Amazon adds a great new feature to Kindle: automatic delivery of corrections

I went to my "Manage Your Kindle" page on Amazon today, to send a copy of the J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith mystery novel The Cuckoo's Calling to my husband's iPad, and I noticed something new.  There was a notice above the section with the list of my books that said I could sign up for automatic updates when a corrected version of an ebook comes out. Naturally, I clicked OK!

A big advantage of ebooks over print is they can be corrected if errors (typos as well as formatting errors) are found. Newer Kindles even offer a way to report these kinds of mistakes (in the More menu that comes up when you highlight a phrase).  But once the publisher has fixed the mistakes, someone who has already bought that book won't see that fix unless they download the book again.  Amazon will email buyers if the mistake is significant, but then they buyer has to request a new copy. This new feature is a "sign up once, and it's automatic from then on" thing, which is much better.

The number of errors in ebooks from self-publishers is widely variable, depending on the author's attention to detail. The number of errors in traditional books used to be just awful, mostly because of workflow issues, but they have (mostly) gotten better. I have found a couple of typos in The Cuckoo's Calling, though (an excellent book, by the way!). I will have to report them and see how well this new feature works!

Finally! The Nostalgia Gambit is now available in iBooks!

Such a time I have had, getting my sixth book into the iBooks store! Finally, it's there! And it only took me over two months of trying.

That was sarcasm, by the way. My experience with this book was a good illustration of the difficulties in dealing with one retailer via another retailer. The folks at Apple don't make self-publishing easy, so I use Smashwords to get my books into the iBooks store.

In the past, Smashwords only accepted MS Word documents formatted with their specific styles. They had a program called the meat grinder that they used to create all the various formats they support (epub, Kindle, PDF, txt, etc). You uploaded your cover image and the Word file, and it took it from there. The books came out kind of vanilla, as far as style, but you got a valid epub file, and that was what made it possible to sell that book on the other retailer platforms. All the major online bookstores except Kindle rely on epub format.

If the epub book had an ISBN and made it into the Smashwords premium catalog (which meant it was well formatted) then it could be sent to iBooks. It sometimes took a week or two to show up but it arrived. Smashwords tries to be responsive to their authors, and when people asked to be able to upload epub directly, they made that possible as of the last day of of 2012.  You can now upload an epub copy and an MS Word copy to Smashwords, and they will use the epub for all the non-Amazon online vendors. The book still has to say “Smashwords Edition” in the front matter, but otherwise it doesn't need to be different from any standard epub file.

Now iBooks has gotten pickier about their book covers. The cover image appears inside the book, as part of the epub file, and it gets uploaded as a separate file for use as on the store's web pages. Apple appears to have changed the rules about what resolution the image can be; too low or too high a resolution, and iBooks won't accept it. Smashwords must have realized this because when I uploaded an epub copy of my seventh book King of Trees, it told me right away that the cover image with the file was too low res. I got that cover artist to supply a different version and the book was delivered soon after and showed up in the iBooks store in a few days.

With  TNG, though, it had passed epub review and gotten into the premium catalog with no trouble, and had shipped to Apple right away, but it never showed up in the iBooks store. I tried emailing Smashwords and they just tried to redeliver it for me.  Still no TNG in iBooks. Eventually, I clicked the link to pull it from Apple, which makes Smashwords send a takedown notice, and once that was sent, I clicked Distribute again, but it would not ship to Apple!  I emailed again, and this time the person investigated and told me the problem was the cover image inside the book was too high a resolution! I got the artist (different artist from KoT) to give me a lower res image and then had that re-inserted into the epub file. Once it was all straight, the book was there in a matter of days.

Victory at last!

How do you say “free” in Italian?

It turns out it's gratuito. I looked it up because Amazon has made The Sixth Discipline free in the Italian Kindle store! I'm not quite sure why the book is free in the US, UK, Canadian, and now Italian Kindle stores, and not the others, but I suspect it's because someone in those countries clicked on the “tell us about a cheaper price” link. Brazil, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, and India, it's your turn. Demand my book to be livre, 自由に, libre, kostenlos, librement, and मुक्त!

Catching up

Is it really July already? How did that happen? I am deep into the revisions stage of Saronna's Gift. When I give a manuscript to my writing group, I always have to weigh their comments against my own sense of what the story is about and what tone I am going for. As you can tell by looking at almost any book's Amazon reviews, people have varied taste. What one person finds edgy, someone else will see as too dark. What one reader admires in a character will sometimes make other readers dislike him intensely. This is why Baskin-Robbins makes 31 flavors!

The group has been in existence for about 20 years, although the membership has varied during that time. One “new” member just rejoined the group because she retired and finally has time to write again. Another is new-new, as he had only attended a few meetings.  The folks who have been in the group for years do have some predictability in their critiques of stories submitted. One guy always wants more physical description of the characters. One woman always loves the character everyone else hates. And one bloodthirsty guy always wants the writer to kill off one or more characters.

When I review the comments my fellow writers have made, I look for two things. First is consensus. Is there something everyone hated or thought didn't work?  Because if so, that is something I need to change. The second thing is harder to pin down. Does a suggestion resonate with me, with what I want the story to be? Because it's my story, and no matter how interesting an idea sounds, of it doesn't make the book into the story I want to tell, then it's a suggestion I won't use.

At least not with this book. But I save everything. A writer is really a kind of idea vampire. He or she feeds off chance observations, friends' life struggles, newspaper items, and anything else that comes his way. It's what we do!

