A Little Push to Start the Year

Someone new came to our writing group yesterday, although she is someone I’ve known for a number of years. She brought along a copy of Write With Fire, my book on writing, and asked me to sign it. I was surprised, flattered, and probably a little bit flustered since that doesn’t happen to me often. I had actually been thinking about Write With Fire for a while and trying to think of some way to give it a push since sales have pretty much flat-lined for it.

I decided last year to write a few “tip” articles and put them up for the Kindle as a way of promoting Write With Fire. I completed the formatting for these and did the covers over Christmas and they are now up at Amazon. There are three of them, each with more than 4,000 words of material, and I’m calling them the “Fiction Techniques” series.

The series includes:

Fiction Techniques #1: Creating Suspense

Fiction Techniques #2: Characters Wanted

Fiction Techniques #3: The Twist Ending

The first two, “Creating Suspense,” and “Characters Wanted,” are substantial expansions on material that actually appeared in Write With Fire. The “Twist Ending” piece is brand new. If they do what they are supposed to do, I’ll probably write more for the series. I enjoy doing this kind of thing and it really helps me clarify my own thinking and understanding about the writing process.

If you’re not a writer, these are almost certainly not of interest to you. I will make both #1 and #2 free for a few days at some point in the next week or so. (I’ll announce it here and on facebook.) That’s why they are published exclusively on Kindle for now.  So if you’re a writer and want to get them you don’t need to buy them. (I would appreciate some “likes,” though.)  I probably won’t make the third one free since it’s brand new.

As for the covers, I thought to do something to reflect our modern world of “Direct to electronic” publications and the ebook revolution. They’re basically screen shots of the works in progress. (I kind of thought it was inventive.) You can see the covers below, although not very well. If you click on the links, without having to buy the piece, you can see the images much better, and can use the "look inside" feature to get a flavor for the works.

Have a good un!

----

----

Editing Louisiana Inklings

I had done four previous publications on Amazon, Killing Trail, Days of Beer, Harvest of War, and Harmland.  Problems had been minimal and I felt up to editing a collection of other folks’ work and publishing it. I figured I knew how to do it this time. Naturally, when one thinks one has a handle on things, that’s when problems crop up. The one that has occurred has me pretty baffled, however.

In order to try and get the poetry to work right, I altered the left margins from the “0” setting on MS Word to a -.5. All other settings were left alone.  I considered this a potential problem so I did 12 test runs before publishing. I checked all runs through on my regular Kindle device, and checked the last few on my Kindle PC app. There were little things here and there that I fixed, but not once was there any problem with the margins, with words being cut off on the sides of the screen. Not once.

I published the book. I checked with a friend of mine who picked it up and everything read perfect. I announced it to the world, or that small part of the world that reads my blog. People bought it.  I was happy.  Two days later the first email came. The letters on the left side of her Kindle PC app were cut off.  I figured it had to be because of the altered margins but hoped it was a single time glitch on her system. I sent her a Kindle file of the anthology to see if that would work, and she said it worked perfectly. My eyebrows went up. The file I sent her was one that read fine on my Kindle and PC app, and was the “exact” one that I uploaded to Kindle for publication.  This led me to believe that it had to be some kind of weird glitch on her system.

Another day passes. Two more people inform me they have margin problems. One, using a Kindle Fire, has letters cut off on the left and right side, the other has a problem only on the left. Realizing that this is no simple glitch, I immediately reformat Louisiana Inklings to take out the -.5 margins and return them to “0.” I do this for both Kindle and Nook, though I have not heard of any problems for the Nook, and republish it.  I send the new Kindle file to the two people who contacted me, but one tells me she’s already fixed the problem. All she did was decrease the “words per line” option and it read fine.

I feel a great sense of relief at that and email a few people that I know who bought the book about the “fix,” if they have any problems.  I also email the first person to contact me about the margin issue and ask her if changing the “words per line” option fixes her problem with the original file. Unfortunately, her answer is, “no.”  Around the same time, another person contacts me about having the margin problem on her Kindle PC app, but only on the left side. The “words per line” solution will not work for her, but the new Kindlized file with the normal margins I send her works just fine. Also around this time, I ask another person who bought the book if they had any margin problems.  They look confused that there might have been a problem and tell me that everything looks great on their Kindle, even though they bought the book before I uploaded the margin corrected file.

Yesterday, I get another email from someone with the margin problem. They bought the book the first day I announced it so I know this was the original file. I send them the corrected file, and they let me know that it reads perfect on their Kindle PC app but still has a ‘slight’ problem with the margin on the left side.

I tell you I’m absolutely baffled. I seem to be able to get everyone a fix for their problem, but I can’t understand why it needs to be a different fix for every person. I can’t understand why the same file can be perfect on some folks’ devices and not work right on others. I did, by the way, for the revised file, use Amazon’s simulator to check it on every single device that run a Kindle app. It looked perfect on every one.

If you bought “Louisiana Inklings” and have had ‘any’ problem, please let me know. I’ll make it right. Email me at kainja at hotmail dot com.

----

----

Free Book Overload?

Because I visit facebook  and a lot of blogs every day, I see a lot of links to free kindle books. I download quite a few.  I mean, I’m the guy who, at book sales in the old days, would fill a couple of boxes for the dollar-a-box close of the sale with stuff that I thought, perhaps, maybe, on a good day, when life was perfect and I’d read everything else in the house, I might give a try. Turns out those books are almost all still packed away in the closet waiting for that day. A few weeks ago when I had to go through some of those boxes for something, I even took out half a dozen of those ‘possibles’ and put them on bookmooch.  I know at age 53 I’m not gonna find time to read them.

So, when I first started seeing free books for Kindle, I pretty much clicked every link, and if it sounded even remotely like something I might eventually read, I downloaded it.  I actually have read some of these.  Fortunately, a lot of free downloads are short stories rather than novels so I can get through them more quickly.  But still, I’ve got, at rough estimate, about 90 of these freebies sitting on my Kindle now.  About two-thirds of those I can no longer remember why I thought I might read them. But there’s no bookmooch for Kindle books.

As a reader, I can’t complain about getting books for free.  In fact, I could pretty easily fill my whole TBR list with freebies. If I actually “tried” I might be able to essentially read for free for years to come. I don’t do that, for several reasons.  1) my reading tastes are mercurial and when I want to read something I want to read it now.  That means not waiting for it to be offered free at some point.  2) I have a lot of friends who write and I like to buy their works and support them, although if they are giving away something for free I’m not above taking advantage of that offer.  3) as a writer I feel like I should give back with money to other writers, both for the pleasure they have given me with their work, and because I want people to buy my stuff too.

As a writer, I have to wonder how effective the free giveaways are, and maybe others can answer this question from their experience.  I’ve tried one giveaway, for “Harvest of War.”  It was free for five days, ending April 8, and I gave away 466 copies.  I was happy with that.  What the writer hopes for with such a giveaway is that readers will read the free work, enjoy it, and then spread that by word of mouth, and maybe even put up a review on Amazon, and maybe purchase other titles that the writer has to offer.  As near as I can tell, only one of these things happened in my case. Here’s the outcomes for me, near as I can tell.

Reviews: I got about half a dozen reviews in the wake of the free giveaway period and I’m pretty sure some of these were from folks who took advantage of the free download. I appreciated it very much, of course, but these were also folks who knew my writing from before.  They were not newcomers to my work, and quite likely would have bought the book and reviewed it anyway. I only got one review from someone who I think downloaded a free copy and had not previously commented on any of my work.  

Sales of other titles: I can’t be sure whether reading “Harvest of War” brought people to my other work. My Cold in the Light sales went up dramatically, but I’m sure the reason for that was that it was introduced in ebook format finally.  For the stuff I’ve self published, though, Killing Trail, Harmland, Days of Beer, I’ve seen no measurable increase.  In fact, prior to the free giveaway for “Harvest,” I’d been selling about 8 to 10 copies a month of Killing Trail. That has dropped to one or two since.  I hope they aren’t related, but, if anything, it looks like giving away “Harvest” hurt my sales of Killing Trail. That could mean that a lot of people really hated “Harvest of War” and don’t want anything else from me, or it could be that such folks have something by me, “Harvest,” that they haven’t read yet and won’t buy anything else until they do read it.  Or it could mean that if they decide to buy something from me they’re gonna spend the 99 cents for “Harvest” instead of the $2.99 for Killing Trail.  Or it could be any number of other things, I suppose. 

