Leeth’s Journey So Far: “Four Books!”

Chatting to an author friend today (Barbara Strickland), about what lay ahead for Leeth, she asked whether my idea for the series in the longer term was to pursue the action path or the emotional side of things?

I’m four books in now, and so far I believe I’ve delved deeply into both sides.  I had to stop and think though, to consider Barbara’s question.  Thirty years ago, I thought the series would be a sci-fi/fantasy action series, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t tell the story without honoring the depths of the characters.

(Because I love Mirella’s cover designs, let me just brighten this short post by including them here:)

Anyway, I realised my answer to Barbara’s question was “both”, even though it means I’ll need to continue a tricky balancing act.  I mustn’t let the excitement of the action elements of Leeth’s dramatic life distract me from the compelling human and emotional side of her story as it unfolds.  There’s no chance of losing sight of that in Book 5, Lost Girl, but in later volumes it may be something I’ll need to keep in the forefront of my mind.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I’ll finish with a quick status update.  In August, Galaxy Bookshop hosted the launch (see the video) for Violent Causes (The Leeth Dossier Vol. 4): all my books are available on the shelves there!  As well, I’ve been learning bits and pieces about book marketing.  I’d much rather be writing, so I plan to go back to devoting myself to that — soon.  Maybe I’ll spend one day a week on the marketing side.

Things I’ve been learning about are Facebook ads from Mark Dawson and Nick Stephenson, Amazon ads from Bryan Cohen (I even created some ads), drawing up a far too exhaustive marketing plan, and learning bits about getting reviews and starting up a mailing list.  I also set up my Facebook Author Page (which I gather if you Like it, you’ll be notified when I post something there).  I also 99% converted my Blogger blog site into a kind of web site, only to stumble at the final hurdle.  Two days before I discovered how to overcome that last problem, I gave up and recreated my website in Wordpress.org.  It’s in pretty good shape, though I still have a small list of things to do.  Via my hairdresser Sebastian I discovered the talented Kellie M Davies and through her, the Aussie Speculative Fiction (ASF) FB group.

I also sent some books down to Bendi-con as part of an ASF contingent, and some are on their way soon to Supanova Adelaide and Supanova Brisbane with the same group of Aussie authors.  (We also had a small get-together in Sydney CBD, which was a great evening.)

Roger Patulny kindly agreed to shift the meeting date for our local writers’ group Authora Australis to a Wednesday that didn’t clash with the Sydney Mediaeval and Renaissance Group’s monthly meetings (thanks, Roger et al!), so I can attend regularly.  And this Sunday (Oct 13) Kristyn M Levis will be talking to our Book Marketing discussion group about Instagram for Authors.

I also created my first Nielsen “Book2Look” book widget (“biblet”) for Wild Thing.  Biblets let you look inside a book, share it on social media, find out where to buy it, and more.  Oh, and I had a flash fiction sci-fi story accepted by Antipodean SF magazine, called Dangerous January (which will be available there for a limited time).  Which also reminds me: I completed the Neil Gaiman Master Class too, and enjoyed it!

I guess I have been working hard after all (but not with blogging — shame, Luke!), even though there’s been far less writing than I like.

Withdrawing My Books from Kindle Select

This is just a quick post to announce I will be withdrawing my books from KU/KOLL, in response to Amazon's algorithm changes that mean the KU money is largely now being shared by just two classes of people:

1. unscrupulous people who game the system
2. best-selling authors who get millions of pages read per day

My books will still be available for purchase from Amazon, and in print as both A-format and B-format paperbacks. They simply won't be available for free once the Kindle Select renewal periods ends.

For me personally this will drop the royalty payments for the ebooks from 70% to 35%, so I will also be increasing the prices in the next week or so. (I've also been thinking for a long time that I may have been pricing them a little too low.)  This should have a negligible effect on sales, because I am not competing with the scammers to pay for ads, so my books are not being bought.  Very few are even found by people borrowing them (perhaps one or two books per month).

So the ability to borrow my books will end, for each, on the following dates:

Wild Thing - Feb 26, 2019 (The Leeth Dossier #1) (Wild Thing paperback)
Harsh Lessons - Dec 21, 2018 (The Leeth Dossier #2) (Harsh Lessons paperback)
Shadow Hunt - Jan 19 2019 (The Leeth Dossier #3) (Shadow Hunt paperback)

Once my ebooks are no longer exclusive to Kindle Select I'll be able to enrol them in all the other ebook distribution platforms, which do not appear to suffer from the same problems Amazon has engineered for itself.

I doubt I will be returning the books to Kindle Select because I anticipate Amazon will fail to take effective action until the average quality of books available there has fallen noticeably.

For any other authors who wish to withdraw their books, the process is quite simple, as described in the relevant KU help page:

1. In your KDP Bookshelf page, next to the book you wish to withdraw, click on the "..." (ellipsis) button beside the "Promote and Advertise" button.
2. In the menu that pops up, click on the "KDP Select Info" item.
3. On the page that leads you to, clear the tick from the "Automatically renew this book's enrollment in KDP Select for another 90 days" in the panel that pops up. (You might need to click on the Manage KDP Select Enrollment button to get that panel with its check box.)

In happier news, I hope to put the finishing touches to Violent Causes (The Leeth Dossier #4) by mid December (about a week), and launch it a couple of months after that.  I'm pleased with how it has turned out -- with Dave's help (and Jon's) as usual!

