Well a big step has been taken. Our first ebook is out. It’s called “Snow White of the South Seas” and it’s FREE. Please go and download it here! (Please,please, pretty please it won’t cost you anything – and it’s actually quite a lot of fun!)
How we made it free by mistake
How it happened was like this. Our esteemed techie James (http://purplebeansolutions.com/) and I had finally finished polishing the last bit of our book. Putting in the last few commas, checking the pagination for the 50th time and so on We had been fiddling for ages and we could bare it no longer.
So we took the plunge went to the ibook publishing site (the FAQ is here) and started going through the long series of forms that they need you to fill in. As ever they asked for things I didn’t know like my Apple id and its password. (The Apple id actually belongs to my wife Jeanie who owns the ipad and uses it principally for drawing. Go and see her blog if you can tear yourself away from this exciting story.) So I normally have to ring her up, and she’s normally forgotten and reminds me that I am supposed to have written it down and so it goes back and forth. Anyway it turned out that James had written in down so we found it quite quickly. Then a few impossible questions down the line, James who was reading out the words read “Is this paid or unpaid?”. “My God I don’t want to pay to have it published” I said “click on unpaid.” So he did and that meant the book was free.
We now pretend it was a savvy marketing ploy
We were pretty tired by that time and so we left it. We finished the questionnaire and went downstairs to celebrate with a cup of tea. We expected the book to be up any minute. It’s not like that. Apparently the books have to be vetted before they are published. There was a big scare some months ago that most of the books from private publishers are pornographic (this is pretty much true as far as I can discover.) Our first book comes pretty low on the pornographic scale. The rudest word is “kiss” and it only occurs three times. Please don’t let this stop you downloading it. It still has a lot of fun in it.
Vetting process for ?? pornography?? . We get 0 out of 10 on the pornographic scale
Anyway some sort of vetting process is involved and in our case it took several weeks. (This is normal. They were n’t scared off by the heavy use of kissing in the Snow White story.) Suddenly we got an email and there it was. We now pretend that giving our first book away was a wonderful marketing ploy and that we are going to re-coup when we publish our next books. I am sure this will turn out to be true.
And our second book (another pantomime) has followed now on Kindle
PS: In fact this was all some time ago and our next book is now out on Kindle. It’s another pantomime “St Minions Battles the dinosaurs” Download that today. This will cost you a quid or two but it is well worth it. More about the process in our next post. It will be up on ibooks soon, I hope. (£2.05 in fact we meant to make it £1.99 but we failed to include VAT or something. Another mistake we can help you to avoid!)
nandjmellersh 