Tag Archives: e-publishing

May 22, 2013 · 4:00 pm

Cover Reveal – Unfinished Business

This is the cover for Unfinished Business, from Melange Books.

Stock Used:

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-syringe-cup-coffee-image17032004
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-close-up-gold-french-coin-napoleon-wooden-table-image29942453
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-france-map-image10577480

For this one, the cover turned out to be relatively simple to do. It’s a suspense/thriller. For this, since it is supposed to have a noir feel to it, I used a dark blue primary color, as well as a grunge tinge. Originally there was a thumbtack on Paris (in the stock photo), but at the request of the author, I placed a syringe over Marseilles, where part of the story takes place. I also looked for French coins as part of the cover texture.

The point of doing this is to give readers a sense of what the story is about, and small nuances can make a world of difference in how a cover looks, and whether or not it is picked up by readers. Not only that, but if it’s picked up by the right readers. A cover can get a lot of attention, but if your cover looks like a paranormal romance, and the book is hard-sci, it’s not going to get the correct attention, and may even get negative reviews because the readers didn’t get what they expected.

Something to keep in mind when creating concepts for book covers. 🙂

Sharing Links – Smashwords and Self-publishing

Just thought I’d share an intersting article on self-publishing. It relates to Smashwords and ebooks, and talks about the business and economy behind them. If you’re planning on self-publishing and/or e-publishing, it’s worth the read.

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/smashwords-ceo-mark-coker-indie-authors-need-to-become-great-publishers/

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” – Ebook Anthology Now Available

Well, the good news is in! “1000 Words: A Collection of Short Stories” is now available as an ebook on Smashwords, and soon to be available on Kindle. 🙂

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/154613

Here’s the cover reveal (went through a couple transformations, but this is by far the one I like best. Yay for a “Twilight Zone” feeling):

Overall, converting it into an ebook wasn’t so hard. Mostly just time consuming, and tweaking things here and there (I’m pretty sure there’s still a couple issues with the Smashwords format, but I’m not sure what). Once I had the Smashwords one done, converting it to a Kindle ebook didn’t take long. Unfortunately, you don’t get all the neat layout designs of a print book, but the content and images are the same.

It’s available for $2.99, and comes with one additional short story not available for free (unlike the other nine stories in it). I will soon be making a print edition available through Createspace, and the price is to be determined.

I’m considering offering formatting services for both print and ebook editions for self-published authors if this goes well, so let me know what you think. 🙂

4 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Writing

Tagged as 1000 Words, anthology, createspace, e-publishing, ebook, editing, honors college project, Kindle, SBibb, self publish, self-published, self-publishing, short stories, Smashwords, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, writing

April 7, 2012 · 1:33 pm

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” – The Carrier

An update on my “1000 Words” project.

For Snow Witch, once the free trial wore off, there were no more downloads of this story (except the one I bought as a gift for my fiance). As such, I’m currently looking at two possibilities: see if sales increase once other short stories are available for free, or make it free as well, and only make the actual, final anthology cost money. (I’m thinking $2.99 sounds like a decent price). Right now I’m waiting to hear back from Amazon/Kindle as to whether there is a way to make it free on Kindle, or if I should simply remove the story so I can make it free on Smashwords.

Either way, I plan to hold off on publishing any of the other short stories on Kindle until the full anthology is complete.

This is largely due to time. It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized that our final project is due on April 27th, the last day of regular classes before finals. Figure in two weeks for printing shipping a book, and that means I need to have completed the book by April 14th… a week from now. On the bright side, I guess I could do expedited shipping.

While I originally planned to do a large photobook version of “1000 Words” to showcase the completed book covers and stories, I’m starting to think that working with just the trade paperback version might be the best option.

Today I self-published the short story, The Carrier on Smashwords. Formatting was much smoother after having already done the formatting for Snow Witch. The one downside to running out of time to complete these stories, however, is not having as much time to find a proofreader. As such, I did extra proof reading of the story myself, and did it over a span of several weeks.

Once all the stories are completed, I do hope to find another proofreader for the whole anthology, or to look over it again myself, to try to catch anything I missed during this initial phase.

The benefit to going ahead and publishing it, though, is that it gives me the feeling that I must move on to the next story, regardless of if there might be more tweaks to be made. But if I were doing this for future projects, especially if it were a novel, I’d definitely want to find beta readers before it went live.

