Smashwords vs. Amazon

Well, "In a Stranger's Arms" has been up for a week now on both Smashwords and Amazon.  While it's certainly too early to tell which one will perform better in the long run, I want to take a little time to just update what my experience with both has been like so far.

On Smashwords, I have not yet received any sales.  I have had 10 downloads of my free sample and probably somewhere around 50 page views.  Both page views and downloads peaked on the first day (when my story was more visible due to its recent publication), and dropped significantly thereafter, but have continued to trickle in.

On Amazon, I can't tell how many page views I've gotten.  However, I have gotten three sales.  Two of these came through Amazon.com, and one through Amazon.uk.  Excitingly, these three sales were enough to push me up into the top 100 paid in the erotica<urban category.  When I looked last night, I was somewhere around #68.  I've since dropped back off (should have taken a picture when it was up), but I thought it was pretty darn exciting just to see something I'd written placing on a top sellers list, even if it was in a small niche and just for a moment.

As I said earlier, it's definitely too early to say whether one store is worthwhile and the other isn't, but I have definitely been having more success this past week at Amazon than at Smashwords.

I still don't have any reviews up on either site.  If anyone wants a free copy to review, feel free to drop me a line.

More Thoughts About Smashwords and Amazon

Well, "In a Stranger's Arms" is now up at both Smashwords and Amazon.  Of course, as soon as I submitted, I found a typo that I'd missed before.  It seems like no matter how carefully you proof-read, something will slip by.  Well, I guess that's the nice thing about e-publishing.

For Smashwords, fixing the typo was as simple as just making the change in the source file and re-uploading it.  The whole process probably took about two minutes.  On Amazon, it was a longer process.  I made the appropriate change and then uploaded it.  However, I again got the message saying that I needed to wait 12 hours for review.  Uploading a new version didn't take my old version down, so my book is still up.  When the 12 hours (or whatever it is) is over, the new version will slip into place.

One place where Amazon has been superior to Smashwords is in ease of formatting.  On Amazon, it really went very smoothly to take my .doc and change it into an e-book.  I ran into one small hitch when I accidentally had track changes on before I uploaded and ended up with a word crossed out.  Other than that, as far as I can tell, what I saw in my .doc is what I got.

With Smashwords it's a bit of a different story.  In my post about Surviving the Meat Grinder, I talked about how the Smashwords submissions process was relatively painless.  I recant.  I thought I understood everything as I initially went through it, and almost everything worked.  However, for some reason anytime I tried to use a style other than "Normal," the Meat Grinder would default my font to something like Arial or Calibri.  I tinkered and re-uploaded my file 5 or 10 times, but was never able to solve that problem.

As it stands, my section headings and front matter appear in a different font, which I don't think looks terrible, but I do wish that I could solve this.  I was using Word 2013, and I have absolutely no idea what is causing this problem.  If anyone reading has had this problem, or knows how to solve it, I'd love to hear what you have to say.

In a Stranger's Arms

Well, I finally did it.  "In a Stranger's Arms," my first erotica short story is out there.  I submitted it to Smashwords and also to KDP (Amazon).  I figure this will cover my bases as far as getting the most exposure.  With Smashwords, the process of submission was very fast.  After I'd put all of the information up, it was only a matter of minutes before my ebook was up and ready for downloads.  With Amazon, it looks like it's going to take a little longer.  On my author dashboard on Amazon, it says that it is "In Review" and will probably be up within 12 hours.

When I submitted to Amazon, I mostly used the same document as I'd prepared for Smashwords.  I changed my copyright notice and removed the references to my Smashwords profile page and interview, because I didn't know whether it was kosher to direct Amazon customers there.  Aside from that, things really were mostly the same, and it certainly wasn't much extra work to upload it in two places.  Going forward, I will be very interested to see how my story performs on Amazon and Smashwords.

I'm happy and proud to have my work online and available (and a little nervous too, if I'm being completely honest).  But it's a good feeling to have something that I've worked on actually be in a place where people can purchase and enjoy it.

I'm not planning on resting on my laurels, though.  I have complete drafts of two more stories at the moment, and I'm just planning on writing more!

