Some publishing news this week.
This project turned out to be something of a saga. Back on 17 July I posted here that my summer project was to break those two books into three novels each in order to allow them to be made into audiobooks on Amazon and Audible sine, they were too long to use Amazon's Virtual Voice auto-narration program. I worked up six new covers, and submitted them in August. Side note; it seems that you can't submit more than three books at any one time on Amazon. I suppose to limit spam books.
The first three books of the Lost Star Stories went almost without a hitch. At first, I didn't upload them right using Amazon's Kindle Create app, so they didn't get the table of contents that they need to be made into audiobooks on Amazon so they did not appear as being made into audiobooks. I was a bit puzzled, but since the last three weren't even released yet, I let it ride. Eventually I figured that out that I hadn't done it right, and re-uploaded them again the right way and they were good to go. But by that time I was dealing with Amazon over the last three books in the series derived from The Lost Star's Sea.
On 7 August I wrote that I was having problem with those three books being approved by Amazon, because some 4 plus years ago, someone pirated them and uploaded them to Amazon, and I had to prove to Amazon that it was my indeed, book, which I did. Ever since then anytime I've made any sort of alteration of the text of The Lost Star's Sea, Amazon ask me again to prove that I'm the work's owner. That happened again this time. They must either have scanned the text and flagged the content, or saw that I noted that the stories had previously been published as part of The Lost Star's Sea. This time around it took even longer to straighten things out - almost a month. But this time, after they had approved the books, and they appeared to be "Live," they weren't for some reason. Their pages came up as unfound, with a picture of a dog. So it was back to Amazon and their chat support program to get this straightened out. Suffice to say that the chat person couldn't fix the problem so they transferred it to the tech staff, and it takes nearly a week to fix anything. Long story short, it was only last week when everything was finally sorted out and ready to go. Since I don't expect to sell many books, ebooks or audio, all this delay was no big deal - I wasn't losing any money with the delay.
But in any event, all six books are now available from Amazon (only) as ebooks and audiobooks for $3.99 each. I don't plan to publish paperback editions of them, as I would likely be their only customers, and I can live without them.
Just to be clear, the stories are still available for free in ebooks and audiobooks on Google, Apple, B & N, Kobo and Smashwords, pulse a bunch more platforms as The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea, as well as in paperback form from Amazon. The Amazon audiobooks are just future proofing my work and getting my work on Audible.
As a final note, I think that Amazon's virtual voice narration was quite good, if read a little slow for my taste. Perhaps it can be speeded up a little in the audio app. They promised a male British English voice for the summer, which has yet to appear, but when it does, I might change the narrator, and when I do, I'm planning on going back with a list of key names and places to make certain that common names and name places are pronounce consistently across all the books. I think I know how to do that now using the search process. We'll see.
Next week more publishing news. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment