I’m taking a break from talking about book promotion, blogging, and e-publishing today to post a couple updates on my own stuff.
First off, for those who are curious about such things, I did some counting tonight, and Emperor’s Edge has officially sold enough copies to cover the ebook-creation expenses (cover art, editing, and formatting). In the next week or two, if the good fantasy-loving folks of the world continue to shop EE, the novel should recoup what I’ve spent tinkering with various advertising methods (if you haven’t seen my posts on Goodreads Advertising and Buying a Kindle Nation Daily Sponsorship, there they are).
As I write this, Emperor’s Edge has been out for two months. I’m definitely encouraged by this start. Encrypted has a ways to go to earn back its production costs, but it came out a month later, so that’s forgivable.
Now, I have a couple of fun (well, they’re fun for me) updates for EE.
New Cover Text
First, I asked Terry Roy of TERyvisions to create some more professional text for the ebook cover. It didn’t cost much, and I think it looks more like something you’d see on an actual paperback now. You can see the old and the new below:
I’d still like to re-do the cover art some day, as the characters didn’t come out as I imagine them, but I want to move on and get more books out in the series before worrying about that overmuch.
By the way, if you need publishing-related jobs done, look Terry up. He was easy to work with, affordable, and gave me several options to choose from so I could get a color and font I liked.
Here’s his company’s blurb: “TERyvisions (including Cathy Wiley who is my business partner) can provide covers, interior illustrations, editing (all kinds), formatting for EPUB, Kindle, and print book interior page layout and formatting (for CreateSpace and Lightning Source), and we can help come up with taglines, buzzwords, descriptions, and ads/ad art.” I’m planning to bug him again when I’m ready to move forward with making print editions of my novels.
As to my second update, I was inspired by Nathan Lowell’s success in the podiobook world, and I’ve decided to do a podiobook of EE. This is basically an audiobook that is released in segments, like the old radio dramas, which can be downloaded to your mp3 player.
I’d been thinking it’d be fun to podcast my Goblin Brothers stories for iTunes anyway, but I wasn’t aware of the podiobooks site and that a lot of folks were doing entire novels.
I decided I might as well do it right if I’m going to do it (i.e. I don’t want people forced to listen to my dogs barking in the background), so I signed on with DarkFire Productions, a small company that helps authors with ebook formatting, audiobooks, and social media marketing, among other things. We’ve got a voice lady lined up, and production should get started soon. Yes, I’ll have to sell many more copies of EE to cover the costs, but it should be great exposure!
Thanks for reading. We’ll get back to the regular stuff tomorrow. I have a nice interview to post with Jennifer Hudock, another indie who used a podcast to help build a fan-base and launch her ebook. Then, next week, I’m going to start a series on how to make money as a book blogger. Several book bloggers have been nice enough to write up my novels, so I want to share some of my experience with increasing blog traffic and earning money through affiliate marketing and selling advertising.
I like the new cover. It does look a lot more like a “real book” now. The podiobook should be fun. There are very few at Podiobooks that are good stories AND are well produced. I think you could pick up a big following there.
Great cover. It’s a small improvement and a big improvement at the same time.
The new font stands out from the cover and is more likely to catch the potential reader’s eye.
Awesome choice about podiobooks. I recorded my book and posted it there in 2008. It’s a great way to get people to look at your book. With a fantasy, you’re pretty much guaranteed hundreds of listeners – if they like it and rate it up, the sky’s the limit. And then you’ll have the ability that Nathan talks about, to identify the handful of hardcore fans who spread the word and form the base of your future success.
Thanks for the comments, guys!
“With a fantasy, you’re pretty much guaranteed hundreds of listeners…”
Wow, that would be awesome change from how it works in the regular world. “You write fantasy? Oh.” My mom is still trying to get me to ditch “that magic stuff” and write historical fiction. 😀
Would it be terribly rude of me to ask what exactly your ebook-creation expenses (cover art, editing, and formatting etc) were? It’s just that I’m only just beginning to look at the whole self-publishing/e-publishing thing and I don’t really know how much it costs to pay other people to do these things for me as opposed to trying to do them myself!
Rachel, EE was about $600 and Encrypted $800 (the main cost difference was in the cover art). The breakdown was about $300 for the editing, $200 for the art, and a little under $100 for the formatting.
The formatting is definitely something you can do yourself, and I’ve met plenty of artistically inclined authors who have done their own cover art. For high fantasy, I’m used to covers with characters on them, so I wanted original art, but lots of people do iconic stuff using stock images they purchased.
For editing, my costs were on the low side (I’ve seen people pay as much as $1200, though that’s on the other extreme) since I was just looking for proofreading and not line editing (my novels had been through a workshop and then gone out to beta readers, so I felt they were fairly clean). I know lots of people have just done the best they could on their own, but that tends to show in reviewer comments about typos and other errors. I’m still finding stuff in EE even after having someone go over it!
Hope that helps. Good luck!
Wow.
The new art work does make it look a bit more like a ‘traditional’ paperback. I liked the former version as well though, a little more “grass rootsy” to coin a phrase.
I’m excited about the audio book – I love em!