Writing / Publishing

The keys of book cover design change from year to year. What worked really well for a hardcover on a bookstore shelf in 1970 is vastly different than what works best on an Amazon browse screen in 2024. Let’s look at the latest updates.

First, as of 2024, 75% of American households have Amazon prime. It’s not even just that the buyers use Amazon. They use Amazon so much they pay up front for free shipping. As an author, you have a personalized book library available 24/7 in 75% of American households. You MUST optimize your cover for Amazon sales. The vast reach of Amazon, compared with one tiny local bookstore, is just mind-boggling.

When you browse in Amazon for books in a genre, let’s say historical fantasy, Amazon now focuses on just showing you a GRID OF COVERS. That’s it. You get to see the star rating and NOTHING ELSE but the cover. Amazon doesn’t tell you the title, author name, details, or anything. If those items are not CLEARLY visible on the cover, you’re out of luck. The person is just going to keep scrolling.

You want to use a title and author font which clearly stand out against the background. The “When Women Were Dragons” is great in that sense. So is “What the River Knows”. But the lower left one? “Darker Shade of Magic”? Good luck reading that one!

You must make sure that the title and author name are clear against that background. Often that involves adding shadow behind the letters so that it’s not “cluttered” in that area. Light-colored letters need to go against a dark background and dark-colored letters need to have a light background. There needs to be contrast in value.

Next, look at the layout of the professionally-published books. There is nearly always a subtitle, a short blurb, or both. Yes THEY CANNOT BE READ AT THIS SIZE :). I understand that. They aren’t meant to be. They are a design feature that in essence says “This book is valuable enough that people buy it in large hardcover format where these tiny letters are legible.” It’s a mark of quality. It’s a good idea to have something like that on your book, for that reason.

Next up, the design theme of your book MUST match this target audience. If someone was scrolling through the historical fantasy books above and then they came across a book presented in this cover style:

That person would keep on scrolling. Sure, my goal book cover is great in the goal book category. But it’s wholly inappropriate as a cover design in with these historical fantasy books. You need your cover to feel like a perfect match for someone who is scrolling in this area looking for this kind of book to read.

If you have a horror story, don’t make it look like an Amish sweet romance. If you have a gritty NYC thriller with gore, it shouldn’t look like a gentle space adventure on Mars. Make sure the cover clearly broadcasts the type of book you have. That way you draw in your target readers with 5-star reviews and gently hold off reader who hate your type of genre and who will give you 1-star reviews.

Most professionally published authors change out their covers every few years, to make sure they keep reaching their target audience as perfectly as possible. That’s how they keep selling books to the new audience. For those of us who self publish, it’s even easier, because we can do it whenever we want, for free.

Make sure you browse through Amazon through your target category area. Look at the covers. Make sure, at a TINY SIZE, your own cover has a similar look and feel to the ones you want to sell alongside.

Ask with any questions, and good luck!

Many people know of HP Lovecraft because of his creepy science fiction / fantasy stories. But every author can take a turn into another genre for fun. In H. P. Lovecraft’s case, one of the earliest works he wrote was in essence making fun of himself and the reputation he’d built as a ‘person who wrote in an old-fashioned way’. That story was “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson“.

H. P. Lovecraft, born in 1890, loved the Old Times. He was racist, misogynist, and wished he lived in an earlier time when White men could simply rule the world without all this trouble. He enjoyed the writings of those racist older folks. So, in this story, he writes in essence about himself as a fantasy creature, claiming that he’d been born on August 20th 1690 – i.e. his actual own birthday, just two hundred years earlier. Lovecraft even says in his story that he’s tricked current people into thinking he was ONLY born in 1890.

In this fantasy world of Lovecraft’s, he got to hang out with all of his favorite old-time authors like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. Lovecraft has fun describing his author friends, and how they would look, and how he would interact with them. Lovecraft jokes that he and Johnson would have a battle of wits, that Johnson would love how snarky Lovecraft was, and they’d become fast friends.

