Announcing my first Kindle Vella, Dragon Touched

You’ve probably heard about Amazon’s new serial fiction offering, Kindle Vella. “Vellas” are stories told in episodes between 600 and 5000 words long. The first three episodes of a Vella are always free to read, but if you want to read on, you have to purchase tokens. Amazon does give its customers 200 tokens to try out the service. The number of tokens needed to read an episode are based on the length — an author has no say in the price charged. Packages of tokens range in price from $1.99 for 200 tokens to $14.99 for 1700 tokens. Episodes cost 1 token per 100 words (rounded down), which means that for $14.99, you would get at least 170,000 words of fiction. That sounds pretty good at first, but if you are big fan of humongous epic fantasy novels, it won’t won’t go very far. Take my novel Yseult, for example: since it comes in at over 190,000 words, if it were a Vella, the largest package of tokens wouldn’t even get you to the end. Right now, Vella has only been rolled out for the US, probably as a testing ground.

It’s a testing ground for me as well. I have no idea if this will go anywhere, either for Amazon or myself, but one of the novels I finished during my “year of completion” (more commonly known as the Year of Corona), was Dragon Touched. It’s an experiment to start with, an urban fantasy with steamy romance elements and dragons, coming in at under 50,000 words — a much better length for Vella-style fiction. Another reason that I decided to try the system out with Dragon Touched is that it’s a bit of a departure from my usual historical fantasy and science fiction. I don’t know if that will go anywhere either, but it was worth a try. The description:

Kyla Drake has long been plagued by visions of fantasy creatures. What she doesn’t know is that the creatures are real, a war is about to break out between them — and she is at the center of the conflict …

This is the way it appears on Amazon as of this writing:

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Touched-Book-Blood/dp/B099HX59WQ/

If you’re so inclined, check out my first attempt at urban fantasy — three episodes free, remember! And if you want to help me out a bit, a thumbs up would be nice. 🙂

Some notes on my experience for other writers who are also interested in testing the Vella waters:

The description. Amazon officially allows 500 characters for the book description of a Vella, but this is way too much. I started out with about 350 – 400 characters, but when I saw Dragon Touched on the Amazon page after I published the first couple of episodes, the description was cut off before the genre elements were even mentioned. It’s better to aim for something about the length of a tweet. As you can see from the above screenshot, even what I have now is a bit too much.

Formatting. Vella doesn’t allow any fancy formatting, only bold, italics, and underlining. It doesn’t even do tabs or centering. And if you cut and paste from your word processor into the text box, you will lose whatever formatting you have. I didn’t notice that right away, and I had to go back and put the italics back in for the first half-a-dozen episodes I published. It’s also possible to upload a doc or docx file, and I assume that would keep the italics. But who creates individual documents for every chapter of a book they’re working on? I write in Scrivener anyway, and I figured it was easier for me to compare the text box and my file on screen and reinsert the italics rather than exporting individual files for every single chapter.

Publishing. It is rather time consuming to publish chapter by chapter (or episode by episode). But on the other hand, for a Vella there is no need to worry about ebook generation and formatting. I create my ebooks with Vellum, and it typically takes me a couple of hours per book. So all told, publishing with Vellum is probably easier.

Free episodes. I thought at first that I would be able to set the number of episodes that would be free myself, and had planned to make it the first five. As a result, I created what I hoped would be a good cliffhanger at the end of chapter 5. When I started uploading my episodes, however, I saw that with episode 4, I had no option for making it free. As a result, I may end up compressing the first five episodes into three, which I assume means uploading everything again. So for now I’ll leave it as is. I want to get the last book in the Glassmakers Trilogy published first.

So, yet another new publishing adventure in my old age. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments, either about Kindle Vella, or Dragon Time, or urban fantasy, or even old age. 🙂

Testing Kindle Scout: Cutting Edges; Or, A Web of Women

My most recent indie experiment is actually based on something fairly old: my hyperfiction piece, Cutting Edges; Or, A Web of Women. I put the hyperfiction* version of Cutting Edges up on the web over 20 years ago, in a fit of literary experimentation when I still thought my future might lie in academia.

Well, it turns out that both hyperfiction and my future in academia didn’t have much of a future after all. Cutting Edges got a fair amount of attention at the time, but has now been languishing mostly unread for well over a decade.

So I decided to turn it into a more traditional novel and use it to test the Kindle Scout platform. You can check out the campaign here.

