So, here's the deal.  I'm going to serialise my e-book for free, starting the last week in July. Anyone who gets bored reading the instalments can buy a copy of the e-book in advance for £2.50 or, if they really want to push the boat out, they can buy a paperback. Incidentally, the free, serialised, e-book will always be available. My aim is to get it printed for a price that will allow me to sell it for £7.99 and send it anywhere in the world for a tenner!

Terrestrially (is that the right word) I'll try to sell the paperback locally, my local book shops, a signing, publicity in the local papers, radio and if I could swing it, TV, e-mails to friends, family, clubs etc. The angle being stay at home parent with two year old writes and self-publishes book - might add NCT or the like to the list for press releases then.

I've thought about Amazon but because they demand you sell it half price I'd have to list it at £15.99 in order to sell it for a reasonable amount and leave room for costs an their cut, let alone actually earn anything from it.  It all seems to be a bit artificial to me.

So there we go, that's the plan... I took a big breath and sent off for the ISBNs today... one for each format of the serialised e-book, one for each format of the sold e-book and one for the paperback.

And yes, it's a lot of money all this printing and isbns and gubbins and I could end up looking a real idiot. It's sort of daunting and yet quite exciting too.

On a lighter note, scion pointed at my Dr Who mug today and, unprompted, shouted "Darlick".

I did tell him what a Dalek was - when he was about 5 months old at any rate - but I don't remember mentioning it since. Even so, clearly it went in.

The new e-short is in the pipeline and I hope to upload it in June... the actual book, Few Are Chosen is, I hope, going live in July... if I can manage it... so you all have something to read on holiday.

Smashwords have to do withholding tax now so I'm thinking I won't sell my e-book, I'll do the give it away free and hope some people will buy a paperback model... unless I can't get a paperback printed cheaply enough to sell it to you all for £7.99 plus postage, in which case it'll have to be a case of sod it, let them withhold it and do it anyway.

So... scores on the doors...

Is This Heaven? - 917 downloads since Christmas Day 09
Bog Man - 1,119 downloads since 12 March

Mmm...

The site is a WordPress site, so it's reasonably easy to use, you register (the link is right at the bottom on the left hand side) and then you can access a template, fill in the blanks about your book, add a picture, links to your website, point of sale, etc.

My entry is here if you want to see.

http://www.ebooksjustpublished.com/2010/04/10/is-this-heaven/

You can tell I'm all excited about it can't you... yeh, small things...

It fits.

Hoorah!

No more pinky blisters...

I'd never seen it before so I'm delighted (not to mention relieved) to have found it now.  I suspect the moral of this story is that you can never proof read your stuff enough times.

On a completely different subject, the p key on my computer has broken. It still types, but the plastic lid won't stay on so I have to put my pinkie directly onto the strange squishy rubbery mechanism... I guess the moral of this story is not to put your computer on the ground so your mobile phone falls out of your pocket onto the keyboard when you stand up.

Another small disaster was averted, too, yesterday when scion came rushing through my nice clean house shouting "egg" and juggling a real one from hand to hand - he is one and three quarters so this was... alarming. I did manage to rescue it and get it back into the pantry... I also managed to rescue the three other eggs he had dropped into the cereal box. Luckily none of them broke either... so no eggy cereal and no horrible eggy goop stuck, for ever, between the floor boards in the hall!

Points to the little one for manual dexterity, too, he'd unhooked and opened a wire egg basket and opened a cardboard egg box inside it.

My first freebie short story, Is This Heaven? has had 108 downloads on Smashwords and is linked in two other writer's profiles. It's had about 350 hits on Freado/bookbuzr and Scribd but I'm not so sure of the accuracy of their stats... but I digress...

My point is, I put the second short story - Bog Man - onto Smashwords at about 6.00pm last night.  I hoped to get a few hits, I thought that if I did it would mean that the people who'd downloaded Is This Heaven liked it and had been waiting for the second one.  Well, by the end of the evening 75 people had downloaded it, by 6.00pm today, 86 people had downloaded it, even better, two of them were new readers who liked it so much they downloaded Is This Heaven, too... 7 Smashwords authors have linked to Bog Man in the first 24 hours, too.

Mmm (says a very smug M T). Isn't that a pip?

Bog Man
A perfectly preserved pre-historic cadaver is discovered in the fens and brought to a Museum. For the new Director it should present a major opportunity but is it real? And if it is, how come the pre-historic ring it's wearing also bears the marks of a local shop. And where is the Museum's Head Electrician? If the Director doesn't find answers soon the unthinkable may happen. In front of the world, he may look an idiot.

You can find it, here free to download...

Enjoy!

If you're looking into self-publishing like I am (in this case while I wait for the results of my latest submission) you'll be amazed at how many questions crop up as you start to explore your options further.  In this case, a few worries about copyright.  It took me a couple of hours of digging to find anything approaching the hard facts on-line in a form I was prepared to believe so... for other authors like myself.  Here are the main points.

As someone who is thinking of self-publishing in the UK, I'm not going to worry about selling different types of publishing rights, thank heavens, because if I self-publish I'm going to be my publisher and unless (or until) I'm are picked up by a bigger one, all the rights stay with me.  Remember to check the small print if you sign up to a POD or distribution sites to make sure of this!

The copyright of your work is yours, from the moment you've written it down.  This applies to the words you use or at least the way you express your idea (ie people can't lift passages from your work) your characters, your plot and the way you conclude it.

So for example if you want to quote someone else's work in your own; song lyrics, poetry, extracts... you have to seek permission from the owner of the copyright, unless you are using a short phrase of about 14 words... In other words, you'd probably get away with quoting "a long time ago in a galaxy far away" without permission but not the whole schpeil of floating letters that comes after it!

General ideas are different, somebody must have come up with the name tractor beam at some point but this has slipped into the language to the extent that most of us could explain what it is, even though it doesn't actually exist... yet.  No permission required for tractor beams to appear in your work, or flying cars, cf whichever Harry Potter it was and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang happily coexisting.

However,  I noticed a section of people on forums, info sites, etc were talking about "establishing copyright" of a novel.  Now, in the US you have to do this, as I understand it but in the UK and most of the rest of the world you don't.

Naturally, the next question that came up in my mind was should I do something to officially 'establish' my copyright, even though I live in the benign UK/rest of the world (the US is a bit of an anomaly on this one)?  So... I looked into it and discovered that there are several ways to establish your authorship just in case it turns out to be a hit - after all, I read somewhere there's a saying which goes, 'where there's a hit there's a writ'.

1. There are people you can e-mail or post your book to who will store it on your behalf to prove you'd written it from well... the day they process it but you need to watch out as this might be as much as several months after you've submitted it.  Sites such as the Writers' Copyright Association will do this for you, for a fee (around £60 I believe).
2. You can put it in an envelope and deposit it with a bank or a firm of solicitors - recommended by the Society of Authors, that one.
3. You can put it in an envelope and post it, making sure it has a legible date franked on it, to yourself; amusingly, that one was recommended by the firm of solicitors I approached after reading the advice from the Society of Authors.  Apparently, you can ignore people who say this method doesn't stand up in court, one of the UK's leading IP lawyers told me that actually, it will.
4. Keep a paper trail, keep the rejections, notes you make, etc.  Back up and keep old drafts on your computer and on an external storage device.

Clearly as I am not in the US and any self-publishing I do will be on a shoestring, I think 3 and 4 are my tickets!

For more information on copyright there's an excellent article on the Writers' and Aritst's Yearbook blog here.

Another thing to remember, if you publish a book with an ISBN number in Britain (which you need to do if you want to sell it on Amazon) is to send it to the six Legal Deposit Libraries within a month of publication.  This also helps establish you as the original author.  The Legal Deposit Libraries are:

• The British Library
• The Bodleian Library
• Cambridge University Library
• The National Library of Scotland
• The National Library of Wales
• The Library of Trinity College Dublin

Well that's handy, Cambridge isn't far away, I could drop that one in and yes, clearly, if you have one, your publisher does do a little bit more than print up your book.

That's very much an 'in a nutshell' guide but I hope it's useful.  Apart from the Writers' and Artists' yearbook blog.  Initially, I found absolutely bugger all about any of this on the web that wasn't specific to the US. I'm hoping this may help other British authors who are researching self-publishing.  I've done the digging so you don't have to.

I am looking into ISBNs at the moment, where you get them, how many you need, whether one fits all versions of a novel or whether you need a new ISBN for e-book, audio or revised versions.  I'll post a quick summary of my findings on that when I've finished.

Please note, I'm not a lawyer but what I've shared here might be enough information to help you ask the right questions.  I hope it is useful and if you spot an error, please let me know.

In an interview  on the writers and artists yearbook blog she was asked what female novelists she admired and said this:

"All female novelists who are also mothers. We should all just get a Booker Prize for finishing a book."

The rest of the article is a great read, too - you can find it here but that particular bit made me feel all warm and fuzzy. And next time I am trying to sort out a problem with a plot in my head, while I am trudging up (0r down) the stairs with the latest clean (or dirty) mountain of washing to attend to; followed closely by small, huffing, puffing, scion carrying a large (full) plastic milk carton in each hand (cartons which are making worrying is-that-milk-going-to-stay-put-in-there-or-it-going-to-leak-out gurgly noises) I will think of that and feel part of a weird sisterhood of mother writers!

Mmm... Isn't that a pip?

So, Kathy Letts thank you, thank you!

What I like about this articles is that unlike most of the how to books, sites or articles you read about writing, ask successful writers, themselves, and they suggest you write what comes out, rather than what you think will sell.

Mmm... I like that approach.  Anyway, enjoy the article which is here and part two can be found... here!

Enjoy!