I’m pretty close to thinking it isn’t.

Let’s look at the issues:

• How can a company that practically rules the Internet have such a sluggish and annoying interface?  Looking at your account on the  Google Books website is like waiting for AOL to dial up in 1995.  It’s maddening.  And once you get online, the interface is like something written in DOS.  It is ugly, confusing, and inefficient.
• Google pays publishers 52% of retail, but others pay 65% or 70%.
• Google is by no means the industry leader in selling eBooks, but it discounts all titles 5%.  This causes Amazon, the industry leader, to discount to price match.  Thus, you can lose a significant amount of money on all Amazon sales, because Amazon pays on net, not retail.  I have therefore already removed all of my titles from US sales by Google in order to preserve my preferred pricing at Amazon.  What few sales then come from Google are international.
• There is no support.  As a small publisher, I have names and email addresses for three or four individuals at Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and Apple who will help me.  Google provides zero support.  When I called Google’s main phone number and asked for Google Books Partner Support, the receptionist tried to transfer me to Google Wallet.  Huh?
• Like any publisher or self-publisher, I have no desire to “leave money on the table” and I recognize that even an incremental share of enough titles will eventually add up to real money.  But dealing with Google Books makes dealing with the IRS look like a breeze.  What publisher can waste an hour every month trying to reconcile a small payment from Google with the reports that load at a snail’s pace?  For me, the answer is none.
• So am I dumping Google?  Not today, but almost certainly in the near future.  Because unless Google can get its act together and make life easier for publishers, I can’t see a reason to endure the headaches.

A.

The post Is Google Books Worth the Headaches? appeared first on Author Coach.

The new Kobo Aura HD, praised by WIRED magazine.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love authors.  But sometimes I forget that authors aren’t dealing with publishing headaches and production 24/7.

Recently I issued a couple of titles in both eBook and POD.  Before releasing the eBook, I sent the file off to the author to proofread.  I got back few or no corrections.  Great! But then I turned out a POD proof of each and sent them to the author, mostly to say Hey, doesn’t this look great?!  And I got back an email that he would begin proofing immediately.  Of course, this should already have been proofed, since the POD used the same file as the eBook.

And I got back corrections.  In one case, a term had been searched-and-replaced and somehow appeared twice in every instance, e.g., “blueblue” instead of “blue.”

So we fixed it.  No biggie, right?  After all, the eBooksellers all automatically update you with the latest version, right?  Well, um, no.

I just had a long chat with a lovely woman at Kobo, who informed me that Kobo does not automatically update its customers’ eReaders with the revised and updated content.  And this from a company that wants to give Amazon a run for its money?

The eReaders Kobo sells are beautiful.  And I applaud their support of indie booksellers when Google dropped them all.  But c’mon!  Is is really that hard for them to set it up so that a user syncing his eReader with the Kobo store gets the updated/corrected version of a book?

I’m constantly confounded by the attitude that Amazon exhibits as a company and as a bookseller.  They are arrogant and merciless and engage in what I consider predatory practices, but they are winning and not just because they play hardball.

1. Amazon’s affiliate program is easy to enter and the tools they provide are so much better than those provided to B&N and Kobo affliates
2. Amazon automatically updates users’ Kindles with the latest version of the book’s file.
3. Amazon has replaced my father’s Kindle a stunning five or six times at no additional cost.  Can you imagine Apple doing that?

So even though Wired magazine rates the Kobo reader very highly and even though its reader is essentially a full Android tablet and not a proprietary sales channel (which is how I see the Fire), Kobo still has a long way to go to really provide competition to Amazon.

I hope they get there . . . soon.

A.

The post WTF? Kobo Doesn’t Automatically Update appeared first on Author Coach.

I am heartbroken by the death and destruction in my old “home town.” I saw Larry Bird play in the old Boston Garden many times. I went to Red Sox games with my dad and chased foul balls across the roof of Fenway Park. I remember going to the fights at the Gahden and being surprised when they actually played hockey. I saw the Cars and Billy Joel play there.  I have a Boston Red Sox license-plate holder even though I live in California (actually, they are not that rare out here). When we buried my grandfather, who had been a dry-goods peddler for many years, one of the lines from the eulogy was that he knew the location of every broken parking meter in Boston.