Lyssa Strutter only wants to make her magazine, Cutting Edges, a success. But then the unthinkable happens…

Mercy Kennedy Flunk is dissatisfied with her life and her marriage, but she feels stuck. And then the unthinkable happens…

Diana Archer is looking for a new band in need of a singer. But then the unthinkable happens…

These women and their friends respond with something unthinkable of their own: they organize a strike in bed in order to put an end to rape.

Sound like a fairy tale? It is.

But if we want to change our lives, we have to change the myths.

If you’re unfamiliar with Kindle Scout, it’s a platform where readers can browse unpublished books and vote for their favorites, thus giving them a better chance of being published through an Amazon imprint — including all the promotion that entails. The royalty rates are lower, but since Cutting Edges doesn’t really fit with my other published fiction (other than the fact that it’s feminist), I decided to run it through Kindle Scout. And who knows, with it’s theme of women’s reaction to sexual harassment and rape, it would be a good companion to the #metoo movement — if anyone notices. 🙂

* Hyperfiction is (or was) an experimental genre in which the narrative could be read however the reader chose, via the links provided in the text. If you are curious as to what I mean, you can try out my story “Triple Helix,” which was originally published in Ideomancer in 2007, but is no longer available on the site. You can now read it here: http://www.nestvold.de/helix/helix.htm

A Good Resource for eBook Sale Sites

I haven’t had a lot of time recently to update my various pages for places you can advertise eBook promos, so I thought I would share this site I found:

https://blog.reedsy.com/book-promotion-services/

It has an especially nice feature that you can click a button to only show free sites.

I should soon have news on the publishing front regarding Ygerna. Just waiting for the file back from the editor. 🙂

How Amazon continues to do its best to piss off its writers: The odyssey of establishing my rights to Looking Through Lace

I’m sitting here listening to a yellow jacket determined to commit suicide in one of my wall lamps, and wondering why Amazon seems so hell-bent on annoying its authors these days.

This weekend, August 5-6, Patty Jansen is hosting another big 99c promo with 100 books in various science fiction and fantasy genres. I entered my boxed set of Looking Through Lace, Books 1 & 2, and was accepted. Only now it looks like my book won’t be on sale — at least not on Amazon. And it’s anyone’s guess if I will have to take the book down or not entirely (on Amazon), for reasons no one has seen fit to provide me answers with.

But let us start at the beginning, shall we?

Early this week, I lowered the price of the Looking Through Lace boxed set everywhere it was available, just like I always do for a promotion. Price changes went through fine — except on Amazon. Instead, I got this:

Hello,

Thank you for publishing with Amazon. Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has his or her books sold by anyone else. To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming your publishing rights within four days:

Looking Through Lace Boxed Set: Books 1 and 2 by Nestvold, Ruth (AUTHOR) (ID:7106553)

Acceptable documentation can include:

– If you are the author and you are republishing your book after your publication rights have been reverted to you, a signed reversion letter from your former publisher
– If you are the author and you are publishing under a pseudonym, a copyright registration using the pseudonym
– If you are not the author, a signed contract between you and the author granting you the rights to publish the book in the territories, languages and formats you have selected
– If you are not the author, an e-mail from the address listed on the author’s (or their agent’s) official website confirming that you have the rights to publish their book in the territories, languages and formats you have selected
– If you are a literary agent, a signed contract between you and the author or an email from the address listed on the author’s official website granting you the right to act on the author’s behalf with respect to the book

Documentation we cannot accept includes:

– A statement by you that you have the publishing rights without verification by the author/copyright holder
– A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed

If you publish books for which you do not hold the publishing rights, your account may be terminated.

Thank you,

Amazon KDP

I wrote back, asking why they were requiring confirmation of publishing rights for a book that had been published with them for over a year and a half. I listed some of the publishing credits of Looking Through Lace and explained why I still had the rights to my own novella, which was originally published in Asimov’s in September 2003.

Instead of any answers, I got almost exactly the same email, with one small change at the beginning:

During a review of your KDP submission(s), we found that content in the below title(s) has been previously made available on Amazon. Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has his or her books sold by anyone else. To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming you have the necessary publishing rights within four days:

Looking Through Lace Boxed Set: Books 1 and 2 (ID: 7106553)

Please provide any documentation or other evidence that proves you have retained rights for the book(s) listed above.

This, of course made me even more frantic. I could hardly imagine that anyone was trying to steal my novella, since it wasn’t exactly selling like gangbusters. Most of the time it just sits there, selling a few copies a month, except when I do some kind of promo. But why would Amazon keep insisting I prove my rights to my own work if someone hadn’t tried to steal it? And why wouldn’t they respond to my questions and tell me what was the specific problem so that we could clear things up? None of what they required as “acceptable documentation” applied to Looking Through Lace or the boxed set.

