Why yes, it’s another new sketch from my comedy team 15 Minutes Away! This was from our October 22, 2022, show at the Pit Loft in NYC. It’s written by me, and features me, Kevin Delano, and Ann Marie Yoo.
I was inspired to write this by the various YouTube exercise videos I attempted, and gave up on, during lockdown. I hope you enjoy it, because performing it almost killed me!
And if you want to see us live, you’ve got one more shot this year, on December 17 – tickets here!
(Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three)
Last time I had just uploaded epubs of Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time onto my phone’s various reader apps, to check for any formatting errors. I had discovered that I needed to delete a page, and was debating whether I should remake, reverify, and reload all the epubs. I decided against it, ultimately – I can’t keep doing that every time I find an error, it would be a mountain of extra work, so instead I’d do one pass through them all, fix all the mistakes at once, then check again. I started with the Google Play version, and was very glad I hadn’t gone through all that work because I immediately discovered another mistake.
I had included the cover to the book in the metadata. That’s great if a book is going to be sideloaded onto a device instead of purchased through a vendor – if I send someone a review copy, I’ll include the cover in the book file. But stores ask for the cover to be uploaded as a separate file, and they attach it to the book themselves – if I include the book cover in the epub or mobi file, I run the risk of the cover appearing in the book twice.
Everything else looks good – Google Play, iTunes, Nook and Kobo versions are all fine on my phone. Back to Scrivener, my writing program, where I make a new mobi file and check it out on my Kindle desktop app. Things seem fine, all the links are working. Time to upload it to the Amazon store. Gulp.
I procrastinate by doing a little work on prepping the paperwork version – I’ll probably put all that into its own post at some point, so I’ll skip it here – and when I’m ready, I decide to go through the mobi file one more time, just because I’m paranoid. And it’s a good thing I do – I find that there are two sets of backmatter, one with all the Amazon links, one with all the Kobo links. How’d I miss that before? In Scrivener, I have a complete set of the backmatter pages for each vendor – that’s a “thanks for reading” page with a request to leave a review, the acknowledgements page, an “also by this author” page where I plug the rest of the series, an “about the author” page, and the copyright information. Every time I compile, I have to check the boxes for the pages I want to include and uncheck the boxes I don’t. I must have made the Kobo epub last before I made the Kindle mobi, and I forgot to remove the Kobo pages from the file. Double, triple, quadruple check everything!
Back to Scrivener to make a new mobi file, and everything looks good (for real, this time). So I’m off to the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) website, to my account. Before I click on “create new title,” I open the page for Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom in a new tab – a lot of the settings will be the same, and it’s helpful to be able to see what I’ve done before.
I’m asked first if I want to enroll my new book in KDP Select. I do not. This would get it into the Kindle Unlimited program, and allow me to run discounted days as a promotion, but it would also mean the book would be exclusive to Amazon. Even though Amazon is far and away my biggest money-maker, I am unconvinced that giving up all the other stores would be worth the extra borrows through KU.
I enter the basic info. The book name, no subtitle. This book is part of a series – check. Enter the series title. (I hate that there’s no dropdown menu with my series title saved – I’m afraid I’ll misspell something and they won’t link up.) It’s volume four in the series, first edition. I’m asked for the publisher – some people come up with a name for themselves as a self-publisher, but I don’t bother. I could have gone with “Brian Olsen Books” or something, but I don’t think readers really care. If I ever legally incorporate myself in some way, I’ll change it.
Next comes the description – the blurb. I hate writing blurbs, I just don’t have the knack for it, but it’s critically important. (Less so on this book, since not a lot of people are going to be starting with the fourth book in the series, and anybody who’s read the first three isn’t likely to pass on the fourth just because the blurb isn’t great. But still.)
You can use html in the book description, so I italicize the book titles. Some people really jazz this up – that’s on my to-do list, but not for right now. I notice that Alan Lennox‘s book description says that Dakota Bell is coming in 2015, but I don’t change it yet. On KDP, once you make a change it takes time for the changes to go live, and you can’t make any other changes while you’re waiting. Since I’ll be uploading a whole new copy of the book once I have the link to Dakota‘s page, I don’t want to freeze changes on the other books just for that.