My family and I went to Boston last fall.  We took the kids to see the Make Way for Ducklings statues in the Public Garden. We went to the New England Aquarium. It was fun to be a tourist in a town that I no longer really know but that you feel a bit like you are stepping into an old shoe when you get there.  It feels familiar.

But watching the news yesterday, nothing felt familiar.

The thing is, and I’ve only heard my wife mention it, one of the big goals for marathon runners who are not in the habit of running twenty-six miles before breakfast is to “break 4 hours,” meaning they want to finish the marathon in four hours.  When did the bombs go off?  Right around the four-hour mark, the point when a lot of runners would be striving to cross that finish line.

This was not just a bombing with horrible intentions, it was designed to strike when there would be a lot of folks working hard to be right in front of the bombs without knowledge of the danger.  Additionally, the bombs seem to have been designed to literally cut people off at the knees.  I’m theorizing, of course, but I do wonder if the bomber literally wanted to not only kill runners but injure others in a way that they would never run again.  Or it may simply be that the bombs were under something that directed the blast out rather than up.

I lived in New York City on 9/11.  I remember the day very clearly and I remember that by the next day, it all seemed quite distant and surreal to me.  Because on the Upper West Side, it was pretty much business as usual, other than subway service.

But this does not seem distant and surreal. It feels very close to home because, geographically, it is.  Less than 30 minutes from my old house, without traffic.

So why am I writing this? Because the waiting is hard. Waiting for more information. Waiting for resolution. What? They haven’t caught the guys yet?  Shows like CSI and NCIS would have caught the bombers by now. But real life doesn’t play out that way. On Grey’s Anatomy, a doctor lost her leg and now performs hours-long surgeries and wears high heels with a prosthetic. I’m not doctor, but I’m pretty sure that’s a pipe dream. People lost their lives and others lost their limbs yesterday. Somewhere down the road, I know we are going to see one, two, or a half-dozen runners cross that Boston Marathon finish line on prosthetic legs because of yesterday and that’s going to be day of incredible emotion.

People talk about Boston being resilient and of it coming back from this.  And it will, but it won’t ever be the same. Next year’s marathon will look less like a premiere international sporting event and more like the president coming to town. There will be snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs and security worth of Inauguration Day.

And in the meantime there will be recriminations.  Why didn’t the BPD do more? Didn’t anyone consider the potential for bombs? Why weren’t they sweeping with bomb-sniffing dogs?  But how do you possibly secure twenty-six miles and all of the surrounding facilities?

Who will come out to run next year? Who would dare to come watch? I suspect many. I suspect it could be the biggest and best Boston Marathon ever, and I will look forward to that.

Because it is hard to wait.

The post Because it is Hard to Wait appeared first on Author Coach.

As a literary agent and author coach, I frequently spend hours reformatting and cleaning up manuscripts.  In days past, this was mostly about spelling- and grammar-checking.  But now it’s nearly full-fledged typesetting.  Editors today are reading nearly every submission on a Sony Reader or Kindle or iPad and I believe they therefore have higher expectations of the works.  Gone are the days where editors were reading second-generation photocopies.  Editors want clean manuscripts free of the distraction created by formatting errors.

And for self-publishers, the formatting is even more important.  Readers buying your self-published book want clean formatting and books free of typos, but getting there is pretty hard without hours and hours of looking hard at your material.

There are three important tools in this process and authors should get familiar with them:

Search & Replace

Recently I got a manuscript from an author I’m now representing on the agency side.  He’s a successfully self-published author.  But when I opened up the file, I saw plenty of room for improvement.  The first thing I do is reveal all of the non-printing codes.  Then I start globally searching and replacing for standard errors, like space-paragraph mark and paragraph mark-space.  These can easily be fixed to be just paragraph marks.  If I want only a single space between sentences, I get rid of all the instances of two spaces.

I also prefer a true ellipsis rather than the single-character version.  So I search for that character and I replace with a non-breaking space-period-non-breaking space-period-non-breaking space-period-breaking space.  This will force the program to keep that ellipsis with the word that precedes it on the same line and force the line break to come either before that preceding word or after the ellipsis.

Em-dashes may appear as two hyphens sometimes with spaces on either side.  There should be no spaces and so I search for versions of it and replace with an actual em-dash (—) without spaces before and after.

And, of course, I look for common errors that show up throughout the manuscript.  Authors who use tabs often have tab-paragraph mark combinations on blank lines.  I turn those into just paragraph marks.  Authors also often have extra blank lines instead of a single line with a centered hashtag (#) to indicate an intended line space.  Or they use asterisks or a line or something else to indicate an intended line space.  I clean those up also.

Studying your manuscripts for patterns can lead to some quick and easy fixes using search and replace.  Remember, every character, even non-printing characters, can throw off the formatting of an eBook or even a printed book, so you don’t want them there if you don’t need them.

Styles

I confess I ignored styles for years.  I would lecture my clients to not “desktop publish” their manuscripts and to simply use basic formatting and let the typesetter handle the rest.  But let’s face it:  agents and editors today may have grown up with computers (unlike, say, me) and thus they may expect something more than plain vanilla formatting.  Thus, I may assign a style for chapter numbers, chapter names, location cues, first paragraph (not indented) and body text.  And perhaps even more.  The nice thing about styles is that once assigned you can edit one instance and apply it everywhere else that style is used.  So if you are self-publishing in printed form, you can play with different fonts and spacing easily.

Macros

I wrote my first macros in WordPerfect 4.2, I think.  Yes, DOS.  Most users have no idea what they are and would never use them, but they can be very helpful.  Macros are basically little programs that can replace repetitive tasks.  For example, for some reason the page numbers in this manuscript would restart with each section.  And nothing I did seemed to change that.  Each section header needed to be edited to get the numbering to be continuous.  I had done about a quarter of the book when I realized I could write a macro that would do it for me.  Granted, I had to click “run” on the macro about 50 times but it was alot faster than doing it manually.

The other macro I built (thanks to http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/usingwildcards.htm) searched for paragraph marks followed by lower-case characters.  This essentially is searching for accidental returns in the middle of a line.  I didn’t think I could do it but, thanks to the Internet, I found this site that explained enough about wildcards that I realized that I could search for “^13[a-z]” and that would find them.  I still have to fix each one manually, but it’s still a huge time-saver.

WordPerfect used to have the edge over Word (well, technically it still does) because it let you not only search and replace and use macros, it let you search and replace for codes.  So changing putting the italics off code on the other side of the period throughout the manuscript was easy.  You can’t do that in Word unless you convert the document to HTML and edit the source—wait!—you can’t do that in Word anymore!  So you’d have to have an HTML editing program.  Not ideal, but still better than nothing.

So, in the end, authors need to do more than type their work.  They also have to deal with the realities of making it look professional.  Do I think you need to make it look like a book?  No.  You could write the entire thing in Courier using underline instead of italics and I don’t think it would reallyhurt you with editors or agents, but I still think you need to go through much of the same process to eliminate the extra characters or errors.  Some editors go by the Word word count.  Others use the old 250 words/per page in Courier with one-inch margins method.  And others use the character count divided by five.  In pretty much any of those formulas, extra characters will mess up the count, so better to have a clean file than not.

A.

The post Because It’s Not Just About Typing appeared first on Author Coach.

One of the things it has really highlighted for me is how much “junk” there is on Amazon.  Amazon has an amazing database and it pulls data from other systems and also allows original entries.  And some of these entries are just junk.

Take Distant Valor, for instance.  For a while, I noticed an entry for ISBN 0788166239, but by “G. X. Moreau” and published by Diane Publishing.  I wrote to Diane Publishing and asked them to provide me a copy of the license for the work.  They wrote back that they didn’t have one and that they had purchased about twenty copies used and that an intern had made an error in assigning the ISBN to it.  But the entry lives on.  I’ve written to Bookwire (part of Bowker) and to Amazon and asked that it be removed.  We’ll see . . .

In another case, several titles that we reissued have entries that are just ASINs and aren’t tied to any ISBN.  These are, in fact, used books and in one case the UK edition that shouldn’t be for sale in the US (but since it’s a used book, I’d guess one can’t stop it).  What’s happening is that third-party sellers of used and even new books create these entries but don’t use the appropriate links.  There is a “Have one to sell?” link on pretty much every book.  If you click that, it allows you to create a new entry that links to the existing entry for the book.  And I like that.  If used books must be sold right next to the new one, let’s keep it all tidy, eh?

