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You are making me never, ever want to self-publish anything. Which is probably what’s best for everyone 
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Apr 30, 2021 14:09
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Ebooks are easy! The cover artist I used wants me to do a physical version of my book because a lot of people are asking him if they can get his art in print, but messing with the set up of the paperback is super intimidating. Also I only commissioned front cover art so I'd have to make something for the spine and back cover and it would not match his quality, and he's busy with commissions for the next 1.5 years.  So ebook only for now.
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Apr 30, 2021 15:44
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In all fairness, the majority of my problems are because I'm doing a children's book which requires print formats and fixed ebook layouts. If I were self publishing genre fiction I'd probably be done by now and even on costs. I did my own illustrations and cover (only because I could get away with that kind of simple art style for a kids book) but shipping ARCs and beta read reward copies probably cost the same amount as hiring a good cover artist/designer. Marketing would still be the same headache. I spent all day today setting up a proper mailing list in preparation for a launch eblast. I ended up ditching the WP Newsletter plugin and going for Sendinblue over Mailchimp because the free plan is better. Still can't get my email on my domain working properly, but is finally an issues that's unrelated to KDP and Ingram Spark so I'll take the variety.  But yeah, don't let my rants put you off self-publishing!
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Apr 30, 2021 15:50
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Ccs posted:Ebooks are easy! The cover artist I used wants me to do a physical version of my book because a lot of people are asking him if they can get his art in print, but messing with the set up of the paperback is super intimidating. Also I only commissioned front cover art so I'd have to make something for the spine and back cover and it would not match his quality, and he's busy with commissions for the next 1.5 years. What does the cover look like? It might be easy to expand it into the back.
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Apr 30, 2021 21:40
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Ccs posted:I only commissioned front cover art so I'd have to make something for the spine and back cover and it would not match his quality, and he's busy with commissions for the next 1.5 years. I have also fallen into this trap. Eventually I commissioned a different artist to extend the original artwork. They did a good job, and people aren't paying as much attention to the back and spine (there's blurb overlaying the back of course) so the slight mismatch in style isn't too glaring unless you're actively looking for it. I hope. Anyway lesson learned!
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May 1, 2021 12:16
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Ccs posted:Ebooks are easy! The cover artist I used wants me to do a physical version of my book because a lot of people are asking him if they can get his art in print, but messing with the set up of the paperback is super intimidating. Also I only commissioned front cover art so I'd have to make something for the spine and back cover and it would not match his quality, and he's busy with commissions for the next 1.5 years. If he's the one who wants a print edition with a back cover, tell him to make time for it or shut up, lol.
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May 1, 2021 14:57
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Megazver posted:If he's the one who wants a print edition with a back cover, tell him to make time for it or shut up, lol. Uh, yeah, absolutely this. I’ve done plenty of covers and the back was always quick as long as no one wanted any new art. He should be able to fit it in.
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May 1, 2021 16:15
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Leng posted:Today is an exciting update! Preorder links are starting to go up at various retailers (Amazon of course, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Kinokuniya, Dymocks), but there are weird glitches due to metadata lag: Further update which I feel I need to post as a PSA because I've been freaking out about this over the whole weekend: The preorder pages on Amazon are fine. There is no issue. People I've been sending to the preorder page can preorder, no problem. The "issue" was a bad user interface design on the Amazon product page, on every major market other than the CA store, which had the default behavior I expected. Namely, when your shipping location is set to a location other than the country of that store, it still shows you the pre-order button, but there is red/warning text telling you that the product does not ship to your selected location. Sensible right? Well apparently some front end developer at Amazon disagreed, because the default behavior on the US/UK/AU stores is that if your delivery location is set to something other than the store's country, then it will take away the preorder button and tell you that the item is "Temporarily out of stock". On a preorder item. Which nobody has in stock, because the point of a preorder is for the retailer to collect preorders for an item that is not yet in stock so they can in turn place a bulk order with the wholesaler in advance of the release date. Thus causing me to freak out over the weekend and make a lot of customer service reps unhappy with my frustration. I only figured it out because I started contacting customer service in every location because there is no single team that looks after this and the KDP team won't touch it if you're publishing via IngramSpark. Not that any of the customer service reps were able to put two and two together either. 