Every time I tried to write them to try and find out what was going on, I got one of the above canned responses, about a half-a-dozen in all — and me becoming increasingly aggravated.

Finally it occurred to me (no help on Amazon’s part) that this weirdness regarding Looking Through Lace might have to do with the fact that it was recently reprinted in a new anthology, Galactic Empires. I sent them the PDF of the contract with Neil Clarke, and pointed out the clause indicating non-exclusive rights.

They haven’t sent me any more stupid canned emails since. But they also still have not gotten around to lowering the price of the boxed set for the promotion. I used to be a huge proponent of Amazon, but since the page flip controversy, I’ve changed my ways — more and more with each passing conflict.

I feel like I’m in a Kafka novel — which, incidentally, is not by me. 🙂

An Initial Attempt at Rebranding: A New Cover for Yseult

As much as I like the cover I already have for Yseult, the conversion rate for my ads is going from quite respectable to abysmal. Not completely understandable, since I haven’t changed the book description or cover for a long time, but given how many clicks I’ve been getting recently without sales, I decided it was time to experiment again. So without further ado, here is the first cover experiment for Yseult:

The idea for this cover is that it maybe / hopefully fits the epic fantasy conventions better, which often have one decisive image rather than an illustration, like the original cover had. The other consideration is that the first cover might be too romantic in tone to draw the right readers. While Yseult is based on a tragic love story, there is a lot of political intrigue and loads of battles. A bad-ass sword just might be the better image for that than a gal and a moon, even if there is a sword on that cover too. But most people don’t notice it until I point it out to them.

Anyway, wish me luck. This may not be the first, since I’m determined to work on this until I get a better conversion rate for my ads. 🙂

Testing new Covers for Chameleon in a Mirror

Since I’ve recently had rather disappointing click-through rates for Chameleon in a Mirror, I decided to try testing some cover designers through Fiverr, just for fun. I wrote about the option in my book Starting Out as an Indie Author, but I had never used it myself. There’s a saying here in Germany, “Probieren geht über studieren.” (Trying is better than studying.) So here I am trying! Here are the cover designs I got from my first Fiverr foray into covers:

For the sake of comparison, here’s the present cover:

And here’s the very first attempt:

What do you guys think? I have to admit, I had the feeling the new covers stood out better in thumbnail for sure, but I’d love a bit more feedback before I finalize. Thanks in advance to anyone who responds!

Starting Out as an Indie Author published! This month only 99c

Starting Out as an Indie Author has finally been published as an eBook! It took me longer than I expected, but then, what doesn’t, right? 🙂 It’s available now at most major retailers:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
Apple
Google Play

You can find other retailers on Books2read: books2read.com/u/4jKvPY

For the month of March, I’m offering a special introductory price of only 99c to get the ball rolling. I can’t reduce the price on Kobo yet, however, because I signed up for a promo where the minimum price must be at least 2.99. Writing this blog post, I also noticed that the sale price has not gone through everywhere. Soon, I promise!

Here’s the book description and table of contents:

Starting Out as an Indie Author
A Beginner’s Guide to Preparing, Publishing and Marketing Your EBooks

Have you written your first book and are considering self-publishing? Perhaps you have started looking into the possibility and are feeling overwhelmed by all the options, all the things you need to do and learn in order to become an indie author? Or maybe you aren’t even sure yet whether self-publishing is for you or not, and you want to find out more of what is involved before you decide.

STARTING OUT AS AN INDIE AUTHOR was written for beginning self-publishers and covers the basics on where to sell your books, formatting for eBook and print, and developing marketing strategies. It includes a number of step-by-step instructions for everything from cover design, to setting up eBooks for various distributors, to creating ads with Facebook and Amazon Marketing Services. In addition, there is advice on any number of topics: eBook pricing, using distributors, how much to spend on self-publishing, and writing blurbs for your books.

With this sanity-saving book as a guide, you will have a much better grasp on what is involved in self-publishing and will be able to approach the task realistically and with eyes wide open.

Including an interview with Kate Sparkes, author of the bestselling Bound series!