To us readers, over a hundred years later, a lot of this can feel like simply a list of names of ancient authors. Lovecraft mentions in passing a Thomas Percy who collected the “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765”, which was an amazing effort which helped publicize a wide range of ballads. Yes, this is stunning in terms of 1700s culture, but do most Cthulhu-loving readers care at all about this?

And, as it turns out, Samuel Johnson teased that ballads were often fairly brainless in their construction a la:

“The tender infant meek and mild
Fell down upon a stone;
The nurse took up the squealing child
But yet the child squeal’d on.”

Percy was not amused.

So, similarly, Lovecraft has in his own story that Samuel Johnson recited a poem and that Lovecraft then made changes to it.

This piece isn’t really meant to be a “story” as much as a fantasy “What if I could have met these cool people” episode, as well as a “I’m not appreciated by my own peers because I was meant to live in another time.” I suppose it’d be like me writing about hanging out with Tolkien and his friends in a tavern, talking about hobbits and lions and so on, and having them comment on my stories. It’s a fun escapist fantasy.

So while this isn’t about cosmic horror, it does give a lot of insight into the mind of Lovecraft, how he felt unappreciated and misunderstood in his own time, and how he dreamed of living in a different time.

Read “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” for yourself:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rdsj.aspx

My video review of this story:

Amazon’s sub-sub-sub categories are getting out of control. There’s a category just for SciFi and Fantasy Art? Apparently I’m their top new release, with my mermaid book :).

On the downside, MOST of the other new releases in this area are massive amounts of AI-generated books featuring big-breasted fantasy porn and scifi porn. The books are flooding their system.

Here’s the link to my book, which is about the history and types of mermaids. It’s not a how-to-draw book.

Authors are often really good at writing, but less great at photography and illustration. What happens when an author is writing a book which could benefit from artwork?

Here are a few options for you.

Stock Photography

There are ALL sorts of stock photography sites out there. You can get free images, which is cost-effective, but which also means you can see the same image show up in 80 other books. You can instead pay a small amount for images, which means it’s much more likely your cover or illustration will be fairly unique out there. It’s key, especially with a cover, that your version stands out as unique. If 20 other books also have your exact same cover, it’s harder to be found.

Here are some stock sites to examine.

Pixabay.com

Pexels.com

Freepik.com

iStockPhoto.com

ALWAYS always always keep track of exactly where you get each image and what the rights are to it. ALWAYS verify rights before using an image. You can get hit with fines of $25,000 or more for illegally using an image you do not have rights to.

Museum Stock Photos

Many museums give FREE rights of usage to images of items in their collection. This can be a powerful boost to anyone writing about historical topics.

National Gallery of Art

The Met

Art Institute of Chicago

There are many more out there as well. Always check to see how they want you to credit the image use.

Hand-done Illustrations

Talk to local art organizations to see if there are artists interested in working with you. This supports local artists and brings a fellow marketer on board as well! You can also look to build up your OWN talents to do your own artwork. A few art classes can go a long way!

AI / Artificial Intelligence Art

I strongly recommend AGAINST the AI-generated art option right now, because many AI companies are unethically / illegally using millions of “real” artists’ works in building their engines. There are many lawsuits moving through the courts to address this issue. To help clarify the issue, look at for example MidJourney:

MidJourney

This artwork is generated from prompts by AI. The AI is not “inventing” its art – the AI rather looks through the online web universe of existing artwork, created by humans, and then makes a version that mashes a few of those together. Many people are strongly against AI art for this reason. With all the challenges one has in launching a book, wading into the AI art debate is not an extra challenge you want to add onto your plate.

If you DO use AI art for any reason, make sure you clearly indicate this in your book. It’s important for ethical reasons.

At some point in the future there will be AI art generators which operate ethically based on opt-in artist submissions. At that point, there will be less of a negative aura around AI art for many people.

