An Author's Request:

My readers!

I'm getting regular emails and visits, indicating your support. Most importantly, more than a thousand of you download one of my books every week, and this is very much appreciated. But if you have a favorite title and you want to see more like it, there's no better way than writing an Amazon review. Putting some serious stars up there will let everyone know what you like and will influence me more directly than any other means.

Writing a review can be scary, but it does not have to be a book report. Simply saying you liked book X and want to see more of Y is enough. If there is a particular element or character you enjoyed, maybe add a sentence to that effect. Keep in mind that five stars="A", four stars="B" etc, and that three stars or less generally warns away other readers.

Thanks in advance!

-BVL

August Release:

BLOOD OF SILVER NOW AVAILABLE HERE!

The second book of the Seeker Series is now up and live for fans on Amazon. Working on Google Books, Barnes and Noble etc. By the end of 2010, all these books will be available in a host of formats in multiple bookstores.

August Release:

VELOCITY NOW AVAILABLE HERE!

My first Anthology of Horrific SF, with a touch of Dark Fantasy thrown in. This book contains 15 Futuristic Tales of Terror... If you liked MECH you should like this. Many of the stories are previously published in various magazines, and some of them have won awards.

Welcome to my EBook How-to site

I built this website to help people publish their own EBooks. Many of us are trying to take advantage of the new fast-spreading technology (Ereaders) as a means of bypassing the hopeless blockage formed by the Big Six publishers. As an author of both print and EBooks, I found that a fair amount of my work didn't catch the eye of traditional publishers. Along with some successes, I've had agents dump me, I've had contracts cancelled after I finished the book, and just plain old rejection. So, I set about to work my way through the technical nightmares associated with self-publishing to bring these lost works alive again.

I found the process challenging, despite the fact I teach computer science college courses. Feeling pity upon all the other authors who I knew must be out there with works they believed in and could not bring to market, I decided to help out by clearly explaining HOW to get certain critical things done. The core of this website are be detailed step-by-step Tutorials on topics such as format your own EBook, build your own Book Cover, etc. I also include articles about the market in general and links to other excellent sites on the topic.

BEST OF ALL: I have no intention of selling you this information! It's all here for the taking. Unfortunately, most Ebooks sold online about making Ebooks, are, well, vague and unhelpful at best. They remind me of those "ancient secret to lose weight" type sites. It's really best to avoid them.

IBookStore Step-by-Step How-to Article: (FAILED)

I made a serious attempt to get my books up on Ipad, but have decided they really don't want you to do it solo. (Meaning they want you to get paid help). There are three major hurdles:

1) You must upload from a Mac (apple computer). If you don't have one, and only about 3% of us do, you must get one/rent one/etc.

2) You need an ISBN. This comes from a single government monopoly source, 1 ISBN for $125 dollars or 10 for $250. Big initial outlay of cash there if you aren't sure how many you will sell.

3) Epub format, and an unpleasantly picky one at that. You must get your book into Epub, which is a pain by itself, then get it to pass Apple's tests, which cause yet more hours of pain.

4) So, what is my solution? If you want to get your stuff up on Ibookstore, go to www.smashwords.com and get your books in the queue. Eventually, they should make it to Ibookstore for free to you. You will not get all the money. You will not have direct control. But it will be cheap and easy.

How-To Price your Ebook

There is no easy answer to this one. I've been up-down and all around with my pricing. The key here is flexibility, to find what works, and then to plan on changing it soon as conditions change. Let me explain the factors involved:

Assumptions:

If you are here, you are probably self-pubbing, and have to declare your own price (no publisher is doing it for you).

If you have a big track record of books with reviews that are selling, you already know how to price them, so you aren't reading this anyway.

Therefore, I'm going to assume you are having troubles moving books, or you are just getting started and know nothing about it.