Contributors – me! Brian Olsen, Author. (I still love the sound of that.) Language – English. ISBN – blank. This took me a while to figure out – for Alan Lennox and I think Caitlin Ross in some places, I would go back once the paperback was published and put in that ISBN here, but that’s wrong. ISBNs are unique to the edition or format of each book, so the ebook should have its own. But none of the vendors I use require your ebook to have one, so I don’t worry about it.
Verify your publishing rights – this is not a public domain work and I hold the necessary publishing rights. Check!
Next is to choose categories. Oh, the trouble I’ve had with this. Amazon only lets you choose two categories, and I had a hell of a time deciding what categories to use for Alan Lennox. It’s a bit of a mash-up, really. It’s sci-fi, but soft sci-fi, which isn’t a category. It’s really urban science fiction, in the same vein of urban fantasy – but urban sci-fi isn’t a category either. It’s sort of a thriller, although not in the John Grisham kind of way. I ultimately went with Science Fiction/Adventure and Thriller/Technothriller. Technothriller doesn’t feel quite right to me, but Alan Lennox is always on the top 100 free Technothriller list so I don’t want to change it… Since I want to keep the series consistent, I’ve put all the following books into those categories as well, and I do the same for Dakota.
Age Range and US Grade Range (meaning is this for middle schoolers, young adult, etc.) – both blank. My books are for everyone! Or at least I’ll let the parents decide.
Book Release Option – I can either release the book now, or set a future date and start accepting pre-orders. I haven’t tried a pre-order yet – supposedly it helps your rankings by counting all the sales during the pre-order period on the day of release, but I’ve been hearing mixed things. Also, I never have my shit together enough to feel confident enough that I’d be ready to upload by the pre-order date, so I just wait until the book is ready.
Next I upload the cover. I’ve used Damonza.com for the covers to this series, and I’ve been very happy with the results. I did the layouts for the original covers to the first two books myself, but it’s so much nicer to have somebody else figure out all those specifications. All I have to do is upload it and I know it’s just the way Amazon wants it.
Then it’s finally time to upload the book file – the mobi file I created from Scrivener. I do NOT select Digital Rights Management – I’m not too worried about piracy, and even if I were popular enough to be concerned by it, I wouldn’t put DRM on my books. You bought it – do what you want with it.
Kindle does a spell check when you upload – I love that, it’s like having another set of eyes on the book and you can never have too many of those. (“You can never have too many eyes,” said the serial killer.) It even checks names, and it caught a mispelling of Tayisha when I uploaded Caitlin Ross, which is pretty impressive. In this case it’s telling me I spelled Dr. Cheek’s first name, Shermon, wrong, but I purposely used the less common spelling, so I tell it to ignore.
I use the online previewer to see how the book will appear on various Kindle Devices. The Fire HDX is first, and yes, I go through every single page. By this point I’d be surprised if there were any issues, I’ve been over this book so often. I just do a quick look through all the other virtual Kindles, and nothing jumps out at me as an issue.
On to the Rights and Pricing page. I verify that I have worldwide rights for the book. I set my royalty rate to 70%, which means it has to be priced between $2.99 and $9.99. The other option is 35% for books outside those prices. (Or I think you could choose 35% and then set your book within that price range, but I’m not sure why you would do that. Do you hate money or something?) I set my book at $3.99, the same as the others – I chose that by looking at other, comparably-sized books in my genre when I first uploaded Alan Lennox (before it was free), and I’ve kept the price consistent, even though the books have gotten longer and longer each time. Dakota Bell is about one and a half times the length of Alan Lennox, but it doesn’t feel right to bump the price for later books in the same series. (Come on down to Crazy Brian’s! My prices are insaaaaaane!)
I set my foreign prices to be automatically converted to local currency based on the US price. You can alter them individually, if you want to mimic the “ending in 99” convention, but I don’t bother with that. It’s too complicated to keep track of and keep them consistent across vendors. I’ll have my assistant do that. Some day.
I enroll in the Kindle Matchbook program, which offers the ebook at a discount if you buy the paperback. I set the discounted price to 99 cents, although I’m considering going down to free. Very few people buy the paperbacks so it won’t cost me much, but I need to think about it. One thing at a time – I’ll come back to that in the future. I also allow Kindle Book Lending – why not? The more readers, the better.
