KDP and PubIt and Smashwords, Oh My! by Lorca Damon

In case you haven't notice, I love Lorca Damon. Not only is she a wonderful writer, but she is also full of valuable information, which I manage to squeeze out of her quite regularly. Here's another great bit of advice/info for writers from the ever wonderful Lorca Damon:

I am a proud self-published author. I have three titles that have been listed across a variety of platforms, sometimes with mixed results. While I cannot honestly say that one ebook distribution platform is better than another, they certainly are different.

For example, Amazon is the big dog. Unless you have a moral compass that points you away from the largest ebook distributor on the planet (and some people actually have a vehement refusal to have anything to do with Amazon as a protest of its oversized corporate status), your book needs to be listed on Amazon because it’s currently where the most sales are happening.

As for the retailer’s often-criticized KDP Select platform, that’s again going to have to be your call. KDP Select makes your book eligible for Kindle Lending. I was shocked at how well this actually worked. I remember thinking, “Seriously? People are going to pay an annual membership to BORROW books?” The answer is yes, they do. As the program currently stands, the author forfeits the right to list his ebook anywhere else INCLUDING posting it for free on his own blog. The trade-off is that every time the book is borrowed, the royalty rate is sometimes six times that of a purchase (my 99cent ebook earns 35 cents each time it is bought, and it’s paid me well over $2 each time it’s borrowed). Some people take issue with the exclusivity of the KDP Select program, others see it as a means to get their book into as many hands as possible.

PubIt!, Barnes and Noble’s self-publishing ebook platform, is very simple to use and requires the slightly  more standard ePub file format. If you’re considering PubIt! or if you’re considering enrolling your book in KDP Select and keeping it out of all other platforms, think about the genre you write. NOOK devices are marketed primarily to middle-aged women. If you’re writing high fantasy or extreme sci fi with elaborate world building aimed at a mixed gender audience, missing out on the chance to list your book on PubIt! might not hurt you too much. But if you write romance, women’s fiction, chick lit, literary fiction, and the like, you may be one of the very successful self-published authors who finds more fans on Barnes and Noble’s platform than on Amazon’s.

Smashwords. The little distributor that could. People in the business like to criticize Smashwords for the insane amount of erotica and romance in the catalog, but the numbers show that romance and erotica digital authors are laughing all the way to the bank. Smashwords has a lot going for it. They will list your book in their Premium Catalog for free as long as it meets the standards of their Style Guide (and the Style Guide walks you through formatting your book, plus it’s free as a download on their website) and listing it in their catalog means they will distribute it to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Apple, and more. Once you upload the file in the correct format, they convert it MOBI, ePUB, RTF, PDF, etc. Plus, each time you attempt the upload, if it still doesn’t meet the standards, their AutoVetter program emails you with a list of what is still wrong with it. After you successfully post the manuscript, a human being is still going to quick-read through it to make sure it looks right on a screen, that it isn’t pirated, etc. More importantly, Smashwords is a tireless supporter of self-publishing and has this week announced there are more than 5 BILLION words uploaded to their catalog. They’re just great people, so unless you have a compelling reason (like KDP Select) to not list your book there, you are only hurting yourself. 

All of the platforms out there have something to bring to the table. One of my books is enrolled in KDP Select because it is a highly-specific niche genre, not intended for general public consumption; plus, I wanted it listed in the lending catalog. Another title was enrolled in KDP Select and I took it out because there’s really no great reason to keep that one exclusive. It was an experiment, but once the terms of agreement are up on that title (you are required to list your book exclusively for ninety days if you enroll it), I plan to list it on PubIt! and Smashwords. My third title, which happens to be my only novel, is on Amazon and Smashwords. The first day I posted it to Smashwords, there were 80 page views of its sales page.

Figure out which marketing strategy makes the most sense for your book. Notice I didn’t say for you as a writer, but for each and every book you write. Decide on your audience and which platform will help you reach them the most.

 Lorca Damon is a teacher in a juvenile correctional facility and staff writer for GoodEReader.com. Her first non-fiction title, Autism By Hand, is an Amazon bestseller and her first fiction title, The Earth is for Dancing, was recently published as well. She is also one of the funniest people I know.  You should stalk her at

Her website:  lorcadamon.com

Twitter: @LorcaDamon

Good E-Reader goodereader.com

Who Died and Made You an Expert? By Lorca Damon

If you’re ever unsure of the intelligence of the average human, go check out the comments section of any article on Yahoo or video posted to YouTube. It’s like the internet has given people the necessary anonymity to say whatever dumb thing pops into their little minds. Sadly, the same thing is true for book reviews.

Everyone who’s ever read a book is now an expert on writing, thanks to the ability to post reviews on the online sales pages of books. Whether you actually read the book cover-to-cover or if you just walked by the display in your local bookstore, you’re now able to write your comments for all the internet to see.

In the interest of full disclosure, here is the most aggravating review of my own book on autism:

“This book was okay if your child is younger. My son was diagnosed at age six and I had already put into place most of the practices discussed and was past other stages. If your child is older than 2, I recommend books by Ellen Notbohm and Paula Kluth instead.”

Let’s dissect this: first of all, her child is older than my child. HOW WAS THAT MY FAULT? You gave this book a 3-star review, thus dropping its status, because you squeezed your kid out before I did? Then you proceeded to completely shanghai my Amazon page with a COMMERCIAL FOR A DIFFERENT BOOK. That’s like me going to the Amazon page for THE HOLY BIBLE and writing, “Y’all should totally read The Torah, it’s way better.”