Ask with any questions!

In early 2024, SmashWords decided it wanted to get out of the ebook publishing business. It let all of its authors know that their ebooks would be migrating over to Draft2Digital, to manage their publishing activities there. That migration did not go smoothly.

Let me explain what this is all about, what happened, and how to move forward.

SmashWords and Draft2Digital

When ebook publishing first began, there were only a handful of places one could publish their ebook. These sites included places like Lulu, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple. Over time, a number of other ebook library systems sprang into being. It became fairly onerous for an author to create an account on every single system, create an ebook entry on each one, maintain the updates with new versions, and so on.

This is where SmashWords and Draft2Digital came in.

Both SmashWords and Draft2Digital were ‘feed’ systems. You could load your ebook into SmashWords once. You simply clicked the checkboxes to indicate that you wanted SmashWords to distribute your ebook out to Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc., and off the book went. You could load the book in one place and have it show up in a variety of different systems. This was a wonderful time saver.

The down side was that every system has its own categories, its own description length, and so on. So using an aggregator like SmashWords meant you were only shown the ‘lowest common denominator’ across all the sites. If Vendor X let you have an 800 word description and Vendor Y only had a 600 word description, you could only enter 600 words. That way your entry would work ‘everywhere’.

Because of this, I used the following process.

1) Amazon – I always loaded my book directly on Amazon first. Amazon provided 99.9% of sales, and I needed that to be absolutely perfect. Amazon gave access to far more options like categories, keywords, etc. than most other platforms. It was critical for my sales that my Amazon entry use every single option available and update instantly when I needed to make changes.

2) Draft2Digital – Draft2Digital was the aggregator which had the best other options. It supported Apple, Barnes & Noble, and other high-end competitors. I would NOT choose ‘Amazon’ from amongst the Draft2Digital options, since I had already direct-loaded my ebook onto Amazon. However, I did choose EVERY other option Draft2Digital supported, to maximize my reach.

3) SmashWords – For whatever reason, Draft2Digital did not reach every single publishing option out there. This is where SmashWords came in handy. SmashWords reached a lot of smaller options. So I would load my ebook into SmashWords and choose ‘everything else’. That is, I would select every option not already handled by Amazon or Draft2Digital.

This trifecta is how I have been maintaining my ebooks since 2013. I did this for about 60 of my 500+ books – all the free ones.

The SmashWords to Draft2Digital Migration

In 2024, when SmashWords decided they were going to move all of their publishing systems over onto the Draft2Digital platform, I was fine with it. As long as I didn’t lose access to existing partners, I could now manage everything just on Draft2Digital instead of having to log into both Draft2Digital and into SmashWords. I was given early access to this process since I have about 60 books in their systems. I went through the prompts to merge the libraries.

What they did instead was create two SEPARATE libraries, with different logons. And instead of using the existing links for what books where listed where, they created BRAND NEW listings for the books on systems where they were already listed.

Let’s take a look at Knowing Yourself, my medieval romance which has been live since 2013. Left is when I began distributing it through Draft2Digital. Right is this new migration in from SmashWords.

Draft2Digital began fresh listing the exact same book Knowing Yourself on the exact same platforms as it was already on. There’s no way I would have had my SmashWords entry for Knowing Yourself to include Barnes & Noble, because that is always done by me through Draft2Digital. You can see on the chart that I’ve had Knowing Yourself on Barnes & Noble through Draft2Digital since 2017. There’s no reason for this new migration of the SmashWords version of it to try to put it onto Barnes & Noble again in 2024.

Right now, things are a mess. I have about 60 books which all just double-listed on a slew of platforms. I can’t just ‘delete’ entries because I can’t be sure which one they’re going to delete. I could have a book which was live since 2017 with hundreds of reviews and comments, and all of that could vanish.

It is frustrating that in 2024 we are still having these kinds of simple data issues. I was a database designer by trade for many years, so this is something I did for a living.