I take a deep breath, then click “save and publish.” I did that at 4:20pm (hm, how should I celebrate?) on July 3rd. A pop-up tells me to expect it to take twelve hours before it appears in the store, but based on past experience I’m sure it’ll be less than that. And I’m right – the Amazon page for Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time is live by six.
Now the fun really starts! But I’ll leave off here for now – next time I’ll go into what to do now that I’ve got that precious Amazon link.
Last time, I was left with the final draft of my next book, Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time, in its completed state, all ready for the actual publication process.
The next step was to update my web site. I’m about to make a bunch of e-books with links leading back to it, and I need to make sure I have someplace for those links to go. First, a page for the book itself. I use a plug-in called MyBookTable which generates a page for each book. Here’s the link to the page for this book, if you want to check it out – as I write this, some of the links on it are active (and by the time you read this, all of them may be), but when I first made it, instead of the price it said, “Coming soon!” and there were no vendor links at all. Otherwise, it looked like it does now.
Next I needed to make a landing page for people who have finished the book. For each of my books there’s a hidden “thank you for reading” page, not accessible through the web site’s navigation menu. At the end of each book I ask the reader to leave me a review, and provide a link back to the page on the appropriate site – if you bought the book from Amazon, for example, it’ll send you back to the book’s Amazon page. That means for each and every vendor, I need to make a completely distinct e-book with unique links. That’s a lot of e-books! So I actually do this just for the major vendors – the rest get sent to this “thank you” page on my site, where they can then click the link for their appropriate store. (Yes, it would save a lot of work to have the generic link in every book, but the fewer times you make a reader click, the better.) Also, the first time I upload, I won’t have the link to the book’s pages at the vendor sites yet, so the generic link serves as a placeholder until I do. Here’s the “thank you” page, if you’re curious.
One last thing – wherever Dakota Bell is mentioned on my site, it says “Coming 2015!” Time to delete that, at long last!
Now I’m ready to make the epub files. Epub files are used by everybody except Amazon, which uses its own file format called mobi. Even though Amazon will be the first site I upload to, I’m leaving the mobi file for later. You can’t crack open and get inside a mobi file as easily as you can with an epub, so the epub is better at this stage, where I’m trying to find potential formatting issues. As I said, I’ll need an epub file for any vendor for which I think it’s worthwhile to provide direct links. At this point that’s Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iTunes, and Google Play. (But that might change – more on that later.) There are a few smaller vendors I distribute to through Draft2Digital, an e-book distribution platform, either because it’s not worth the effort to go to them directly, or because they don’t accept self-published authors directly. They get a general epub with all the links going to my website. That’s the one I’ll make first, for testing, because it’s the most generic. The body of the book is the same from version to version, so if this one is all right, I’ll only need to check the backmatter for the other versions.
I write my books in a program called Scrivener. I love, love, love Scrivener and recommend it for anybody who does any serious writing. It’s got a million features, most of which I ignore, but the most useful is its “Compile” function. It takes the book and turns it into whatever kind of file I need. I use it to make a Word file to send to my beta readers, and now I’ll use it to make all the epubs. It even generates a table of contents based on the chapter titles I created.
Once I’ve got the epub file, I open it in a free program called Adobe Digital Editions, which is an epub reader for your desktop. I go through it page by page, looking for anything weird. I was very lucky this time through – there were no formatting problems in the body of the book. When I did this for Mark Park and the Flume of Destiny, I discovered this bizarre issue where punctuation was not staying married to italicized words. So if, for example, I had somebody saying a sentence with the last word emphasized, like:
“Can you believe that guy? What a jerk!”
and it came too close to the end of the line, it would display as:
“Can you believe that guy? What a jerk
!”
which is not attractive. It took me an entire day to figure out what was happening. Scrivener doesn’t allow you to look at the raw html of your document (something I really hope they fix in a future update), so I used another free program called Sigil to figure out that the html tags for the italics were creating a space between the italicized word and the non-italicized punctuation. I wound up having to put all the trailing punctuation in italics too – that was a bit of a process. (I could have fixed it in Sigil and re-saved the epub there, but then I’d have to use that as my source forever and ever rather than Scrivener any time I wanted to make changes – no dice.) Since I knew about that issue from the start this time, though, it was smooth sailing. (But if you find any orphaned punctuation in my books, do let me know, would you? Thanks.)