Amazon is failing its authors, its readers, and itself

There’s a growing awareness that using computer algorithms to handle decisions — from debt assessment or even being fired to self-driving cars — can have unexpected and even disastrous effects. Around October 2017, Amazon joined those unfortunate ranks.
Sounds scary? It is, when you dig below the surface a little.
Over a million new books are now published each year. Over half of those are in English.
I started publishing in December 2015, using Amazon exclusively for my eBook editions. Sales and reviews were low but showed a steady growth. My approach was to concentrate on writing each new book and do the bare minimum on the marketing side.
For almost two years that seemed to be working — until October 2017.
At that point, sales plummeted. Had I done something, or said something to upset people? Highly unlikely, since I’d been silently working on the current book. I assumed my silence was the cause. But after discussing sales with a few other authors who used Amazon ads and active marketing, I changed my mind. They told me that from around October 2017, they found if they pay $X to Amazon for ads, they came out ahead by about 10%.
What happened? What follows is my best guess. There are three parts to it: book discovery, Kindle Unlimited, and unscrupulous people.

Book Discovery

Readers can discover books on Amazon through various searches, but in addition there are three important ways Amazon promotes books:
Recommendations

1. Emails from Amazon to you suggesting books you might like.
   
2. Suggestions for other books based on your searches, on Amazon web pages.
   

Note: included in these recommendations are books that have paid to be promoted.
Best-seller lists. In each category, a list of the books that have earned the most revenue in the last 48 hours.
Popularity lists. Like the best-sellers, but across the last 30 days.

Kindle Unlimited

Readers who pay the monthly subscription fee can borrow books from Kindle Unlimited (KU) at no extra cost. Some of the subscription fees go into a pot of money paid to the authors.
This ‘Cockygate’ article by the Verge notes: “There are over 5 million books available via Kindle, with over a million books available on the Kindle Unlimited system. Amazon is currently paying out approximately 20 million dollars every month to authors on Kindle Unlimited.”
U$20M lying on the table: does that sound like a tempting target for unscrupulous people?
At first, Amazon divided up the pot based on number of books sold. Absurdly short ‘books’ started appearing. Amazon changed the algorithm to count ‘pages read’ instead of ‘books read’. Scammers started stuffing books full of ‘bonus material’ to dramatically boost their number of pages.
It’s been an arms race between scammers trying to grab money unfairly from the pot, and Amazon trying to counter them. This article by Derek Haines argues Amazon’s algorithms can’t count pages or words, but he goes on to add:
“KU scammers and ebook stuffers are not the real issues here.
[…] Until Amazon can find a better system to track and record KU ebook reading correctly, the scammers will keep finding ways to make money, and honest authors will lose out.
Or be terminated.”
But wait, there’s more…!

How recommendations used to work

Before Oct 2017, Amazon’s algorithms recommended books based on some score related to average review rating, the sales rate, and purchase by other people of similar books. (“People who bought TitleX — as you did — also often bought TitleY.”)
I think this system is still used for the 30 days after a book is released, perhaps extended if the book hits a best-seller list or while it is earning high revenue.

How they work, post Oct 2017

The only books being promoted were those from paid ads. At first, I guessed that Amazon had changed its algorithms to only promote advertised books. There are so many authors publishing, Amazon can profit from authors buying ads.
Amazon don’t disclose how their algorithms work, and rightly so. They’re in a war with those who try to game the system to make money. I have a lot of sympathy with Amazon and what they face.
But since October 2017, the KU pool of money has been paying large sums of money (perhaps most of it) to some unscrupulous ‘authors’. I say ‘authors’ because some are not authors: they are business people who pay ghost writers for content.
The result is, only books with paid ads are being promoted.

Unscrupulous People

David Gaughran’s Kindle Unlimited -- A Cheater Magnet and Kayleigh Donaldson’s Book Stuffing, Bribery and Bullying articles were eye-openers for me — I recommend them. The problem is that payments to unscrupulous people has a terrible effect on honest authors, harms readers, and has started damaging Amazon’s brand (and, I assume, the revenue from self-published books).
The effect on the readers is the smallest: the unscrupulous people can’t afford to annoy them too much, since readers determine the KU payouts. But even for readers, it’s making it harder to find and read books they’ll enjoy.
The unscrupulous people spend big, buying Amazon ads to turn a good profit, paying for those ads from the profits. If collectively they spent 18 million dollars for a 19 million dollar payout from KU, they’d be happy — and hey, that even leaves a million dollars to be divided amongst the remaining 500,000 authors! <sarcasm off/>
The greatest harm is being done to the honest self-published and indie authors. Like most skills, writing follows a Bell curve. A minority are really good; a minority are really bad; and there’s a big spread in the middle between those extremes. (The true picture is more complex, because everyone’s taste differs. But that’s not important for this argument.)
But most good and great writers have no interest or skills in marketing, nor in spending time and effort on it. So most authors can’t compete when it comes to marketing.
If you’re an author selling via Amazon and your readers have declined and your income has plummeted, take heart at least in knowing it’s likely not any indicator of how good your book is. Your small voice is being drowned out by the people gaming the Amazon system. The unscrupulous are producing ten or fifty books to your one, and paying for vast numbers of Amazon recommendations of their books, rather than a meagre few algorithmically-generated recommendations that yours are getting.
Writing a book is hard work. A lot of writers manage one. Producing a book proves to an author they can do it. But without a lot of luck, or a big and skilful marketing effort, few readers will discover the book, so the return is low in terms of money and in appreciation. And with Amazon’s ineffectual response to the cheaters, a lot of new authors will try, but won’t find out if they are great or even good. Unless new authors stumble over this article or one like it, they won’t know the failure may well have been Amazon’s, not theirs.
On top of that, the Amazon algorithms only seem to promote books for the first 30 days. This of course encourages writers to produce shorter books and pressures them to cut corners. For the unscrupulous, it actually plays into their hands since producing content quickly is something they can pay or cheat to produce — they just need to keep one step ahead of Amazon’s lacklustre attempts to rein them in.
By inducing many of the good and some of the best new authors to give up, while still ‘feeding the scammers’, over time the overall quality of Amazon’s book marketplace will decline. At first, not massively. Just a little. But the trend will continue, and in the long term will make Amazon the place for second-rate books which are clearly lower quality than those from other publishers.
The Amazon book marketplace will swell with the people who pay for the ads, and the people with good marketing skills. There’ll be some very good books in there, but on average, the rewards will go to the best marketers and to the scammers, not to the best writers.