Word of Mouth sales of “Harvest of War”:  Immediately before and after the giveaway there were some sales for “Harvest.”  Since April, however, it’s sold fourteen copies.  Some of that may be word of mouth, although I do post about the book fairly frequently on facebook so I can’t be sure whether these are word of mouth from readers or word of mouth from me.  It’s certainly not had a huge impact.

I have to wonder about what happened to those free downloads of “Harvest.”  Did folks read them, or, like me, do they have a glut of freebies sitting on their kindles and the stuff they downloaded yesterday keeps getting pushed further down on the list by the free stuff they are downloading today. If the story isn’t being read, then the free download would appear to be useless to the writer.

Just a few more thoughts from someone trying to make sense of this crazy new world of publishing we are living in. Your thoughts are equally welcome.

-----

-----

Erotica

ADDED NOTE: I'd forgot about this, but an interview with me just went up over at Penny Ehrenkranz's blog. I hope you can check it out.
And now, back to my original blog post for today.

I’ve blogged before about a strange goal I’ve had in my writing life to try and publish something in every genre. In pursuit of that goal, many years ago now, I had an erotica story published under a pseudonym. I used the pseudonym because my mom was still alive at the time, and she would not have approved. When I was a teenager my mom didn’t even like me reading anything with sex in it. She once picked up a book I’d borrowed from my older sister that had sex scenes in it. That was not a pleasant day when I got home from school, and I know it was worse for my sister, who I’m sure got a sound chewing out.

Even worse, when I was in high school my mom found one of my notebooks in which I’d written down a scene that had sex in it. I still vaguely remember that scene, and it was incredibly tame even by the standards of the time. Nevertheless, it was sex and she was not happy. I didn’t get yelled at too much; I got the “disappointment,” and that was far worse.

I did later publish stories with sex in them while mom was alive. I just didn’t tell her about them. But I didn’t publish anything in which sex was pretty much the sole purpose of the tale. Except that one pseudonymous story. This brings me to today’s post.

I’m thinking of republishing that old erotic story as a .99 cent kindle ebook. I haven’t decided on a title yet, and I have no idea at present about a cover. I’m trying to decide whether to use my own name or another pseudonym. I do intend to acknowledge it if I publish it, but it might still be best to use a pseudonym. The thing is, although the books published under Charles Allen Gramlich have been in different genres, they have all had a strong sense of adventure at the core of them (except for some of the stuff in Midnight in Rosary, I guess.) This story would not have that so it seems reasonable to establish a different name for it. I had once thought about writing a romance novel and using the name “Pamela Charles” on it. I have a feeling that erotica sells better with a female author’s name on it, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe someone here knows. So here are my questions to my fellow bloggers.

1. Is there any likelihood that publishing an erotica story would hurt the sales of my other titles? I guess here I’m wondering if there is still any stigma attached to publishing erotica. I have to admit, and it’s probably my Catholic upbringing, it still sometimes seems a little questionable to me.

2. What do you think about a pseudonym? Should I use a female one, and, if so, what about Pamela Charles?

3. For anyone that has published or read a .99 cent ebook, what kind of word count do you typically look for in such a work? Especially for erotica?

4. As for covers, how and where do people get covers for erotica?

As always, thanks for reading.
-----
-----

Interview With Me Up at Kindle Author's Blog

We interrupt our scheduled Part Two of "In a Story" to mention that there's an interview with me up over at David Wisehart's Kindle Author's Blog. It just went up today so I wanted to link it. I hope you'll check it out if you get the chance. I'll put up the second half of "In A Story" on Thursday.

-----
-----

Some Notes on Publishing Killing Trail: Part 3

This should be the final post on publishing Killing Trail via Amazon’s Kindle ebook program. This one is mostly about the text itself, and about my results so far.

