Here’s where I’m at: the galley. I’m just waiting for that to arrive so I can go through it several times with a fine-toothed comb, a hatchet, and a red pen.
Ya see, when I lost my book files from the tornado storm, I had to convert my novel from a PDF to a doc I could manipulate, and when I did that, it randomly stripped out words, punctuation marks, numbers, etc. Oh joy. Right. Insanely annoying, especially for a perfectionist like me.
I uploaded my eBooks at Amazon, B&N and Smashwords on July 5th, but I’ve done at least three updates since because I keep finding these weird, random errors. (Soooorrry if you’ve bought my YA novel Kings & Queens and it keeps changing on your Kindle. 
I’m not finished either. One more round should do it.)
So, once I have my paperback book file and eBook file ready, I’ll re-upload and send the final to the publisher and get to organizing another blog tour. Because I keep having one unforeseen delay after another with this novel, I wanna wait until my book is up everywhere so perked people won’t have to wait for its availability.
I just wrapped up a Giveaway at LibraryThing. Three more people have requested my eBook in exchange for a review, which is cool with me. If you didn’t win a copy and would like one for FREE, just let me know. I’m giving out Smashword coupons and my eBook is available in all eBook formats expect plain text.
Publishing a book is exhausting and this is just the easy part. Then I’ll have to kickoff my big marketing phase and simultaneously finish up my second novel, StarStruck, which I hope to have out before Christmas. My plan is to offer that eBook for free. When you have a FREE eBook, you end up listed on all these sites that list free Kindle books, and that’s free exposure and might just generate sales for Kings & Queens.
For marketing, beyond the blog tour, I may do another giveaway at Goodreads. I’m creating flyers, bookmarks and a press kit with a press release. I’ll send the kit out with copies of my book (that I’ll get for free with ecards I’ve gotten through swagbucks) to major newspapers, I may try click advertising at Goodreads for a month and try to land as many eBook of the day spots as I can across the web, like on Kindle Daily Nation. That’s just to start. If you have any other inexpensive or free marketing ideas, please share. Thanks.
So that’s where I’m at.
~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.
I know it’s been a hassle, but you’re almost there. And let’s face it, it won’t be this hard next time because you know all the things you needed to do and didn’t from this experience. So now it’s going to be smooth(er) sailing right through for you.
Also, please explain how you got listed on the free Kindle books sites. I can’t list my book on Kindle for free and Smashwords, while awesome, doesn’t have nearly the traffic Amazon’s Kindle store does. So will you explain that aspect a little bit? I looked at the Kindle Daily thing too, but at the time I didn’t have the money (I was still unemployed). I might look at that again.
Keep going! You’re doing great, CV!
you have to be listed for free on smashwords first and then submit a price match request to amazon. Another writer in my publishing company, Sybil, did it and had a huge download success in moving 10,000 copies of her book in one day. Here’s her blog post about it so you can see how she did it. http://sybilnelson.com/wordpress/?p=713
With my fifth book, I was finding a lot of doubled paragraphs and things (on my designer’s/illustrator’s part) so it took me a couple of months to really get that one out, but it was released in December with all the fixes but then again I don’t have my state series as ebooks (and that may happen in the future, I just can’t say for sure right now) but am in the process of editing my YA paranormal mystery which will be available in all formats and that will be gone over several times before really releasing, hopefully by the end of October so that it is available for a teachers’ conference in November and the Savannah Children’s Book Festival.
Doing all the work yourself can be frustrating but it is worth it. Everything will happen and hopefully no more crashes for you. Do you have a backup like dropbox or possibly using Google docs to also put your files in so that if your computer crashes, at least you still have a backup of your files that haven’t been converted? Just a couple of suggestions. These are accessible on any computer. Keep going and before you know it, the book will be published. Good luck with everything – E
Ma America, The Travelin’ Maven (Elysabeth Eldering)
Author of the JGDS, 50-state, mystery, trivia series
Where will the adventure take you next?
http://jgdsseries.blogspot.com
http://jgdsseries.weebly.com
Author of Finally Home, a YA paranormal mystery (coming soon)
http://elysabethsstories.blogspot.com
http://eeldering.weebly.com
I don’t have google docs but I have been emailing my files to myself but that’s a good idea. Thanks for the tip and for visiting my blog. Congratulations on the release of your series and your upcoming novel. i appreciate the encouragement.
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