An interesting case

An interesting point about ebooks is that their use is not governed merely by the technology available but by the marketplace. Sony had a very nice e-ink reader before Amazon came out with the first gen Kindle (which looked a little clunky in comparison), but Sony didn't have much of a bookstore, and its Reader never got much traction in the marketplace. Amazon was the first company to successfully deal with the chicken-egg problem: no one would buy an ereader unless there were lots of ebooks to read, and one one would publish in ebook form unless there were lots of folks with ereaders. Their success gave them a solid head start in the ebook race.

To establish the Kindle as a viable reading platform, Amazon not only created apps for other devices (iPhones, iPads, PCs, Android), they discounted the price of ebooks so that best sellers were rarely more than $9.99. They could do this because publishers sold ebooks at wholesale rates; they set a price, and Amazon paid them that amount. Amazon then turned around and set its own retail price at whatever it wanted, sometimes less than it had paid for the book.

It was the Kindle's success that made the publishers fear it. In case you haven't been following it, there is a case in federal court right now that relates to the struggle for the ebook market. The Department of Justice is suing Apple about possible price fixing and antitrust aspects of its agreements with five of six of the major publishers; those agreements called for agency pricing where the publisher sets the retail price and the retailers gets a set percentage of it when the book is sold. The five publishers, who made Amazon accept agency pricing, too, have all already settled.

Apple has a lot of (very good) lawyers, so I am wondering how this lawsuit will come out. A judge is hearing it, not a jury, so there won't be any kind of deadlock. But I do wonder if Steve Jobs were still alive if they would call him to the witness stand.

The case is awaiting a decision and speculation is rife on the internet.

Amazon goes to India!

Amazon is now reporting sales from India in a separate sales report, which told me there is now a Kindle store in India.  Here is the sales report list, which illustrates how many Kindle stores there are at the moment:

My books look so much more expensive in rupees! And The Sixth Discipline isn't free there, at least not yet. See what I mean:

In my royalty reports, I have seen some sales of books that should have had a royalty rate of 70% but they were in fact only paid at 35%, which Amazon tells me means they were not sold in the US. I wondered if they were from India (which until very recently was folded into the US Kindle store) and now I'll know.

BookBub promotion: second wave of numbers

The one drawback to using Smashwords as a portal to other retailers (iBooks store and the Nook store are my biggest non-Kindle markets, but they also cover Sony and Kobo, and a few others) is that it takes a while to get the sales numbers back. Smashwords just recently updated the May numbers both Apple iBooks and Barnes & Noble Nook sales reports. When it came to giveaways, Nook was a winner, at least for me. I gave away over 4,000 Nook copies of The Sixth Discipline! That doesn't compare to the 15,000 copies I gave away in May on the Kindle, but it's still a lot more books than I ever gave away before on any other non-Kindle platform. Sales figures for No Safe Haven, the sequel to the free book, were pretty good for the Nook, but about 20% higher for Apple. I wish I had some giveaways stats for iBooks, but it seems like Apple no longer bothers to report “sales” for free books, so I don't have much to go on in comparing, but since the Kindle and Nook giveaway-to-sales ratios are very similar, I think I probably gave away about 5,000 iBooks copies. Since I don't know for sure, I will go with Nook as the giveaway winner.

My Kindle Addiction

I can't quite believe it, but I just bought another Kindle!  This one is a Kindle Fire. The irony is, I don't really plan to use it as an ereader. I'm a total e-ink fangirl, and I am keeping the Paperwhite. What I really want is a small tablet for travelling.  When I leave the house to do errands, the Paperwhite will still be in my purse. Anytime I find myself with nothing to do, I can whip it out and start reading.

On the other hand, when I travel to Boston in a couple of weeks, I can pack the Kindle Fire in my purse or my carry-on bag, and have it available for reading or for browsing the web if there's wifi. I hate lugging a laptop just to answer email and do a blog post or two, so I will be set with my new Fire HD! The 7" size is perfect for that!

Plus there's a Father's Day promotion going on and you can get $20 off any Kindle Fire using the promo code DADSFIRE. Some of the accessories are on sale, too.  I feel a little guilty getting a Fire for myself with a Father's Day promo, but my husband has a Kindle Touch and an iPad, so I get the Fire!

Update on my books

So, here is where we are in Buxton World:

King of Trees is now on iBooks as well as Kindle and Nook.

The Nostalgia Gambit is still not on iBooks! I don't know why, since KoT made it onto that platform in days, but TNG is still not there after two months.

The Sixth Discipline had a fantastic month! Thanks to the Bookbub promotion, it has already topped 15,000 (free) copies in May, and that's on Kindle alone. It's also now free in the UK and Canadian Kindle stores.  The sequel No Safe Haven is selling well in consequence.

Lastly, my science fiction romance (working title is now Saronna's Gift) is back from being critiqued by my writers group, and is now undergoing some revisions.  I'm still aiming for a late summer release.

King of Trees is available in more stores

I recently uploaded King of Trees to the Barnes & Noble Nook store, using their new Nook Press feature, which replaces Pub-It!, the original iteration of self-publishing on the Nook.  It took about two days, but I'm hapy to report that it's now for sale on the Nook as well as in iBooks.

Oddly, The Nostlgia Gambit is still not in iBooks, even though it made it to the Nook and everywhere else!  The folks at Apple must not like nostlgia!