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May 3, 2021 14:39
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Yeah the way they display this stuff is annoying. When I go on the US store my ebook says its not available for purchase because I'm accessing it from Canada. There's nothing that says "oh you're in Canada, you can get this available for purchase on your version of Amazon." I think the web version actually does pop up a warning saying "you should try the .ca site" but on mobile it just says it's not available. Not the most user friendly bit of UI design.
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May 3, 2021 20:03
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yeah, I would absolutely always presume you're gonna do a print version, get both covers done. Even if nobody sees the back cover until they buy a copy, it just makes everything look more professional, and self-publishers need all the professional look they can manage. Make sure your artist has done print before, because RGB on a screen is piss easy and idyllic but four colour printing is a demon-spawned hellworld where your design needs to be robust against whatever the gently caress colours it might feel like today, and also registration errors like when they just decide to use thicker paper than the cover size calculator thinks (happened to me on Libra Shrugged). I always thought nobody would buy a print version, and it turned out to be 25% of my sales. I mean, good! More money!
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May 3, 2021 22:00
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all other things like the standard of storytelling and cover art being equal, what are the most popular genres in self publishing in a hierarchy? erotica romance fantasy sci fi crime misery memoir then what?
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May 4, 2021 00:23
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Switch romance and erotica. Milscifi above sci-fi probably.
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May 4, 2021 00:28
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military eh? what about stories of second world wartime derring-do? my grandfather wrote an account of his time in the air force and ive sometimes thought about revising it.
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May 4, 2021 02:29
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Ccs posted:Not the most user friendly bit of UI design. Speaking of, I now have a new target of frustration and rage: Apple. It seems I am not the only one experiencing this weird script error with Apple and Apple IDs being deemed not active and therefore the iTunesConnect set up process choking: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252527782 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252586742 The applebooks@apple.com email is useless - they just send back an email parroting the error message you already have and telling you to activate your Apple ID (without realizing that the reason you're contacting them is because there's nothing to indicate that your Apple ID is inactive, particularly as you can login, etc without issue). Also it will take 3-5 days for them to reply. The online chat team also can't do anything when it's an iTunesConnect issue, phone support is required. Oh, and the information about phone support information on their own website (https://itunespartner.apple.com/books/articles/apple-books-support-2701) is wrong - all phone support hours are 9 AM to 7 PM US Central Mon-Fri, despite the public webpage saying they do 8 AM to 8 PM for the Australian phone lines. According to the only helpful online chat person I got, their internal operating manual says otherwise. Well that would definitely explain why I'm on hold for hours on end if I try calling the Australian line on Monday in Australia, or quite frankly any time after 10 AM in Australia, after daycare drop off. divabot posted:draft2digital deal with both pretty painlessly IME Quite frankly at this point, I'm going to leave it on Kindle, and then set up an ecommerce store on my own website to distribute PDFs and epubs. Most of my readers are going to come via word of mouth anyway, so it's not like I'll be relying on them browsing through the other stores to find it, and I'm not enabling DRM on the ebooks either so it doesn't really matter where they get it from. EDIT: OMFG that was so much easier than setting up anything on Apple. I now have a working estore that accepts credit card payments on my website. The free plan on ECWID doesn't include auto fulfilment of digital goods, but a quick test shows that when someone places an order, I'll get an email and be able to manually send them the file. I'll call this a win for today. Leng fucked around with this message at 06:18 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 04:10
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Breath Ray posted:military eh? what about stories of second world wartime derring-do? my grandfather wrote an account of his time in the air force and ive sometimes thought about revising it. Was he in the Luftwaffe? If so you'll do very well. If he was just Joe bomb loader in England that'll be much less of a big seller. Combat memoirs will do well, there was a glut of them after WW2 and are still quite popular.