How Amazon Could Fix This

It’s in Amazon’s interest to fix this, despite what some cynical people argue. Like other observers, I believe the problem lies as much with Amazon as with the scammers. Amazon seem determined to address the problems with technology (algorithms), not people, and I can see the sense of that: the solution must scale to handle millions of books, hundreds of thousands of authors, as well as defend against sets of active and inventive scammers trying to snatch an unfair share of the money available.
Taken together, this also means that until Amazon develop a solution to the problem, the company appears disinterested and unsupportive, damaging their brand even as the quality of their content declines.
So here’s my set of suggestions for Amazon (the first two of these I owe to a friend, Geoff Dash).
Follow the money. The problem of the scammers is proportional to the amount of money they’re taking. So audit the highest-earning authors in order of the revenue they earn. Examine their books to ensure they’re meeting Amazon’s Terms of Service rather than gaming the algorithms. Add legitimate authors to a register of Verified authors (and even mark their books as such). Add scammers to a list of banned authors and remove them from Amazon.
Suspect the absurdly productive. Amazon could reduce the number of authors they need to Verify by examining them in order of productivity: the authors producing the most books per year (or, per month).
How to Verify. It doesn’t have to be done manually, although the above two principles make that feasible. Instead, deep learning algorithms could be trained with examples of scam content and genuine content. Amazon could use the Mechanical Turk to help examine the books selected for audit. It could build a set of trusted Verifiers. It could use some of its own people to examine the books and explain to the algorithm developers what patterns and qualities to look for.
Only Count Content Once. Use its internal plagiarism detecting algorithms to identify content so that when a reader ‘reads’ a book, that content is only counted once. I imagine something like MD5 markers for a book, stored in a reader’s account. That information could even improve the user experience, by offering the reader a chance to skip the previously-read content.
Be more Transparent. It’s fine to have algorithms making decisions for you, and you need to keep their workings secret to make things harder for the scammers. But have a good and fair system for resolving disputes. Amazon needs to do this because its record of hurting good guys with bad algorithms has damaged its reputation in this respect.
Algorithmically select for quality. By this I mean, engineer algorithms that over time will encourage high quality work by offering reasonable revenue to the author. At the least, stop using algorithms that encourage low quality. The current system that only seems to recommend books published in the last 30 days encourages ‘publish fast’ over ‘publish high quality’. Blocking reviews from professional bloggers and reviewers who are gifted with so many books they don’t spend over $50, is another algorithm that does not select for quality.

What Will I Do?

At present, I see no value in being in Kindle Unlimited, and little value in selling your books through Amazon at all. Being exclusive with Amazon is worthless after the first three months. I recommend anyone who has currently chosen exclusivity with Amazon, to terminate that exclusivity. You may need to wait three months for your current exclusivity period to end, but when your sales are zero there’s no difference in revenue between 35% or 70%. Start publishing your books elsewhere, where you won’t be drowned out by ads and scammers.
If enough authors take this step, it will also send a signal to Amazon. Hopefully, such a market-savvy company will recognise and react to that. Certainly, from reports I’ve read, Amazon doesn’t appear to react to any other signals.
I'm quoting from the Verge’s ‘Cockygate’ article, in which Zoe York (romance author) notes:
“All of these people, without exception, all of them, publish exclusively on Amazon,” she said of the book-stuffers. “This is not a problem on iBooks, on Kobo, on Barnes and Noble, or on Google Play, which are the other major ebook retailers.”


Amazon did a wonderful thing in basically creating and nurturing the ebook marketplace, and through that, stimulating the self-published marketplace. It would be sad if it misstepped now and its know-how and support became irrelevant.
Amazon now rewards good marketers (honest ones, but also the scammers), not good authors. That needs to be fixed, or it will likely lead to the collapse of Amazon as a reputable self-publisher.

Amazon book tweaks — Categories, Keywords, reviews, and links

Following some discussions with Barbara Strickland (Amorina Rose's blog) about Amazon Categories and Keywords, and remembering some of what Lama Jabr explained in one Amazon publishing seminar, and after reading this article Six Things You Should Be Including in Your EBook (and Probably Aren't) by David Kudler, I decided to revise all three of my books for Amazon.

What I wanted to do:

• Make sure I had links to each book in the series so far.
• Follow the suggestion to add a review link right at the end of the book.
• Make sure my categories and keywords were good.

It took me about a day to update the first book, four hours for the second, and an hour for the third. Hopefully this article will help you tweak your first book in less time than I took for mine.

The tweaking is in two parts: tweaking the copy of your MS (probably in .docx or .odt format), and editing your ‘book details' on Amazon.

Links

It also occurred to me (largely because Barbara Strickland had recently commented on how attractive the covers were), that a thumbnail of each cover would make a more attractive link than just the plain text title. Like so:

Novels by L. J. Kendall

The Leeth Dossier:

Wild Thing
Harsh Lessons
Shadow Hunt
Violent Causes
…

(By the third book, I even realised I should include a link to my Amazon author page!)

While doing this, I found Calibre doesn't preserve hyperlinks on images when you convert to .mobi format, which is what I had been using for upload to Amazon. But the developer, Kovid Goyal, said that format was pretty obsolete, and recommended a different one. I tried epub, and that was just fine.

I wanted to put country-independent links to my other books, in each book. Links to the appropriate Amazon store for the reader's country.  I didn't want to do it through Amazon's OneLink system:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/202165020?ac-ms-src=faqonelinklp&cid=faqonelinklp

merely because I myself am leery of systems that earn money from people clicking on links.  Granted, I think it's only a few cents, and only if they actually buy the product, but still...  Maybe that's just me being weird, but maybe other people have a distaste for that, too.

