Indie Publishing with Draft2Digital, Girls Succeed 99 cent Promotion

Hello and welcome to the Focused on Story Blog!

Girls Succeed! by J.Q. Rose
To inspire girls

Today I am sharing my story on distributing my ebook, Girls Succeed! Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women, to readers.

I decided to offer my non-fiction book for Middle Grade girls to a wider audience, so I took it out of the exclusive amazon program KDP Select. I kept the book available at amazon, but uploaded it to a new-to-me distributor, Draft to Digital, also known as D2D. 

Now Girls Succeed! is available in many other online retailers including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Scribd, Indigo, and more. I also like having a Universal Link that allows a reader to click on it and see ALL the places where my ebook is available and not just as a Kindle format. Click here to see what I mean about the universal link.

When the e-book first came out in 2012, I placed it at amazon and Smashwords. I had a "hen" of a time getting SW to accept it because the formatting for the Table of Contents was incorrect. I spent hours and hours of time trying to get it right. I followed Mark Coker's guide book to the tee, I thought, and still had to do the ToC over and over. Finally it was accepted with no guidance from SW.

Later I took it out of SW and did the exclusive amazon plan because of the great opportunities for promotion. When I determined I may be missing many readers by having the amazon only association, I again uploaded my updated manuscript to SW. I received the bad news it wasn't accepted. When I checked the evaluation, there was a bunch of gibberish as to what was wrong. It was way over my head and I could only think about how much time and energy I had spent trying to fix it the first time.

I turned to D2D to see if I could get the ms accepted there. Then the dreaded message came back from D2D--"Apple has rejected Girls Succeed! Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women." I felt like throwing up my hands and saying "fuhgetaboutit." But along with the message D2D who formats your manuscript for free, added this 

"Incomplete/Inaccurate iBooks-Generated Table of Contents

- Please provide a complete, accurate listing of all chapters or sections in the iBooks-generated table of contents.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Questions? They actually wanted me to ask questions? So I sent the listing of the chapters. Crystal from D2D answered me with this information about the ToC format.

Hello,

The reason it's rejected is that when you convert your book with our conversion tool, in order to create a proper ToC within the epub file (which is required by Apple) it has to read the one in your file. I see that you have your own linked Table of Contents (ToC) in the file. However, when you linked the file you did not link the entire list. Our conversion tool will look for the phrase or word Table of Contents or Contents.  Once it sees this it will consider every link after to be part of the ToC.  Once the conversion tool sees unlinked text it sees the list as being done and assumes that the rest is not related to the ToC in the file. 

In order to fix this you simply need to link the entire line for each entry instead of only a partial line or remove the unlinked text altogether. 

After a few more messages between Crystal and me, I sent her what I wanted the ToC to look like, not just Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, but to include the woman's name and her career in the title of the chapter about her. Crystal offered to format it for me. I asked what the charge would be and she said no charge. I would've hugged her if I could have!! 

Big hugs for Crystal of Draft 2 Digital

What a relief to have her do it for me. And she did! then sent the complete ms with the new formatting for the ToC to me so I could upload the corrected ebook file. Now when the reader clicks on the Universal Link, they can order a copy from Apple too!

So I must say, D2D's customer service is top rated in my estimation. And I want to add, all these messages flying back and forth between Crystal and me were done in just a few days. Crystal promptly responded with the solution each time.

If you are an indie publisher, what distributor do you use? Are you exclusively in amazon to use their promotions? Aren't I full of questions? Now you know how Crystal must've felt. LOL. 

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If you have the time or the curiosity, you're invited to pop on over to the Girls Succeed Blog. Click here to visit.

99 Cent Book promotion

With my new opportunities to offer the Girls Succeed book to a wider audience, I ran a 99 cent promotion Sept 28-October 9. Originally the ebook including a reader's guide sold for $3.99. I'll report on the success or non-success of that experience once I get all my info together.

BTW--the ebook is available now at $2.99 and you can take a look at it and even purchase it to inspire a girl in your life here. Or if you would consider leaving a review, I would be happy to send you the PDF copy of the book FREE!

Thank you for stopping by.

My Dad's Birthday, Self-publishing with Smashwords

January 26 is my dad's birthday. I always think of him on this day. The weather on or around his birthday was almost always not so nice.( Even in Florida! Yes, don't let the Florida Chamber of Commerce fool you, there are cold days and rainy days during the Florida winter.) He is pictured here with his first grandchild, Staci, who is now a mother of a college-age student.

Time passes so quickly. I lost my dad when I was 28 years old. I didn't think I would ever get through that first year without him. The deep grief that gripped my life that first year has been replaced by good memories and stories about him when the family gets together. He still lives in our hearts.

Dad was an undertaker, yes, a funeral director. He loved people. He didn't care if they had nothing or lived in a mansion. He was always good to every one of the people in our small town. He taught me to treat every person with respect and appreciate the small things in life like the intricate snowflakes or spider webs. He was a brilliant piano player and could play anything by ear, never needing to look at a sheet of music. And he was a night owl. But being in the funeral business he was on-call 24 hours a day and a lot of the calls were in the middle of the dark Illinois nights. 

You can probably understand then when I tell you I am writing my third mystery, and it will take place in a funeral home. Yes, really! Of course the family who runs that funeral home will have the same attention to detail and caring that were so important to my dad. 

I thought it would be easy to write because I know the characters so well.  I don't know if it's because it is my third book or because the subject is so close to me that I'm having a difficult time putting the story together. It's not writer's block, it's just my own tendency to get the words right the first time and this is an especially close-to-my-heart project. Stay tuned!

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I recently updated a previous version of my non-fiction book for girls, Girls Succeed! so I easily uploaded the revised manuscript and new book cover to Amazon and it went live the next day. I dreaded loading it on Smashwords because of my first experience with them. They are picky! LOL..I like that though. If there are problems, they tell you so you can fix them and put up the best e-book you can for your readers. Originally I had to upload my book about 19 times in order for them to allow it to be distributed to all their outlets like Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Sony. So you can understand how I dreaded the possible hassle ahead with uploading the recent files. 

Image on the cover by majesticimagery.com

After uploading the new file, I checked it in the free e-reader for e-pub formats and found a couple of errors. It's so much easier to find them when you actually see them as an e-book on the Adobe Digital Editions instead of a Word file for some reason. So I quickly fixed those errors and re-submitted. The file was okayed to be put up on the Smashwords site and was fast-tracked to be checked for re-placing the e-book in the Premium Catalog for their distributors. Hallelujah! It was included in the catalog in only four days with no notes about any problems. 

So can you picture me jumping in the air like the happy jumping girl on the new cover of my book? Yes, I was a happy girl too when the e-book passed the muster for the premium catalog! Now I'm ready to get this revised book into the hands of girls to inspire them to dream big.

Writers on the Move Host Me: Self-publishing with Smashwords

Writers on the Move will help you with your writing career.

I'm a guest blogger today on the information-packed website for writers, Writers on the Move. I am sharing my experience of self-publishing on Smashwords with the readers.  According to Smashwords information, they are the largest distributor of self-published e-books in the world. Their service is free to upload a manuscript and churn out a finished e-book. They publish the work on their site in all the formats used for reading on the many devices available now for e-reading. Then, if your e-book passes the strict guidelines for getting into the premium catalog, your words will be distributed to major online booksellers in order for you to reach more readers.

Click on over to my blog post at Writers on the Move to read about my experience and to discover this helpful site for writers.

BTW, the book I published on Smashwords is Girls Succeed: Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women, a non-fiction e-book for middle grade girls. Take a peek at it.