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May 4, 2021 16:52
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divabot posted:yeah, I would absolutely always presume you're gonna do a print version, get both covers done. Even if nobody sees the back cover until they buy a copy, it just makes everything look more professional, and self-publishers need all the professional look they can manage. The cover artist I used was barely in my price range for a front cover, to get the whole wrap around done would be beyond what I could ever expect to get back in ROI. Maybe if I come into money in the future haha. That's what I get for going with a guy who's illustrated Harry Potter books. Well worth it though, the front cover is probably the reason anyone is actually reading the dang book and I just feel incredibly lucky that he was willing to work with me at all. In the future he'll probably become one of those absolutely legendary illustrators like Craig Mullens who never takes commissions.
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May 4, 2021 18:47
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Breath Ray posted:all other things like the standard of storytelling and cover art being equal, what are the most popular genres in self publishing in a hierarchy? ime, crime/mystery/thriller are more popular than scifi, but i haven't looked closely at scifi in a few years
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May 4, 2021 20:05
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Leng posted:
yeah, this works. Kindle has achieved the miracle of coming up with an ebook store where people spend money, and was always gonna be 90% of ebook sales. Ccs posted:The cover artist I used was barely in my price range for a front cover, to get the whole wrap around done would be beyond what I could ever expect to get back in ROI. Maybe if I come into money in the future haha. That's what I get for going with a guy who's illustrated Harry Potter books. Well worth it though, the front cover is probably the reason anyone is actually reading the dang book and I just feel incredibly lucky that he was willing to work with me at all. In the future he'll probably become one of those absolutely legendary illustrators like Craig Mullens who never takes commissions. oh god yeah that sorta guy, awesome I have considered various Guys of that sort but my current artist is a genius who keeps underpricing herself so I pay more than she asks. If you like my covers, my artist is Alli Kirkham of punkpuns.net and she is both an artist and a graphic designer, and you fuckin' pay her right ok
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May 5, 2021 00:04
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drat divabot, somebody got $10 worth of mad at you. or like 1/10000 of a bitcoin mad at you, since i'm assuming it was a crypto goon
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May 5, 2021 18:35
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:drat divabot, somebody got $10 worth of mad at you. $20 worth - some aggrieved coiner bought this, someone else bought back the previous image, then the aggrieved coiner bought this again
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May 6, 2021 17:15
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divabot posted:$20 worth - some aggrieved coiner bought this, someone else bought back the previous image, then the aggrieved coiner bought this again Still a more useful investment than bitcoin.
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May 6, 2021 19:01
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Today's update: Marketing I still hate social media. But I had a new idea for a regular thing I could post that doesn't feel spammy so I spent 4 hours this week doing the artwork that could be posted to Instagram and another 2 filming extra footage so it could go on YouTube then another 2 hours creating a related PDF download. It's also Mother's Day related so I'm capitalizing in the timing with this weekend. The Instagram post and related tweet did ok for a new account with not many followers but I shared the Facebook page post to one of the Facebook groups for this niche and it blew up. I wasn't really expecting it to go quite that quickly, so I was still setting up Google analytics and web pages. Will have to wait until next week to see how well it translates into audience growth, newsletter subscribers and then eventually book sales. Wish I had had the forethought to set up Google analytics BEFORE I put up the preorder links because then at least I could track how many people clicked through on those.Overall I'm feeling pretty good since I finally have some regular content I can post without feeling like that annoying person who's constantly spamming people to buy my book. And I should be able to eventually repackage all of the free content into a print book I can sell!
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May 7, 2021 08:41
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I wrote an 89k word novel in 2019 and submitted it to agents in early 2020 after doing live pitches at a conference. I got 5 requests and 5 rejections, and they all said essentially the same thing: it was clear that an adult was writing the book or narrating the story which was meant for a young-adult audience. I got the same feedback from the friends and acquaintances who read it. I've decided to try one more time to have it published, so I'm going to do a rewrite with a mind towards fixing the language, scenarios, and other elements for a younger audience. I'll probably cast a wider net this time, but if I hit a wall of rejections again I'm going to self-publish it. Anyways, does anyone here have a good recommendation for blogs, books, other resources for re-writing a book?