Image composition on Linux

I spent some time grabbing images for those buttons to make my own.

I then spent 90 mins finding image editing software that would let me combine them together, for Linux. Lots were recommended, but apparently the idea of a canvas on which you simply drop some images and move them around is a bizarre mental model. Well, apart from the Gimp, but I thought if I could find any other program to do that, I'd probably save time compared to working out how to perform even that simple feat using the Gimp's diabolical UI.

In the end, I found the KDE program KolourPaint, which was very simple and intuitive — it was easy to open up images, and copy them onto a single canvas and then move them around.

Reviews

Before I did any of this, I first contacted Amazon directly to ask if it was okay to use generalised links that pointed to the reader's local Amazon store, instead of to the US one only (say). I specifically asked if it was okay to use bookshow.me. The representative responded and said that was fine.

E.g. the country-independent links for my books in Amazon look like this:

Wild Thing: http://bookshow.me/B019DQVR76

Harsh Lessons: http://bookShow.me/B01HA4FALC

Shadow Hunt: http://bookShow.me/B06XVH355Q

Previously my Afterword asked people to review the book, but didn't offer them any help to do so. In contrast, the Six Things article described how to construct a link directly to a "rate/review" page for your book so the reader just needs one click, with no typing or searching to arrive there.

I also added a note that reviewers will need to login (to Amazon or Goodreads respectively), to be able to write a review.

So the idea is to add a note at the end, saying something like:

"I hope you enjoyed reading this. If you did, consider rating and/or reviewing it. Thank you!"

(You'll need to sign in to your account(s).)

The Six Things article used an image to click on for the reviews, which I think is more appealing and ‘button-like' to click on than just text. So I grabbed some images from Goodreads and Amazon to make the buttons. I feel that's safe, as Amazon owns Goodreads, and I'm only directing readers to Amazon sites. If you're not selling through Amazon, of course you'd need to pick review sites related to your retailer.

Goodreads review

But the link structures for reviews described by the 2013 Six Things article have changed since it was written. E.g. for Goodreads they'd said:

… um, I can't find it, actually. Maybe David didn't spell it out? He does describe how to find the book ID, though. (You can find it out just by clicking on a Goodreads review link and inspecting the URL.)

Anyway, the review link needs to look like:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/<goodreads-Book ID number>
Just search for your book in Goodreads to determine your book's ID and examine the link. E.g. for Shadow Hunt the book link is https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34823396-shadow-hunt, so the book ID is 34823396, and the review link becomes https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/34823396

Amazon review

For Amazon, you determine your Amazon book ID (ASIN) the same way: find your book and examine the URL.

The example book link http://www.amazon.com/Your-Book-Title-ebook/dp/B00EXAMPLE/ is pretty correct, except the http has changed to the more secure https. E.g. Shadow Hunt is https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Hunt-Leeth-Dossier-Book-ebook/dp/B06XVH355Q/

But the link the article describes for reviews, "http://www.amazon.com/Your-Title-ebook/product-reviews/", is now quite different, and the Amazon review link is now coded like this:
https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_wr_but_top?ie=UTF8&channel=glance-detail&asin=B00EXAMPLE

E.g. since Shadow Hunt's Amazon ASIN is B06XVH355Q, the URL for its review is: https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_wr_but_top?ie=UTF8&channel=glance-detail&asin=B06XVH355Q

I also thought it made sense to repeat the links to all the books in the series at the end, since at that point the reader is more likely to know if they'd like to read more of your work.

Amazon Categories and Keywords

The categories & keywords topic is where things get interesting...

Amazon have a good help page about setting them up:
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200652170

It turns out that everything on that page is essential reading. I had ignored it.  So my keywords were not doing what they should.  E.g. I didn't know you had to also apply one (or two) of your categories as keywords, for certain Amazon searches (category searches?) to work for your books.
Watching the video that's also on that page suddenly made a whole lot of things really, really clear.  E.g. the stuff at the 3min40s mark where she says something like "Words in the title, categories, and description, will already be part of the search criteria: try to say something new".  Also, she says you should play around with the keywords and see which work best — I've never done that!

It's worth watching — maybe several times.

Setting Amazon categories

From https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200652170:

"Browse categories are the sections of the Amazon site where customers can find your book. Think of browse categories like the sections of a physical bookstore (fiction, history, and so on).

"During title setup, you'll select a BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) code. The codes you choose, along with your selected keywords, are used to place your book into certain categories, or browse paths, on Amazon. After your book has an Amazon listing, your book's category will appear under the Product Details section of your listing. This will be the path a customer can follow to find your book. [...]

"You can choose up to two BISAC codes for your book. We may also assign additional browse categories depending on your BISAC selections and assigned keywords."

The article also includes tips on choosing categories, and you should definitely read it.

Setting Amazon Keywords

Also note the topic "Categories with Keyword Requirements." For sci-fi and fantasy that links to this page: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201216150

Now, for each of my books I'd just made up keywords that I felt best reflected it, and entered those. I suspect I'm not following best practice even now, but at least I'm choosing keywords from the above list. I assume these are words which are most used by readers in Amazon searches.

You might be able to discover them by typing a search term and seeing what words auto-complete in the Kindle store?

Here's my before and after list of keywords for each book:

Keywords — Wild Thing, before
Science fiction	Urban fantasy
Strong female lead	Magic
Near future	Abusive relationship
Adult situations

Keywords — Wild Thing, after
cyberpunk	Urban
Strong female lead	paranormal
horror	Coming of age
Adult situations

Keywords — Harsh Lessons, before
strong female lead	some adult situations
some humor	some violence
assassin	covert agency

I also changed the category from Fiction > Science Fiction > Action & Adventure, to Fiction > Science Fiction > Cyberpunk

Keywords — Harsh Lessons, after
cyberpunk	urban, fantasy
strong female lead	paranormal
spy, spies, assassin, covert, agency	bully, bullies, bullying
thriller

(I also made the same category change for Shadow Hunt.)

