Today on the blog we have poet Heather Haley with a fitting poem about the Virgin Mary. As we draw closer to Christmas, it's probably time that I start thinking about Christmas, not work and writing. I will start my shopping today, I swear... maybe after a little ski (it is a powder day after all).
One of the big challenges of being an indie writer (aside from resisting powder days) is all the busy work associated with updating one's front and back matter and files whenever a minor mistake is discovered or you have a new release. Buy-through is enhanced dramatically if you have links to and excerpts from your other books, so it's worth it to go back through and update all your back matter whenever you have a new release. This can be very time consuming though especially if you have a lot of works. Draft2Digital has created a new feature whereby apparently you can update your back matter in one place and it automatically is included in all of your novels and shorts.
For those of you who don't know what Draft2Digital is, it is an amalgamator, like Smashwords, whereby you can upload your pieces to one dashboard and have them appear on all the platforms, even Amazon. They take a 10 percent cut I think. It is, apparently, not as powerful as working with the platforms directly because you can't optimize categories and keywords. I don't use it for Amazon (because I need to be able to do that optimization), but I do use Draft2Digital for the other platforms because my sales on the other platforms are too low at this point to worry optimization.
I think this backmatter updater is an unbelievably great idea. I haven't tried it yet because I don't have a lot of books on the other platforms because of the power of KU. But if Amazon were to add a feature like that, it would dramatically reduce my workload and increase my writing time. So here's hoping that in 2016, Amazon creates a backmatter updater. End of today's wishful thinking and on to Heather :-) (and some powder... maybe).
Heather Haley
Trailblazing poet, author and media artist Heather Haley pushes boundaries by creatively integrating disciplines, genres and media. Her writing appears in numerous journals and anthologies including the Antigonish Review, Geist and The Verse Map of Vancouver. Haley was an editor for the LA Weekly and publisher of the Edgewise Cafe, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines. She is the author of poetry collections Sideways, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, and debut novel, The Town Slut’s Daughter. Haley’s videopoems are official selections at dozens of international film festivals and she’s toured Canada, the U.S. and Europe in support of two critically acclaimed AURAL Heather CDs of spoken word song.
Find Heather’s blog, One Life at: www.heatherhaley.com
Amazon.com/author/heatherhaley
First Came Mary
Before hate. In spite of war. A few years back I was fortunate to visit the Yucatan, now referred to as the Mayan Riviera. An anthropology buff, I was thrilled to tour the ruins of Tulum and Chichen Itza. It was Christmas and I was astonished by the degree of Maryolotry, the inspiration for this poem from my collection Three Blocks West of Wonderland.
It bears repeating, especially…more