6 Reasons Why I Refuse to Have My Work Edited

1. I want people to tell me my book is horrible. I think it's great and that's all that matters.
2. I want 1-star reviews! It fuels me to keep writing; the 1-star reviewers are just jealous.
3. I want people to see me as an amateur, not a professional. After all, writing is my hobby.
4. I want to be known as an author who doesn't value my own work. 
5. I want people to refuse to buy my work in the future. One sale is plenty.
6. I want to sabotage my own writing career and keep my day job a good while longer.

Honestly, those are the only reasons I can come up with, and all of those reasons are asinine. I can't figure out for the life of me real reasons why authors seem to refuse to have their books edited (not read by their two best friends) before they decide to publish. I'm so disappointed by yet another author's work that I tried to read . . . I really tried. It was so full of mistakes that I had to turn my Kindle off and write this post -  instead of writing a 1-star review.

If you are an author who refuses to have your work professionally edited (and no - spell check doesn't count), you're yanking the rug out from under your own feet! I have to ask you - how many times do you have to hear that it is an absolute necessity before you'll get on board? Why won't you do it?

I think it boils down to one of two things:

1 - You don't know how.  

If you don't know how please let me help you. Google and shop around. We all have figured out Google has the answer to everything. Get to Googling and find an editor that works with your genre, jives with your personality, fits your budget, can meet your deadlines, and can provide you with a sample of his/her work.

Here are a few links for you just in case you don't know how to use Google.  Each provider listed below does EXCELLENT and affordable work.  

Of course there's us, Kissed Publications; just click on the services tab on this page.

Lynn Loves Editing

- https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lynn-Loves-Editing/371274692913054?fref=ts

U Can Mark My Words

- http://www.ucanmarkmyword.com

Kai Wilson

- kaiberworks@gmail.com

Teresa Kennedy

- http://villagegreenpreenpressllc.com

Kissed Publications

- http://www.kplapublishing.com

2 - You don't want to.

If you just don't want to have your work professionally edited, please return to the beginning of this post to read the six things that you obviously want instead!  Here's another fantastic article about a seasoned author making this grave mistake. - http://www.lorijometz.com/2012/10/22/self-publishing-my-most-important-mistake/

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Welcome Leader of Me Participants!

We are honored to take part in your publishing journey and are here to support you in that regard.

As presented on the Leader of Me call, we invite you to subscribe to our mailing list. We understand that some of you may be inundated with emails on a daily basis, so we promise not flood your inbox. What you can expect instead is a quick quarterly update, keeping you abreast of new release announcements,  featured author articles. publishing industry trends, opportunities in the marketplace.

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Traditional or Self Published? You Decide.

By Carolyn Kellogg

January 9, 2014, 1:00 p.m.

Writers prefer to be published by a traditional publisher over self-publishing. Go figure.

More than 9,000 authors responded to questions about the publishing industry in a report to be issued next week. Of the writers surveyed, 57.8% said they'd rather go the traditional route with their next book than try self-publishing.

These aren't just old-fashioned authors. That percentage includes writers who have been both self-published and traditionally published. What's more, the survey was conducted by Writers Digest and Digital Book World -- which certainly captures people interested in digital publishing.

Of course, traditional publishing houses publish e-books too. They'll be among those at the Digital Book World Conference, which takes place in New York next week. That's where the report will be presented with its full details.

Thursday, on the Digital Book World Site, Dana Beth Weinberg provides a preview of the Digital Book World and Writers Digest 2014 Author Survey. She writes:

"Despite the rise of self-publishing and the enthusiasm with which self-published authors celebrate its ascendance, overall, the authors surveyed are more interested in traditionally publishing their next book. The greatest preference for traditionally publishing was reported by traditionally published authors (87.2%) followed by not-yet-published authors (76.8%). Among authors who have self-published, more than half hoped to publish with traditional publishers -- 53.5% of self-published authors and 57.8% of hybrid authors."

A graph on the site shows more information. Most authors and aspiring writers are open to a mix of traditional publishing and self publishing; very few are dedicated to self-publishing only. Even among those who define themselves as self-published authors, more than half -- about 53% -- would prefer that their next book be published by a traditional publisher.

This is the second year that the survey has been conducted. It's a self-selecting survey of interested parties, so, Weinberg warns, the numbers aren't scientific. But it does show that traditional publishers are doing something right -- authors still like them lots.

See the original posted article here:
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-authors-prefer-traditional-publishers-to-selfpublishing-surprised-20140109,0,2171066.story#ixzz2q6j0mRTm

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Make 2015 YOUR Year!