Now, I don’t know if these non-linked ASINs are actually erroneous entries or if the people using them are just trying to game the system somehow.  Perhaps used-book sellers don’t want links to the new editions or Kindle edition?  I don’t know.  But I wrote to Amazon about a bunch of them and I’ll be curious to see if anything gets cleaned up, e.g., do all of those used editions under some random ASIN suddenly show up under the right ISBN (paperback or hardcover) for the book.

Regardless of what the result is, though, I do suggest that authors do their own spring cleaning.  Get on Amazon, Bookwire, BN, Audible, etc., and look up your books.  Perhaps include Amazon UK, CA, DE, JP, etc., and see what editions are yours there.  See an edition you don’t remember authorizing?  Ask your agent or publisher if they licensed the rights.  If you can’t figure it out, then have your agent or publisher (or do it yourself if rights have reverted and you have no agent) write to the publisher listed or seller listed and see if you can figure it out.  There’s a chance that there’s foreign rights income due you or that you have found a pirate.  If you really can’t get to the bottom of it, write to the Amazon site itself and explain the situation.  If there’s actual copyright infringement going on, I’d expect the title to be pulled.

Next, pull out all of your contracts for rights, e.g., translation, audio, etc. and review the reversion clauses.  Many contracts are for a set number of years and others can be cancelled if sales don’t exceed a certain number.  Books that are under contract but not selling are lost money.  Many translation rights contracts say nothing about eBooks.  Talk to your agent about getting rights back and licensing again to another foreign publisher who will also produce eBooks.

Too many authors let things slide, I find.  Sure, if you have an agent, the agent has an incentive to stay on top of reversions, but the process of checking all of your titles on Amazon and inquiring about suspicious listings is a time-consuming one that will forever be a low priority.  So take a couple of hours and do that yourself.  In the end, it may help not only make your listing on Amazon and other booksellers look better, but to also sell more books!

Z

The post Do Some Spring Cleaning appeared first on Author Coach.

But no matter what hat I’m wearing, I often hear the constant refrain from authors, “I’m just going to self-publish it myself via Amazon.”  And therein lies many a problem.

Via CreateSpace, Amazon has done a fantastic job of creating an inexpensive (mostly free!) process of publishing your own book.  But it’s highly misleading.  Many authors think they can upload their Word file, choose a cover template and go from there.  But that makes for a very ugly book.  I would not want to read it because the actualexperience of reading that book would make me take me back to the days of 13″ black & white televisions.  Because that’s what so many of these self-published books feel like to me.  In a world filled with 3D HD 60″ televisions, many self-published authors are producing the equivalent of a 13″ black & white TV.

But let’s say you happen to be a graphic designer who also happens to be an author.  Chances are you can produce a good-looking book (the writing is another question).  But can you get people to buy it?

You see, Amazon doesn’t really do a lot to help authors sell their books—or perhaps market is the better term—and thus it is up to the author find buyers.  Additionally, most independent bookstores and Barnes & Noble won’t order books published by CreateSpace, since they see that as supporting the competition.  There is an option with Amazon that you can pay for that allows distribution via Ingram, but I don’t recommend it, since that will actually make you less money than distributing via Ingram yourself.

But there’s another problem there:  Recently I heard from an Ignition Books author that a local bookstore would not carry his book.  The bookstore owner complained that the discount was too low.  You see, while the publisher sells at a standard 48% discount to Ingram, Ingram is only passing along a 25% discount to booksellers and that’s not a high-enough discount for booksellers who need a decent profit margin.  Of course if the publisher increased the discount to Ingram, Ingram could increase the discount to booksellers, but then the book would actually make no money for the publisher or the author.

Print-on-Demand publishing is a wonderful thing.  It allows the printing of individual copies of works and ensures that one can always get a copy.  But it is fantastically expensive compared to traditional offset printing and the printing of thousands of copies at a time.  For example, a unit cost of $5 can be common.  And Lightning Source recommends a 55% discount on such titles.  But will readers pay $16.99 for a 272-page book?  Even though it is a trade-paperback?  I bet most readers would consider that high.

