I spent a few days frenziedly working on covers: tweaking, completely re-doing or creating brand new.

End result included six covers for my Shadow Connor series, which I’m revamping this year. If you’re interested in following along as I rewrite the first three titles, you can hop over to ShadowConnor.com, register for free and do so. All three originally published stories are posted; there are some bits that may or may not be included in the books, plus the re-written prologue for Feral Intensity is posted.

From one comment made when I posted links to the covers on Twitter, it appears that I’ve managed to trip into ‘branding’ this series. Yay!

Without further ado, here are the covers:

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 Took forever, but it’s finally been released to the wild! Find it at Smashwords.

I’d intended to spend this past Sunday working on covers for the six upcoming titles needing them. Instead, I was viciously attacked by a sinus headache that took me down as though I were made of tissue paper.

Yep, wadded me up and tossed me in a corner.

What a way to start my week.

Winter arrived here in West Texas, with a bit of snow, freezing temps and today, wind. Yay. Not.

In spite of it, we’ll be loading up here in a few hours to trek to the city and purchase doors, primer, paint and counter top that will be my desk top for my office. Carpeting may or may not follow next week.

What I’m skirting around is the fact that I’ve gotten jack all done towards finishing Arcane Solutions up. My Story Tamer’s been busy with visiting relatives, so the final edits for The Silent One are on temporary hold.

The very last thing I needed was a Kithran slinking up to purr about a blonde and her very interesting planet. Damn Kithrans.

I did try to shove him into a closet, but he’s bigger than I am. There are battles I can’t win, and this was one of them. Roughly 4k later, he’s agreed that I may have a break.

[glances over shoulder] I’m not sure my idea of ‘a break’ and his match up.

Also, something I’ve kept meaning to mention is that Smashwords announced it has brokered a distribution deal with Amazon.

Opting in means an author/publisher receives 42.5% of the retail instead of 35% distributing directly through Amazon. Smashwords standard take is 15%. If that’s what their percentage is on this deal, then Amazon is receiving 42.5%.

Which means a 50/50 split of sorts now.

Better. Of course, we’re having to wait to see how Amazon is going to handle our titles already directly distributed through them that have been opted in through Smashwords. Be silly to issue another ASIN for them, but I know we want that 42.5% over that 35%.

So we’ll see how that all shakes out.

And I’ve run out of things to say. Laters.

New to self-publishing? Here’s something to look forward to!

This is part of the process I go through when I have a title that’s got a hefty enough word count to justify offering it as a print version in addition to the ebook.

For my ebooks, I have a set pricing schedule based on word count, and I only count the words that actually tell the story itself, not chapter headings, copyright info, etc. stuff.

Arcane Solutions is my example here, since I know the final word count after finishing it and the editing process will fall within the 50-70k range. Knowing that, I know the ebook price will be $5.75.

The print version is a bit more difficult to determine a cover/retail price for until I have the final word count and actually format it. I’ll have to guesstimate the final number of pages because of that, so I’m going to work with a low to highest page number.

It’ll will be a 6 x 9 inch book, and my low estimate is 202 pages with an even 50k word count. My high is 282 pages with an even 70k word count. This does include the needed extra pages like title page, copyright info, author’s bio.

So my base production cost will be between $3.27 to $4.23, going through CreateSpace. I do pay the one off $39 fee to upgrade from Standard to Pro plan, and there is an annual $5 fee to keep each title at the Pro plan. There are two reasons I choose to pay that: 1) I can make a better profit and set a more reasonable retail/cover price for it and 2) I figure CreateSpace deserves something for the free ISBN number and storage of my files.

I will have to pay cost plus S&H for a proof before it’ll be available for sale. If I screw up the formatting, then I’ll have to order another proof. Wait, no I won’t. I get the first proof free because Arcane Solutions was my NaNoWriMo novel this year! Yay!

Moving on.

Not counting my efforts & time spent writing it, plus formatting it and designing the cover, I start off $39 in the red. Not bad.

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I admit I grin every time I see a comment made to that effect.

I’m an e-book author – I know how much and what goes into publishing my e-books.

You need tools to create them, such as:

• A computer
• Word editing software for writing and formatting them.

You have monthly expenses associated with them:

• Electricity to run that computer
• ISP fees

Those are just the very basic expenses every e-book author has up front, before even a word is written.

Some require an image editing program to design their covers and another program to convert the finished e-book to their desired format.

Other authors might pay someone else for cover design, formatting and file conversion.

Professional editing *should* be an expense as well.

Then, there’s domain name registration,  monthly hosting fees and site design.

Yes, many of those last items can be attained for free and some e-book authors do choose that route. But others don’t, and even those that start out on the ‘free’ path may later decide that free Yahoo site isn’t cutting it, etc.

So an e-book author can – and does – begin his/her writing career already in the red by a few hundred to thousands of dollars before that first title is ever available for sale.

Despite that, authors should NOT factor all of that in when creating their pricing structure, anymore than they should factor in the time and effort spent writing and marketing.

You can’t put prices on those last items. Trust me on that.

Price reasonably after doing some research, and aim for a small profit per sale, then go forth and promote as though your ass is on fire!

You can do that for free on sites like Twitter, FaceBook and other social media sites.

See? Not only do we authors earn pennies a day, but we’ll be sitting in the red for a good long time until/unless we build a readership that’s eager to purchase every title we publish.

We writers really are an insane bunch!

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