We are searching for 10 aspiring authors who want to become published in 2015. Stop pretending your talent doesn't exist and MAKE this year your year!

Submit your query online line here!

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Book Promoting Sites

40 Book Promoting Sites – Part 1 (via ePublish a Book)

40 Book Promoting Sites – Part 1   When publishing a book, the key to success is promotion and distribution. Both are meant to give books as much exposure as possible. In order to gain time, it is best to know where to find opportunities to gain exposure easily. This is why we are now creating a…

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DIGITAL PUBLISHING

Sesame Street Now On Nook

By Dianna Dilworth on February 2, 2012 12:25 PM

Barnes & Noble is now selling Sesame StreeteBooks on the Nook Color.  This includes titles such as The Monster at the End of This Book.

The books are being published by Sesame Streetand Random House Children’s Books, who announced a new digital imprint partnership last week. This spring, the imprint will put out another eBooks including: Get Moving with Grover, Big Bird Says and Baker, Baker, Cookie Maker.A select group of these new books will include audio narration from Sesame Street veteran Bob McGrath.

Wendy Bronfin, Senior Director of Kids Digital Products for Barnes & Noble, stated: “We are excited to introduce a series of popular Sesame Street titles into our extensive picture book catalogue of NOOK Books. Sesame Street has been a leader in technology and education for young children for many years and we are thrilled to bring these family-favorite stories to Barnes & Noble customers– and right before Elmo’s birthday.  What a great birthday present!”

Original post - http://www.mediabistro.com/ebooknewser/sesame-street-now-on-nook_b19923

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Nook Color Battery Life

Your Nook Color battery life is probably important to you for many reasons. An ereader’s primary attraction is its ability to function wirelessly on battery power. Therefore, a device with a short battery life is fairly useless and potentially a waste of money. Owners of the Nook have an additional reason for wanting their battery to last a long time, these ereaders run on rechargeable batteries which cannot be replaced by their owners.

Most Nooks come with warranties so that you can avoid the inconvenience of having to submit the device for a replacement. Either way, replacing the battery is not for the do-it-yourself types. 

The Nook Color Battery

The Nook Color has a rechargeable battery, like its predecessor. It can function for as much as eight hours after a full recharge. However, to achieve this duration, you have to make certain changes to a few settings to consverve its power usage. These energy saving ideas are also good for extending the overall life of the battery. The first step in making the battery last longer is making sure that the cable is snug when you attach it to recharge at night or any other time. These cables are notorious for having tricky connections. They must fit correctly into their connections or you will never charge the battery up sufficiently.

 Keeping It Running

 To keep the battery running as long as possible once you have unplugged it, you need to shut down or avoid certain applications. Unless you are actively using the wireless connection, this should be shut off. This will avoid draining power unnecessarily. You should also avoid using programs and games with a lot of graphics, such as Angry Birds. These applications use up a lot of power. If you do use them, do not be surprised if your battery life is much less than the promised eight hours.

 There is one other less obvious service which you need to turn off if you want to get the maximum life possible out of your battery. There is a little known service running in the background. It is called the Cell Standby Service. This is actually a smart phone service that allows for phone calls and SMS messages to be received. The odd thing is that it really has little reason to be a part of the reader and it drains a considerable amount of electricity. However, it continues to run even when the Nook is powered down or charging.

 Turning this service off requires that your Nook be rooted. InspiredGeek has a quick little tutorial that walks you through turning off this pesky little service.  Since you cannot replace the rechargeable battery when its performance begins to decline, consider warranty options. In addition to the one-year warranty, you might want to get anextended warranty. This can provide you some peace of mind when your battery begins to lose its ability to recharge properly.

http://www.pdfdevices.com/extending-your-nook-color-battery-life/

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The Release of a "Slew" of E-books

A small team at Penguin India's New Delhi office is agog with excitement as the publishing powerhouse - with 250 titles every year - waits for its E-moment - launch of the first set of 150ebooks slated for this month. 

Not just Penguin, other Indian book publishers are taking the risk to launch e-books to try out the potential of this virgin market at a local level. Top publishing houses like Harper Collins and Amar Chitra Katha are all expected to release their first set of e-books within the next six months. 

"We are aggressively converting books into e-books. At this point in time, there is not a big market for e-books here but when the device explosion happens, we'll be there," says Ananth Padmanabhan, vice-president for sales at Penguin India. HarperCollins India, the Indian subsidiary of American publishing major HarperCollins, will launch its first e-book this year. 

Collins is now preparing the ground for entering the e-book market: developing the technology conversions, working out the legalities and creating the rightdistribution and sales strategy. 