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May 8, 2021 20:43
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While I can’t recommend specific sites, I would find books with characters of a similar age to your narrator and read them a few times to study how that author used the voice. Maybe rewrite a few chapters of your book in the best approximation of that voice as an exercise. The scenarios don’t necessarily have to change, but the way the characters react to the scenarios might.
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May 9, 2021 00:52
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:I wrote an 89k word novel in 2019 and submitted it to agents in early 2020 after doing live pitches at a conference. I got 5 requests and 5 rejections, and they all said essentially the same thing: it was clear that an adult was writing the book or narrating the story which was meant for a young-adult audience. I got the same feedback from the friends and acquaintances who read it. I'm not sure how applicable it is to YA, but my favorite book about editing is called Self Editing for Fiction Writers, and it's by Renni Browne.
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May 9, 2021 06:24
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I appreciate the recs. Here's the pitch from my query letters/in person script: Flint, the son of a feral cat chief, is doomed. Assassins hired by rival heirs hunt him; a doomsday cult, the Golden Circle, summons terrors from a dead future; and the American Civil War descends on Flint’s city, Vicksburg, Mississippi. In the middle of a Union naval raid on the riverfront, assassins attack Flint. Kulke, an old war ally, saves him. To pay his life-debt, Flint enlists in Kulke’s religious order, the Ratkillers, for a mission beneath the city, to disrupt a Golden Circle summoning ritual. Flint, Kulke, and their allies fail their mission. Monsters embodying the horrors of Late Capitalism—global warming, white supremacy, the surveillance state, among others—emerge from the underworld to destroy the secret societies of cats. Flint’s conscience won’t allow him to flee Vicksburg alone, but time is running out on the doomed city. To save his family, Flint must return home to face ruthless political enemies. To save his best friend, he must join the war against the Golden Circle and their army of drowned dogs, possessed rats, and insane cats. To save a love lost to the cult, Flint may have to become a lost cause himself. To save them all, he must find the one force that can contend with the madness of the cult: Solidarity. SIEGE CATS is a gritty, urban, left-wing Warriors, with a mature style like The Wicked Deep and The Night Circus, where cats battle time-traveling forces of Late Capitalism, connecting readers’ experiences of contemporary issues with the enduring legacy of slavery.
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May 10, 2021 20:01
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:I appreciate the recs. Okay. I missed the fact that they were cats at first and was very confused. This doesn’t read like a YA pitch to me at all. It reads more like a political allegory. But with cats. I’d be expecting something more like Animal Farm. I can’t see how this would appeal to a YA audience. I probably don’t know what I’m talking about, though, so feel free to disregard.
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May 10, 2021 20:55
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Haha yeah there's a reason it got rejected a bunch and I'm gonna end up self-publishing!
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May 11, 2021 01:54
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Could you just age up the protagonist? Honestly I feel like with that pitch I’d want an older main character. Maybe early 20s, or whatever that is in cat years.
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May 11, 2021 02:52
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:SIEGE CATS is a gritty, urban, left-wing Warriors, with a mature style like The Wicked Deep and The Night Circus, where cats battle time-traveling forces of Late Capitalism, connecting readers’ experiences of contemporary issues with the enduring legacy of slavery. newts posted:Okay. I missed the fact that they were cats at first and was very confused. Seconding this. I do read YA from time to time and this really isn't YA. Is there a particular reason why you're trying to go after the YA market? As I understand, the YA market is insane competitive, but I mainly know what I know because I subscribe to Alexa Donne's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfwTRhTSM2NyJImC8HeUd1Q (she's traditionally published in YA, her two published books are sci-fi retellings of Jane Austen classics) Ccs posted:Could you just age up the protagonist? Honestly I feel like with that pitch I’d want an older main character. Maybe early 20s, or whatever that is in cat years. Also this. Flint doesn't come across as a young kitten coming into cathood, he sounds like a grizzled veteran (old war ally, a lost love). And also why cats? I mean, I love cats and I am a real cat person, but why cats in a YA book?  Usually YA has a huge focus on coming of age stories and first time romances, etc.