Rules for Pricing Your Ebook:

These rules change as the market changes and your prices need to be reconsidered several times a year. The Ebook market is exploding, new players are joining the game on a month-to-month basis and even the contracts are changing with the new competition.
Start Low. Zero is the best price, if you have something else to sell that the freebie will get them to buy. For example, if you write a trilogy, give the first one away. About 5% to 10% of the people who read that book will buy the next one. Notice, I did not say "of the people who download" your book. Somewhere around half the people who download it will never read it, they will just take it because it is there and it is free and they might never get around to reading it.
Let's say you don't have a series so you can't give one away. Prices that move books for new authors = $1. You might move one for $2, but that would be the maximum. If you price higher, you won't see many sales. Remember, you are starting out at the bottom of a list of millions of titles. People can't even find you at first. The way to get things moving when you have no record is to go cheap. People will take a chance on things that are cheap enough.
All that above might sound pretty depressing. BUT after you have some reviews and a record, you can always up the price. And you should raise it, a least a little.
Let's say you have a great book, but nobody notices. Give it away, get some good responses, then charge for it after a month or two.
Don't worry about giving away too many copies. Right now, the number of customers getting into the pool is growing daily, millions a year. Not all of them will have your book.
In July 2010 Amazon will be switching its royalty structure, doubling the royalty given IF your book costs 2.99 or more. The others are expected to match this (BN, Google, etc). This is going to make cheap books more rare, and if you have an established book, you can raise the price and get about $2 for every 2.99 book sold. That is huge, considering as a print author I only get about 7% per unit sold.
Personally, I think it is smart to go for marketshare now. In other words, go cheap and sell a lot, you can increase the price later as new customers come in to the game.
At this point the only real way to make money for most us will be to have a number of books. Best case, these books will be all of one type or in one series (woe is me for not wanting to write the same thing every day!)

How-To Tutorial for Translating an MS Word book file to a pro-looking Ebook publishable on Amazon:

This sequence of steps is easier than those given on Smashwords (click here to see their steps if mine don’t work for you). They seem to work well for normal books that are primarily text-based. They are not for the faint of heart, particularly if you want to have embedded Cover Art like the pros. Steps are included here for embedding cover art.

Note that the software used is assumed to be MS Word 2003, 2007 or 2010. I used Mobipocket creator ver. 4.2 (free download) as well.

Steps:

Make a backup of your file. Then make another one and e-mail it to yourself to make sure!
Open up the file in MS Word.
First kill every tab. I do this by typing a single tab, selecting it, then clicking the copy button. Open find/replace and paste your tab with shift-insert keys into the Find box (you can’t type a tab in there). Then leave the Replace box blank and click Replace All, Zap: 1000+ tabs vanish!
One of the worst steps is this one: you need to edit your styles in MS Word so the font is consistently Times New Roman and so that it changes sizes fluidly in different readers. Another annoyance is the tendency of word-based epub files to not indent your paragraphs properly. This process is fairly simple in 2007 word, after you get a paragraph looking the way you want(times new roman 12 single-spaced), just right-click on the “Normal” style on the ribbon menu at the top, click “Update...”, and you will set it so that every “Normal” styled paragraph looks right. I also set up the title and subtitle with larger font sizes for chapter headings and book titles. If you are not using 2007, look up style changing instructions online. (If this step fails to change your book paragraphs, you probably used a different style to write your book, figure out which one to edit).
If you have underlining to represent Italics in your book (for quotes and thoughts, etc.) you can hunt them down, or use Find and Replace again. Use the Format button to tell it you want to search for the font with the basic “Underline Style” and then click on the replace box and use the Format button again to tell it you want to change it to “Underline None” and “Italics”. Don’t type any words into either box. Click replace all, with luck it will do it.
Get rid of page breaks. (You might want to keep these if you are planning to publish in PDF, otherwise you don’t need them.)
Turn on track changes and "accept" everything that shows up in red (if anything), you can't get these tracked fixes out of Word otherwise and they will show up on you after the conversion even if you hide them now.
Make every space between text (like chapter breaks) three returns long. This looks pretty good on almost any reader. Clicking on the paragraph button ¶ to show special characters helps here.
Change Scene breaks (meaning spots where you might switch character POV inside the same chapter and usually is done with a few blank lines) to one return, one line with * * * centered then one more return. (It will look good in many formats)
Type in all the copyright notices at the top after the title, but before the book starts. Get these from an ebook sample if you are unsure what to type.
Save the file.
Select “Save As” and save the file again, but this time select "Web Page, Filtered" at the bottom. It will save the file as .HTM
Open the new .HTM file by clicking on it will show a web browser and check that it looks okay. Don’t worry if the lines look long, they will now automatically stretch to the size of any screen, which is what you want. Close the browser, you can’t edit it in there, that was just to check it.
Unfortunately, to get things really looking good you need to edit this HTM file. I suggest you copy and rename it, something like BooknameReworked.htm. Then get out of Word and start Notepad. Open your file with Notepad. (Don't Use Word, the following steps will not work!)
These last steps will get spacing right between paragraphs and allow you to put in Page Breaks between chapters. Go thru your manuscript (in Notepad) and find spots that look like this:

<p class=MsoNormal> </p>
Replace those bad boys with:
<br>
(this can be done with a Find and Replace All). This step should get your spacing to look right.
To put in pagebreaks, add: <mbp:pagebreak> where you want the break (such as just before each Chapter heading).
If you don’t care about having a Cover embedded in your file, stop here and upload the .HTM file you just made and preview it, otherwise go to the next Tutorial on embedding images.

Tutorial: Embedding images in Amazon Ebooks.

Download and install Mobipocket Creator (It might have to be done while you are online.)
Run Mobipocket creator. Click "import from html document".
Find your .HTM file for the “Choose a file” line and set your output folder to the same folder your book is in.
Click Import.
Click on “Cover Image”, find your cover and click Update. JPG is reccomended here, they will charge you a few pennies based on file size, so use a highly compressed (small) image file type.
Optional: If you have MORE images (as for a child's picture book), go back to Publication Files, Click “Add File” and add in these other images. If you had one image per chapter, you would have to break up all your html files into chapter-long files, then add in one image, then the chapter, then another image, etc. in the correct order.
Optional: Change the order of any extra images by dragging them to the right spot.
When you have the book ready, click build (up top) and select NO compression, NO encryption. Click the second build button at the bottom.
Save, get out of Mobipocket. You are done. Now, on Amazon’s site upload the .PRC file that this process created. It will be in a new folder (which it made without telling you) whereever you set your output folder to be.
Preview the book, you should see a black and white version of your cover on the sample. Kindle’s don’t currently have color. However, you will be able to see the color if you use the Kindle PC reader to read it.
You should have installed the Kindle reader by now, and use it to open and examine your .PRC file that Mobipocket made. This file might not look perfect but it should be close. Doing that will give you an idea what people will see who read it using the PC kindle software.
Now, slowly page thru your book, checking it for errors. Cursing, go back to your original word file and fix things that didn’t come out right and do it all again.
When you finally have it published, it takes about 2 days for Amazon to put it up for purchase on their site (or longer). I would suggest you test the sample of your book right away.
I'm paranoid, so I go ahead and buy a copy of my own book right away to check out the entire thing (you will get part of the money back) and check it out on a reader. That is the safest way to go. You only get one chance to make a first impression.

Google Editions

Article About it here. This could be a really big area of expansion for ebooks. One of the critical things they are reaching for is ebook distribution for the smaller bookstores. This is a big market, as big as BN itself. The main suggestion I have for people who want to get involved is to set up a Google Books account now, those books will be rolled automatically into Google Editions when it opens (according to pubs I know, and the Google Books info). If you want to be there on day one, put it up now. Google Books.