I will post updates as I work my way through this issue.

This is very sad news for the publishing industry. As of March 29, 2024, Small Press Distribution has closed its doors. It has shut down operations. All 300,000 of the books in its system needed to be relocated.

In our modern print-on-demand world it might be hard for younglings to even understand what Small Press Distribution existed for. Started in 1969, Small Press Distribution worked with HUNDREDS of small presses to help them get their books out into the hands of buyers.

Let’s say you were a boutique science fiction press who worked with 30 authors to publish their books. As the press / publisher, you took care of finding the authors, editing the books, creating covers, and making the book “ready”. You contracted with a printing house to then print out a run of 1,000 books for sale. But as a small press, you didn’t have warehouse space or shipping ability to actually deal with those physical books.

That’s where Small Press Distribution came in. Small Press Distribution had warehouses, shipping know-how, customs forms, and everything else. They carefully tended to your books until they were ordered, and got them out into the hands of buyers. Small Press Distribution was a critical part of this process for small presses.

Even as Small Press Distribution was running out of money, think about what they had to go through to protect the authors. A GoFundMe effort had to raise the $100,000 to pack, ship, and relocate those 300,000 books into an Ingram warehouse so the books were even available to authors going forward. Can you imagine contacting thousands of authors and asking them all to “come get your books”?

As things stand now, all those books are in the hands of Ingram. Authors can work with Ingram to either get those books back to their own homes or to sign up with Ingram to have Ingram ship them out. But overall, this world of stockpiling thousands of books as you wait for sales to come in seems to be dying out.

I want to caveat that I have a few author friends who are VOICIFEROUSLY against print on demand. These friends insist that they want to work with the very best printers, choose their color maps exactly, print out thousands of books, and then sell them one by one. I also want to note that these specific friends have a LOT OF MONEY and can afford to pay for these books up front. So while I understand their “high quality!” point of view, I also think this isn’t a solution that the vast majority of us can afford. Most of us are just trying to pay for food and gas.

So with all of this being said, I am very sad that Small Press Distribution went away. At the same time, I think their paying for an expensive Berkeley California warehouse to store literally 300,000 books while waiting for someone to buy them just isn’t a best-operation model any more. Any model that requires authors (or publishers!) to pay up front for hundreds of books just doesn’t make much sense to me. Someone is paying to print, store, heat, cool, and maintain those books for months, maybe years, all in the hope of some future customer wanting them. And if you had typos in that copy? Too bad, you can’t change them.

I really think we need to go to a high quality print on demand system where we are NOT paying costs to warehouse and store books for months. Our climate is already in enough trouble. We should create an item when someone wants to acquire it, and ship it in the most efficient way possible.

Let me know your thoughts!

Small Press Distribution Statement:

Here is the text of the statement, in case the SPD website goes down:

It is with great sadness and a profound gratitude for the amazing literary community we have served that we must today announce that Small Press Distribution (SPD) is closing its doors effective immediately. We know this news is both sudden and devastating.

For more than five decades, SPD has distributed books for hundreds of independent literary publishers, allowing thousands of writers to bring diverse, experimental, and disruptive literature to audiences across the globe. SPD’s impact on the literary world over the past 55 years is hard to overstate. Against all odds, a tiny distribution service in the back of Berkeley’s Serendipity Books grew to help authors attain some of the literary world’s crowning achievements. SPD-distributed authors won multiple National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, MacArthur “Genius” Grants, PEN Awards, Lambda Literary Awards–nearly 100 awards since 2019 alone.

Unfortunately, these accolades were no match for the challenges of a rapidly changing book industry and funding environment. Several years of declining sales and the loss of grant support from almost every institution that annually supported SPD have combined to squeeze our budget beyond the breaking point. SPD lost hundreds of thousands in grants in the past few years as funders moved away from supporting the arts. The tireless efforts of a world-class staff to raise new funds, find new sales channels for our presses, and exit our expensive Berkeley warehouse couldn’t compensate for these losses. SPD exhausted every avenue in seeking emergency funding and loans to avoid the shutdown.