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May 11, 2021 03:02
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Classifying it as YA is a tough sell from the description, and it makes sense that you'd have those troubles with publishers. More adult themes in books can work for the YA audience... But it depends on the content and reception, doesn't it? Watership Down wasn't intended for YA but found a good place there, for example. Doesn't mean you'd suggest it be advertised as YA if it were being released today. This definitely sounds more like Blacksad than Watership Down, if we're talking animal protagonist stories. (I'd read it, though!) Leng posted:And also why cats? I mean, I love cats and I am a real cat person, but why cats in a YA book? https://youtu.be/doFcWmt7-J0 It's about cats.
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May 12, 2021 10:34
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Further update around marketing: I hate this lead up to a release date because I don't want to endlessly spam people about my book. I spent today putting together this week's regular free content. Tomorrow is going to be filming the related YouTube video. Hopefully after that I'll have the energy and motivation to start Edwardly posted:https://youtu.be/doFcWmt7-J0 I love cats and I love musicals but I most definitely did not love Cats. 
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May 12, 2021 13:39
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Today's marketing update: Filmed the related YouTube video in the morning. Watched YouTuber marketing videos on thumbnails, etc over my lunch break. Went and changed a bunch of things as a result after lunch. Finished editing and uploading around 3 pm. Went back to the launch newsletter I drafted earlier this week and sent some test emails. It keeps getting cut off at the bottom in Gmail. 10 tries later, it's 5 pm and I finally have an initial launch newsletter blast that a) has unique content to the newsletter vs Instagram and Facebook; b) is short enough that it doesn't get cut off automatically by Gmail and c) ready to go at 9:30 AM Sydney time tomorrow. So tomorrow's pre-release date marketing plan is: - newsletter scheduled to go out to my small list at 9:30 AM Sydney time, which is still 7:30 PM Eastern, so hopefully I'll catch US/Canada before they go to bed and Australia during the day. Unfortunately, this means everybody in the UK will already be in bed, but 75% of the audience is not bad I guess - free audiobook on YouTube goes live at the same time, description will have links to buy on Amazon and a bunch of other places - Facebook group and Instagram posts are gonna go up also at 9:30 AM, this will be mainly to the audiobook, which I hope to then drive sales of the print book Hopefully the momentum keeps going over the weekend so I don't have to do anything on the weekend other than engage with replies, etc. I'm reasonably confident it will, because that's what happened with last week's Facebook group post (which according to Facebook's analytics apparently reached 7000+ people after 9 shares, and only 2 of those were mine). Tuesday is launch day, so my plan is to film me reading the hardcover with my daughter and post it as an IG/Facebook story. Not really sure what I'm going to do after that, but it seems like most other authors in this space build buzz by hosting giveaways. So I will probably do that, but not with my book because I want them to buy my book, but with other people's books and do a cross promo. I hate marketing so much.
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May 13, 2021 08:15
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Fair enough, it doesn't really fit for YA, I just assumed it would have to be YA because of animal protagonists. They're cats because of a line in a history of the Vicksburg siege I read, where a Union soldier remarked after taking the city that the Confederates were so desperate and close to starvation that you couldn't find a stray cat or hog or dog in the entire town. The image stuck with me, and I figured an apocalyptic story about animals in a siege would be good. The cats could probably be adapted into gangs of kids or something, and that's an angle I'm considering. It would lose a lot of freedom in crafting mythologies and political systems, but it could work.
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May 14, 2021 04:24
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Part of me is curious if you changed the characters ages and kept them as cats whether it would work. A lot of people grew up on Redwall and so forth, maybe they'd be more open to a story featuring animal protagonists that wasn't necessarily for kids. There's already comics like Blacksad and so forth that do this. But if you think the selling potential is better by changing them to humans or something and keeping their ages young that's fine. I dunno, the blurb didn't come off to me as YA, and that's before reading any of the prose and having to decide whether the voice sounded YA or not, so seems to me if you're going to change them to humans to avoid the "YA-ness" of animal protagonists, might also be easier to age the characters up as well.