If you'd like to purchase my book, it's up at Smashwords right now.  It's not up on on Amazon yet, but when it is, I'll post the link there as well.

Smashwords Formatting: Surviving the Meat Grinder

So last night after my husband and son went to bed, I decided it was time to get "In a Stranger's Arms" ready for submission to Smashwords.  I'm expecting to get my cover back from the designer today, and I'd like to be able to get the e-book up as soon as I get it back.

So, I armed myself with the invaluable Smashwords Style Guide by Mark Coker and set to work.  I was actually impressed by how easy it was.  It took a little reading and a little time, but it wasn't really a complicated process.

For those of you who don't know, Smashwords e-publishes to a variety of formats and makes its books available to a number of different e-book retailers.  Because of this, Smashwords uses a system that it has effectively termed "The Meat Grinder" to prepare all of the different formats.  Now, I've heard that the tricky thing about the Meat Grinder is that if you don't format your e-book correctly, you could end up with some very bizarre and ugly results.  That's what you get with automation.  As such, a large part of the style guide is dedicated to helping you avoid the errors and anomalies that could lead to serious formatting goofs.

Smashwords's current system accepts .doc files, and it is recommended to use Microsoft Word as you prepare your document for submission.  But because Microsoft Word hides a lot of data and formatting in places that we can't always see it, we need a way to strip that away.

The first thing I did was copy my entire story (first composed in Google Drive) and paste it into notepad.  Doing this strips out all of the formatting.  Then, I copied the text in notepad and pasted that into Word (I use 2013).

From here, I went into File>Options>Display> and clicked all of the boxes under the heading "Always show these formatting marks on the screen."  This makes it so that tabs, spaces, hidden text, paragraph marks, etc. are visible.  Not all indents are created equal.  Some are created on a style level, and some are created using a tab character.  These two different sorts of indents are treated differently by the Meat Grinder, and they can make for big problems in the way that your e-book comes out.  But if you don't have these boxes checked, you won't be able to see the difference between the two.

The Smashwords Style Guide does a much better job than I will be able to of explaining all of the hows and whys of formatting, but the basic gist is that just about all formatting should come down to styles.  This means that instead of manually putting tabs or bold or font changes, you should define these elements in a style and then apply styles to the different parts of your e-book text.

Here are the styles that I used:

Normal (for all of the general body of my e-book):
Font: (Default) Garamond, 12 pt, Indent:
    First line:  0.3", Left
    Line spacing:  single, Widow/Orphan control, Style: Show in the Styles gallery

BookTitle (for the title on the title page):
Font: 16 pt, Bold, Space
    Before:  60 pt
    After:  24 pt, Style: Show in the Styles gallery
    Based on: Centered

Centered (for the front matter):
Indent:
    First line:  0", Centered, Style: Automatically update, Show in the Styles gallery
    Based on: Normal

Centered Bold (for when I wanted to bold something in the front matter)
Font: Bold, Style: Show in the Styles gallery
    Based on: Centered

CustomHead (for section titles):
Font: 16 pt, Bold, Indent:
    First line:  0", Centered, Space
    Before:  60 pt
    After:  18 pt, Page break before, Style: Show in the Styles gallery
    Based on: Normal

Flushleft (for making the very first paragraph of text flush left just to make it look pretty):
Indent:
    First line:  0", Style: Show in the Styles gallery
    Based on: Normal

As I went through the formatting, I started by making everything "Normal" style, then changed the different parts as necessary.  Following the Smashwords Style Guide, I was also able to add in a table of contents with links to the proper sections.

I'm interested in seeing how my story comes out of the Meat Grinder.  It's possible that I've goofed something, and it'll come out with the formatting completely destroyed.  But if I've got it right, then it really wasn't too painful of a process.  If you follow the Style Guide as you do your formatting, you'll come out just fine.

My Smashwords Interview

Hello all!  This is just a short post to say that my Smashwords interview is now up and running over at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/viviangwynn.  For anyone who wants to know more about me and my writing, that's a great place to find out a little more. (Or you can contact me via this blog, facebook, or twitter and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.)