Contents:
Part I: Is Self-Publishing for You?
Chapter 1: Advantages and Disadvantages of Self-Publishing
Chapter 2: Potential Self-Publishing Mudholes
Chapter 3: The Costs of Publishing as an Indie Author

Part II: Getting Ready to Publish
Chapter 4: Why Editing is Important – and Who can Probably Skip the Expense After All.
Chapter 5: Preparing Your Manuscript for eBook Retailers
Chapter 6: Cover Options for Indie Authors
Chapter 7: Writing Blurbs and Descriptions for your Books
Chapter 8: Amazon Delivery Fees and Reducing the File Size of Your EBook

Part III: Publishing Your Book
Chapter 9: EBook Pricing
Chapter 10: To KDP Select or not to KDP Select
Chapter 11: Using Distributors for Getting into Online Bookstores
Chapter 12: The Importance of Keywords
Chapter 13: Formatting the Interior of your Book for Print
Chapter 14: Creating a Wraparound Cover for your Print Book

Part IV: Marketing
Chapter 15: The Big Challenge: Becoming Visible
Chapter 16: How to Develop a Strategy for eBook Promotions
Chapter 17: Alexa Rankings for eBook Ad Sites
Chapter 18: Advertising Sites
Chapter 19: Social Media and Cross Promotion
Chapter 20: Newsletter Basics

Part V: Final Thoughts
Chapter 21: Why “Write the Next Book” isn’t Enough; Or: What to do if your Books aren’t Selling
Chapter 22: Rolling with the Changes

If you’ve enjoyed the series here on my blog, please do share and spread the word. 🙂

Back to the (cover) drawing board

A friend of mine with a background in PR explained to me in detail why the covers I posted a little over a week ago don’t work from an advertising and branding perspective, so I’ve gone back and created a couple more with her advice in mind. For the sake of comparison, I’m also including the winner of my last poll, the more serious cover based on the graphics I used for the blog posts. Here are the covers:

Do please take the poll or let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks!

Poll for Indie Author Book Cover

Now I have also created a poll on helpmechooseacover.com with my three designs, so you can vote if you so choose:

Covers and Book Description for “Starting Out as an Indie Author”

I’m almost there! “Starting Out as an Indie Author” is nearly ready for publication. But first, I need some feedback on covers and the book description I’ve come up with. The first cover is based on the graphic I’ve been using for this series for some time now, with stock art I’ve already purchased, so it is more finished than my other two designs. The others have more the character of mock-ups, since I thought it would be fun to attempt something more playful as well. And as you can see in the covers, I haven’t purchased the art yet. They might be too playful, after all, and I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it to purchase the art.

And here’s the book description I came up with:

Have you written your first book and are considering self-publishing? Perhaps you have started looking into the possibility and are feeling overwhelmed by all the options, all the things you need to do and learn in order to become an indie author? Or maybe you aren’t even sure yet whether self-publishing is for you or not, and you want to find out more of what is involved before you decide.

STARTING OUT AS AN INDIE AUTHOR was written for beginning self-publishers and covers the basics on where to sell your books, formatting for eBook and print, and developing marketing strategies. It includes a number of step-by-step instructions for everything from cover design, to setting up eBooks for various distributors, to creating ads with Facebook and Amazon Marketing Services. In addition, there is advice on any number of topics: eBook pricing, using distributors, how much to spend on self-publishing, and writing blurbs for your books.

With this sanity-saving book as a guide, you will have a much better grasp on what is involved in self-publishing and will be able to approach the task realistically and with eyes wide open.

Contents:
Part I: Is Self-Publishing for You?
Chapter 1: Advantages and Disadvantages of Self-Publishing
Chapter 2: Potential Self-Publishing Mudholes
Chapter 3: The Costs of Publishing as an Indie Author

Part II: Getting Ready to Publish
Chapter 4: Why Editing is Important – and Who can Probably Skip the Expense After All.
Chapter 5: Preparing Your Manuscript for eBook Retailers
Chapter 6: Cover Options for Indie Authors
Chapter 7: Writing Blurbs and Descriptions for your Books
Chapter 8: Amazon Delivery Fees and Reducing the File Size of Your EBook

Part III: Publishing Your Book
Chapter 9: EBook Pricing
Chapter 10: To KDP Select or not to KDP Select
Chapter 11: Using Distributors for Getting into Online Bookstores
Chapter 12: The Importance of Keywords
Chapter 13: Formatting the Interior of your Book for Print
Chapter 14: Creating a Wraparound Cover for your Print Book

Part IV: Marketing
Chapter 15: The Big Challenge: Becoming Visible
Chapter 16: How to Develop a Strategy for eBook Promotions
Chapter 17: Alexa Rankings for eBook Ad Sites
Chapter 18: Advertising Sites
Chapter 19: Social Media and Cross Promotion
Chapter 20: Newsletter Basics

Part V: Final Thoughts
Chapter 21: Why “Write the Next Book” isn’t Enough; Or: What to do if your Books aren’t Selling
Chapter 22: Rolling with the Changes

Do please let me know what you think!