I did find one mistake, though – the links to the individual pages for the books on my website were wrong. They were pointing to the old links, before I used MyBookTable. So that had to be fixed, not just in Dakota, but in the three prior books as well.
One more check. Just because I think the epub’s code is fine and dandy doesn’t mean it is – there may be some invisible glitch in the html that will cause the vendors sites to reject it. Luckily there is a free epub validation website that does just what it says on the tin – you upload your book and in a few seconds it tells you if the code is good. Isn’t it nice to feel validated?
I made the epubs for all the other vendor sites (Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes and Google Play), checked the links, and verified them. They all checked out, so I sideloaded them onto the various reader apps on my phone for a closer look at how they’ll actually display on devices. (I don’t have a Kindle or a Nook or a Kobo or a…whatever the hell you read Google books on, so this is the closest I can get. At least it’s an iPhone, so I’ve sort of got one of the five.) I checked Google first – it’s my second-best selling site, after Amazon. And while it displayed just fine and dandy, I realized I had made a mistake.
I have a short story out called This Is What He Should Have Said, and after rather dismal sales on other vendors I made it exclusive to Amazon so I could take advantage of their Kindle Unlimited program. Unfortunately, I apparently forgot to remove the links to it in the “Also by Brian Olsen” section at the back of all the non-Amazon books. Whoops! I need to delete that from each of the ebooks, and go back and do it for the first three books in the series too. Even small changes to an epub file can have unexpected consequences, and deleting a whole page isn’t all that small of a change. So I need to decide if I’m going to go forward and review all the epubs as they are, or go back, remake, reverify, and resideload them. But that’s been quite enough work for one day, so I’ll have to sleep on that and figure it out tomorrow.
Ooh, a cliffhanger! Seems like a good place to leave off, until next time…
(Part One)
I’m kind of wishing I had come up with a better title for this series of posts. Ah, well.
I left off last time with a relatively clean draft in Scrivener. All my edits and notes from my beta readers were in, and I had made a sweep for common errors and for general clean-up. I was ready for my final editing pass before publication.
After I put up that blog post, I got back to work. I used Scrivener to make a .mobi file, which is the type of file used by Amazon for the Kindle. I’ll get into the specifics of that in my next post – there’s a lot more e-book creation to come – but I made a .mobi because I want to read the book on the Kindle app on my phone. I don’t own any actual e-readers, but my phone has got the Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBooks apps, so I can approximate how my books will look on other devices reasonably well. I’m going with the Kindle for now because the Amazon store is far and away where I make most of my sales, so it takes top priority when it comes to book formatting.
Once I sideloaded the book onto my phone via iTunes, I started to read. I read the book aloud to myself because it’s a great way to catch typos. I only started doing this with my last book, Mark Park and the Flume of Destiny, but I’ll be doing it with all of them going forward. When you read words on a page or screen, especially when you read the same thing for the umpteenth time, your mind tends to fill in the blanks if something is missing – your eyes just dart right past that missing period or preposition. When you read aloud, you’re forced to pay closer attention. Even if my mouth is moving on automatic, it’ll trip over a typo almost every time.
I’m not making many significant changes at this point. I’m correcting obvious errors, and occasionally altering some word choices. If a non-trivial word is repeated within a paragraph, I’ll change or delete one of the instances to something else. For example, I came across this sentence: She spun around, gesturing to the city around them. Two “around”s in one sentence is awkward and redundant, so the second became “surrounding,” which sounds a little better. (Although now I’m thinking they still sound too similar. Ah, well. Books are never finished, only abandoned, as da Vinci sort of said.)
Very occasionally I’ll catch something more crucial. The major continuity errors have all been fixed (fingers crossed), but some minor ones have slipped through. There’s a character from earlier in the series re-introduced in this book (no spoilers!). A new character asks the protagonists how they know that re-introduced character, but just two chapters earlier they had already discussed him, and she had been present for that conversation. Whoops! Fixed. I didn’t catch it before, because there had always been several days between editing those two chapters and every time I just plumb forgot she had already been told who he was. This time I’m reading the book so quickly that mistakes like that jump right out.