Publishers: We are honored that you have let us steward your works and authors for these past five decades. Our inventory of 300,000 books is in safe hands, having been transferred to our SPD Next partners Ingram Content Group and Publishers Storage and Shipping (PSSC) over the past several months. You will need to contact Ingram or PSSC to discuss distribution options and the return or disposition of your books. Please see our other, publisher-only email for the appropriate contact information.

The SPD staff has been reduced to a minimal team that is in the process of winding down operations. We regret they are not able to respond to individual queries.

We are so privileged to have worked in the center of the literary community for so many decades. SPD has connected small presses and their authors to readers around the world for more than half a century. SPD was founded in 1969 by Bay Area independent booksellers Peter Howard and Jack Shoemaker, starting with just eight small presses and reaching a peak of more than five hundred. Generations of devoted staffers gave it their all.

Everyone at SPD is heartbroken at this devastating outcome, which seriously jeopardizes the ability of underrepresented literary communities to reach the marketplace. We thank you for your years of support.

In March 2024, Amazon Kindle Vella’s episodic publishing program underwent a series of changes. This section here is about just one aspect of those changes. It involves how much a reader ‘pays’ to read one episode of a longer story.

When Kindle Vella first launched in early 2021, a reader would pay an amount, in ‘tokens’, for an episode based on how long that episode was.

Amazon, like many other systems, used ‘tokens’ to try to make the buying process less painful for readers. When a reader has a collection of ‘tokens’ somehow it seems less ‘real’ to buy content. The reader spends tokens more freely than they spend cash. A token was worth around a penny, depending on how many a reader bought at one time.

If an episode was 600 words, the reader would pay 6 tokens. If an episode was 1,500 words, the reader would pay 15 tokens.

You might think this process was fair, since a reader would pay more if they were reading more content.

However, in practice, this got REALLY confusing for readers.

Let’s say a reader was contemplating reading a 30-episode story. That is roughly equivalent to a 30-chapter book, which is fairly typical. However, the reader would have no idea up front how much this ‘book’ was going to cost them!

What if all the episodes ended up being 600 words each? That would be one price. But what if the episodes actually were all 1,500 words each? That could be over double the price!

In our world, we expect to know BEFORE we start consuming something how much it’s going to cost. We don’t go to a restaurant, get handed a menu with no prices, and then only get told at the end of the meal how much we have to pay.

So I think this change is quite fair. A reader should know right at the start how much this reading project is going to cost them. The reader should be able to judge, from their own budget, if they can afford the process.

The issue here arises because the Kindle Vella system was begun in 2021. There are many authors who have put books into Vella with a certain plan in mind. I personally always recommend short chapters, to keep a reader ‘moving forward’. It gives the reader a sense of accomplishment. So if I write episodes which are about 600 words each, I used to get 6 tokens per episode. I’ll now get 10 tokens per episode. I’ve gained a small amount of extra money.

But for authors who decided to create super-massive episodes, at 2,000 words or more, those authors will now only get 10 tokens for each of those episodes. I can see why they might feel a bit discouraged by this change. Sure, the author can take down the existing book and put up the book fresh with better balanced episodes. But that process would mean the new book had a fresh blank slate with zero starting reviews / zero starting thumbs up.

So for the authors with long chapters, I commiserate with your frustration. Change is always rough for some people. It’s the throw of the dice.

For the rest of us, I think this token-equalizing change is really useful and important for readers.

Going forward, authors should optimize their chapters to work with this 10-tokens-an-episode system. Readers should hopefully read more works, now that the readers have a clear idea of how much it will cost them.

Ask with any questions!

Below is my essay about one of the other changes Kindle Vella made in March 2024 – involving how many episodes a reader can read for free in a given story.