Text Issues: I purposefully decided not to make the first line of the stories flush left. Printed books do this but it always bothers me. Perhaps I’ve read too much stuff in manuscript form. Anyway, since it was my book I’d, as Cartman says: “Do what I want!” I indented the first line of all paragraphs, which looks better to me and improves my reading experience.

Whatever you decide to do about indents, however, you use the “paragraph” function on your word processor to set the margins. If you use the space bar to indent, it won’t come out right. You can manipulate the margins directly for the first line if you don’t want it indented. Always remember, though, that you can kindlize different versions of your manuscript to study before uploading it. That way you can use trial and error, if needed, to get the indents right. I’ve seen quite a few Kindle books that have indents all over the place and it does detract from the reading experience.

I picked up the margin information from Natasha, and I also learned that you need to create a hard page break after each section, as at the end of the table of contents page, and the end of each story or chapter in your book. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can put your cursor where you want the break to be, click on the “insert” button on your MS Word Menu and select “Page Break.” Or, you can put the curser where you want the break to be and hit the CTRL – ENTER keys. This doesn’t mean, necessarily, that the table of contents page will always appear on one page in an actual Kindle document, because the amount of words on a page depends on the size font the reader selects. However, it does make sure that chapter 2 starts on a ‘new’ page rather than a few lines down on the same page as the end of chapter 1.

Uploading Your File: After you have your file the way you want it (or before), have a look at the “Getting Started Guide” offered by Amazon here. You can also register and login from that page, which you’ll need to do to publish for Kindle. There is a very helpful video that walks you through the publishing process here.

Getting Paid: Amazon will pay you by check, but only when you’ve accumulated about 100 bucks. If you want to get paid before that, you’ll need to give them a routing number for a checking account so that the money can be deposited directly into that account. They apparently do this about every 60 days. I decided to set up a new account just for writing purposes and used that routing number instead of the one to my primary checking account. I’m not sure there’s any risk, but I’d prefer to take a chance with a 100 dollars instead of the several hundred in my regular account. I haven’t gotten my first pay from Amazon yet.

My Results Thus Far: And now for the good news and bad news. That is: Sales. The good news is that, between Monday, July 5th at 8:39 a.m. and Friday, July 23rd at 1:30 p.m., I sold 33 copies of Killing Trail. I make $2.07 per book at %70 percent royalties on $2.99 (minus .03 cent delivery charge), so the total comes out, according to Amazon, at $61.08. That’s $61.08 I didn’t have before. That’s a nice dinner for two at our favorite restaurant. But that’s not the whole story, of course.

The bad news is that I sold only 33 copies of Killing Trail in about 2 and a half weeks, and I laid out 25 bucks in giveaways before I even started. The bad news is that I sent several hundred emails to folks, did a blitz on my blog and on Facebook, got a big front page write-up in my hometown paper, spent 8 hours or more a day for most of the first week promoting the book…and sold 33 copies. During that time I also bought about $35 dollars worth of Kindle ebooks (and some printed books) from friends, to help them promote their work, and I know that most of them did return the favor. Take away 60 from 61.08 and I’ve got about enough for a MacDonald’s value meal. That’s still not the whole story, of course.

Honestly, I didn’t expect to do a whole lot better than this. I said going in that I’d like to sell 50 copies in the first two weeks. I figured 100 copies was real pie in the sky stuff. And, of course, the book is out there now and may continue to sell some copies over time. I can hope a bit of buzz develops. I can hope.

And, I also had good news in the form of some very nice reviews of Killing Trail. Those who read it genuinely seemed to like it, and that means a whole lot to me. I’m sure others are doing much better with their ebooks than I’ve done. Maybe they’re better writers than I am. Or better promoters. Or both. But they can’t be any happier when someone tells them that their stories are valued. I’ll end with a couple more of those reviews below.

From: O’Neil de Noux
KILLING TRAIL is a wonderfully familiar dusty, road - a thrilling ride of vengeance, unfulfilled love, sweaty saloons, bushwhacks, shoot-em-ups, bloody villains and cowboy heroes. What is familiar is not cliché when penned by Charles Allen Gramlich. The stories in KILLING TRAIL follow the tracks great western writers have left (Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, Elmore Leonard, William W. Johnstone, Ralph Compton, Loren Estleman, John Edward Ames - the list goes on and I can't list them all). Gramlich joins the posse with stories of vengeance, right versus wrong and bullets flying. I highly recommend this book.

