September Sales for Cancelled

I am very proud of my release month! My original goal, way back when, was to sell 50 copies, releasing the beginning of the month. I didn't release CANCELLED until September 14, so I only had 16 days, not 30. I sold a total of 28 copies!!! Extrapolating that rate out, it was roughly 1.75 books on average per day, and if I had had 30 days, multiplied by 1.75, that would have been 52.5 books!

Here is what my sales looked like:

Results of Free Ebook Giveaway

I have a bunch of news and one little blog post to get them out! I apologize for taking a mini-break, but last week was insane for me! I began scheduling my blog tour, and I will have dates posted soon. I am mainly going for October/November, so if anyone has any dates, let me know!

Last week I had my FIRST author interview on A Book, A Girl, A Journey by @J_A_Bennett. This Friday will be my first ever review, from the amazing @SusiBorath on her blog. I'm hoping my friends and I can kill her traffic numbers for the day. We did it for @J_A_Bennett! We can do it for @SusiBorath!

So let's talk some shop. :) Anyone out there have a FREE book as about the extent of their marketing plan? Yeah. I know how you feel. Back when I was writing CANCELLED I thought, erroneously, that I would just give coupons, tell people my book is FREE and Wham! Bam! I'd have sales coming in hand over fist. Well, we all know I can freely admit when I was wrong....

Uploading to Amazon KDP The Real Story

I uploaded to Amazon's KDP on 9/13/2011 and I'm STILL tweaking.

There are 4 main areas to Amazon. Your regular Amazon account, where you buy and sell, make reviews. Make note of that email address and password.

Next, is the KDP section. If you don't want to panic and go nuts later on, USE THE SAME EMAIL ADDRESS AND PASSWORD AS YOUR AMAZON MAIN ACCOUNT. I messed this up, signing up with KDP with one email address, and Amazon's main site with a different one because I didn't realize the two were linked. I thought I had to resign up. I accidentally uploaded my book under the one email address, then signed in with the other, swapped to KDP to check on my sales (yes I'm a newbie and each sale makes me giddy) and MY....BOOK...WAS...GONE! I fixed it, but now I have 2 email addresses to maintain with Amazon.

Now, KDP doesn't let you edit your author page. For that, you have to go to Author Central. Yeah. Again, sign in with the same email address you used for KDP and regular Amazon. All of these steps require your information, metadata, etc. Your author page should have a professional photograph of you, not a hold your cell phone and take it. People can tell, even if your arm isn't showing from the quality and angle of the photo.

Claiming your Author Central page removes your About the Author on the product description page, BUT it add links to your author page and a photograph of you and information at the bottom. You can add a biography, events (I'm using mine to promote Trick or Treat for Ebooks), links, and an RSS feed to your author blog!

The final place is Shelfari, which you connect through your Author Central profile, and you next perform a book report on your book. It wants characters, quotes, a one sentence summary, synopsis, description, etc. PHEW! I'm only filling out a few of the blocks, as I'm not 100% sure what shelfari does.

So uploading to Amazon is quite an ordeal.

A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby. CANCELLED is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.  WIP: PAST DUE A nurse, crippled by debt, takes a part-time job in medical investigation only to find the man she's dating is a fraud!  (status: outlining)

All Ebook Formatting Made Super Simple

I finished my final round of edits and began working on formatting. GRR! UGH! SERIOUSLY??????? and a number of expletives left my mouth early on...until I found Jutoh. I originally was looking for something free, but this program is worth 40 pounds of gold, not just $40. I only paid $24 in a combination deal to purchase Writer's Cafe as well, but that's a separate blog post.

How easy is Jutoh? This easy.

Download OpenOffice.org if you don't already have it. Write your story. Pick one style for your chapter headings. Pick another for your ebook text (set your paragraph indent with the style, DO NOT USE TABS). Save as .odt [you can have more styles, I have 4 in my book total and it preserved them all!!!]

Open Jutoh. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux (YAY!). Start a new project. Fill in your metadata (be prepared for this, this helps Amazon and the other sites catalog and show your book for other readers). Select the .odt file you made with everything in it. Select the file you want to be your cover. Tell it to autogenerate your Table of Contents. Click compile. Wait a minute or two. Run the check, then go to FILE:Export and pick the format you want. 

TA DA!!!! You now have access to your book is every format you need. Including .epub, .mobi, the file for Smashwords, and other formats I don't even know where they sell.

Want to get fancy? You can change up which files are included in making the ebook for different versions called configurations. So if one store doesn't allow links in the book, but another does, have two different files of the area with the links and presto changeo.

Like I said....worth 40 pounds of gold. Which at current market value would be almost $1.2 million. 

Give Jutoh a try, a trial copy is free. I don't know exactly how long the trial lasts, as I played with the software for about 30 minutes before deciding it was a must-have for a self-published author.

UPDATE: All formats uploaded to the Amazon, BN, and Smashwords with 0 problems. The Smashwords edition I just saved the file I made perfect for Jutoh that was .odt as a .doc. I fixed the Copyright page and added the ### to the end. So far, so good. A few typo issues, but that was my fault of choosing the wrong file. In the future, upload day will not involve me being the sole caregiver of my toddler. 

And I've already sold 3 copies! 

Get 50% off any version on Smashwords! Coupon code: JZ49W. http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/88799

"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 22, 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.