Keywords — Shadow Hunt, before
thriller	cyberpunk
mutants	wizard
magic	coming of age
vampire

Keywords — Shadow Hunt, after
thriller	cyberpunk
strong female lead	magic, wizard, paranormal
spy, spies, assassin, covert, agency	coming of age
vampire

So, that's it: a bit fiddly, bit not too bad. I don't expect dramatic changes, but hopefully the rate of reviews will climb from nothing (for almost a year) to a handful of new reviews!

To Do

What I've failed to do (yet) is add the attractive-clicky-button links to make social media sharing of your book super easy. I think that might even be the most important thing to do!

The Six Things article describes how to set up sharing links for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Scribus for print edition covers

Here’s the long-delayed article on using Scribus to make the cover for your print edition. It’s not a full tutorial on using Scribus — I’m sure there are Youtube videos covering that, and anyway, its manual and the tutorials that come with it are very good. It’s surprisingly easy to use, amazingly powerful and well-designed, and… I just love it! It’s also free, and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. And it works so well!

(I wrote it today because someone - hi, Eustacia! - was interested.)

Why new covers, Luke?

Several reasons. I have a small sci-fi/fantasy convention coming up (the Sydney Freecon, Nov 3,4,5), but I have zero printed copies on hand. I also wanted to make some subtle changes to the covers, along with reformatting the internals of the first two. I was also finally ready to make the 4.25"x7" A-format ‘mass market’ style paperback editions. (Simply because I prefer that size for paperbacks.)

A brief digression, before I get to the topic at hand: the internal changes were switching the dialogue quotation style for the first two books to match that of the 3^rd. I’d held off for years, hoping the bug in LibreOffice preventing me from doing that would be fixed. In the end I gave up and used WPS to change them all. Of course, pasting the novel back into LibreOffice left the odd block of text in weird point sizes (some side effect of using ‘direct formatting’ instead of styles, I gather), but they weren’t too hard to fix. And having received help from some of the LibreOffice developers to understand page setup, I had created a good and safe couple of templates for 4.25"x7" and 5"x8" before transferring all the text into them.

One other thing, too: dreaming about offering some printed copies to my local library, I realised there was no way for a potential reader to know the story is quite dark, so I came up with the idea of including some quotes from reviews, since a lot of reviewers did comment on that. That meant I also wanted to insert one page in the very front, as you often see in traditionally-published books. For me though it was less for advertising than to warn readers what to expect.

And let’s start with a picture of the sort of errors that can occur if you don’t pay close attention to the trim and guide marks provided by your publisher. Here’s a picture provided by a very helpful person at Ingram Spark (waves to Erica), pointing out several serious placement errors in what I thought was a nicely-crafted cover for the A-format paperback edition of Harsh Lessons. How wrong I was!

What do you need for a cover?

I had the excellent cover files generated for my guesstimated size (page lengths) from Mirella de Santana, including the CMYK-profile Photoshop .psd files. You need a template from your publisher that lays out the exact dimensions for your cover: where the front, back, spine artwork goes, and what are the safe areas to stay inside. (The cover can shift a mm or few in the printing.) So I logged in to Ingram Spark and used their cover creator tool to generate and send me a PDF file for each of my books, and sat down with Scribus to make the new covers.

Here’s what the template for Harsh Lesson A-format looked like:

Now, because I had given Mirella only a guess of the no. of pages, and I was wrong in the end, I had to fiddle things to make them fit the template exactly.

Even if you have the right sized cover artwork, though, Scribus is great to let you prepare the right file for your publisher/printer/distributor. Although some people say you should be able to work in RGB images (the colour space you see on your computer screen, with its red, green and blue pixel elements), because printing presses cost millions of dollars and have a lifetime of decades, we’re still a long way away from being able to send most publishers anything other than the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK colour space files they need. Which is where PDF/X (which is also called PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-3) comes in. PDF/X is a file that lets you specify what’s called a ‘colour profile’ for the images in your artwork. Ingram Spark require/prefer ‘U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2’. You can download the free ICC CMYK colour profiles for a wide range of needs; as with everything Scribus, there are good pages about downloading, installing and using the ICC profiles, such as this one.

Setting the colour space in Scribus

I remember when I first started using Scribus I had trouble enabling the colour management. After some Googling, I found the answer at askubuntu.com. (Scribus 1.4.2: "PDF/X-3" option still grayed out, how make it work?) Manfred Moser posted with a problem similar to mine. Some time later he made a follow-up post (emphasis mine) —

"Okay, so I figured it out myself. It is important to turn on color management for the current document. This is done in File - Document Setup - Color Management. Changing it in File - Preferences - Color Management like described everywhere I found only affects new documents and not already existing ones."

If you’ve done that properly, when you open a new file in Scribus and go to File->Document Setup->Color Management, you can easily set things up so it will look like this (it’s showing ASUS for the RGB because that’s the display I use on my computer):

Note in particular the ‘Simulate colours on screen’ and the ‘Show colours out of gamut’. If, when you load in an image, it shows large patches of horrible lime green, that means it won’t print properly: unless you click on the image and choose the correct colour profile for it! As soon as you do that, all that nasty green should vanish. And you do that by right-clicking on the image and choosing Properties, clicking on the Image tab in that dialogue box, and choosing the correct ‘Input Profile’ (which in my case is ‘Embedded U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2’). That’s all you need to do.

How to use your cover’s template PDF

One of the many great features of Scribus is that it can read and work with PDF files, and understands some of the internal structure, so the PDF ‘image’ is not just one big image blob. So, just open the template file PDF for your cover with Scribus. E.g. in my template file (which I named HL-4x7-284pp-9781925430073-Perfect-template.pdf) here’s some of what that structure looks like in Scribus:

You can select each object and the corresponding picture element will move into view and be highlighted in the main drawing area.