Now, I realize this sounds like me just venting some anger at a pointless review. Let me be the first to assure you that it’s not the case. I have two UGLY one-star reviews from people who absolutely hated my book and I respect them for having strong feelings about a topic and trying to share those feelings with others. I don’t like what they had to say, obviously, but I respect their opinions. This crappy review above, however, was just unnecessary.

As readers, we should make our points clearly and succinctly. I agree that having forked over some of my hard-earned cash to purchase a book does give me some right to voice an opinion on it. But as writers, we should stick to an honest evaluation of the writing in a book we review. I can read a book on a topic I don’t really care about but still be able to intelligently appraise the book’s value. I am literate enough to understand whether or not other readers will be able to appreciate the book or if they will have to put on their hip waders to muck their ways through its poor editing and outright rape of the English language.

Reviewing a book is an awesome responsibility. As a reviewer, I may unwittingly encourage one to spend their money or worse, stop someone from reading a life-changing book. It’s not a job I take lightly, and I would hope that other writers feel the same way.

 Lorca Damon is a teacher in a juvenile correctional facility and staff writer for GoodEReader.com. Her first non-fiction title, Autism By Hand, is an Amazon bestseller and her first fiction title, The Earth is for Dancing, was recently published as well. She is also one of the funniest people I know.  You should stalk her at

Her website:  lorcadamon.com

Twitter: @LorcaDamon

Good E-Reader goodereader.com

You Really Gotta Know the Agent by Lorca Damon

Considering that I have recently been querying my dark humor novel And They Call Me Crazy, the following emeralds of wisdom from Lorca Damon are not only funny, but very timely.  Thank you for this one, Lorca!

Lorca Damon

I am an unloved writer. I’m one of the hordes of would-be novelists who is still trying to break through the Great Wall of Publishing, one brick at a time. The first brick: finding an agent.

I have to admit that I queried about one hundred agents with my first novel. I got only a handful of requests for the full, and then nothing. I put that book in a drawer, so to speak, when my life got busy with some super cool projects and changes. I actually pulled it out of said proverbial drawer last week and oh my god the writing is a bunch of shit. I sounded like I was trying to use every 25-point word I knew. And this was supposedly young adult. I wanted to beat me up for being such a nerd, and I wasn’t even a teenager.

Luckily, my writing got way better (See? I can talk like a teenager) and I wrote a book that an agent actually adored. Here’s how the timeline went:

Late April 2011: queried agent

Late August 2011: she requested the full

Late September 2011: the book won a contest that I forgot I had entered and the prize was a greenlight to submit to a major publisher; emailed the agent to let her know, we Skyped about it on video chat for an hour, we emailed a million more times; then nothing happened.

Late January 2012: heard from the publisher, they loved it but couldn’t publish it after their lawyers said the estate of J D Salinger will eat us all for breakfast; emailed the news to the agent, who said she finally decided the she loved it and wanted to represent it IF I made some revisions and we began another 50 back-and-forth email conversations.

Late February 2012: gently nudged the agent in an email to see if she liked those revisions; she said she did, but she still had some thinking to do.

Early May 2012 (more than a year after I queried her): gently nudged the agent in another gently nudging email; she responded with her concerns and said she would make a final decision by the end of the month.

Late June 2012: I still haven’t heard a peep

.

Now, this is where authors (especially successfully self-published authors) start to roll their eyes and talk about everything that is wrong with the industry. Yes, it moves at a snail’s pace. No, it may not be any more lucrative to traditionally publish than to self-publish. But I have to point the finger of blame once and for all:

This fell through because of me.

What? How is this possibly your fault, Lorca? You did everything you could! You entered contests! You kept in contact while still giving the agent her space? You made the revisions she asked for even though it was YOUR book! How could this possibly be your fault??? (I know what you’re thinking because I thought those same things for a while)

This is how it’s my fault: all my contact with the agent had been because of a referral, then through email and Skype. When I finally wandered over to her agency website one day to see if there was any news of her actually dying, I was horrified.

There were kittens all over it. Yes, pictures of kittens as the motif. She was a children’s book agent. She reps books (presumably) about kittens. I don’t write about kittens unless someone is having to eat feral cats to survive.

Despite learning that she wanted to branch out into YA fiction, I chose the wrong agent for the job. She had told me she was “having trouble getting behind my other projects,” which is industry lingo for “I may not be the right agent for your work.”

So? Suck it up and rep my book, right? Wrong.

I read an interview with an agent who had rejected the Harry Potter series when J K Rowling was just a lowly querying-stage author like the rest of us. The interviewer asked this agent if he was kicking himself now for not taking on the boy-wizard and the agent immediately and firmly said, “No.” His reason? He said those books never would have BECOME the Harry Potter series if he had taken the project, because that’s not what he represents. And that takes guts to admit.

People die in my books. Whole towns full of people. Dogs even die in my books, and not from old age or a rabies bite that he got while protecting the little kid. A teenager pulls out a gun and shoots the dog in my book. It was important to the story (I don’t just have a thing against dogs) but it was too disturbing for her. She wasn’t the right agent for my kind of books, and God bless her for even trying. She likes my writing, just not my subject matter. And that doesn’t make her unprofessional or a lousy agent. It makes her one of the best, in my opinion, because she’s willing to say, “I can’t take this book as far as it should go because it’s not what I do.”

  

Lorca Damon is a teacher in a juvenile correctional facility and staff writer for GoodEReader.com. Her first non-fiction title, Autism By Hand, is an Amazon bestseller and her first fiction title, The Earth is for Dancing, was recently published as well. She is also one of the funniest people I know.  You should stalk her at

Her website:  lorcadamon.com

Twitter: @LorcaDamon

Good E-Reader goodereader.com