In the case under discussion, we priced the book at $14.99 and offered a 48% discount.  That means that Ingram pays $7.79 per copy.  From that, $5 has to be deducted for the printing costs, leaving $2.79 in earnings to be split between the publisher and author at their contractual terms.

Now consider that Ingram recommends a 55% discount.  That would mean $6.74 comes in, from which $5 is deducted for printing, and leaves $1.74 to the publisher and author.  So, the bookstore and the distributor actually make more money off every book sold than the author and publisher.

Of course, this is a fundamental problem of the publishing business in general.  When I worked in a bookstore in 1983, it was not uncommon to see a discount of 42% from publishers.  That meant that bookstores paid 58% of the retail price to the publisher.  But then discounting became rampant in the industry.  First it was best-sellers from the New York Times only and they were discounted 25%.  Okay, that’s 17% profit to the bookseller.  But then Barnes & Noble launched their superstores and started discounting every book in the store at least 10%.  Smaller bookstores couldn’t survive doing that and B&N became a larger and larger market for publishers . . . and able to demand larger and larger discounts.  Oh, and it stopped discounting every book in the store once the competition was gone.

And, of course, then came a lawsuit from the American Booksellers Association demanding that all bookstores get the same discounts as B&N.  And I think that was fair, but with B&N leading the way, sort of like a tractor trailer leads a line of smaller cars through a snowstorm, publishers found themselves giving up more and more of a book’s price in discount.

So how did publisher’s react?  By raising prices, of course!  Sure, the price of paper and printing and other elements played a role in the rising prices of books, but by far the greatest culprit was B&N and its demands for increased discounts.  At least in my humble opinion.

Amazon’s entry into the business and the growth of book sales at “big box” stores didn’t help, either.  Sure, consumers get “lower” prices through such outlets, but the reality is that the prices were marked up to start in order to accommodate the discounts given to the stores.

And where does all this leave the self-published author?  Well, primarily selling via Amazon, bn.com, and other online booksellers, which deal in such volume that they can afford to sell books on which they receive only a 25% discount from Ingram.  Or higher in the case of CreateSpace titles sold through Amazon.  Because your local bookseller likely isn’t going to be able to afford to stock the book if they order directly through Ingram.

That said, if you are publishing the book yourself, you may be able to do a deal with the bookseller directly (presuming the bookseller wants to get into that kind of arrangement).  For the one title I’ve been discussing, the bookseller said she would take copies on consignment from the author.  In other cases, the bookseller may be willing to buy two or five copies directly from the author so if the author is willing to order in bulk and cover the shipping, he can sell to the bookstore while still pocketing a few dollars.

But this turns the author into a salesperson, literally going from store to store with a box of books in his trunk.  For some authors, this could be a fun way to spread the word about his or her book.  For others, it’s exactly what they don’t want and why they need a more traditional publishing arrangement.

Regardless of your goals, though, Author Coach can serve your needs, from developmental editing to line editing to copyediting, from book cover design to interior layout and even publication*, we do it all.

Z

*Not all books will be eligible for publication via Endpapers Press.  However, we can help any author self-publish via his or her own venture.

The post The Challenges of Selling Your Self-Published Book in the Real World appeared first on Author Coach.

I am an Amazon Associate. In truth, I’d rather not be. I’d rather be with B&N at this point. Or even Kobo. But both of these companies just plain suck at running affiliate programs. They have outsourced it all to a link-sharing company rather than grow it in-house. The ability to create a store on your site that links to their sites requires a programmer. You can create an Amazon store on your site with one embedded link.

You can edit that store on Amazon and have it show up on your site. Similarly, you can edit widgets on Amazon and they will update and appear without issue on your site. Try that inside the B&N or Kobo sites and let me know how it goes. I could barely get past signing up for the B&N program.

Amazon wins overall at least in part because it is winning the affiliate program. Sure, it will kick thousands of affiliates to the curb in order to avoid paying sales tax in some states, but the ones who don’t get kicked do a lot to promote Amazon and the products it sells via their own sites. And the affiliates don’t need to pay programmers big bucks to accomplish this. Amazon has done the programming for them.