From: Gary Addis
The stories in Charles Gramlich's Killing Trail collection offer plenty of action, and surprisingly thorough character development as well.
----
----

Some Notes on Publishing Killing Trail: Part 2

OK, so last time I talked about transforming the cover from an MS word file to a Jpeg and about inserting images directly into the word file and using them without converting. I discussed my copyright page and posted it as an example. This time I’ll talk about the text and the table of contents.

Again, I used an MS Word 97-2003 file for sending to Kindle and didn’t make any html notations in it before sending. I went with Times New Roman 14 as the text font, and I used TNR 16 point text for the chapter titles and for headings like “Table of Contents.” Here’s one thing I noticed. On page 2 of the collection I repeated the title above a picture of the gun in its holster. I tried to do the tile at TNR 40 point, which made it as wide as the image below it in my original file. It came out smaller than the image once Kindlized, though, which I think means that Kindle won’t recognize very large font sizes that are sent to it.

I don’t know what the largest size Kindle will recognize is, although I’ll do some experiments eventually to find out. If I had it to do over, I’d just convert page 2 to a jpeg too and insert it in the text. Font size is irrelevant to the result on Kindle when you do that.

For the table of contents, I did something different from any other kindle ebook I’ve seen before, and I’ve received one email from someone who thanked me for how I did it. Some ebooks have the table of contents set up as a “clickable” file using HTML. That means that you can select and click say, Chapter 12, and leap directly to that chapter. Other ebooks, including most that I’ve seen, just have the table of contents page without the clickables, which just tells you what stories or chapters might be in the book, but won’t allow you to jump to them.

It occurred to me that, for Kindle, the “location” is the equivalent to page number in a printed book. If you don’t have a Kindle this might not make much sense but I’ll try to explain. Killing Trail has 1371 ‘locations’ in it. If you want to go to location 1300, you press the menu button, select “go to location,” enter 1300 at the bottom of the screen using the keypad, and “click” the selector. You’ll be taken directly to location 1300.

What I did was figure out where the “locations” for the stories were going to be in the Kindlized book and add them to the table of contents as if they were page numbers. In Killing Trail, you don’t just click on the story “Powder Burn” to go to that story, but you enter the location for the story, which is 742, and that will take you to it.

How did I know what locations my stories would be at? Well, that takes me to the most important element of all this information. Kindle allows you to Kindlize all kinds of files. When I got my Kindle, it came with instructions about how to send any personal file to Kindle so they could change it to Kindle format and send it back. You can have these files sent directly to your own Kindle, for a very tiny charge, or can have them sent to your email for downloading free of charge. Then you can move them back and forth to your Kindle as you like.

I’ve Kindlized lots of text files for my own personal use. So, once I had Killing Trail set up how I wanted it, I kindlized it and had it delivered to my home email. I loaded it to my Kindle, checked where the locations were, and wrote those into the table of contents. Then I Kindlized that version to make sure the locations were correct. They were. I actually Kindlized five different versions of the book for myself and finally selected the one that I liked the formatting on best. That was the one I uploaded to be published.

At the end of the book, I wanted my contact information, my email and blog address, and I just typed them into the word processing file and hit enter after them. This automatically converts them to a clickable in MS Word, and that came through just fine on the Kindle when the file was converted, without doing anything else.

I also did the same thing for the “Other Books By Charles Gramlich” section. I typed the title of the book, then added the Amazon link and hit enter after it. It became a clickable and that translated into the final Kindlized version. If I had this to do over, I’d use the “tinyurl” process to decrease the size of the links. I did convert them to TNR font 6 in my text but they came out pretty large in the finished Kindle book. They are clickable, though. You select one and can jump right to Amazon to the listing for that book. Here’s exactly what it looked like in my original file:

Write With Fire: Thoughts on the Craft of Writing.
http://www.amazon.com/Write-Fire-Thoughts-Craft-Writing/dp/1434403629/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248328011&sr=1-1

OK, there’s still more I can talk about so there’ll be a third post in this series, but this is enough for today. I’ll end with another review of Killing Trail, this time from Bernardl. Thanks, man.

