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Our fortnightly newsletter will keep you up to date with what is going on with our books (Four Old Geezers and a Valkyrie, The Man from Outremer and Katie and the Deelans, with three further novels due out later this year/early next year), as well as ideas for writers. It's essential reading for self-published authors and writers.

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Creating audio editions for a self-published book is an endeavour that needs professionalism and commitment, according to a recent article in Publishers Weekly.

The article, written by writer and editor Ryan Joe, lists some of the companies that offer the service and what that comprises, pointing out that audio editions can be hard to sell.

The Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) is one place to find narrators, producers and distributors for audio books, and ACX connects with Amazon, Audible and iTunes.

Another option is Deyan Audio Services, which has more than 1,000 actors on its books. (This is a US company.) The company offers complete audio book production or editing and mastering services.

Dog Ear Publishing offers a service where the author reads his or her own work, providing the editing and mastering services in house, as well as ISBN and distribution services. Again, this is a US company.

To find a narrator, the article suggests picking out a five to seven-minute sample (1,000 words) which features dialogue between key characters.

For authors in the UK, the website indiesunlimited has useful advice about software for a DIY version of an audio book - GarageBand offered by iTunes is recommended by many authors, and Propaganda.

For those with a very small budget, indiesunlimited recommends Audacity software which can be downloaded for free.

The website offers instructions for how to record your own audio book.

Calling all writers! Friday is Friday Flash Fiction day and if you are in need of a little writing practice, head over to our sister site, fridayflashfiction.com and submit a story.

You can add a Friday Flash Fiction classic (a short story of 100 words or less), a longer story, a poem or a six-word story if time really isn't on your side. 

The Friday Flash Fiction website always welcomes new contributors. You can send a brief biography and photo too.

Friend of Comely Bank Publishing Jackie Copleton’s début novel, A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, will be published on 16 July 2015.

When a badly scarred man knocks on the door of Amaterasu Takahashi’s retirement home near Philadelphia and says that he is her grandson, she doesn't believe him.

She knows her grandson and her daughter died on the day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. She searched the ruined city for weeks. They vanished.

But the arrival of the stranger forces her to relive her memories of August 9, 1945, the hurt and humiliation that came before, and the pain and guilt that followed.

A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is about grief, regret and forgiveness as one woman searches for peace in the wreckage of her life. We can’t rewrite history but can we change our future?

Published by Hutchinson in the UK (and Penguin Books in North America, where is will be published on 1 December this year), the book has been described as “an exceptional tale of a family in crisis… at once intimate and sweeping, profoundly subtle and yet remarkably affecting” (Mary Rose Maccoll, author of Falling Snow).

Jackie Copleton graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in English and moved to Japan in the 1990s to teach in language schools. She has worked as a production journalist in local, regional and national newspapers in the UK and the UAE, and was the joint prize winner of the Curtis Brown prize in 2011, for the best fiction writer across Glasgow University’s creative writing programme.

We've been busy adding yet more material to our resources section of the website. If you are looking for resources for writers, you'll find useful help and advice on these pages. 

Rewriting, postage costs, writing standing up and other subjects are covered in depth.

If there is anything you would particularly like us to cover, please let us know. you can comment on this post, or email us. And if you find our resources interesting or helpful, please feel free to share it.

In addition, we have started up a new section - the Writers' Diaries where the CBP stable cover the high and low of the writing week. If you are a writer and you would like to join in, or to submit a guest post, please feel free to email us.

Amazon is to pay certain authors for every page downloaded – and not the books.

Starting next month, the company will pay authors based on the number of pages people choose to read from their books, and not the numbers of copies sold.

The new system is for authors enrolled in the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Programme and it adjusts how authors receive their royalties from books listed on the Amazon lending library or Kindle Unlimited.

Total pages turns per month will determine how much each author receives from the monthly pool of cash.

Amazon says the change is in response to author complaints – those who wrote longer books felt short-changed by the old system.

A traditionally published best-selling author has chosen to self-publish a cook book.

Jane Green, whose novels include Jemima J, Straight Talking, The Patchwork Marriage and Tempting Fate, chose self-publishing for her cookbook Good Taste. She used the creative projects funding platform Kickstarter to fund the book

Speaking to Galley Cat, Green said she has been incredibly lucky with her novels, but she hadn’t been sure if anyone would be interested in a cook book, which is why she decided to self-publish.

Green is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute. A recipe book, she says, was a long-held dream of hers.

Self-publishing, she said, had been a fascinating learning curve for her and she added that it had required the same amount of time and expense.

Asked about the “stigma” of self-publishing, Green said she thought the entire model of the publishing world had changed and doing what you’ve always done and expecting to get what you’ve always got no longer worked.

