Olive O'Brien on starting Silver Angel Publishing

I always intended to write a book, particularly one for children. But with a hectic work schedule and with so many other things going on in my life, I just never got around to doing it.

This all changed in 2008 when I set off on a solo trip around the world. It was a real eye opener and I returned to Ireland a very different person. I took this as an opportunity to write a book and a few months later, my first book Perry the Playful Polar Bear was finished. 

As I had put some time into writing my first story, I really wanted to see it in print. However, I found out pretty quickly that as printing costs are so high, most Irish publishers don’t publish picture books. As traditional publishing wasn’t an option, I started to look into the whole area of self-publishing.

I never worked in publishing and had so many questions such as; how do you self publish a book? How do you sell and promote it?!

Fortunately, Dan Poynter’s Self Publishing Manual (a must-read for anyone who is considering publishing their own book) answered some of these questions and I began to take the first tentative steps towards publishing my own book.

I decided to set up my own publishing company, Silver Angel Publishing to publish and distribute my children’s book. First, I needed an illustrator and looked at several portfolios before I decided on an amazing illustrator called Nina Finn-Kelcey, who has worked with me over the last two years. With the number of illustrations, I also felt that it would be best to employ a graphic designer to design the cover, lay out the interior and prepare it for print.

Once the file was print-ready, I sourced a printer. A local company gave me a competitive price and I printed 1,000 copies of my book. So, my first book Perry the Playful Polar Bear was printed and ready to go.

Now all I had to do was sell it.

An independent bookshop in Cork agreed to hold my first launch in November 2009 and I managed to blag some press attention. An article on the book and launch appeared in a local newspaper which was followed by positive reviews in the Irish Examiner and Primary Times. My book also won the children’s books category in the 2009 DIY Book Festival which honours the best of independent and self-published books.

The launch and subsequent sales exceeded my expectations, which prompted me to release a second children’s book, Perry the Polar Bear Goes Green in 2010.  This eco-friendly book teaches children about the effects of global warming through the eyes of a polar bear cub and has drawn plaudits from the INTO for making the recycling process accessible and compelling to children.

Shortly after the launch of my second book, I set up www.creativewriting.ie an online writing community which offers online and correspondence writing courses. Until then I distributed my books through my website however I found myself becoming busier and busier. So, I went about sourcing a distributor and luckily Gill and Macmillan agreed to take on my books. I also employed a book sales agent which freed up a considerable amount of time.

My third and most recent book Eco Zico was released at the end of 2010 which shows children how everyday actions can make a difference to the world around them and earlier this month, an interactive book app for the iPad was launched on iTunes (link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ecozico/id478600242?mt=8) based on Eco Zico.

It has been a major learning experience, but one that has proven worthwhile. I not only love writing children’s books, but also enjoy visiting schools and libraries around Ireland to carry out book readings and workshops. In addition, Silver Angel Publishing was recently shortlisted for the 2012 David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards. My books are available in major book chains and independent bookstores across the country and are distributed in the United Kingdom by various educational suppliers.  

The United States is the next port of call, which will be a tough nut to crack but fingers crossed for next year. I also hope to publish a fourth children’s book in the New Year and you can check out my website at www.silverangelpublishing.com for updates

.

Follow me on twitter at @oliveobrien or find me on facebook at www.facebook.com/oliveobrien. Books available for purchase at www.silverangelpublishing.com

How to Publish your eBook Part 4

So you've formatted your eBook here
created a lovely cover here
created a Smashwords account
and published it on Smashwords here.

The first thing you should do is to check that the different version created by the meatgrinder on Smashwords are readable. Sometimes there can be wierd characters that leave great big gaps or mess up the fonts.

The different versions are described here.

First download the versions you can read on your PC. PDF, Plain Text, HTML, Javascript, RTF and scan through to check the formatting.

Download the adobe digital reader here to read epub for iPads, Nooks etc.

If you don't have a kindle to check out the Mobi file, download Kindle for PC here or the Mobipocket reader here.

Those are the main ones. If these are OK, the other less common ones probably are too.

If there are any formatting problems, you can correct them in the original .doc document and on the Dashboard screen, click Upload a new version.

How to Create an eBook - Part 3

You've formatted your eBook
here

(or paid someone to do it)

You've created a cool cover here (or paid an aspiring graphics designer to do so)

You've created an account at smashwords (More on account related stuff later)

Now to publish your book.

Click Publish.
Enter the Title
A Short Description up to 400 characters. This is the all important blurb that readers read before they descide to download your book. It should be in the same style as the book and have a great hook.

Mine is:

Zoë Madison has escaped to an uneventful life in Dublin when she gets a call from sexy, celebrity gardener Larry Harte. Larry has found that her New Age hippy mother worked for Larry's popstar father before he died. But is there more to the story? The paparazzi certainly think so and pursue them across Ireland as they delve into the past and face the future. Life is the Story of Plan B.

Then an extended description, up to 4,000 characters. This is optional but I think you might as well use it. Don't just repeat what's in the short description as they usually display one after the other.