At this stage, I recommend doing a few things that will make life easier:

1) Click about in the Outline dialogue until you find the three parts of the barcode for your book — the white background rectangle, the barcode itself, and the ISBN — and rename those objects to be something sensible. Then copy each item to the top of the page. With the object selected, the Properties dialogue easily lets you move it up and down in the drawing order. (You click on the green Up and Down arrows in the ‘X, Y, Z’ tab.) Don’t change the size of scaling at all: you want the barcode to scan properly!

It’s a good idea to Group these three parts together for convenience. And maybe name the group something sensible — like Barcode!

2) Now click about in the Outline dialogue until you find the parts of the template that show the inner, middle, and outer edges of the front, spine, and back of your cover, and rename them to something sensible.

3) Open the Windows→Layers dialogue and click on the ‘+’ button to create a new layer. That will make it trivial to flick all your artwork to be visible or not, so you can see whether all the important stuff fits entirely within the safe areas. It’s also a great idea to click on the Lock icon for the Background layer to make sure you don’t accidentally move or change anything in your publisher’s template!

Adding your Cover Image(s)

Next, insert the excellent cover artwork for your cover itself. For simple cases you can just create a single ‘frame’ to hold the whole cover image. Or you might need to create a separate frame for the back, the spine, and the front if you messed up and need to move or stretch or clip parts of the image.

You must create an image frame to hold an image: you do that by choosing ‘Insert Image frame’ from the Insert menu. Next, drag a rectangle that roughly sizes the rectangle. You can easily size and place it exactly, by either zooming in insanely far, or by going to the ‘X, Y, Z’ tab in the Properties dialogue and adjusting the Geometry by directly typing the measurement you want (and hitting Enter when you’re ready), or by using the up and down arrows beside each number. There’s also a small ‘Chain/lock’ icon you can click to tie the Width and Height together. Incidentally, the Name field in this tab is where you can type a new name for the object (Using just numbers, letters, spaces, parentheses, dash, or underscore: again, hit Enter when you’re ready).

Anyway, after you’ve placed and sized the image frame exactly right (or before: it’s up to you), you add the image to fill that frame by right clicking in the frame (or on the object) and choosing ‘Get Image...’ and then browsing to the location where your image is. Another insanely great feature of Scribus is that it understands Photoshop .psd files, including the CMYK colour space (unlike the Gimp), so you can directly use your cover designer’s Photoshop file if you thought to ask them to prepare a CMYK version for your print edition.

When editing the image (resizing, scaling, repositioning, etc.), just keep in mind: the ‘X, Y, Z’ tab in the Properties dialogue lets you adjust the image’s frame (the ‘window’ or ‘viewing port’ onto whatever part of the image you choose to make visible), and the ‘Image’ tab in the Properties dialogue lets you adjust the image itself. Again, you can (and should!) use the lock icon on the X-Scale and Y-Scale so you can’t accidentally squash or squeeze the image so it’s out of proportion.

And a super handy feature of Scribus is the ‘Scale To Frame Size’ radio button on the Image tab, which will quickly scale and position the image to good starting value that you can then later changing by choosing the ‘Free Scaling’ radio button instead.

One last thing: check! Use the Outline dialogue to click on those boundary objects for the front and back cover, and the spine. In the main view, you’ll see fine red selection rectangles appear, and you can use those lines to check that all the important parts of your cover are within the safe margins your publisher has recommended.

It was only after receiving the image at the start of this post, today, that I realised this was a really important step which I had failed to do.

Barcode (and QR code?)

You’re almost done! Just use the Outline dialogue to bring the barcode (that you copied and then Grouped together and named sensibly earlier, remember?) to the top of the drawing order so it’s visible, not hidden underneath the image you added for the cover. Make sure it’s still one inch (25.4mm) high. Don’t change its size!

I personally think it’s a good idea for self-published authors to also add a QR code alongside the barcode, containing a useful search string or URL as the encoded text. For this, I use the free software ‘qrencode’. Here’s the command line I used for Harsh Lessons:
qrencode -o QR-code-HarshLessonsBuyGoogleSearch.png -s 20 -d 300 \

"https://www.google.com.au/#q=%22L.J.+Kendall%22+%22Harsh+Lessons%22+buy"

which is just a way of encoding a Google search for: "L.J. Kendall" "Harsh Lessons" buy

There are also similar QR code tools with graphical interfaces, like qtqr.

Creating the PDF/X file for the printer

Your printer/publisher, who supplied you with your book’s cover template, will also have told you what kind of PDF file you need to create, but typically it will be PDF/X (PDF/X-1a or PDF/X-3), which means it supports CMYK.

In Scribus, simply select File→ Export → Save as…, and then

Choose the right ICC CMYK colour profile. These things are designed so the printer doesn’t try to put more ink onto the cover than the paper can handle, as well as faithfully reproducing the colours.

So… how hard is it?

I think my first cover, using Scribus, took me a day to work out most of the stuff above. Then, coming to it this time, I wanted to make four covers in one day (Wild Thing and Harsh Lessons, A and B formats).  I discovered I had no Scribus cover for Wild Thing — I had used Inkscape, and not provided a PDF/X!  I remember Ingram Spark at the time warning me that the cover was barely within the limits of the 240% maximum ink coverage, and a few parts slightly over. I realise now that it worked only by pure luck: the colours happened to be that way.

So I started from scratch, after having not used Scribus for several months (and that last time, was just one day in the last year). Even so, creating the cover for the B-format edition of Wild Thing took just 45 mins. For the A-format, I decided that process had been so painless and easy I’d do it from scratch for that one, too. This time, it took 20 minutes! So then I moved on to Harsh Lessons: each of those took me just 15 minutes.  That's right: four book covers in under two hours, since I already had the actual cover designs and the template PDF files.

