“This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.”

Makes me wonder, Dean …

I already had the first edition and do not regret having both on my iPad now. Really shows how things are evolving.

I also found Catherine Caffeinated and opted for an EIN instead of an ITIN. Took less than two minutes on the phone to get one.

I have not wrestled through POD yet, though. Preparing 25 books for publication in the next couple of weeks. Will put them up one after the other and hope to have mastered the POD game at the end of it.

Thanks for all your help, Dean. This is a great blog.

What good news, as readers beyond that mythical “corner bookstore” we’re all supposed to be worried about (I certainly don’t have one here in Switzerland!) are making the most of their e-readers. It confirms what Kris wrote recently about the unlimited versus scarcity model for sales.

Reading through the Library Thing reviewer list, I see locations that surely were never served by B&N, Waterstones, or any English-language bookstore, like Finland, Germany, the Philippines, Italy and South Africa. Meanwhile notably, an astonishingly disproportionate number of US e-readers responded from Florida, the Carolinas, California, Kentucky and Texas.
Fascinating and well beyond our promotional reach in the traditional order of things.

Thanks again.

I’m very pleased with this purchase. It’s also timely, as I have new novel/series ideas forming, and I want to have the business side ready when those come together.

Thanks, Dean!

And yes, I do mention the time spent on learning curves, especially in some later chapters. And yes, that’s why I called some of the things in this first part “chores” because they are just a pain to get through.

But worth it at the end, as you are saying. Thanks again for the great viewpoint from Europe. Things are really ramping up there and will be changing a ton as new markets come on line. This is all great fun.

Contrary to legacy practice, we decided that the E&E logo would appear on the front cover of the e-books and shift to the back only for the paperbacks. It makes for a nice “signature” look when they’re all lined up in my email signature or on the Amazon author page. This is one design point when I think Indies are capable of being ahead of trad publishers in their web marketing style. (Did we remember to build ourselves an email signature using bitty jpegs?)

Designing a logo was the “emotional” start of all the business chores to come, as you listed them above. As I read through your list, I realize where the year has gone, but now it’s done. Logo, Facebook product page, Paypal, learning formatting with Styles, Smashword Style Guide/paperback PDFs, designing covers, tax status, not to mention re-editing OCRs of the previously published books to which I held e-rights.
Now six novels are up under two author names, on all the platforms we could access except OmniLit (still to come but with tax status confirmed.)

Note: Tax status for us overseas had to be dealt with to avoid 30% withholding, so we were saved by Caffeinated Catherine’s great post on the quickie way to get an EIN instead of faffing around with a ITIN. We asked Amazon/Smashwords to hold all payments until E&E could get that assured and registered. Oops! Amazon issued an unwanted check minus 30% anyway, but after a flurry of emails, they refunded back taxes from 2011 via EFT.

There’s setting up and then more setting up: We’ve had a bitch of a time getting CreateSpace (who are at least accessible by phone 24/7) to stop realizing they are the cart, not the horse. Problems arise when you fill out their book description form, e.g. having created titles for the KDP e-books first, CS automation came up with the most unforeseeable variations that prevented us from linking e- to p- versions without a flurry of corrective emails to KDP and CSpace both. e.g. In the mystery series, CS introduced a colon into the title, The Wardens of Punyu: The Handover Mysteries, instead of The Wardens of Punyu (The Handover Mysteries) the existing title across all the reading platforms like KDP, Goodreads, Library Thing, Shelfari, etc.
When we asked CS to correct? They came up with The Wardens of Punyu:(The Handover Mysteries.) Nope, try again. More emails…
Thinking there wouldn’t be a problem with the latest stand-alone novel, we were wrong. The KDP Love and the Art of War became (and they are creative at CreateSpace!) Love and the Art of War (Volume 1.)
Uh, CS fellas, there is no Volume 2. More emails.
We thought it was all solved but yesterday saw that with so many cooks in the kitchen, Love and the Art of War had vanished from the Author Central page and…yes, more emails and it’s back.

Some days, it feels like mole-whacking. My only consolation is that my trad publisher, an old-fashioned small literary house in London would never, never, NEVER have taken the time or understood the computer skills required to nurse my books through the system.

My point is that setting up is one thing, but there are hiccoughs where you least expect them, again and again, before you can rest on your haunches and start to think of writing again!

I hope in your revision of a great blog-book, you stress the time consumption of follow-up and mindless archiving tasks on the readers’ platforms, not to mention harassing the delightful people who hold these mind-breaking jobs at Amazon and Smashwords when you need fine-tuning. (Diesel posted a gobbledy-gook book description when they uploaded A Visit From Voltaire. Smashwords had to contact them after I stumbled on it.)

I always remember to thank the online people for their hard work and I think courtesy pays off. You’d be surprised, at least in our European time zone, how often the same names in India and South Africa, as well as the US, start to crop up in the correspondence (thanks Suresh Rao! thanks Raylene!) and as my father always said, “You always meet a man a second time.” This is fast becoming a global business network as well as a global marketplace.

Love your blog.