Jules Jones

I'm busy getting my Loose Id titles back into print with the sterling help of Alex Beecroft. First up is Lord and Master, with new cover by Alex below. What I would like before I drop this on my Official Author Website is some help with link testing. I'm using Draft2Digital to push the book to retailers other than Amazon, and they have a Universal Book Link which if clicked on will offer a selection of online stores, linked to the appropriate site for the location of the person clicking - eg USians choosing Kobo should be directed to the US Kobo website, Australians can choose Angus & Robertson amongst other offerings, etc. I've also found a Thing on the Amazon affiliate site which is to direct your website readers to their local 'Zon site but I have not got to grips with that yet...

Onwards. Please admire the new cover art, suitable for current fashions in romance novels, and then I would be really grateful if people click on the links and make sure they end up in the right place. Some of the retailers haven't accepted the push from D2D yet, but there seems to be a reasonable selection there already. With Amazon I'd also like to know if it shows you the paperback as well as the ebook.

Draft2Digital universal link: https://books2read.com/u/38EMkZ

Amazon Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07WQHPZBW
Canada: https://amzn.to/2HBeK5h
Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B07WQHPZBW
Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B07WQHPZBW
UK: https://amzn.to/2My7oU8
US: https://amzn.to/2Zr7BKV

Incidentally, since writing Twitter has been discussing library ebook purchasing, here are some numbers: I've set the ebook price at $3.99 for purchase by individuals - my percentage of that varies by site, but I'll get somewhere between $2 and $2.70. At Draft2Digital I've also enrolled it in various subscriptions, including the Kobo Plus programme, which is Kobo's rival to Kindle Unlimited but doesn't require the author to make the book exclusive to them. Yay Kobo. :-) I've taken D2D's suggestion on the price for library purchases, that being $7.99, of which my projected royalty is $3.74 for One Copy One User, or $0.46 for Cost Per Checkout. Someone wants to give me money to make my book available to people who prefer or need to read for free? I will have some of that, please.

And I see Amazon still thinks this is LGBT literature, sub-class erotica. I may have to do some emailing to customer services. At least it hasn't been filed under BDSM anymore.

I have finally dipped a toe into the SmashWords ocean, and put up a story that was already available as a free read on my website. I had a couple of reasons for doing this -- one was to make it available in multiple formats, plus get it in front of more people who might then look at the for-pay stuff, the other was to get some experience in using SmashWords, because I have a couple of short stories that have gone out of print in ways that make it awkward to put through another publisher as a reprint.

It basically took me all of Sunday to prep a 2,200 word story. This is partly because they strongly recommend using Microsoft Word, which I don't use at home other than having it installed on my PC to deal with the ever-increasing range of people who assume that Word is the only word processor in existence. So I really did have to follow the step by step guide in their formatting guide. But as a result of this, I can report that the guide is very helpful and clearly written, and I managed to get a good result out of it. I also spent some time hunting down a suitable stock photo for cover art and creating an appropriately formatted cover image -- and again, the formatting guide was clear and helpful on this, although I think not quite as good as the bit for preparing the text. Of particular note is that while they strongly recommend Word, they recognise that not everyone uses it, and had some useful tips for ways the automated process can go wrong on files generated by other word processors and what you can do about it.

Uploading was very frustrating, because it kept spitting my upload attempt back at me for various errors. The final error was that it refused to recognise my Word file as a Word file, because my up-to-date FireFox was reporting it as a filetype which it didn't recognise as Word, in spite of Firefox clearly saying that it was Word... It did helpfully suggest trying another browser if the error persisted. I tried IE first. No, that couldn't even get past accepting the first data entry box. Fortunately I had Chrome available as well, but really, it chokes on 2 of the 3 main browsers?

Once I did the upload it didn't take long to convert it, and my book was live on the site early Sunday evening UK time. It was easy to assign an ISBN once it was live on the site. You get a live indicator in your dashboard of total downloads, and a more detailed page which shows you both the page views per day and the downloads per day. My test piece was a free short story, gay erotica, shaving erotica. It had picked up a dozen or so downloads by the time I went to bed, was up to 20 or so by Monday morning, and currently stands at 32 downloads. That will include a few downloads which are the result of me asking for people to check if the system works.

Neyronrose kindly looked at the story in various ereaders and reported back that it looked good in all of them, which is reassuring.

The site emailed me each time someone reviewed the file, which startled me the first time because I hadn't noticed that there was a setting for that. I haven't gone through all of the tools available yet.

The dashboard reports that the book is still pending review for the Premium catalogue, which is simply a manual check to make sure it has all the necessary data and formatting to be pushed out to third party distributors. It does say in the FAQ that this can take several days.

So first impressions are - use the formatting guide, it's good and it's there for a reason. It can be frustrating getting the file uploaded, but once the process is in hand it works well, and the dashboard tools I've used so far work and are useful.

If you want a look at the book's page, it's https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/249352 - it's also not safe for work. :-)

Well, they already are self-published, some of them at least. They're on my website, or there are links to them on my website. But it appears that what all the cool kids are doing these days is turning their out of print stuff into self-published ebooks via places like Smashwords and Amazon's self-publishing thingie. I should probably do this simply for the name exposure side of things, which is what they were doing on my website as free reads in the first place. Since I appear to be finally climbing out of the latest pit of "no energy/working brain after work", I should probably try to do something about it the next time I need an excuse to avoid 300 words a day.

So does anyone have a burning desire to see something particular in ebook format as well as webpage? (My own inclination is to do the Lord and Master short "Flight of Dreams", but I'll need to check in with Loose Id about that, as it's part of a series otherwise published by them. Theoretically I can do as I please with it, but it would be seriously stupid not to ask for their opinion on how it might affect the other books. They have way more experience with selling patterns on Amazon than I do.)

I'm not sure what to do about And If I Offered Thee A Bargain. It's not currently available at all, so would be a natural one to start with, but it's also a love story with a tragic ending, and likely to put off romance readers who download it thinking they're going to get one of my HFN endings.

(Addendum: I should look at my own website more often. I've just found a badly formatted page courtesy of one missing bracket, which has been that way for two years...)