Readers expected more connection with authors these days through social media, she added. Green’s recipe book has been promoted on social media by the likes of Martha Stewart and Jodi Piccoult.

The University of Glasgow is now accepting submissions for New Writing Scotland 34, due to be published in summer 2016.

Authors retain all rights to their work(s), and are free to submit and/or publish the same work(s) elsewhere after they appear in New Writing Scotland. A maximum length of 3,500 words is suggested for prose, and entrants should submit no more than one prose work or no more than four poems. The competition doesn’t accept entries by email or fax. 

Successful entrants will be paid at a rate of £20 per published page.

Submissions should be typed on one side of the paper only and the sheets stapled at the top-left corner. Prose pieces should be double-spaced and carry an approximate word-count.

For submissions, you should provide a covering letter, clearly marked with your name and address. You should also put your name on the individual works.

To receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your manuscript, you should enclose a stamped addressed postcard. You should enclose another stamped addressed envelope with sufficient postage if you would like your submission returned.

The deadline for submissions is 30 September 2015, and they should be sent to the Department of Scottish Literature, 7 University Gardens, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QH.



 

Outskirts Press authors have revealed the marketing products and tactics they regard as the most worthwhile, a recent press release has revealed.

Outskirts Press offers many of these services, although others can be done independently. 

Many of the services are available through Outskirts, though others can be done independently.

Amazon branded feature book of the week. Authors can get their book and cover information and an easy way to order directly from Amazon straight into the inboxes of literary enthusiasts.

Amazon Extreme Package. Authors save 25 percent on three marketing services focused on amazon.com

Amazon Kindle Submission Service. This creates availability on Amazon's Kindle ebook reading device. More formats on Amazon means more exposure on Amazon, and the Kindle is heavily promoted by Amazon.

Amazon Search Inside the Book. According to Amazon, books participating in this programme enjoy "significant" sales improvement, on average, over books that do not.

Barnes & Noble NOOK Submission Service. Millions of books are available on Barnes & Noble's NOOK.

Book Review Submission Service. Securing positive book reviews is the first step toward building word-of-mouth buzz for any book. Reviewers receive a complimentary copy of the book, as well as a professional cover letter, a copy of the author's press, and the sales sheet.

Custom Press Release. Have a professional press release writer compose an original, unique press release, submitted for review/approval, and then distributed to the news wire service. 

Google Books Preview Programme Submission. A way for authors to get their book in front of millions of readers quickly and easily.

Marketing Assistance. As an author, help developing a book marketing plan can be very beneficial. Professional marketing experts can help arrange book signings and events, establish and develop an author platform, and advice on marketing strategies.

Virtual Book Tour. Authors can gain an edge in visibility for their book. A Virtual Book Tour ensures that the author and their book are still making "appearances" on the blogosphere and social networking sites.

 

Outskirts Press offers self-publishing and book marketing services.

Last week saw the death, at 96, of the German typographer Hermann Zapf. There’s a good chance that the name isn’t recognisable, although there will be some who will feel they know the name ‘Zapf’ from somewhere. If you haven’t got it already, the answer is Zapf Dingbats, the font on your PC that contains all those symbols that you’ll never use.

Hermann Zapf designed Zapf Dingbats, but he designed so much more as well – in fact he could really be described as the world's first font superstar, so much has his work shaped the appearance of our writing. In an era when the average person actually hand-writes fewer than 50 words per week, the calligraphy in our computers assumes enormous significance, dictating the appearance of books and newspapers, letters, signs, tickets, even examination papers – and of course the appearance of the computer screen itself. All Scottish school examination papers are printed in Palatino, one of Zapf’s most famous creations.

His personal story is as interesting as the work on typefaces. Born and raised in inter-war Germany, Zapf’s career ambition to be an engineer was thwarted because his father’s trade union activities were disapproved of by the Nazis; indeed Zapf senior was one of the first to be sent to a concentration camp (Dachau) after it opened in 1933. His own ambitions to become a high-quality printer were also dashed, but eventually one firm took him on as a calligrapher. A combination of ill-health and this skill as a calligrapher – the Germans needed specialists who could write in the Germanic script the Nazis wanted to encourage – helped Zapf stay out of the front line during the war.

Arguably Zapf’s greatest work came with the arrival of computers, especially once he worked out how to use computers to re-space letters according to the ones that preceded and followed them. This in turn allowed the creation – only as recently as 1998, at the age of almost 80 – of his masterpiece font, Zapfino, which was the first font to allow a computer to write in credible-looking joined-up writing.

Next time you want to send someone one of those online personalised cards, think of the skills involved in spacing the letters correctly as they type. And at the same time give three loud cheers for Hermann Zapf.