So, wake up Barnes & Noble, Kobe, Sony, and everyone else. If you want to win the war, you need to raise an army . . . of affiliates.

Z

Amid all of the discussion of the death of the publishing industry and Amazon’s laser-focused effort to eliminate competition, one point I have yet to see discussed is the competitions absolutely abysmal use of affiliates.

I am an Amazon Associate. In truth, I’d rather not be. I’d rather be with B&N at this point. Or even Kobo. But both of these companies just plain suck at running affiliate programs. They have outsourced it all to a link-sharing company rather than grow it in-house. The ability to create a store on your site that links to their sites requires a programmer. You can create an Amazon store on your site with one embedded link.

You can edit that store on Amazon and have it show up on your site. Similarly, you can edit widgets on Amazon and they will update and appear without issue on your site. Try that inside the B&N or Kobo sites and let me know how it goes. I could barely get past signing up for the B&N program.

Amazon wins overall at least in part because it is winning the affiliate program. Sure, it will kick thousands of affiliates to the curb in order to avoid paying sales tax in some states, but the ones who don’t get kicked do a lot to promote Amazon and the products it sells via their own sites. And the affiliates don’t need to pay programmers big bucks to accomplish this. Amazon has done the programming for them.

So, wake up Barnes & Noble, Kobe, Sony, and everyone else. If you want to win the war, you need to raise an army . . . of affiliates.

Z

The post You Have to Win the Affiliate Wars appeared first on Author Coach.

I am working on the eBook for a previously published novel.  Actually, the novel has been published twice, since it went out of print and then, as the agent, I sold the book to another publisher that then went bankrupt.  So now we have the rights back and we’re reissuing through the Ignition Books imprint of Endpapers Press.

This book has been delayed as I was waiting for the author to proofread the scanned version.  There were technical glitches with Adobe Digital Editions and his computer.  You need ADE because when you open an ePub file in ADE there are actually page numbers for reference purposes.  But he found only a couple of errors and that seemed unlikely.  So here’s what I did:

• Opened the ePub in Calibre.
• Converted it to HTMLZ.
• Extracted the HTML file.
• Opened in Microsoft Word.
• Converted to a Word file.
• Started the spelling- and grammar-checker.

While I’m doing that, I have the ePub file open in ADE so I can locate the errors in that version to report the page number to the conversion folks.

I keep a Word doc with a three columns showing the page number in ADE, the original text, and the corrected text.

I also keep Webster’s site open to double-check spellings:  http://www.merriam-webster.com/.  And I reference the web as needed for unusual terms.

But beyond all that, I’m finding typos from the original book that the author should have located the first time around, never mind this time.  And I’m finding copyediting errors that should never have been gotten through in any edition.

Now, on the one hand, I recognize that this book was written years and years ago, on a word-processing typewriter (remember?  the typewriters with the little screens?), not a computer.  It was then edited and copyedited by hand and typeset and proofed in the old-school manner.

On the other hand, I recognize that I have access to more tools now and want to use them.  But I do have to weigh the return on investment.  Not fixing every “can not” to read “cannot” won’t likely get me in trouble.  But missing quote marks can make for a confusing read.

But what’s most telling to me about this, which is my umpteenth trip down this road—going through an author’s book in Word—is that most authors really don’t spend enough time simply using Word’s built-in tools.  Working with a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and the Webster’s website noted above, each author should be spending far more than just an hour or two on the spelling- and grammar-checking process.  Add in the need to review formatting and it’s easily a two- or three-day full-time job.

What about the copy editor, you ask?  Well, my theory is that you want to fix what you can long before your copy editor gets into it.  And copy editors are not always as good as we want.  One client (and his girlfriend) of the Zack Company spent weeks trying to straighten out a completely flawed copyediting job (he would use a different f-word there).  The copy editor introduced historical inaccuracies (into a work of history!) and made cuts and changes with which the author strongly disagreed.  Sure, he could stet those changes, but working through a file using Tracked Changes it is often hard to know which change you are rejecting and then the program moves onto the next.  It’s a time-intensive process and requires you to look hard at every change.

