Jules Jones

I put my short story One Size Fits All on Smashwords and Amazon with a placeholder cover I made myself just to get the thing off a webpage and into modern ebook file formats. That was... two years ago. I've finally done something about improving the cover, and while I was at it I reformatted the text and added some backmatter. Which means that it's coupon time. :-)

I would much appreciate it if people would go along to SmashWords and download a copy in the file format of your choice, and report back any weirdnesses in the file (I've already seen one, I have no idea how to fix it, and I'm wondering if it will bother people). The book is priced at 99p, but coupon code NR46R gives a 100% discount, making it free at checkout. The coupon's valid for the next week.

While I'm at it - thoughts on the new cover? It's a cheap-n-cheerful job from a Fiverr artist, and looks it; but I hope it indicates that There Be Smut In These Here Parts.

Copy-n-paste from my post to the OrgASM comm:

My plan was to start on Monday, but in fact I got in some wordage yesterday. 329 words, to be precise, which takes Nice Tie to 27375. And it was like pulling teeth, even though I had the next couple of thousand words in my head when I had to down tools before my extended Christmas break. This is why I need to write every day.


And some information about my experiment with a free short story at Smashwords. Copy-n-paste from my posts at Picowrimo for background and early numbers:

11/11/12: In addition, I have written up the results of the first two weeks of my having posted a free short story at Smashwords, if anyone's interested in seeing some data about number of downloads and how many third party distributors it's got to. Note that it's an erotica story and while there's no excerpt the post does include the keywords I used for the file. http://julesjones.livejournal.com/547953.html

25/11/12: Update on the short story at Smashwords - I forgot to check it last Sunday, but it ticked over to 200 downloads sometime between Saturday night and Monday morning, so let's call it 200 on Sunday last. Right now it's showing 227 downloads. The number of libraries it's in has varied -- it's currently at 18, but has been as high as 19 and then back down to 15, so presumably some people have added it and then discarded it.

30/11/12: An update on the Smashwords figures - as of this evening total downloads of 234


And as of 13/01/12, it has 312 downloads and is in 23 libraries. It never did get any more ratings/reviews beyond the three in the first couple of days.

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...)