Another example – in chapter twenty-two, Tayisha can’t fit an important object in the pocket of her jeans. This time through, I remembered that back in chapter twelve she had fit the object into her pocket with no problem at all. The object not fitting is more important, so back to chapter twelve I went to figure out another way for Tayisha to carry the object around.
I’m a pretty fast reader, so this editing pass moved right along. I can get through about three chapters in an hour – that’s an approximation, because the length of the chapters varies quite a bit. The shortest is 1,290 (chapter nineteen) and the longest is 10, 503 (chapter twenty-eight – the big climax), but those are outliers, so let’s average. Right now the book is 124,565 words. (Thanks, Scrivener! You make counting easy.) At 29 chapters, that’s about 4,300 words per chapter (sounds about right for most of them), so about 13,000 words an hour. I got through six chapters that first Saturday, but almost every day since then I’ve had either a fetish festival or work. (One of those was way more fun than the other.) I’ve only had about an hour in the evening to edit, but that’s still three chapters a day, sometimes more. And this past Saturday, while resting between Pride celebrations (of which I took many pictures that you can see here), I went on a binge – I got eight chapters done, and finished the book.
So that’s it! A clean fifth draft of Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time, all ready for you to read, right? Well, not quite. Now the fun really starts, as I get ready to format. More next time…
I’m in the final steps before publication of my fourth book, Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time. If you’re curious about the nuts and bolts of self-publishing (and why exactly it takes so damn long between the time I trumpet on Facebook that I’ve finished the last draft and the actual time you can get the book), over the next few weeks I’m going to write some posts going through the final stages of the pre-publishing process. (My stages, that is – other writers have their own processes, but this is what works for me.)
Yesterday I finished the fourth draft of the book. The first draft is, obviously, the first time putting everything down on paper, working from a chapter-by-chapter outline I already prepared. (In this case, I wrote the outlines for the second, third and fourth books in this series immediately after I published the first book). My second draft consists of major revisions – during the first draft I don’t go back and make major changes, I just take notes of what to look at later (so if I find halfway through the first draft that I still need a character I killed off earlier, for example, I don’t go back and fix it then and there, I just keep moving forward. He gets un-killed in the second draft). When I finish the second draft, I load it onto the Kindle app on my phone. I read it through while sitting in front of my computer – looking at it in a different format helps me catch typos and errors I missed before. That’s how I create the third draft.
This third draft is then sent to my beta readers – I’ve got five for this book, and they all go far above and beyond what would be expected of a typical beta reader. I don’t hire a professional editor, so my beta readers serve that function. (Most of them are writers or editors in their own right, so they do a pretty great job.) When I get the notes back from them, I go back through the book incorporating the notes I want to keep (which is most of them). This is also the fastest I’ll go through a draft, which is good – it helps me catch plot, continuity, or stylistic problems I might otherwise have missed. (It’s easy to relate a bit of exposition more than once, for example, just because I forgot I already went through it earlier in the book.) (In this book, one of my beta readers pointed out that the main characters are very pleased with themselves in chapter twenty-seven for figuring out a plot point that was flat-out explained to them back in chapter three. Whoopsie!)
So that’s the story so far. I finished the fourth draft yesterday, and today I begin the fifth and final draft, the draft that will actually see publication. Today was basic maintenance – I have a sort of style guide for myself of problematic words and phrases that pop up in my books. Some of them can be spelled in more than one way and I want to be sure I pick one and stick with it, or they’re words that are easy to get wrong so I want to do one final check for them.
Here’s my list:
Then there are those characters of my own creation whose names I’m constantly getting wrong:
After I’ve done that, I’ve got one final sweep:
Then there may be random things I have to fix that can vary per book. When I made invisible characters (like spaces) visible, I saw that in this book for some reason after every chapter number (”Chapter Two”) there was an unnecessary tab. Delete and repeat.
Now, in theory, I have a clean draft with no errors. (Hah! Ah, hah hah. Sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight face there.) The next step will be to make an epub file and load it onto my Kindle app for one last pass through. But I’ll get into all of that next time…