Today's Daily Express has an interview with a self-published author offering useful advice on self-publishing and how to succeed. 

Rachel Abbot is a best-selling Amazon author who has self-published four books.

The e-book share of the UK book market has decreased slightly in 2015, according to a report by Lisa Campbell in The Bookseller.

Findings from Nielsen Book Research show that e-book share was up from one in five to one in three in the period 2012-2014, but down to 29 percent in the first quarter of 2015.

The whole UK book market (including print and digital) increased by 4 percent to 311 million in volume and £2,176m in value last year, thanks to children's and young adults titles, which were up 9 percent in sales, according to Steve Bohme, who conducts book research for Nielsen.

Print buying decreased, though, with adult fiction sales decreasing 5 percent and adult non-fiction down 4 percent.

Amazon-published and self-published titles made up 17m of those books – worth £58m – in 2014. This represents 5 percent of the overall book market and 15 percent of the digital market. The volume and value sales are similar to 2013, but up 70% since 2012. 

Bohme said that consumers had an awareness of self-publishing, were positive about its impact, willing to try titles, but uncertain about genres and pricing. 

The figures were presented at The Literary Consultancy and Byte the Book's Summer Digital Book Party on 5 June.

Some books are widely recognised as self-published – 50 Shades of Grey being perhaps one of the most recognised in this category.

But there are other best-sellers that also started out as self-published books. Here we list some of them for you – and watch out, there are a few surprises:

1. At number one, 50 Shades of Grey is the best-known self-publishing success story, as the intro says. EL James’ story started out as fan fiction in tribute to the Twilight series and she posted it on fan fiction sites and her own website before developing it into a trilogy. The first book was self-published as an e-book and print-on-demand book. 
2. James Redfield’s spiritual journey The Celestine Prophecy was self-published in the 1990s, with the author selling copies out of the back of his Honda. When he’d sold the first 100,000 copies, Warner Books agreed to publish it. The book is believed to have sold more than 20 million copies world-wide.
3. Romance novels tend to do well in self-publishing. HM Ward’s Ferro family saga has sold more than 4 million books since her debut in 2011. Her first book, Damaged, became a number one best seller in Amazon’s new adult genre. Ms Ward is still a self-published author.
4. The film attracted attention this year with Julianne Moore’s Oscar win for her main character role, but Still Alice by Lisa Genova began life as a self-published book. The story – about a woman with early onset Alzheimer’s – was picked up by Simon & Schuster in 2009 and it spent more than 40 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
5. Here at Comely Bank Publishing, we’ve mentioned Hugh Howey and his Wool trilogy once or twice because we’re keen on self-publishing success stories. Whilst Howey did opt for a traditional publishing deal such was his power that he was able to negotiate the terms of that deal, turning down a seven-figure sum for a six-figure one so that he could hold onto the digital rights.
6. Amanda Hocking started publishing her rejected paranormal fiction books on Amazon to raise $300 so that she could pay for a visit to an exhibition about Muppets creator Jim Henson. In six months she had made $20,000 and some two years later, $2.5 million. (Her last rejection letter, which she didn't keep, had been from a UK literary agent she recalls…)
7. John Grisham’s first novel was influenced by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird – and rejected 28 times. He then published 5,000 copies through a small private publisher. Later books were published by Doubleday which led to the re-issuing of his first novel, A Time to Kill.
   

There’s an increasing trend for authors to shun the Big 5 publishing houses, according to a recent article on European CEO.com by Elizabeth Matsangou.

With the advent of less support for fledgling authors, less favourable royalties and extremely restrictive contracts, more and more authors are turning to the option of self-publishing and the freedom it provides.

And there are more and more organisations popping up online to facilitate the process – Comely Bank Publishing being just one of them.

Nigel Lee, the CEO of Lulu, the biggest self-publishing platform after Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service, is quoted in the piece saying that self-publishing has now hit the mainstream and is a force to be reckoned with.

Self-publishing, he says, doesn’t have the profit-orientated censorship of traditional publishing, allowing for greater freedom and creativity.

The piece also quotes the experiences of Hugh Howey, author of the New York Times best-selling Wool trilogy, part of which was published through Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP allows writers to make about six times as much on every sale, meaning that books can be offered at lower prices to attract readers.

Howey now does have a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster, but he was in the position to specify his conditions which means that he is in charge of his digital rights. He believes the rise of self-publishing will create a vibrant and healthy freelancer market of editors, cover artists and more. Agents, he reckons, will be the “new boutique publishing option"

The piece ends with advice for publishing houses, saying that the co-existence of traditional and independent is possible but that adjustment is needed on the part of traditional publishing – “they must play to their strengths and offer what others simply cannot”.