And authors often deal incorrectly with copyedited manuscripts.  When the copy editor writes a comment, the author shouldn’t respond to the comment with one of his own, as if he is having a debate with the copy editor.  The author should revise the manuscript to address the comment.  For example, I had a novel where the copy editor commented, “How can he see the gun if it is in his pocket?”  The author noted, “Slit pocket, so he can fire the gun without taking it out of his pocket.”  This was the wrong response.  He should have looked at the scene and the ones prior and somewhere added the detail about the slit pockets.  Since he didn’t, I did, but it really was his job.

I do all that spelling- and grammar-checking as I type.  Good for you.  Now, do it again.  In fact, go to the Options dialogue and under Proofing hit the button that says “Recheck Document.”  This causes Word to look at everything again.  And then so can you.  That word you thought was foreign, look it up in Webster’s.  It may not be.  And Word’s tools aren’t always right, either.  It wanted to change “breech” to “breach” on me today, apparently not knowing what a breech-loading weapon is.

Next, consider that many words you may think are capitalized actually aren’t.  Check the Chicago Manual of Style for the term and usage.  The president walked into the Oval Office, is correct.  The President of the United States walked into the Oval Office, is correct.  The President walked into the Oval Office, is incorrect.

And the past tense of the word “drag” is not “drug.”  Don’t laugh.  I see this monthly, at least.

So, use the tools you have and be patient and diligent.  You will be rewarded.

Z

The post If You Think Making eBooks is Easy . . . appeared first on Author Coach.

“Ken Pakman’s Domestic Tranquility is a chilling look at our world as it might have been. Isaac January is a protagonist that could give Lee Child’s Jack Reacher a run for his money. This first novel is a must-read . . . and now!”

—Joe Weber, New York Times best-selling author of DEFCON One

 Domestic Tranquility gives you an action-packed thriller of a story, set against a compelling and darkly-imagined background. It’s a great read.

—Ian Racey, author of A Traitor’s Loyalty

Awesome story. The concept of a police-state America and the way Mr. Pakman fleshes it out is nothing short of brilliant. Isaac January is a heck of a hero in a land ruled by martial law and the Joint Chiefs. As a first-generation Cuban-American, I found Mr. Pakman’s alternate America . . . quite fascinating and also quite original  From the explosive hand-to-hand combat scenes to a downright scary America controlled by the military, Domestic Tranquility will make you damned appreciative of the freedoms granted to all of us through the ultimate sacrifice paid in blood by the men and women of our Armed Forces. Truly a good read.

—R.J. Pineiro, author of Havoc, Spyware, and 01-01-00

“Ken Pakman’s Domestic Tranquility is a chilling look at our world as it might have been. Isaac January is a protagonist that could give Lee Child’s Jack Reacher a run for his money. This first novel is a must-read . . . and now!”

—Joe Weber, New York Times best-selling

author of DEFCON One

Domestic Tranquility gives you an action-packed thriller of a story, set against a compelling and darkly-imagined background. It’s a great read.

—Ian Racey, author of A Traitor’s Loyalty

Awesome story. The concept of a police-state America and the way Mr. Pakman fleshes it out is nothing short of brilliant. Isaac January is a heck of a hero in a land ruled by martial law and the Joint Chiefs. As a first-generation Cuban-American, I found Mr. Pakman’s alternate America . . . quite fascinating and also quite original  From the explosive hand-to-hand combat scenes to a downright scary America controlled by the military, Domestic Tranquility will make you damned appreciative of the freedoms granted to all of us through the ultimate sacrifice paid in blood by the men and women of our Armed Forces. Truly a good read.

—R.J. Pineiro, author of Havoc, Spyware,

and 01-01-00

The post Advance Praise for DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY, by Ken Pakman appeared first on Author Coach.

But it raises an interesting question:  Why?  What has turned this older title into a new best-seller?  Was there a publicity hit somewhere?  Has some Kindle-centered military college required all freshman to buy and read it?  Was it put on the Commandant of the Marines’s Reading List.  I don’t know the answer, but I hope the sales keep on coming.

Congrats, Doc!

Z

The post STINGRAY Becomes a Kindle Best-seller! appeared first on Author Coach.