Continue your read ...

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First-Time Author Mistakes

Prior to being published, first time authors frequently make mistakes that damage or even preclude their book's marketability. Commonly, these errors include

Poorly designed or stock cover art
Unedited or unprofessionally edited text
Under funding of or lack of a book marketing budget
Inadequate online presence
Absence of book platform and clear audience for the material

Book Covers make or break your ability to obtain reviews and readers. You can judge a book by its cover.

As James Cox, Editor of Midwest Book Review puts it,

"Stack #3 are those titles that are immediately rejected — not for their subject matter; not for being written by a first time author; and not for their self-published, POD-published, or small press published status, but because they are poorly designed or defectively produced in terms of presenting substandard, inadequate, or otherwise unattractive covers."

Appealing covers summon buyers. Whether these buyers actually read your book is another matter, but the most important element for purchasing a publication is its wrapper. It has been proven that people choose a book by what they see and read on the cover, especially if they don't know the author.

Make sure your cover is designed by an award-winning book designer, not a general graphic designer. For different angles and musings on book covers, visit book design web sites and blogs.

Editing is also critical to your book's success. You want to interview several editors and hold their completed books in your hand. Choose a set of editors who are experienced with your genre. Among equally qualified candidates, hire those with whom you have some professional chemistry. For an explanation of the types of editing your work might benefit from, read The Northwest Independent Editors Guild categories at http://stephaniebarko.com/2010/12/06/types-of-editing-2.

What is a reasonable Marketing Budget for a book launch? Plan to spend $2.5 to $12K before and during the first three months of your book's life. If you get an advance on your manuscript, I recommend spending the whole amount on marketing your book.

Line item expenses in a prep & launch budget might include research & fact checking, editing, indexing, illustrating, cover & interior design, web design, optimization and maintenance, book distribution, shipping, travel, publicity, and advertising. If you need media training or a public speaking coach, include that. Post-publication, add in book fair and industry conference fees, book award submission fees, exhibitor costs, and presentation equipment.

An author's Online Presence is absolutely crucial in today's book market. Internet book sales have risen 18% year on year since 2002. For this reason, each author needs a web site that pulls incoming traffic from people who are searching on the book's issues, title, and author name.

The internet is so dynamic that each year the way to attract customers on the cyber superhighway seems to morph. Right now it's social networking. Perhaps 12 million Americans now keep a blog because they've learned that frequently updating their content will maintain or lift their Google page rank.

Use search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Google Adwords to discover high ranking keywords, and then repeat those throughout your web site, blog and press releases. Seek a web designer who is both imaginative and good at taking direction, while exhibiting a proficiency in English, design, WordPress, SEO, and business.

Finally, if you cannot define your book's Audience and Platform, your book will never get off the ground. To market your book, you must be able to distill its issues and know who and where your readers are and how they search for books and information. Create a pitch to attract them and prioritize your first year plan so that you fully fund and lead with the strongest device in your platform.

Don't end up in the slush pile! Spend time and money with your editing team, a book designer, a web optimization guru, and a publicist, so your book is more likely to remain competitive among the almost 300,000 titles released in America each year.

Originally posted at Midwest Book Reviews. 

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Should You Make Your EBook Free?

One author's take on making a title available for download at the price of FREE!

With permission from Stephanie Haddad

Why Free Was For Me - Stephanie Haddad

If you’ve been following my announcement over the past month, you might have caught on to the fact that I’ve made my novel, A Previous Engagement, free as an ebook. (Paperbacks aren’t free, sorry…LOL). You can download it just about anywhere: Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, and iTunes. It was a risky move, just giving away my work, but it was one I felt I needed to make.

See, to be totally honest, before I made that novel free to download, sales weren’t going so great for me. I’d hand-sold about 100 paperback copies (of my two titles combined) and only about 30 of the ebooks. Sure, that’s a great start for an independent self-pubbed author like myself, but I knew I could be in better shape.  After all, A Previous Engagement had been out for about five months in December and I hadn’t reached anywhere near the audience I knew I could. Ads, giveaways, and guest blogs were helping, but barely. And with a second title WAY under-performing the first after two months out, I was heading downhill. My self-publishing career was costing me more than it was earning me.

That’s when I knew it was time to take matters into my own hands.

I thought long and hard, made lots of lists, and consulted some of my friends in the Indie Author Group on Facebook. In the end, it was their advice that really got me leaning towards making one of my titles free. Many had shared their stories with me, especially how a free ebook had helped them to gain exposure, reach new readers, and ultimately, resulted in more sales of their other titles.  With two books out, I knew making one free could help me sell the other. And since I plan to publish three more novels in 2012, I hoped reaching new readership would have a domino effect on all my titles’ sales.

