destroyedordamaged

They make it way too easy to release books on KDP. It was a couple of clicks, and I was done. It's out. Here it is.

It's selling. People have bought it and are buying it and, I assume, must be reading it. It's as terrifying as it is exhilarating. Look at that, I've even had a cheeky review, there. By the time you read this, there might be 20,000 more reviews. But I doubt it; it's not selling that well.

If you look at the top of the page here too, you'll see links to different pages: Everything Around Me is Destroyed or Damaged and About Me. I added these to make this site look a bit more professional. Like I mean it, y'know. Because I do. And everything on those two pages is true and anyone who tells you it ain't is a FUCKING LIAR.

So what now? Well, if you could buy my eBook, that'd be fantastic. And if you could review it after you've read it, that would be even better. And if you would then share it with any of your friends who would also enjoy it, you're verging on best friend material. You hear that? WE COULD BE BEST FRIENDS. But, y'know, you don't have to do any of that stuff. You could do none of it, and I wouldn't mind too much. *grumbles*...

Thanks for reading the My First eBook series. It was fun. And so much quicker than I thought it would be. Story of my life.

I got my second tattoo today. In fact, it was finished less than 3 hours ago. It was the second of many, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first. Here's a picture. If you're considering getting a tattoo but haven't brought yourself to do it yet, get on it.

click for full size.

It's a Queens of the Stone Age thingymajig, and it's from one of the best albums ever made. Yeah, I went there. Deal with it.

Release date, and marketing plan.

The first, I have. The second, I'm a bit sketchy on. I've never been very good at selling myself (and in saying so, I'm proving it right off the bat. Skillz); unless I'm pretending to be arrogant for comic effect with friends, I'm generally self-deprecating, because I've always felt like that's a better quality to find in a person than actual arrogance, so I've spent years cultivating it. But too much modesty is harmful to someone who has something to sell, to get out there, to spread... and confidence in your own work and your ability to market it to people isn't a bad thing at all. You can be healthily, tolerably confident in something you've done without being intolerably arrogant. I definitely believe that. I just find it hard to pull off.

So I've taken steps to prepare myself for selling my eBook, and steeled myself emotionally for their epic failure. These preparations take the form of the following:

Compiling a list of book bloggers. These people are everywhere on Twitter, and they're infinitely more helpful and nice than I'll ever be, and they love to have books suggested to them. They'll review them, write blog posts on them, spread the word, you name it... but they have to like your work first. So you can't be all like, YO, READ MY BOOK ABOUT A MURDERER WHO RIDES DRAGONS IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY IN THE YEAR 6043 PLZ to someone who likes to review chick lit. It just won't work. So what I've been doing is reading blogs and working out tastes so that I have a list of people who might actually like my book, and when it's released, I'll send them personal e-mails (not templates, never templates) begging them to love me. If even one of them does, it's better than none, isn't it.

Throwing pictures about, and that. I've made some images to put up on my Twitter page, as the background, and across the Facebook pages I manage, so that everyone who stumbles across me will know that I have a book available to buy. I'm not hard selling. Except maybe I'll post 400 tweets a day with links to the Amazon page.

Facebook ads. I've done this before, and it wasn't fantastic, and it gets an even worse press these days. You hear that unless you're spending big, Facebook will make sure your ads are hardly ever seen by anyone who'd care; but who knows if that's true? Who wants to risk it? I dunno. This is just a consideration right now. It's an option.

Communities. I'm a member of several writing communities on Facebook, so I'll post it around there. The problem I have is that most of those are just full of people begging for other people to read their work, and no one who actually reads any of it. So while I'll let them all know what I've done, I won't expect much feedback. Cynicism is cool, kids. More useful, I expect, will be my presence on Twitter (and my Twitter friends), along with some new tools I'm toying with like Triberr.

Friends and family. Yeah, this is what I'll resort to in the end. Bugging the shit out of everyone I know until they've all bought 5 copies each. I've already started - I've sent 529 texts since I started this blog post, and before the night is out, I will have sent 529 more.

So that's the plan I have right now. It's not comprehensive, or structured, or sensible, but nothing about my life right now is. I live in the fast lane, baby, and when you live like me you'll understand that we ain't got no time to put our seat belts on.

Oh, and the release date? July 23rd. Because I fucking love working to tight deadlines.

Formatting for Kindle.

I know I said this would be a better post than the one before it, but I was lying. It's gonna be so much worse. Deal with it, dickhead.

