the template size which seems to change during transfer - not by a huge amount - something like 0.097 and we are talking either mm or cm. Consequently I have not got much else accomplished this week!

KDP Help Contact Us have yet to come back to me. Within 24 hours, they said; well, they have some hours to go yet, but it seems like a long wait for answers to me. Nor does it help that BT keeps dropping the internet in our locality for short periods of time.

On the plus side of daily life, the farmer's fields are greening up nicely. Hardly any bare brown earth to be seen.

KDP, crime and voice

Kindle DP seems to have got itself in a muddle over Christmas. Either that, or my PC is heading for trouble. When I check my sales on KDP, the figures and locations do not tally. Titles sold in the US Canada, Europe, UK show in one section, but not in another. I hope it sorts itself out soon. 

I'm just about to launch into a blitz on writing and critiquing. Haven't done much over the hols, and definitely feeling withdrawal systems. I'm attempting a mystery with this wip, and being devious is not coming easy. In theory I'm not against having a murder in the pages, but find in practice a reluctance to harm any of my characters. Even the villain. I can't render them dead too soon, or else the story folds!

Perhaps a certain turn of mind is required for crime novels. An ability to describe squeamish things, for a start. There's also a great need to hang onto details, because so often the details become important later when all the unravelling-a -la-Poirot takes place. Given that a story changes as it is written in the case of many authors including me, remembering to lay the clues and remember them as you progress with the story is hard. In my case, there's confusion about who said what, when and where. Straight historicals are much easier!

I'm thinking about voice today, because I've just seen an article on Twitter on how Lee Child sets about writing Jack Reacher novels. Evidently he starts a novel on 1st Septermber each year and takes a year to complete. He has no plot and no draft when he begins, and he  thinks his hero's voice is the most important part of the story. It is certainly strong. I think it must be easier to maintain voice when the story is written in the first person POV. Another author who has a strong voice is Caroline Dunford with her Euphemia Martin mysteries - Death in the Highlands, and Death in the Family. The story lines are much lighter than Reacher, but the strong voice struck me right away - tart, very feminine and I loved it! That has got me thinking about how I present Daisy. Maybe this draft won't be the final one!