Language

Adult Content Flag - has to be pretty wild to be considered, I think.

Pricing Tricky one this. If you just want people to read your eBook, out it out for free or put it out for free for a while at the start. If you want to make some money, most people tend towards charging $2.99. If you charge less, e.g. €0.99, there are some places that won't take them as their cut is too low. But google around for thoughts on this. You can change to price at any time.

Sampling. I think 25% is best. If someone downloads 25% and reads that, they should really be into it by then and should pay for the remaining 75%. If they don't want to read on, you've lost nothing.

Categories Add two categories. e.g. Fiction > Literature > Mystery and Detective or Romance or Poetry Anthology or whatever.

Tags are used by search engines to find books that fit the searchers criteria. So if your book is a Romance in Shetland involving sheep, boats and a pregnant protagonist, those would be your tags. Or a murder mystery in Tipperary with vampires and hobbits or whatever.

eBook formats Choose them all. Why not?

Cover imageYou previously created jpg file from your PC.

files of book to be publishedYour labour of love, correctly formatted and saved in word 97 format (.doc)

Read the terms (i.e. it's your book and you know what you're doing) and hit Publish.

What happens next?
It goes into the meatgrinder queue which turns it into the (currently) 7 formats, checking for basic errors.
This stage used to take ages but now it's pretty quick.

There may be formatting errors reported. If it's not obvious what the problem is, you may have to start again and use the nuke method (see previous post). It's either that you have the copyright and header bit wrong or formatting.

If you're successful,

Congratulations. Your work...has been published on Smashwords and is now available for readers.

you're published! Congratulations.

You do need to assign an ISBN. Why? Smashwords retailers such as Apple and Sony will not accept your Smashwords book unless you have a unique e-ISBN.

I'd recommend using the free ISBNs for now from smashwords. Go to the ISBN manager and select the FREE one.

OK that's enough for now. You're published. Next to check the formatted copies, look at getting paid and also at Amazon.

Poetry Apps

First posted on writing.ie.

Inspired by this piece by the poet and fiction author, Nick Laird in the Guardian (can't be doing without my Saturday Guardian) I've had a look at some of the online poetry tools he mentions.

Wattpad - a website to share your stories and poems. You can perhaps read the most popular (What's Hot) but having a quick scan through showed nothing of interest to me. 1 millions reads? Romance gets a lot of reads here; poetry doesn't. There's an app to read on your mobile too. Wiki here tells you how it all works. I've uploaded an old short story of mine up here and will see what happens.

Portapoet for

• Easily writing and sharing rhyming poems
• Finding rhymes for words
•  

Available as an app on iPad etc. Not a huge fan of rhymes for rhyming sake myself.

Another is Erotic Poems where you can, for 99c, once you successfully complete the structured poems in this program, create more complex work, learning to:
-excite all five of your lover's senses
-identify formulas for creating structured forms of poetry
-enjoy the fruits of prewriting and revision
-use figurative language to entice someone special
-create a sustained image to captivate the person of your desires

Right, so.

The Poetry Foundation in America has some apps. It is said to turn your phone into a mobile poetry library. But only if it's an iPhone. I have an HTC. I love my HTC.
Poetry Ireland take note. A great way to promote Irish Poetry. Also the Poetry Society in the UK. Get over yourselves and get out there.

Prose with Bros again for the iPhone, competitive poetry with random words. Each player is given the same 50 words to construct their prose, and after submitting the results, other players vote on which is best over the course of the next 24 hours. As described here, pretty smutty.

On my HTC, if I search Marketplace for Poetry I get 1,046 results, mostly other people's poems for free, people I haven't heard of as well as Bill Shakespeare and his buddy, Goethe.

Refrigerator Poetry is there as an android app and there are rhyming dictionaries too.

Next Steps to Publish your Beautifully Formatted eBook - The Cover

Book Cover. You need a book cover. Ideally you will make your own, using your graphic design skills. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it does have to look like a book.

Have a look on Amazon at other book covers of the same type you are writing. Don't steal someone's photo from the internet. There are plenty of very reasonably priced photos if you can't make one yourself. You can adapt an existing picture with readily available picture software. I use Corel Photo House but other people use Paint if they don't have Adobe Photoshop.

Put your book title in large letters as the cover will often be quite small as a thumbnail. And it has to have your name or pen name on it too.

My cover isn't any great shakes, frankly and I'm considering redoing it. This picture, by the way, is the warning sign at The Cliffs of Moher.

Check the dimensions of existing covers. Mine is 832 pixels by 1280 pixels and 150 dpi. (Smashwords say 500 by 700 but I thought this looked a bit odd next to thumbnails for paper books.)

The well known blogger Catherine Ryan Howard recommends a cover designer here who, I think does a good job.

7 Steps to Format Your eBook

Do you have a masterpiece wilting in a drawer/on your hard disk? Do you have a book ready that is for a small readership? Do you want to share your work? Do you want to make money (actually the last one is not a given, not by a long stretch)

My first novel, The Story of Plan B, was shortlisted for the London Lit Idol but it had been sitting on my hard drive ever since, pretty well. So having seen some other people I knew successfully publish their books as eBooks, I decided it was a waste to keep it just to myself and to share. I published it as an eBook.