So, yes: Scribus is powerful, flexible, robust, and once you’ve picked up a few key concepts, really easy to use.

Go forth and Cover!

Correcting your book on Amazon

This is a short piece about correcting your errors and updating your ebook, mainly on Amazon. It's an interlude to break up the series of Q&A discussions about my 1^st two books — this article is aimed at Indie authors.

Sigh. Well, I thought it would be a short piece. After all, the process can be explained in a few words: update/correct your MS. Upload it to Amazon. Contact them and ask them to offer the new version to people who have already purchased a copy.

Here's what Amazon say about the process: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/A2KRM4C8E91086

But I remembered Stella (my wife) telling me how much feedback she'd had from very satisfied users of her technical manuals saying how valuable it had been to get step-by-step instructions. Somehow the article just grew….

So, yes: the mechanics of making the correction to the edition you have on sale is straightforward: update your manuscript and make sure the same changes are made to your ebook edition. If you're using Calibre to generate the ebook file, that's trivial:

1. Save your MS as a Microsoft Word .docx file
2. In Calibre, select your book and Choose "Add files to selected book records" (then select your corrected .docx file). If asked about replacing an existing .docx, of course choose that option, since that's the whole point!

3. Still in Calibre and with your book still selected, choose "Convert books".
4. Choose ".docx" for the input format and (for Amazon) ".mobi" for the output format. For other publishers, you probably want to choose ".epub" as the output format to upload to your publisher.

5. Click OK. Calibre will spend a minute or so creating the .mobi file in your Calibre library. Upload that file to Amazon.

E.g. for me, under Linux:

$ ls -l "/home/luke/Calibre Library/L. J. Kendall/Shadow Hunt (99)"

-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 511043 Jun 9 17:33 Shadow Hunt - L. J. Kendall.docx
-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 1279081 Jun 9 17:35 Shadow Hunt - L. J. Kendall.mobi
-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 535810 Mar 26 2017 cover.jpg
-rw-rw---- 1 luke kendall 5658 Jun 9 17:33 metadata.opf

After the upload

This is where things get interesting.

What happens next is that Amazon will check your updated file before releasing it for publication. Basically, I think they check to make sure the book still matches its description and represents fair value, since Amazon has a duty to protect its customers. I imagine a small minority of shonky people try to use Amazon to scam or exploit people. Amazon works diligently to protect its customers from that.

This check can be quite fast if you're lucky, but may take up to two days (if I recall correctly).

At present Amazon provides no mechanism for you as an author to summarise the changes you made (for their staff who check your changes). I assume they have excellent internal tools for making the changes visible, though.

Amazon will send you an email when the updated file is released and available. On your Amazon Kindle Self Publishing page, under the Bookshelf tab, you'll see the book listing has changed back to LIVE

I think it's a good idea to have something like a revision number somewhere visible in the first few pages, so you can Look Inside to make sure the right version is there and available, and readers can also easily determine if they have the latest version.

Oh, and I strongly advise you to at least flip through the online preview of your uploaded content to at least glance at every page. This should pick up any outrageous things that have gone wrong — like blank pages, a shift into italics for long stretches, missing page breaks, illegal characters appearing instead as grey blobs… that kind of thing.

So, that's it — all done?

Nope.

Sure, people who buy your book from that date onward will get the new and corrected edition. But what about previous purchasers — won't Amazon distribute the corrections to them automatically? Or at least, offer it to them?

Nope.

The reasoning is that people might have made bookmarks and annotations, and preserving those when the underlying text shifts and changes is a tricky problem.

So, does Amazon at least inform existing owners there's a new version available?

Again: nope.

Well, at least you can inform people that there's a new version available, yeah?

No, not really. You don't know who bought your book. You can broadcast the news, but even if an existing purchaser goes to Amazon and re-downloads the book, they get the same version they originally purchased. Nor do they get the new version even if they delete the book from their device and re-download it!

Purchasers can only get the new version in one of two ways. One, by directly contacting Amazon and asking specifically to be given the new version. One of Amazon's people will then check and send them the new version manually. Which is a lot of effort for all concerned, right?

The other method requires no effort on their part, provided you do the right things. Using this second method, Amazon will send an email to all purchasers with a link they can click on to get the new content if they wish. Much easier. But you have to do some work as the author, to make that happen.

Have a look at what Amazon themselves say about this topic: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/A1RGGPBKDR1BPZ

You may think readers can set the options to get automatic updates; perhaps this works only in the US. After I'd tried and failed to get the updated version of another author's book, that I had purchased, after I knew she had updated it (waves to Barbara Strickland), I finally gave up and contacted Amazon via chat, to get the new version. After a bit of back and forth, the helpful Amazon rep pushed out the new content to me. But I wanted to know why I couldn't get it myself, so the chat continued:

Me: Great, thanks. But *surely* there must be a way for customers to do that without contacting Amazon? I was hoping to blog about the correct way to do this...
BTW, the new version is on my tablet, so that's good...
[Amazon rep.]: Thanks for your feedback.
Luke, is the automatic book update option turned ON on your account?
Me: I believe so... I'll check...
[Amazon rep.]: https://www.amazon.com/mn/dcw/myx.html/...(See full link)
Under settings, scroll down and you can see Automatic Book Update.
Please confirm this option once.
We value your support and look forward to the continued opportunity of serving you. Would be there anything else that I can assist you for today?
Me: Thanks. Yes, it is turned ON.
So, why did it not update, given that Automatic Update was already turned on?
You can still help me by explaining what should have happened, or by explaining why it did not update automatically.
[Amazon rep.]: Luke, some Kindle book update can be initiated only from our end.
Me: I believe that even with Auto Update, updates aren't pushed out automatically by Amazon because Amazon worries that people will lose their bookmarks, reading position, etc. So I though there was some user action required, to get an updated version. (And then I couldn't find a way to do it.)
[Amazon rep.]: Yes, you understood it correctly.
Me: So you're saying that there is no way to get an automatic update to a new version, except by contacting Amazon and asking them to do it for you manually? (I know that if the author goes to the trouble of requesting updates to be sent automatically, and I am not asking about that. I am asking about the situation when the author does not do that extra step.)
(I am having trouble understanding that Amazon don't provide such an obviously-useful feature: an option to "refresh/update" the book to the latest version.)
[Amazon rep.]: I can understand your concern completely. However, currently we don't have an option to process the update automatically without the request made from author or customer.
In this case I take it as feedback and forward it to the appropriate team.
Me: Thanks. I will do the same, from my end. I will also blog about it.
[Amazon rep.]: Customer feedback like yours helps us continue to improve the service we provide, and we're glad you took time to write to us.
We're regularly working on improvements to your experience with Amazon.