“KILLING TRAIL combines all the elements of good Western storytelling - strong characters, hard places, and grim down to earth action. It is a very entertaining read.”
----
----

Some Notes on Publishing Killing Trail: Part 1

There’s certainly more than one way to set up a file to publish to Kindle, and maybe some are better than mine. But here’s what I did. If I did it all wrong, well, if you have a copy of the book you can see and decide for yourself whether the formatting worked. I’m going to cover my process over the next few posts. (Before I forget it myself.)

First, the biggest surprise of publishing with Amazon’s Kindle program was finding out how easy it was. I didn’t use any HTML code and formatted strictly with my MS Word. I used Word 97-2003.

For the cover, I created a word processing file with the title at top and my name below, and imported the picture into the file using the “insert” command. I sent it to Lana, who found the font and did the frame around the page. She sent it back to me and I converted it to a jpeg using information at this site. We had to download the cover font from the web because my word processor didn’t come with it. But that didn’t take long. Then, when the rest of the manuscript was done to my satisfaction in MS Word, I just used the insert command to put the cover jpeg at the front of the file.

For the interior illustrations, I simply inserted photographs directly from my files into the text at various points. These were not converted to jpegs, only inserted into the word processing file. These were all photos that Lana took, by the way, so there were no copyright issues. Since the cover was the pistol by itself, I inserted a picture of the holstered pistol on page 2 of my file, with a repeat of the title. I then used a cropped down picture of the pistol by itself as a header illustration for each story in the file. These were copied directly into line 1 of the page where the story started. I double spaced down to put the story’s title. This gave me the start position I wanted for the story on the page.

Note, about the images, Kindle does not support color images so even though the originals were in color, they only show up in black and white in the ebook. But you can get a preview of how the images are going to look before you decide to include them or not. I’ll talk about that later. (By the Way, Steve Malley turned me on to the fact that Kindle for PC will show the illustrations in color. Thanks, Steve.) I’d heard repeatedly that Kindle doesn’t handle images well. Other than the lack of color, I had no problems whatsoever inserting these pictures in the book, and I think they added to the overall presentation.

For the “All Rights Reserved,” “Copyright,” and “Dedication” information, I got out a few published books and used the basic format I found there. I edited some elements slightly for my own taste, then put it all together on a single page of my word processing file. I just double spaced between sections, and I’m going to stop today with a copy of what my copyright page looked like in my original word processing file. It did not come out as a single page in the resulting ebook, however, but on two pages at the smallest kindle reading font size. As you can see if you have the ebook, the lines as they will appear in a published Kindle book are not as long as the lines in a normal word processing file. However, they wrapped just fine when I uploaded the book to Kindle without me having to do a thing.
-----

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Except for brief quotations, such as those to be included in reviews, no section of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author.

The short stories in this collection are works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is coincidental.

Dedication: To Louis L’Amour, who made me love the west.

And to Roger James, my brother-in-law, who introduced me to L’Amour’s work and who never griped when I borrowed his paperbacks. All of his paperbacks.

Text Copyright © 2010 by Charles Allen Gramlich.
Cover Photo & Design copyright © 2010 by Lana Gramlich.

Published by Razored Zen Press, 2010.
Contact at kainja@hotmail.com

“Killing Trail” originally appeared in somewhat different form in Elbow Creek Magazine in 2001.

“Once Upon a Time with the Dead” first appeared in Bits of the Dead, 2008.
-----

I’ll leave you with a review of Killing Trail by Randy Johnson. Thanks, man.

“A fine collection of western tales by the author of the Talera novels and Cold In The Light. It is Mr. Gramlich's first venture into ebook publishing.

There are a couple of pieces that discuss authors, particularly Louis L'Amour, that influenced his writing and a bit about the old west in his home state Arkansas. I know what he meant about considering the west way out there and not realizing the history of his own state.

The price is right and the stories are good, an unbeatable combination. If you like westerns the Killing Trail should be an acquisition. I don't own a Kindle myself, but took advantage of the free Kindle download for PCs. It took me only about an hour to read this fine collection.

Definitely worth a look.”
------
------