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May 14, 2021 14:54
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Fair enough, it doesn't really fit for YA, I just assumed it would have to be YA because of animal protagonists. Oh. That is not a good reason for targeting the YA market. And that inspiration is really cool. If that's what got you all fired up to write the book, then stay true to that instead of twisting it into something else that it isn't. Also: Ccs posted:Part of me is curious if you changed the characters ages and kept them as cats whether it would work. A lot of people grew up on Redwall and so forth, maybe they'd be more open to a story featuring animal protagonists that wasn't necessarily for kids. There's already comics like Blacksad and so forth that do this. If you had pitched this to me as "Redwall, but for grown-ups and from the POV of cats" I would buy this as a reader, no question.
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May 14, 2021 18:37
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So this might come in handy for people: The Self Published Fantasy Blog Off is coming up and I thought "it'd be cool to submit to that, too bad my book is trapped as a KPF file and thus stuck inside the Amazon ecosystem, whereas bloggers require the files provided to them in Mobi for review." After some googling I downloaded Calibre and installed a KFX plugin that people SAID would convert the KPF file into whatever I so desired. Fantastic! Oh, but tragedy, what it actually did was just give me my crappy old Docx file I had originally uploaded into Kindle Create without any of the nice formatting I later added. Oh well... But in a last ditch effort I searched "KPF" on Calibre's main page. Turns out Calibre doesn't expect anyone to have downloaded the KFX plugin, and thinks they're being helpful by instead just grabbing the Docx inside the KPF package and loading THAT in. But if you disable the plugin that comes with the program that grabs this Docx, and then enable the KFX plugin in its place, you can then convert your nicely formatted KPF file into a Mobi, an Epub, a what-have-you. Hooray! Managing to escape the Amazon ecosystem while still geting all the benefits of their formatting feels nice. Edit: Although I'm not sure this has anything to do with it, today I can't find my book when I search for it on Amazon.com. It's still there, still enrolled in KU, still searchable on Amazon.ca, but the .com just sort of vanished it. I'm wondering if for some reason converting it to a mobi alerted Amazon somehow and they've decided the punish the book by hiding it, or it's just a weird glitch... Ccs fucked around with this message at 16:34 on May 15, 2021 |
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May 15, 2021 04:07
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Yeah the book totally vanished from Amazon.com, although still available if you type in the exact search address, and my author profile no longer lists it. Definitely thinking that Amazon figured out I had converted it into a mobi and the system automatically delisted it or something. But I didn’t get any notification to that effect or warning. I’ve contacted Amazon support in the hope they can make it right. Very dangerous to play around with Amazon’s file formats. Sigh, all I wanted to do was be able to send out review copies to get the book to a wider audience. Now the audience has been shrunk like mad until this gets resolved. It could also have been a freak accident but the timing is too much of a coincidence. EDIT: Turns out it is probably a coincidence. The KDP forums are filled with people complaining about missing books, apparently it's affecting "just about everybody." Fun times. Ccs fucked around with this message at 17:23 on May 15, 2021 |
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May 15, 2021 17:01
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Breath Ray posted:misery memoir I'm just sitting here laughing because that's such an apt description. I'd prefer to never have to edit a memoir again, though it's not the content, it's the mine field of critiquing the author's life story.
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May 15, 2021 17:14
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Hijinks Ensue posted:I'm just sitting here laughing because that's such an apt description. I'd prefer to never have to edit a memoir again, though it's not the content, it's the mine field of critiquing the author's life story. it's a proper genre! people like reading about other people's miserable childhoods! my gf's friend wrote one and did a reading at the library and it was daaaaaark. describing in detail how her father knocked her around. i think anyone who reads that stuff should be locked up tbh or at least have their hard drive seized
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May 15, 2021 22:20
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