See the thread "Sugar & Spice hits Amazon Kindle" in YWO and Literary Agent News! Waking the Dragon

I thought my ears were burning, and I heard my name being whispered in-between the bamboo shoots. Some links to check out, Lynne:

http://tim-ellis.yolasite.com/

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Tim%2BEllis

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Tim%2BEllis&x=13&y=8

Tim

Thanks very much, all. I so appreciate your comments and helpful suggestions. It looks a bit daunting at first glance to get the book 'ready', but I'm hoping that the format we had to prepare in word for YWO publication will be a suitable starting point? I hope so anyway! I'm not sure how I then get it into HTML, but I'm hoping it will become clear (as if by magic!). Thanks again, and for your good wishes.

We launched our crime-thriller Sugar & Spice on Amazon Kindle in November 2010. By December we were earning from it.

At the time of writing this review it is at number eleven in the Amazon UK Kindle thriller chart, has been as high as number seven, is receiving excellent reviews and now building its own momentum.

With almost a million titles out there, and growing daily, it’s very easy for your book to just disappear into the ocean of e-books available, especially if you’re an unknown author with no past reputation and no existing readership. After all, you’re up against the top international best-sellers, past and present, just like in a real-life bookshop.

Getting your book proof-read I essential. Believe me, every last typo and misplaced comma will come back to haunt you if you don’t. Then there’s the formatting. And a cover. And...
Not to mention all the other e-platforms, like Smashwords, Nook, etc, etc...

Then you have to get people to buy it. Which first of all means letting them know it exists, and secondly that it’s worth reading.

We used web-sites, blogs, Facebook, twitter, word of mouth, local newspapers, pigeon-post, jungle drums and smoke signals to make sure its existence was known to as many people as possible. I even volunteered to walk the streets naked with the title tattooed on my backside, but my co-author vetoed that one.

Of course, none of that can guarantee even a single sale, but at least it gets the attention of prospective readers and hopefully some will be tempted to part with their hard-earned cash.

After the first few sales, if the work is good enough, those readers in turn tweet, Facebook, email and otherwise network it themselves. Add to that favourable reviews and you really can’t go wrong!

To get an idea of our marketing and networking approach, check out and subscribe to the following links:

www.markwilliamsinternational.com

http://saffinadesforges.wordpress.com

http://sapphicscribe.wordpress.com

http://facebook.com/saffina.desforges

http://twitter.com/Safficscribe

http://www.saffinadesforges.com

Then comes the all important question: Does publishing on Amazon finish your chances of getting a traditional publisher?

ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Yes, the e-book lists will inevitably include many dire works of dubious literary merit put on Amazon by authors who have been rejected time and again by agents and publishers alike.

But plenty of authors have gone on to dead-tree contracts following the success of their on-line version.

The key word here being success. If you put a book on Amazon and it bombs then you really have no right to expect an agent or publisher to see any value in it.

But if it succeeds...

At the end of the day agents and publishers are there for one thing: to make money!

They are running businesses, not charities for wannabe writers. When an agent or publisher turns down your precious manuscript there is one over-riding reason for it: it is not commercially viable.

Of course, they might be wrong. Just ask the many agents and publishers who took one look at the first Harry Potter book and told JK not to give up the day job! Ask the agents and publishers who rejected John Grisham fifteen times, or Stephen King fifty!

Of course, rejected scripts that went on to make millions are the stuff of legend, and what drives us all on.

But if we’re honest, most scripts are rejected because they are not good enough. End of...

If you are brave enough to let the Amazon market-place make that decision for you then good luck. You may sell to your nearest and dearest, but you’ll only climb those charts if your work is good enough to sustain interest and attract new buyers in significant numbers.

If your book is making serious money on Amazon you can be sure it will be of interest to an agent / publisher at some stage.

And you can be sure agents and scouts are monitoring the top-selling titles in the hope of finding and signing up the next JK before someone else does.

And yes, you retain full copyright!
Don't get left behind by the e-publishing revolution.

There's never been a more exciting time to be a writer!

http://www.markwilliamsinternational.com

Go for it!

I kindled one of my books yesterday ("Gnome or Mr Nice Guy") and was amazed how easy it was, especially compared with Amazon's "Look Inside" facility, which I found was a nightmare to set up.
I did spend ages downloading software to covert "Gnome" to HTML, only to have Kindle reject it ... then I noticed that you can upload as a Word document. After that, it took about two minutes, cover image included!
If you're using a Word document that you have already published in book form, you need to go through it first to remove page numbering, gutters, blank pages, etc, and to make sure that your indents are ok: I had to remove indents from chapter headings, for example. Also Kindle tends to swallow up blankl lines, so if you have line spaces between sections within a chapter, stick in a centred * or tilde, as Ann suggests, otherwise the paragraphs may close up.

Good luck!

Scias te fortasse Romanum esse si animal convivialissimum arbitreris esse caprum (Henricus Barbatus)


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