Also, this isn't to say I'm definitely opting for Kindle over, say, Smashwords. It's just to say that KDP is a bit of a prettier site, so it held my attention for longer and I ended up experimenting with the advice given by this booklet, and eventually creating a proper .mobi file, like what real authors have. Now that I've linked to that book, in fact, I don't really need to write any more blog post. Everything you need to know is in there. As long as you follow that advice word for word (except for a couple of points below), you'll be fine. But in case you've missed something along the way, here are my tips:

Remember to work on your book as .doc. I'm on Word 2013 and so will a lot of you be, but most people are probably on Word 2007 or 2010 I reckon. Either way, you'll be saving as .docx by default, and the new format will mess with your formatting, so just hit File > Save As, and shut up moaning, alright?
My only issues with Building Your Book for Kindle are that it advises you to set 1.27cm indents and 10pt paragraph breaks. This is completely your choice, and you might like those settings, but I thought they were both way too high. When I viewed it in the previewer, I thought it looked terrible. I think I ended up using 0.8cm and 7pt. Deal with it.
I centre-aligned all of my headings. I just think that looks so much better. But you can do what you want.
It's so important that you use the previewer to view your .mobi file on every device possible - each of the e-inks, each of the Kindle Fires, and each of the iOSes. What looks fine on e-ink might not look good at all on Kindle Fire. For me, this was because e-ink devices were using the default font for their system (which I liked), but the Kindle Fire devices had the sans serif font that I had used to create the file, and it looked terrible. I changed it all to Garamond, and now it looks better on those devices, while remaining the way I like it on e-ink. I'd still rather it was a bit prettier on all those shiny screens, but I don't know what that pretty font is that the e-ink screens use. Or do I? I do. I wrote it down somewhere actually. Let me get back to you on this one.

I wish I had more to say, but that book really does explain it all. God, I feel so useless. At least I still have my looks.

Metadata.

That is, blurbs and shit.

So it turns out that I forgot or I didn't think about until now the fact that books have blurbs, and eBooks are no exception. When I was formatting my book to give it a go on that there Kindle emulator thing (full details on formatting to follow, in a much better blog post than this one), I realised that I would have to enter all of this stuff in order to preview it. So I've started brainstorming.

I don't know if there are people who write blurbs as a job, but my mind tells me there must be. It's an art form, condensing the message of a 100,000 word book down into 5 lines of enticing summary, and it must take a certain sort of mind to perfect it. It has to be witty but not too playful, clever but accessible, cheesy but aware of its cheesiness, inviting but not too revealing. Authors don't write their own, surely? No, of course they don't. Don't be ridiculous. They're too close to the work. They'd be terrible at it.

But I have to, and so do you if you want to self-publish. So get to it. Here's my first attempt (with a clever play on words which I'm not sure comes across very well now I read it back):

From disturbing to enlightening, seedy to romantic, Everything Around Me is Destroyed or Damaged is a 23-story fall through the mind of the author of DestroyedorDamaged.com.

Featuring a selection of stories from the site and a whole bunch of exclusive new ones, this collection is full of laughs and shudders and lovers and losers, and is sure to change the way you feel about street magicians and business meetings forever.

Designing a cover.

Have you noticed how a lot of self-published books on Amazon, particularly the ones with 20p price tags, have terrible covers? Like, as you gaze at them, valiantly holding back the tears and vomit, you wonder if the person who designed them has ever seen a printed book in a shop? I'm not sure if what I just said is really controversial - nobody seems to talk about it, so it might be one of those things everyone knows about but no one mentions, like the menopause and the fact that Daft Punk are overrated - but I've said it now, so deal with it. Whenever I see these terrible eBook covers, I think, surely this person could have done better than that, if they're creative enough to write a book?!

With that in mind, I set about attempting to design a cover that a real book cover designer might design, if they'd had only a very light head injury recently. And what I found out is this: it's really hard. Covers like this one and this one just get it so right - font, style, effortlessness... and it's so hard to recreate that yourself, having had no design training at all and with only the shitty kind of free software one obtains when one doesn't want to do pictures and that for a living. So yeah, I apologise, cheap eBook writers of the world. I was so wrong about your design talents.

Anyway, I've come up with a couple of designs I like. I'm going to keep working on it, so there'll probably be another "Designing a cover" post soon, but for now, here they are:

FIRE. (click for full size)

ANGRY SCRAWL. (click for full size)

The problem I've found - and I might be wrong here, feel free to correct me - is that Amazon really don't care what size the cover art you upload is. And nor do Smashwords, as far as I can see (I haven't decided how to publish it yet. Maybe both - these are the two options. Thoughts on a postcard, or in the comments section). They offer guidelines, it must be at least this and at least that; but no clear standard, which would be nice for a computery person like me who likes rules and clear guidelines and all of that bullshit. So I've read a few blog posts and they said that it should be something like 1500x2500 pixels, so that's what I made the above. They look good enough to me, sizewise, but if you've published to Kindle or whatever before, let me know what you did. I want this communication to be two-way. Why don't we talk like we used to?

Where was I? Oh yeah, those two covers. Do you like either of them? Do you have suggestions? Do you like onion rings as much as I do? Answers in the comments or in tweets to me. Thankyouverymuch.

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