«

»

Feb 08

E-Publishing Part 2

Now that I’ve e-published 20 screenplays, four plays, two novels and 3 short stories, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons.

 

  1.  Publishing on both Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Smashwords is still an excellent idea.
  2. I recommend you do Kindle Direct Publishing first – because they have an excellent built-in spell checker for their text editor and it will find things you didn’t know were a problem.  They will also find things that you want to ignore – in my case I use a lot of contractions in my dialogue and so while KDP will flag sittin’ and doin’, you can simply click the “ignore tab for each word they detect as a possible spelling error and be done.  But if there are others, you can click a tab at the top of the spell check window and have the list e-mailed to you.  Once you have this in your hands (in a matter of seconds it will arrive), you can do a search of your document and fix the errors and upload your whole document again.  The second time you upload the program knows to ignore all the words you told it to ignore last time.
  3. If you publish screenplays, Smashwords does not like you to put “First Draft” on your title page (even though that’s the professional way to do it).  So I put “First Draft” on my KDP version but not on my Smashwords edition.
  4. If you have sufficient copyright information, like “a copyright date and ‘All Rights Reserved’” the only other difference you will need to make is to add the line “Smashwords Edition” to your copyright page.”  Here’s what I do:

Page 1:                                         TITLE

An Original Screenplay

by

Jack R. Stanley

©  All Rights Reserved (forced page break)

 

Page 2:                                         TITLE

Text copyright © 2013 by Jack R. Stanley

All rights reserved

This screenplay (or play, book or short story) may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in his/her review.

This is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to any persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Credits:

Cover illustration background

(Here I credit my image source for my cover page)

jackstanley43@gmail.com

thefictionwritersnotebook.com

 

For the Smashwords edition I add this line after the “All Rights Reserved” line:

 

Smashwords Edition

  1.  Once you’ve uploaded your text and cover to Smashwords and presses the publish button, go back to your Smashwords Dashboard and go to ISBN Manager.  Here you will find a list of your Smashwords publications – only one if it’s your first – and you and get a “free” ISBN number for your Smashwords Edition  — which is required by Apple E-books and some others.  But DO NOT use this  number on your Kindle Edition.  The two are independent publications.
  2. I’d suggest you not pick the Kindle Select program because this ties up your publication for 90 days minimum by making your work ONLY available on Kindle and Amazon.  If you publish on Smashwords while under the Kindle Select program bad things happen to you.  Don’t do it.
  3. Also be aware that KDP Select has a hidden box which unless you find it and uncheck it, will “automatically renew” your work in the KDP Select program for an additional 90 days at a time until you uncheck it.  (OK, I understand Amazon is the largest e-book publisher in the world, but they don’t publish Apple E-book, or Nook e-books, and any of the others.  And what you don’t know is that the one person who will most love your work could be a Mac person and not have an Kindle, Kindle Fire, or any android tablet or even the Kindle app for their devices.  This cuts you off from a lot of potential readers.)
  4. Add a link to all your books (I use a link to my Smashwords list because they do Kindle as well as everything else) as a part of your signature block for your e-mail.  Don’t become an e-book seller on everything you write – it makes you into a spammer.  A simple URL to get to your books will be enough.  If someone is interested, they’ll find your work.  If not, they at least won’t block an e-mails from you in the future.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>