In today’s Journal
* Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
* YouTube
* Two New Books
* An Amazon Hack
* More on Payhip
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
The Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
To take part, write at least one short story per week (or add to your novel), then submit the story title, word count, and genre to me each week for publication in the Journal on Monday.
The whole point is to have fun and grow as a writer. You can join or rejoin the challenge at any time. There’s no cost.
During the past week, in addition to whatever other fiction they’re writing, the following writers reported their progress:
Short Fiction
- Balázs Jámbor “Dreams and love” 1900 Romance fantasy
- George Kordonis “Bait and Switch” 5634 Urban Fantasy
- Adam Kozak “The Tees That Bind” 2673 Humor
- Alexander Nakul “Along the flow of a young stream” 1676 Erotic Fantasy
(I suspect Chris Ridge wrote something this week and was unable to send it for some reason.)
YouTube
I went live yesterday as promised. A few hardy souls stopped by, so it was fun. I even told a couple of personal anecdotes. Next week, I’ll talk more about writing.
If you wanna stop by and take a look, you can view it here.
A couple of writers asked questions about pricing and why I uploaded PDF books, etc. and I answered them during the video. So you might want to stop by for that.
By the way, you can skip the first 6 minutes or so. The internet was iffy, so I went live early. The real show didn’t start until about six minutes in. If you do watch the first few minutes, the screeching you’ll hear when I step out for a minute is the wind.
Two New Books
Just as I finished uploading all my novels and novellas to my new store at Payhip (I uploaded the mysteries last) it dawned on me that I had exactly 7 books in the Stern Talbot PI series (5 novels and 2 novellas) and exactly 7 one-off mysteries (6 novels and one novella).
So I took about three hours to compile two omnibus collections, each with 7 books in it. So that’s two new pieces of IP inventory for about two hours’ work. Not too shabby. You can view those here:
Stern Talbot, PI: The Omnibus Collection
One-Off Mysteries: The Omnibus Collection
Those will go “live” at Amazon and everywhere else on April 20 and 27, respectively. The only place anyone can get them before that is directly from StoneThread Publishing.
During that three hours, I compiled both collections, created two promo docs (almost identical), and designed two covers.
I also uploaded the two “new” books to my Mysteries genre page at StoneThread Publishing, created two new book pages, and then uploaded everything to Draft2Digital.
An Amazon Hack
Once I had the epub files from D2D, I uploaded those to Amazon instead of uploading the Word documents.
Here’s the thing: D2D automatically creates a table of contents in their epub, mobi, and PDF files, but Amazon doesn’t.
So by uploading the D2D epub files to Amazon, I avoid having to go through the laborious process of creating an interactive TOC in the Word document before I upload it to Amazon. Isn’t that cool?
So there’s one more reason to use Draft2Digital if you aren’t using them already.
Then I uploaded the epub, mobi, and PDF files to Payhip for those two omnibus collections, and I called it good for the day. (grin)
So at present I have 102 “products” up on my Payhip account, each with three versions of efiles. And that doesn’t include my short story collections, nonfiction books, or poetry collections.
I’ll upload the nonfiction books next, then the collections. Then I’ll decide what I want to do with all the individual short stories.
Okay, speaking of PDF files,
let me ask you guys: Why NOT upload them? Anybody? Seriously, talk to me. If you can talk me out of uploading them, that will save me roughly a ton of time over the course of all my books.
More on Payhip
I also just noticed yesterday that Payhip has something called “Collections.” To you and me, that means Genres or Series. I talked a little about that on the video too.
So soon I’ll go back in and learn about that. Then I can lump all the books in the Blackwell Ops series together, for example, and lump together a lot the other books in their series and-or genres.
As I also mentioned in the video, but I probably didn’t explain it very well, I’m seriously considering deleting (or archiving) all the individual book pages that are currently on StoneThread Publishing.
Instead of sending possible buyers from the Genre page at StoneThread to an individual book page at StoneThread and then from there to the individual book page on my Payhip site—in other words, a three-step process—I can link the small book covers on the genre pages directly to the individual book page at Payhip.
There, they can read the book description, and if they like it, they can buy it right there. Only two steps.
It’s always a good idea to make things as easy as you can for the prospective buyer. Always.
Okay, that’s it for me for today. I’m gonna go back to Payhip now and set up some more “collections” (genre, series) pages. Again, that will help readers more easily find my books once they get there.
I’ll talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 910
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date…… XXXXX
Fiction for March…………………….…. 61200
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 225792
Fiction since October 1………………… 528848
Nonfiction for March…………………… 29530
Nonfiction for April……………………… 910
Nonfiction for 2024……………………… 129630
2024 consumable words……………… 355422
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 6
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 1
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 88
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)…… 239
Short story collections………………… 31
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
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So, I have not yet looked at YouTube for potential answers, but on Stone Thread the Add to Cart takes you direct to PayPal, which is cool, but would it work better to Add PDF, Add Epub, Add Mobi buttons as fileserv (instead of having reader input codes in a field later), or are you already planning this? Also, do you have a Payhip store or what you could link, or us that extra hoops for the reader to get sidetracked? I looked at Payhip briefly. Exciting stuff, even physical product ording too. I hope you offer a how-to in webmaster guidebook in the future for this amazing e-file-topic though. I know you will probably just Journal more on it, but should you compile posts after, I will certainly understand it more. Anyway, Thank you for showing us your journey.
Thanks, Sebastian. At the moment I’m going through my entire site at StoneThread Publishing to delete the buy links for PayPal. That didn’t work out. Even though I added code to tell PayPal which book the customer bought, in their email to me to let me know a purchase had been made, PayPal did not include the code.
Anyway, I’m almost through adding my Payhip direct buy link to every book page on the StoneThread Publishing site. That’s the easiest for me.
I’ve blogged in the Journal over the past several days about Payhip. There’s a lot of stuff there. Go in and take a look. I think I started talking about it on March 27. Read forward from there.
I just looked at Stern Talbot Omnibus, and I guess you are including all three file formats? Kinda seems to answer my question earlier.
Yes sir, and unless someone can give me a good reason not to provide all three file eformats, I’ll continue to do so. In the old days when you bought a book from Smashwords, you could download any file format you wanted, and all of them if you wanted. Seems only right to me. I don’t want to marginalize anyone because they prefer a certain eformat.
Totally agree, and that is the generous attitude, considering it is less confusion long-term for the reader wondering if they should buy multiple files for so many devices one can read on. Since you let readers print your PDF file for personal use, I think you might want to keep that file type. Easier to search for passages honestly. Although, a nice looking print-ready PDF can be a pain to compile sometimes.
I don’t go that far. I save it as PDF and I slap a cover on the front, but I don’t do any special formatting.