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| Girls Succeed! by J.Q. Rose To inspire girls |
Today I am sharing my story on distributing my ebook, Girls Succeed! Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women, to readers.
I decided to offer my non-fiction book for Middle Grade girls to a wider audience, so I took it out of the exclusive amazon program KDP Select. I kept the book available at amazon, but uploaded it to a new-to-me distributor, Draft to Digital, also known as D2D.
Now Girls Succeed! is available in many other online retailers including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Scribd, Indigo, and more. I also like having a Universal Link that allows a reader to click on it and see ALL the places where my ebook is available and not just as a Kindle format. Click here to see what I mean about the universal link.
When the e-book first came out in 2012, I placed it at amazon and Smashwords. I had a "hen" of a time getting SW to accept it because the formatting for the Table of Contents was incorrect. I spent hours and hours of time trying to get it right. I followed Mark Coker's guide book to the tee, I thought, and still had to do the ToC over and over. Finally it was accepted with no guidance from SW.
Later I took it out of SW and did the exclusive amazon plan because of the great opportunities for promotion. When I determined I may be missing many readers by having the amazon only association, I again uploaded my updated manuscript to SW. I received the bad news it wasn't accepted. When I checked the evaluation, there was a bunch of gibberish as to what was wrong. It was way over my head and I could only think about how much time and energy I had spent trying to fix it the first time.
I turned to D2D to see if I could get the ms accepted there. Then the dreaded message came back from D2D--"Apple has rejected Girls Succeed! Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women." I felt like throwing up my hands and saying "fuhgetaboutit." But along with the message D2D who formats your manuscript for free, added this
"Incomplete/Inaccurate iBooks-Generated Table of Contents
- Please provide a complete, accurate listing of all chapters or sections in the iBooks-generated table of contents.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Questions? They actually wanted me to ask questions? So I sent the listing of the chapters. Crystal from D2D answered me with this information about the ToC format.
Hello,
The reason it's rejected is that when you convert your book with our conversion tool, in order to create a proper ToC within the epub file (which is required by Apple) it has to read the one in your file. I see that you have your own linked Table of Contents (ToC) in the file. However, when you linked the file you did not link the entire list. Our conversion tool will look for the phrase or word Table of Contents or Contents. Once it sees this it will consider every link after to be part of the ToC. Once the conversion tool sees unlinked text it sees the list as being done and assumes that the rest is not related to the ToC in the file.
In order to fix this you simply need to link the entire line for each entry instead of only a partial line or remove the unlinked text altogether.
After a few more messages between Crystal and me, I sent her what I wanted the ToC to look like, not just Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, but to include the woman's name and her career in the title of the chapter about her. Crystal offered to format it for me. I asked what the charge would be and she said no charge. I would've hugged her if I could have!!
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| Big hugs for Crystal of Draft 2 Digital |
So I must say, D2D's customer service is top rated in my estimation. And I want to add, all these messages flying back and forth between Crystal and me were done in just a few days. Crystal promptly responded with the solution each time.
If you are an indie publisher, what distributor do you use? Are you exclusively in amazon to use their promotions? Aren't I full of questions? Now you know how Crystal must've felt. LOL.
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If you have the time or the curiosity, you're invited to pop on over to the Girls Succeed Blog. Click here to visit.
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| 99 Cent Book promotion |
With my new opportunities to offer the Girls Succeed book to a wider audience, I ran a 99 cent promotion Sept 28-October 9. Originally the ebook including a reader's guide sold for $3.99. I'll report on the success or non-success of that experience once I get all my info together.
BTW--the ebook is available now at $2.99 and you can take a look at it and even purchase it to inspire a girl in your life here. Or if you would consider leaving a review, I would be happy to send you the PDF copy of the book FREE!
Thank you for stopping by.
10 comments:
You are amazing. I look forward to hearing the results of this “experiment.” You’ve only done it with your GS book, right. Thanks for sharing.
What I love about his, JC is this allows you to get your stuff up on Apple. I'm not doing Apple anymore. I've changed formatters and she's less expensive than an earlier one, but that person uploaded to Apple for me. I may have to look into this. Thanks for info and good luck with book.
PS. I publish on Amazon, B & N, and KOBO. :)
I tried to share through the FB link and kept getting a message the link wasn't working. ??? I copied and pasted instead, but I wanted you to know.
Thanks for sharing the information, JQ. That's great that D2D give such excellent support. I hope Girls Succeed does really well on the wider platform. Congratulations on getting your re-release up and running. It looks great!
This is great info, and very timely for me. I just decided to put one of my books on D2D. And after reading your post, I will do it this very week. So helpful to share info between indie authors.
Hi Sandy, Hmmm I love "amazing.." Yes, I will also add my other non fiction books to D2D eventually.
Thank you, Marsha for sharing. I'll check the link. Glad you can use this info.
Thanks, Helena!
Kathy, glad this helped.
sd
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