Indie Publishing

Adventures continue as this indie world moves right underfoot.  I submitted The Goblin Queen as an epub twice to the Lulu experts for distribution in the iBookstore.  Twice I had the epub passing every check-program on the web.  Yet twice they said it was rejected for errors, adding that Apple's standards are stricter.  How am I supposed to fix errors that I cannot find? So I almost gave up on the whole process.  But then Lulu changed everything.  Their entire distribution process switched up so I can choose an ISBN option first thing.  DOC files work just fine (just like Kindle).  No more epub madness, hurrah.  I did find a few formatting tweaks so I fixed those and uploaded The Goblin Queen again.  Supposedly, it will be automatically submitted to the iBookstore so I'll keep an eye out for that.  Might be tricky since I don't have an ipad, but I'll figure it out :)

I also learned that Kindle and Lulu have different royalty payments.  For my 2.99 list price, I make about $2 with Amazon and about 1.60 with Lulu.  My big draw for Lulu is the iBookstore, so if that doesn't work, I may abandon them in favor of Kindle exclusives.  Although Nook is getting into the game, too, with a pubit publishing platform soon to be released. I hope!

Fun stuff.

And even better news, I posted the zombie story.  This one has a different advantage for Lulu.  Lulu lets me post it for free.  So if you want a free short story download, go here.  You can download it to copy over onto your ereading devices or read on your computer.  And hopefully free soon for the iBookstore (again, I'll let you know).

Amazon, on the other hand, requires a list price.  The cheapest that I could go was .99.  Which is fine for a short story.  It happened to me yesterday where I was stuck as a car repair shop (helping my Mom with her car and babysitting- long story).  Anyway, I had a couple of minutes so I downloaded D. Nathan Hilliard's spooky new ghost story onto my Andriod phone using the Kindle app.  Finished reading it at my daughter's gymnastics' class.  Reading can go anywhere and everywhere now.

So the zombie story for Kindle is being cataloged now (I'll add the link when it's live.)  I suppose the .99 is a convenience charge.  But I would like to be able to deliver free stories to Kindle readers, too.

Maybe that will change soon, too :)

I did all of this in the hour that my Mom took the 2 year old boy for a picnic.  School started last week so life is back in the classroom.  I sure love my creative time, though :)