So I did it. On December 9, 2011, one month ago today, I made A Previous Engagement free and lowered the price of Love Unlistedto just 99-cents. That was a big jump from my asking price of $2.99 for each title. I was risking quite a bit of potential profit, but I knew from experience in retail that you’ll sell more volume at a lower price. In the end, provided you reach as many new customers as you hoped, your sales dollars will be greater when selling at the lower price. But you’re not reading this for a basic consumerism lesson, you want to know what happened…

Well, a few things happened. First of all, I hit 1000 downloads of my free title in about 9 days. Today, one month later, I’m closing in quickly on 5,000 downloads. I’m averaging about 150-200 downloads every single day, and they’re coming from all outlets, iTunes especially. Here’s some other fun facts about what a free book will do for an indie author’s reach:

• I’ve gathered 470 ratings and about 30 reviews on iTunes for my free title.
• And about 20 ratings for my second novel (the 99-cent one).
• I reached the #4 spot on the top free downloads for contemporary romance novels on iTunes.
• The was listed on several popular sites as a free title, reaching lots of new readers. Check out GetFreeEbooks.com for one example.
• I’ve gathered almost 50 reviews on Barnes & Noble (2 for Love Unlisted so far.)
• My sales of Love Unlisted were multiplied 10 times over. I sold 4 copies in November, compared to over 40 copies in December alone!
• I’ve added about 20 new fans to my Facebook page!
• My blog went from averaging 8 hits per day to averaging over 40 hits per day!

So while it’s early days still, and I have new titles to publish and promote, I have to say that the first results of this freebie experiment are all positive. Not every rating is a 5-star one, not every review is glowing, but the point is that people are reading. And when they like what they read, they’re buying my next book. I’m not going to be a millionaire any time soon, but I’m just happy my books are being read.

At the end of the day, isn’t that why we write our books anyway?

Original post - http://www.stephaniehaddad.com/fiction/?p=487#comment-475

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Click here for Ebook Secrets Exposed - How to Make Massive Amounts of Money in Record Time With Your Own eBook. 

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Three Secrets to Selling More Books

If you ask a group of authors "how can I sell more books" you are likely to hear a number of responses, from scheduling book tours, to buying and distributing promotional items, to spending time on social networking and blogging sites. None of these are wrong, and honestly, no one really has a magic formula for what works 100% of the time. If there were such a thing, there would be no room on the best sellers' lists, right? 

I can tell you that the art of book sales takes a lot of work. A LOT of work. None-the-less, here are three quick and easy tips that are sure to be helpful.

Know HOW to Talk about Your Work.

Do you have an elevator speech? You know, if you and I were together in an elevator, could you tell me about your book before the elevator arrived at our destined floors? More times than not, when I've asked authors to tell me about their books, they stumble over their words, dig for a post card or bookmark so that I can read a printed synopsis, or begin a verbal dissertation that's far too lengthy to hold my attention. You should be able to sum your story up in 1-2 compelling and intriguing sentences.

Create and Maintain a Mailing List

Keeping and utilizing a mailing list allows you to reach your customers and fans with your updates, new releases and other information about you or your books. While Facebook, Twitter and the like are great tools, sometimes posts are simply missed. Sometimes you have more than 140 words of info. Sometimes  by the time I get to Facebook, your status has moved away from my initial viewing page, and you know what they say - out of site, out of mind. Opt-in lists are easy to build, use and manage, and can be a great way to showcase an excerpt. 

Promotional Items Alone Don't Sell Books

Bookmarks, postcards, key rings, t-shirts are great give-aways, but don't rely on promotional items to sell your books for you. They won't. We've all done it before...attended some type of event or trade show and collected items from various tables without a second thought of what the item promoted. Sure, it may have had functional value (a pen always comes in handy, and so does a tote bag) but does it sell a book? Not by itself. Learn how to be strategic with your items, exchange that pen or key ring for an email address that you can add to your mailing list. 

Of course this list could go on forever; visit our Marketing page for more great tips and strategies.

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Now Accepting Submissions

We are currently accepting submissions for digital publication (Nook, Kindle, etc.) of Women's Commercial Fiction. You may email a query letter along with a brief synopsis and the first ten pages of your manuscript to  submissions@kissedpublications.com . If we take an interest in your work, we will notify you via email.


Completed works should be 65,000 - 80,000 words.

Click here  for complete submission guidelines.

Click here  for more details on our Digital Publishing program.

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