At the time of typing, The Carrier has had nine downloads, and no reviews (neither has Snow Witch). I just hope it is enjoyable. 🙂

Anyways, the statistics of the project is as follows:

2 Stories completed.

5 Stories written but not edited.

3 Stories still need to be written.

4 Book Covers completed.

2 Book Covers near completion.

4 Book Covers still need to be designed.

Snow Witch: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/139780

The Carrier: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/149719

4 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Writing

Tagged as 1000 Words, author, book cover, book cover design, e-pub, e-publishing, ebook, SBibb, self publish, self-publishing, Smashwords, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, writing

March 7, 2012 · 12:07 pm

Self-Publishing 1000 Words – Snow Witch is on Smashwords

I have completed the cover for Snow Witch and finished formatting the short story for Smashwords. (Next up will be a Kindle edition). It is now up on Smashwords. The process felt surprisingly easy, and I only had one issue (had to change it from .docx to .doc), but the solution was easily remedied. I’m currently reading through and getting the hang of sales versus downloads, but hopefully it will work out well. I’m not sure if downloads also includes downloads of the sample.

Since Smashwords currently has a sitewide promotion going on this month for downloading an ebook, I choose to give “Snow Witch” the option to be downloaded for free. I’m hoping to entice people to download and review it, but we’ll see if anything comes of it. I missed the first half of the promotion, though, so it will only be free for three days, until March 10^th. I would be curious to know how many people are interested in it because of the cover, and how many people are interested in the story due to the short description.

I also posted a note about it on my photo illustration Facebook page, made an announcement via Absolute Write’s announcements forum, and posted it here to my WordPress blog. I currently have two sales, one with the Smashwords coupon, and one an actual purchase. I’m not sure if the actual purchase was intentional or not. I’ll be curious to see how it tracks for the next few days (and will probably have to tell myself not to keep checking Smashwords’ dashboard for updates).

Next up is to create the Kindle edition, and then I need to edit and write the next short stories to be published. One down, nine to go.

2 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Photo Illustration, Writing

Tagged as 1000 Words, Absolute Write, author, book cover, book cover design, e-publishing, photographic illustration, SBibb, self publish, self-publishing, short stories, Snow Witch, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, writing

March 5, 2012 · 11:36 am

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” Project – A Collection of Short Stories

For my capstone honors college project, I elected to merge both my major and minor together. I’m a photography major with a creative writing minor, and for my photography I have a special interest in book cover design and photomanipulation.

Therefore, I decided to create a project consisting of ten short stories, each approximately 1000 words long, which would each be illustrated with a book cover. The title of the project, 1000 Words, comes from the phrase, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.”

While I will be creating a print, photobook version of all ten stories as the completion point, I realized I needed some sort of motivation to write, edit, and illustrate each individual short story.

Enter self-publishing.

I’ve long had an interest in self-publishing, but I also want to try the traditional route, and intend to start off trying traditional for my novels. Now, with the advent of ebooks, I want to try selling the short stories as a side project. Part of this is because I will be using my own first printing rights for the project, and the other part is to help me get a feel for the process and book cover design in order to aid future clients.

So I decided that I will create an e-version of each short story, and self-publish them as I complete them through Smashwords and Kindle. I’ll start off using Smashwords so that I can learn the formatting, then create a Kindle version afterwards.

I am currently planning to price each one at .99 cents, then once all of them are written, compile them into the final anthology called 1000 Words. I have not yet decided on its price, though I’m considering $2.99 and $3.99 at this point in time.

I honestly don’t expect to make any money off of this, especially since I have little in the way of marketing planned. I do intend to announce on my facebook page when I release a story, but seeing as how I have few followers on the business page, I’m not sure how effective that will be.

Also, I am hoping to offer a promotion of a couple day free downloading period (or give coupons to those who ask) for friends or people who might be interested in reviewing the short stories. I have considered leaving one story free once I get multiple stories uploaded.

In the meantime, my first short story slated to be published (hopefully by the end of this week), is “Snow Witch.” A young witch ventures outside of her town for the first time in hopes of transferring her brother’s illness to a willing creature.

I’m in the process of reviewing the short story (which I posted in AW’s Share Your Work forums) and I’m also currently editing the book cover to make it the best I can. 🙂

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. I’m hoping that sharing the process will be helpful to multiple people. 🙂