Warning: All these pictures are links… I get 6% from Amazon of any purchases you make after clicking them. That 6% comes out of their profit, it doesn’t cost you 6% more. So if you think authors are overpaid, bloated plutocrats, don’t click (seek professional help).
Yes I have finally got there. A MANKIND WITCH, to which I got the rights back is finally availble from…
me. I reformatted it, added a little material (a very little), and put it up on Amazon. It feels rather odd. For about a year now I’ve been experimenting with putting shot stories – first through Naked Reader
then a collection with them,
Then with Eric
and our best-selling
and a novella -1/3 of a 400 page novel in case – which is thefirst part of the Rats Bats and Vats story -which has a large following and continues to sell – but not the novella much…
and then a collection with Eric – which contains Pirates of the Suara Sea, represents a huge saving on buying the story on its own… but does not sell as well as either, or even both.
And then finally on my own shorts:
A venture into paranormal historical romance shorts (just to prove I could):
And then my dour sense of humor Bolg PI: novellas (and short)
Baen (and Pyr) have also got in on the act of late.
It’s going to be _very_ interesting to see how their royalty/sales reporting compare to my own novel. I will report the figures.
So: welcome to A MANKIND WITCH, INDY 🙂
I should be putting up the ‘THE FORLORN’ myself in the near future, as well as some more Bolg stories (these are heading eventually to be foundation of a novel. _Me_? I asks yer wid tears in my baby blue eyes. Would I mock the UF genre? I wouldn’t even know satire if I met her in the street. More novels… probably. It all depends. But there are 34 entries under Dave Freer in the kindle store. So when does the fortune arrive? And has anyone experimented with create space?
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “A Mankind Witch, Indy”
Yes, I used Createspace to make Vulcan’s Kittens available in print. It was not difficult at all, and it also preps the book for kindle pub, so that’s one less step if you don’t have the book up there already. For me, formatting the cover was the hardest part, but partly because I made a bonehead mistake on the spine. I really should do a step-by-step blog on it. Part of the reason I haven’t is that I followed the instructions, like reading a recipe, and out popped a book. I’m rather excited about that, it was so easy. I chose to buy the $10 ISBN option from CS, rather than invest in a bundle from Bowker at this time. Being frugal this spring.
Thanks, Cedar, I will have to brave it I think… of course I did it the wrong way around. How like me! 😉
I’m unpublished, and was having an attack of nerves, so I used Createspace’s editorial evaluation services. Three publishers and seven agents had evinced a serious lack of interest. I know I was looking for a gatekeeper, but still, I figured the evaluation would tell me whether the manuscript needed so much work that Ishould set it aside as a practice piece or not. I rationalized that if I played golf, I would spend a lot more money on what is, for me at this stage of development, still only a hobby. At $200, I found the evaluation very useful, and made a number of the recommended changes. It also told me that I wasn’t so far off base that it wasn’t worth a little more effort. A friend was so impressed with the evaluation that she got one, too.
I was interested in the copyediting, but with something over 120,000 words, that came in at $1500, and my golf comparison collapsed. I got a friend to proof it. A cover with a single image and one round of changes was $400, so I’m going to try my own, first, because I do have a clear picture in my head of what I want it to look like, and there are three images in my imagination.
Again, because of the high word count, I remember being surprised at the printing costs, which come from my side of the costs, and lead to a high price on the book.
So, I’m starting with Kindle, just to get an idea of things. I know I want to put my second book out in print, and I may use CS first so that they prep it for Kindle, too.
That seems a high price to me – I don’t know if I’d rate $200 let alone $1500 affordable. (for the record my expenditure on AMW (excluding time) is $125.00. I would shop around for the cover. I am fairly sure I’ll recover that, and get more of a return than I would from the story sitting in my drawer. Real pay for hours… yes, well, that, even including the money I got from the book’s original sale, I would have been better off flipping burgers. But I don’t think I’d have enjoyed the flipping as much, and I believe it pleased some other folk more than a burger would. And hopefully, it will have a long long tail.
For a shameless plug I will point out that Mankind Witch is my favorite novel of yours, of course I already have it, so I won’t be buying it, but maybe I can convince someone else to 😉 I take it The Forlorn must no longer be in the Baen Free Library, if you are planning on putting it out yourself?
I had a look on the library, and as far as I can find, it’s not there. Thanks for the comment about AMW – it’s in my top 3 :-).
The Forlorn is still my favorite. I like all of them, but I think Dave’s best are the ones he wrote alone.
🙂 My firstborn….
Create space doesn’t seem to match in sales, from what I heard. And GOOD LORD Man, it feels weird to me, too. But I’m going to keep doing it. Right now, re: fortune (for given definition) I’m hearing four years and thirty books. We plug on.
Match in sales, Sarah? Do you mean more ebooks will sell than print versions? I knew that going in, but I had quite a few people who wanted print copies, and I have an ‘in’ to NH libraries, who will only buy print copies. So for me, it was worth the $35 I wound up spending on it. Of course, I was able to be that cheap by doing ll my own formatting (not much more difficult than for ebook) and my cover. But I do have graphic design training.
Way more ebooks. Sorry. I’m fighting an enormous headache AND trying to do my weekly article for PJM through it. Something hit me at close of day yesterday, with a sore throat and headache. I THINK it’s allergies since we were up in parts of the state where weird things grow, but you never know.
And yes, I’m bringing Shakespeare and the others out in paper too because I can sell them at cons, and some people prefer paper, and I’d like to get into paper dristro. I’m wondering — off list — if I could pay you to type set them. Waiting for Dan to, might take forever as busy as he is.
Yep. Onward or die right here.