Pushing out the update

You can get Amazon to offer your update to all existing purchasers, by contacting them and asking them specifically to do so. It does take some work, however. The main thing you need is a clear and reasonably detailed explanation of what you have changed. You contact Amazon, and provide that information, and wait for up to seven days (usually) while they check the changes and your explanation, and decide whether it is a good enough reason to offer the new version to existing purchasers.

It's a little bit tricky, but not too bad.

For the explanation, they will happily accept very detailed lists of exactly what changed. E.g. for most of my (embarrassingly many) updates to Wild Thing after its initial release. E.g. for Release 5 (blush), my explanation to Amazon started with a summary:

Release 5: Based on reading the 1^st (proof) printed copy: numerous small improvements (punctuation, word choice), several small continuity errors fixed, several typos fixed, changed to us US-style punctuation within quotations.

"Global" changes:

+1) Replaced all pairs of "<non-breaking space><space>" by plain "<space><space>" (7,000+)

+2) Fixed all wrongly-spaced chapter headings (approx 10)

+3) Changed from British/Aust style quotation-punctuation style ('He said "Yes, really", then…') to US/Canadian style ('He said "Yes, really," then…') in majority of cases (approx 150). (The remaining examples, for unusual situations, are deliberate!)

+4) Replaced all British/Au-preferred "towards" with US-preferred "toward" (approx 30)

Below, the underlined portions of the "before" (left text, Release N-1) and "after" (right text, Release N+1) are to highlight the specific changes. The page numbers refer to the page number in the 5"x8" print edition: they are given just as an approximate indication of the location for the ebook edition.

(Followed by the detailed list of every change:)

Prolog, p6,p7 (punctuation)
'Or might they not even seek → 'Or, might they not even seek
but I believe! → but I believe.

p9 (punctuation, phrasing)
a hammer blow on meat, signalling → a hammer blow on meat signalling
her elbow against his ribs → her elbow into his ribs
and Shining Hair completed her spin → while Shining Hair completed her spin
as if expecting → as if he'd expected

p10 (punct)
husband's chest each impact → husband's chest, each impact

p11 (clarity)
She lunged, grabbing → She lunged forward, grabbing

p14 (clarity)
the female figure → the adult female figure

p15 (punct, typo)
the rigging lines he → the rigging lines, he
But you will → 'But you will
swallowed the land yacht.' → swallowed the land yacht.

Chapter 1, p21 (word choice)
before collecting herself → and she collected herself

Chapter 2, p27 (word choice, punct)
wall of affection → wave of affection
to his office → to his office.

etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Only on one occasion did I have trouble with Amazon. I had found an appalling error in the conversions, that had been present for volumes 1 and 2 for some period. What had happened was that in every place where I had used a blank line as a separator, to indicate a small scene shift or a passage of time, the conversion to .docx and then .mobi had lost the blank line — so the two scenes were jammed together! (I fixed this by making sure each empty blank line contained a "non-breaking space" character. This prevented the automatic stripping of these blank lines.) I provided just a summary of this change, and a sample of the places where this had happened, and uploaded the fixed versions. However, I got back a peculiar message from Amazon asking (I thought) more detail about my changes:

For example:
> Location 129**
> Error: Her mother have tol me
> Correction: Her mother has told me.

For months, as we went back and forth, the miscommunication continued. It was literally only while writing this blog article today that I realised they weren't quoting errors they had seen in my book and were concerned with, or couldn't find, as I thought they were telling me. I kept asking them to check the book they were looking at, and seeing the above errors, since those errors were not in my books — not realising they were giving me an example of the level of detail they needed, and were asking for additional specific examples.

Contacting Amazon

Okay, so, how do you contact Amazon to ask them to do this? First, login (Sign In) to your Amazon Kindle Select Program page:

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US

Scroll down to the very bottom. You should see a small, pale grey link called "Contact Us":

Clicking on that will lead to lots of useful help topics, but for this task you need to select "Book Details" under the "How can we help?" list of topics, and under that, select "Update a Published Book" and provide the explanation of what you changed, that we discussed above. You'll see from the template text they provide, Amazon also wants the title of your book and the ASIN (e.g. for my 1^st book, Wild Thing, the link looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Thing-Leeth-Dossier-Book-ebook/dp/B019DQVR76/)

Click on the "Send Message" link after you have filled in all the details (it will be quite long), checked it to make sure you haven't got silly typos or errors in your message, copied it and saved it away for your own records in a file or into an email you send to yourself.

Then wait for the news from the approval from Amazon.

So: is that it? Is it done now?

Why, yes, Mr Jones. I believe it is. All that's left is to perhaps notify your readers in your own social media that you've fixed problems and they might like to accept the offer of an improved version, when Amazon emails them.

And I think this blog article is done, too. I hope it's helpful for a few Indie authors!

Next time, I'll continue with the series of Q&A discussions about the 1^st two books in The Leeth Dossier.