Kindle Vella Publishing Changes – Ten Episodes Free

My book on Amazon Kindle Vella

If there is one constant in our world, it is that everything is always changing. It does no good to complain about Change. Change is simply a fact of life. Every system we use is going to be tweaked and altered as it struggles to survive in the larger ecosystem. This includes Amazon’s Kindle Vella publishing program.

Back in 2021, I was an extremely early adopter (beta-tester) of Amazon’s Kindle Vella episodic system. Amazon was attempting to go up against Wattpad, Radish, and other episode-by-episode publishing systems. There is clearly a HUGE market for these types of serial story systems. Amazon wanted to take advantage of the existing audience.

For several years, Amazon paid ‘free money’ to all authors who helped them build the Vella system up. I am always a fan of free money.

Now, as of March 2024, Amazon is rebalancing itself to try to better equalize the money it is taking in with the cash it is paying out to authors. Here is one important change being made.

Ten Free Episodes per Storyline

In the original days of Kindle Vella, a reader would get to read three episodes free in a given story before being charged for subsequent episodes. This is about the same as a person getting to ‘look inside’ a Kindle book before buying it. It is equivalent to a person going into a physical bookstore and reading the first few pages of a book before buying it. This is completely fair. A user should be able to see if the content is typo-free, well written, and interesting to them before making the purchase.

Unfortunately, some authors would put the minimum amount allowed in those first three episodes, so that readers barely got any sense of the storyline at all. Sometimes authors would front-load ‘filler material’ (dedications, etc.) so the reader barely got any actual content at all.

For those reasons, Amazon is now providing readers with the first TEN episodes of a story before the reader has to start paying.

This is great for the reader. Hopefully even more readers will give Kindle Vella stories a try, knowing they can enjoy a full ten episodes of a story to get a sense of what it’s about. That should lure the reader in enough that they want to pay money for the remaining episodes.

For authors? An author needs to hook that reader solidly so the reader wants to know what happens next. By the time a reader has gone ten episodes into a story, if the story is well written, the reader is going to be hooked. They will keep reading.

The challenge is that this change is happening several years into the Kindle Vella process. There are many authors who ONLY put ten episodes out in a given story. They figured the reader would get three for free, pay for the remaining seven, and this was a good balance. Now, however, if all ten episodes are free, there isn’t any ‘more’ for the reader to read and to pay the author for. So any authors who worked with the ten-episode-and-done plan are now going to have to figure out a new solution.

It is worth mentioning that Amazon used to give new Vella users 200 free ‘tokens’ to spend on books. So in that sense, readers were already probably getting the first ten episodes free to read. This new system just makes the reading opportunity more clear for readers. By having the first ten episodes visibly free, the process hopefully encourages the reader to read further and further into a book, hooking them.

It is always critical for an author – no matter what format they’re using – to draw a reader in and to keep them reading along. It is one of those key factors in telling a story. If a reader normally reads a given genre, and isn’t intrigued by the characters and plot by the time they read the first few chapters, then something in the book needs to be fixed.

So I definitely agree with Amazon that if a reader gets 10 episodes into a story and then feels it’s not worth reading any further, it’s most likely something in the story itself that needs to be fixed. By that point anybody who feels ‘I just don’t like horror’ or something similar has already long since left. The people who keep reading should be the ones who actually like this type of story and would normally read it to the end.

Ask with any questions!

Here is my book on using Kindle Vella –

Kindle Vella Book by Lisa Shea

Woo hoo!! I got the top billing spot on Amazon for my new Kindle version of The Front Page! It’s a play in three acts written back in 1928.

This was a CHALLENGE to format. I’m glad this project is done!

It’s very interesting reading, given the time period and topic. It all takes place in a Chicago press room on the night of a hanging. The reporters are very jaded and fast-talking, each eager to get the first news of the story out to their papers. And, then, of course, trouble happens …

What are you all up to?

The Front Page on Amazon