Step 1. Start, I think with Smashwords. This site has been going for ages

Smashwords is an ebook publishing and distribution platform, serving authors, publishers, readers and major ebook retailers. Smashwords is ideal for publishing novels, personal memoirs, poetry chapbooks, short and long-form fiction, and non-fiction. If you've written it, we want to help you share it and sell it!

So create an account. At this point you can download or sample loads of other books. Have a look around. There's a whole world of eBooks out there, some wonderful, some less so. How do you tell the difference? Same as paper books. Word of mouth, reviews, popularity and by reading samples.

Step 2. First, and really, really importantly, read through your book looking for typos and grammar errors. Yes, use the spellchecker and grammar checker but that is not enough. There will be typos. Find them. Exterminate them. Ideally use another reader. You can pay a professional. Be ruthless. Even then, there may still be typos. And it's really annoying for your readers and a sign of an indie-publisher.

Step 3. Now format your book. Do what I didn't do at the start and try and use your current version. If you're anything like me, you've been working on it for years. It's been through the mill. It's been rewritten, edited, cut and pasted, different version of Microsoft Word, or whatever your chosen word processor is. You've changed fonts, changed them back.

Step 4. So do what Smashwords call the Nuclear Option. Open a new document. Select all in your current novel. (Ctrl-A) Paste without formatting into the new document.

(This is Word 2007. You're version may look a little different)

Step 5. Now you should go back and correct the formatting.
Use Normal Style for the whole book. There's a big long spiel in the Smashwords style guide on paragraphs, well worth a read if your knowledge of styles in Word is any way shaky. To summarise, use one indent at the start of each paragraph, single line spacing or multiple a max of 1.15, no blank line after each paragraph.

Chapters are different in eBooks. In paper books, a new chapter will start on a fresh page. In an eBook, you don't know how big a 'page' is so each chapter starts after a couple of blank lines from the previous chapter.

“Hello?” I said again. Something was wrong. I looked at the phone. It was upside down. I turned it the right way up. “Hello?” I said for the fourth time. “This is Zoë Madison. Who is this?”

~~~~~~

Chapter 2

Two minutes later I sat down on the sofa, my head whirring. Larry Harte was still on the TV, digging steadily through a bed of muddy earth. The muscles of his shoulders moved under his olive-coloured T-Shirt. The hand-knitted jumper was draped over the red wheelbarrow.

I have the Chapter markers in Heading 2.  I have one blank line at the end of Chapter 1. a line of squiggles. Another blank line, Chapter 2, a blank line Then the first paragraph of Chapter 2.

So get rid of all your page breaks, section breaks, whatever. Get rid of all your multiple blank lines. Don't mess with Tabs.

If you need anything more fancy, change those paragraphs individually.

Smashwords recommends using one font (Times New Roman, Helvetica, Verdana, Whichever appeals but is easily readable. Font size doesn't matter, as long as it is consitent. eReaders can modify font size to suit the reader.

This shouldn't take hours to do.

Step 6. The start of your book must have the title, author, "SMASHWORDS EDITION", a copyright notice and may have a brief link to your website or blog. This is mine

The Story of Plan B

by

Kate Dempsey

Copyright Kate Dempsey 2011

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Read more news, views and stories on her wildly popular blog emergingwriter.blogspot.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Step 7. And at the end of the book, you should put something about yourself and point the reader in the direction of other books or blogs or whatever.

THE END

Kate Dempsey is a writer and poet living in Ireland. Her poetry and fiction is widely published in Ireland, the UK and Europe in magazines and anthologies as well as RTE radio and in the Poolbeg/RTE anthology 'Do The Write Thing.' She has won and been nominated for prizes which include the Hennessy New Irish Writing for Poetry and Short Fiction, Frances MacManus Short Story Award, The Plough Prize and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. reads with the Poetry Divas Collective who love to blur the wobbly boundaries between page and stage and are available to perform at all cool events.

Read her blog at emergingwriter.blogspot.com

Tweet at PoetryDivas and let her know what you thought of the book.

OK, that's enough to be going on with. Next post addresses the legendary 'meatgrinder' which formats your book for all sorts of platforms and cruel, autovetter errors. Also pricing and coupons.

Self Publishing

Well, here's a fascinating story about self publishing of a type. Kate Thompson, a well known chick lit author with books and books under her belt was turned down byu her publishers (is there hope for the rest of us when someone with a track record like that is removed from the lists?) and so she did it herself. Online for taster chapters and then posted out the rest. Fantastic. Of course she already had a gaggle of readers waiting for her books and on emailing lists and the like but still. What an acheivement. You hear so many horrors stories or not so much horror as hard slog and not worth it stories about self publishing. Good to hear one that works.

Here's her link.
http://www.katethompsonenterprises.com/

Helps to have a link from Marian Keyes newsletter too!