Showing Tag: " ebooks" (Show all posts)

Obooko revamped

Posted by Paul Samael on Monday, May 28, 2018, In : Self-publishing 



Free ebooks platform Obooko has just undergone a (much delayed) revamp, with a much cleaner look and some improvements to the way you can browse/filter titles.  My experience with Obooko has been good in terms of the upload process etc, but less so in terms of downloads (click here for more details, including tips on how to create different types of ebook files for uploading to Obooko).  I've been on there since 2013 but my downloads remain stuck in the low hundreds - although others have don...
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The Curse of OCR

Posted by Paul Samael on Sunday, November 1, 2015, In : Random thoughts 



I’m a little hesitant about criticising books for having typos, as I’m sure that – despite my best endeavours to weed them out - my own are not entirely error-free.   So having a pop at William Boyd’s publishers over the numerous typos in the Kindle editions of some of his older novels could be seen as mild hypocrisy on my part.  Someone with higher moral scruples might conceivably agonise about this for several paragraphs – perhaps even whole pages.  But a couple of sentences is en...

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Trade by Lochlan Bloom

Posted by Paul Samael on Sunday, May 26, 2013, In : Book reviews 



“Trade” by Lochlan Bloom is narrated from a point in the not too distant future when an internet platform (a sort of cross between Facebook and Ebay) has radically changed the way that people approach sex.  Sometimes you have a feeling from the first page that something is going to be worth reading - and for me, “Trade” delivered on that initial promise.  The premise was sufficiently intriguing and enough happened in terms of plot to justify the label “novelette,”...


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Taking stock

Posted by Paul Samael on Sunday, January 6, 2013, In : Self-publishing 
 
It’s now more than 18 months since I set up this website and over a year since my first attempt at self-publishing.  So I thought now might be a good point to consider whether it’s been a worthwhile exercise so far.

Downloads are a fairly crude measure of success/failure – but for what it’s worth, here are my numbers as at 6 January 2013:



UPDATE 8.2014:  I have now discovered that the stats from Scribd are pretty unreliable, so in the interests of accuracy, you should ignore the totals...
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The Pirates! In an Adventure with Self-Published Authors!

Posted by Paul Samael on Thursday, November 8, 2012, In : Self-publishing 


Ahoy there, readers.  Yesterday I discovered that my novel had been put up on Amazon by a scurvy bilge rat claiming to me - and demanding that the reading public pay the princely sum of £1.92 for the privilege of reading it (even though it is available for free on Smashwords and Feedbooks).  So I wrote to Amazon and to their credit, they replied within hours and promised to remove it (although to my great disappointment, they refused to undertake to give the culprit forty lashes with the cat...
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Publishers: no better than fund managers?

Posted by Paul Samael on Thursday, November 1, 2012, In : Random thoughts 
In my last post, I expressed surprise that commercial publishers weren’t interested in a novel which ticked all my usual boxes (thought-provoking and ambitious yet not at the expense of readability or a good story) but was also by an established author and should have been relatively easy to market effectively.  Yet despite all that, it was rejected because it wasn’t felt to be “commercial” enough (which, translated, probably means not enough of a “safe bet”).

But perhaps I am bein...

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In the future this will not be necessary

Posted by Paul Samael on Wednesday, June 13, 2012, In : Writing fiction 



After much dithering, I have finally taken the plunge and published my novel as an ebook on Smashwords.  It's also on Scribd as a PDF.  I had been planning to try to get some more reviews from peer review sites before I went ahead, but in the end I decided to just publish the damn thing and see what happens.  A Feedbooks edition will be next.  I'm also intending to turn my attention back to some reviews of free ebooks by other self-published authors, which I have rather neglected of late - so...
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Feedbooks - better than Smashwords?

Posted by Paul Samael on Thursday, May 17, 2012, In : Self-publishing 



UPDATE 5.2019:  Sadly, Feedbooks has recently closed down its self-publishing platform - see this post.  Which is a shame because, in its heyday, Feedbooks performed quite well in terms of downloads (see below).  If you are looking at this because you are interested in self-publishing platforms generally, I would still recommend Smashwords - and for some other suggestions, take a look at my guide to self-publishing.

Just uploaded couple of short stories to Feedbooks, to see how they do - and w...
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BookieJar.com - worth a shot?

Posted by Paul Samael on Saturday, December 17, 2011, In : Self-publishing 


 
UPDATE 8.2016:  Bookiejar no longer seems to be operating, so you might not want to bother reading what follows. 

Just published "The Hardest Word" on another platform, BookieJar.com, which seems to be offering itself as a rival to Smashwords (although there's nothing to stop you publishing on both, which is exactly what I've done).  Click here to view.

The publishing process was very straightforward - I was able to take the version I'd used for uploading to Smashwords, change the front materi...
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The Hardest Word

Posted by Paul Samael on Friday, November 25, 2011, In : Writing fiction 

 

Just published a short story, “The Hardest Word” on smashwords.com.  Very impressed with how straightforward the whole process was – you just need to be prepared to put in some time formatting the book correctly in MS Word (the smashwords guidelines explain what you need to do and are extremely clear).  This was a dry run for making my novel available as an ebook, also via smashwords (the key advantage being that it makes the book available in almost all major ebook formats).  If you...
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My self-publishing "masterplan" (hmmm...we'll see)

Posted by Paul Samael on Monday, October 3, 2011, In : Self-publishing 

 
So, how do I propose to self-publish my work and avoid sinking without a trace beneath the mind-bogglingly vast number of other books which are published every year? Well, here -  for what it’s worth - is my masterplan (or, if you prefer, the pitifully deluded ravings of a sociopath determined to inflict his mindless drivel on the rest of us):

1. Get some reviews:  if you’re an unknown author, I don’t think you can expect people to read your stuff unless you have some decent reviews fro...

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About Me


Paul Samael Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.
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