Smashwords made it very easy, and actually quite fun to fill out the interview.  They had a series of questions to choose from, or the option to write in one's own questions.  I only answered the pre-selected questions, because it was a lot easier than making up my own ones.  Sometimes I find it difficult to just come up with what I want to tell people about myself, and the questions Smashwords provided gave me a very useful, easy to follow formula for talking about myself.  It was also nice that there was a number of pre-written questions that I could cycle through.  Not every question was interesting to me, so it was nice to be able to just get a new question with the click of a button (it'd be great if real interviews were like that!).

The Smashwords interview had room for ten questions and answers.  I ended up answering eight.  I'll probably go back later and answer the last two questions a little later.

Why Have a Smashwords Interview?

A Smashwords press release says that Smashword Interviews help "readers learn the story behind the author" and go on to say that "a good interview helps the reader develop a multidimensional understanding of who you are as a writer and a person."  It also says that on to say that an interview is an opportunity to convert prospective readers into readers, and turn fans into super-fans."  That sounds nice, of course.  I hope my interview can help people to find my writing and develop a connection with me.

How to Make a Good Interview?

The same press release gives instructions regarding creating a stellar interview.  It says that the people who read an interview will generally be one of four different groups of people:

1. They’re already a fan of your writing, and they’re curious to learn more about you as person. Your interview can help them appreciate you and your work on a completely new level, and will help solidify your brand in their mind. 
2. A fan of yours, or possibly even a complete stranger, enjoyed your interview and shared it with their social media friends on Facebook, Twitter, or on their blog.  Be sure to promote your interview to your fans, and encourage them to share it with their friends!
3. You’re a new author to them, they’ve never read you. They’re looking for a good read and they’re curious to learn more about you before they take a chance on your book.
4. They stumbled across your Q&A by accident, possibly via a search engine like Google because your interview addresses a topic that matches the keywords they were searching on.  They didn't know they were looking for your book, but after reading your interview, they might think differently!

A good interview will have something for each of these groups of people.  If you include some information for each sort of person, your interview is bound to be a success.

Editing

So now that my cover designer is busily working on the cover for "In a Stranger's Arms," it's time to get this baby ready for submission.  Last night I did a deep read through and edit of my story, because there's nothing worse than getting something into print and then finding glaring problems.

The best way that I have found to do this is to read my writing slowly and out-loud.  Like many of you, I read fairly quickly unless I actually force myself to slow down.  When you read like this, it's very easy to gloss over spelling errors, word choice problems, and a host of other mistakes.  At high speeds, you don't always actually read what's on the page, you read what you expect will be on the page, and this means that you might auto-correct in your mind the very mistakes that you're looking for.

Reading out-loud can also help you to guard against getting too overwrought in your writing.  There's nothing like reading out-loud to make you really own your text and ask yourself, "Is that really the way I want to put that?"

But reading by oneself, even out-loud, is only step one.  No matter how carefully you read, it is still you doing the reading, meaning that you can only get your perspective on the story.  When you publish, you will hopefully have appeal for an audience of more than one.

It is important to have one or more readers who can look over your work and help to tell you what does and doesn't work.  You want someone who can be honest with you both about what works amazingly well and about the times that drag, are confusing, or are unintentionally humorous.

Not many people in my immediate circle are comfortable reading erotica (or even know that I do), so my pool of potential readers is currently limited.  Thankfully, my husband is an experienced and accomplished writer.  He has a lot of experience with both reading and writing (and he's open-minded about my sexually-oriented writing).  I've already had him look over it once before, but before I go to press, I'm definitely going to have him read it over again more in-depth.

For some people editing, proofreading and getting feedback from beta-readers is an extraordinarily painful process.  And it makes sense that it is so.  Our writing is so personal.  It takes blood, sweat and tears to get something down on the page.  Perhaps more disconcertingly, it reveals a wealth about our basic assumptions about the world and ourselves, even (and perhaps especially) the things that we least meant to share in our text.

The important thing to remember is that errors will be found regardless.  If something goes to press and has a typo, an unbelievable moment, or an awkward phrase, someone will find it.  But wouldn't we rather that that happen before it goes out to the general public?

When I've finished with my edits, the next step will be getting it ready for submission to Smashwords.  I've already started looking over the style guide, but I get the sense that I'll be doing a lot more studying of that document before "In a Stranger's Arms" finds its way online.

Cover Design

Boy, it has been quite a day today!  I work a . . . not-so riveting day job and it's been nothing but stress, spreadsheets, and grumpy people all day long.

There have been a few saving graces.  First, I just got a copy of Bill Willingham's Fables Volume 4 at the library, and I love Fables.  Second, on my lunch break I got to give my husband a hug and get some exercise.  And third, I'm eating tortellini with broccoli and chicken in a cream sauce.

Most pertinent to this blog, though, is the fact that things are moving forward with "In a Stranger's Arms," my first erotica.  I started editing it last night and also began corresponding with my cover designer.  She asked me a number of questions in order to determine what sorts of images to use on the cover.

She asked what color hair the protagonist's hair is and whether she and her love interest should be dressed or undressed.  She asked whether they should be embracing or kissing.  She asked what sort of background I wanted?  Cityscape?  Apartment?

Some of these I'd already thought about, and some of them provided food for thought.  For example, when writing the piece it actually never came up what my protagonist's hair is.  I was writing from her perspective, and most people don't spend a ton of time thinking about their own hair color.  There was a lot more detail about her love interest, of course.  In the end, I told the designer that the protagonist was brunette mostly just because I was going for a bit of a an everywoman character, and brown hair is fairly common.

My designer also asked for a summary of the work to aid her in creating the cover.  Here's what I sent her:

Sara Graves has always made the responsible choices in life. She dated the nice boys, went to a good college, flossed. But after her "nice boy" husband cheats on her, Sara ends up in a bar looking to make the first big mistake of her life. She finds that mistake in Terrell, a tall, muscular black man playing pool in the bar. When Sara comes on to him, she finds him more than willing. But Terrell isn't just a powerful lover, he is a tender one as well, and as he makes love to Sarah in the restroom of the bar, his car, and finally his hotel, Sarah realizes that she may have just made the best mistake of her life.

In the end, I realized that I have two goals with my cover.  First is to accurately represent the feel of what is in my story so that readers will know what they're getting into when they start reading.  Second is to create something eye-catching and sexy.  As long as I get those two things, I'll be happy.

Beginnings

Hello, I'm Vivian Gwynn, and this is my first blog post!  I am just jumping into the world of self-publishing erotic fiction.  I love writing, and I love sex, so this seems like a match made in heaven.  I'm planning on selling my fiction through Smashwords, and I'm curious as to how the process goes.

I've been told that self-publishing is a great venue for erotica and works of a sexual nature (probably because people feel more comfortable reading a sexy e-book than they do carrying around a hardcover collection of erotica).  This makes sense to me, and I hope that I have the chance to share my writing with a lot of new people.

I've written my first piece of erotic fiction, "In a Stranger's Arms," and I'm currently preparing it for publication at Smashwords.  Currently, I'm working on getting a cover for it.  Because I'm working on a pretty tight budget, I'm trying a designer who works with a website called Fiverr.  At Fiverr, every service is $5, although there can be add-ons which add to the price.

On a couple of forums, I've read mixed reviews of cover designers at Fiverr, with some saying that they've had great experiences and others saying that you get what you pay for.  I figured that for $5 I can afford to take a little gamble.  My biggest concern was whether the images used in my cover would be legal and correctly paid for.  So I specifically asked all of the designers I was looking at where they got their images from.  I avoided any who said that they simply found them on Google, so there wasn't any issue.  The designer that I've ended up going with says that she gets her images from bigstockphoto.com and that they offer a license for up to 250,000 downloads.  If I end up getting 250,000 downloads, I'll need to upgrade to an extended license (but if that happens, it's nothing but good news!).

I'm currently waiting to hear back from the designer.  She says that she'll be contacting me soon to show me some options for the cover.  Exciting!