Amazon won’t deliver my books to Canada or within the USA.

Part of my process of self-publishing is to send my new work to beta readers. The payback, I’d like to believe, is their contribution enhances an original work of art. Too grandiose? Okay, how about they get to be one of the first people to read a soon-to-be bestseller? Wishful thinking? At the very least, they get a free book once it’s published with their name listed on the Acknowledgement Page. And, of course, my undying gratitude.

But alas! Due to COVID19 Amazon is not shipping books to Canada, saying, “...due to the current Prevention measure taken by the US and due to increased demand for essential goods, we have been forced to reduce product selection available for delivery to Canada and also within the US as well.”

Some of my beta readers prefer ebooks, but others want paperback proof copies, and so do I. For me, the typos and dropped words I’ve missed in my Word manuscript jump out from a hard copy. And there are a lot of them.

So that means, The Bird Witch - Book 4 in The Mattie Saunders Series, will have to wait for what I’m not sure. A vaccine?

Until then, if you’re running out of things to read, contact me at rod_raglin@yahoo.com and I’ll send you the ebook ARC of The Bird Witch along with some beta-reading tips.

Just think, not only will you be one of the first people to read a soon-to-be bestseller, your contribution will have enhanced this an original work of art.

It’s a rare day indeed that I don’t receive promotional material regarding some writing related program, service, publishing platform or marketing gimmick.

There seems to be no end to people who, for a price, will support my career as an author. Where do they all come from and considering how many there are how do any of them make a living?

You wouldn’t think there were that many suckers out there.

Here are three more sure fire suggestions to polish your manuscript, generate reviews and enhance your sales that don’t work.

Reedsy Discovery. Reedsy took umbrage when I described their new Discovery site as a “Another paid review, bogus up-voting book marketing site”, so I’ll let them describe it for you (how fair is that?). Visit https://blog.reedsy.com/announcing-reedsy-discovery/

Let’s assume you send your manuscript plus $50 and the Reedsy team smiles upon you. Your book gets a high quality review and your promoted on their Discovery Feed. Reedsy doesn’t appear to have any shortage authors ready to anti up $50. I receive at least two emails a week from them with a list of newly launched titles.

But does it work?

I’ve been tracking a few titles and here are the results to this date, July 10, 2019. The dates indicated are the Reedsy Discover launch date. Many of these books were actually published months before.

In Verse by Tex DeJésus was launched May 15th. It has no reviews on Amazon and one review on Goodreads posted by the author.

Nobody Drowned by Peter Kingsmill was launched on May 22 and has three reviews on Amazon (two are prior to the Reedsy release date) and two on Goodreads - one duplicated from Amazon and one from the author.

Martyrs al Sabra by Dan Kalin has no reviews on Amazon and three reviews and two ratings on Goodreads, the majority of which were posted prior to the Reedsy launch.

In Case You Forgot by Aubrey Stack was launched on May 23 and has no reviews anywhere.

The Alchemy of Noise by Lorraine Devon Wilke had its Reedsy launch on July 3 and has 32 reviews on Amazon and 40 on Goodreads, all posted prior to the launch.

One thing for sure, this site isn’t going to launch your literary career.

Following the Reedsy release most of the titles I tracked showed no increase in reviews on Goodreads or Amazon and no bump in Amazon book ratings.

BetaReader.io invites you to “share your unpublished manuscript to selected readers. Collect feedback and reading data to understand what works and what needs polishing. Private, secure, and easy to use.” I took advantage of their Basic Forever Free Plan which allowed me to upload one active manuscript, and get response from three readers for up 30 days. I got zilch response. Let’s face it, good beta readers are hard to find, why should they be more successful at it than anyone else?

Free email blasts. http://awesomegang.com http://pretty-hot.com https://mybookplace.net/ An incestuous cluster using “free” as a come-on to get you to buy up. Don’t know what you get when you pay, but it’s not even worth your time to fill in the meta data for the free option.

Stay calm, be brave, watch for the signs.

30

Author Amazon Page https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

Seeking Beta readers for two short stories fro The Beta-Earth Chronicles

One is "A Day in the Death of the Magic Mabel" with a Word Count of 10196. Set 40 years in the future on our planet, it's set on a doomed cruise ship with a horrible fear-inducing chemical compound hidden somewhere on board. Can Mary Carpenter find it in time?

The other is "The Alien That Never Was" with a Word Count of 10772. It's set on Beta-Earth during the Alman Civil War with a distinctly WWII flavor. Can sexy special operatives of the Kirippean resistance fool the forces of the power-hungry Lunta?

If interested in an Advanced reader copy PDF, or Word file, of either of these yarns, reply to me here or email me at spywise@verizon.net.

Thanks in advance--

WB

I am constantly amazed at how many errors there are in my manuscripts.

And I don't mean the first draft.

Nothing is more frustrating for me than finding errors in my books, or worse, having others point them out. As well as being patently unprofessional I feel it shows a lack of respect for the work, not to mention the reader. I suppose this could be resolved by hiring a professional copyeditor.

Bookbaby's Copy Editing services include, "A word-by-word edit that addresses grammar, usage, and consistency issues." My soon-to-be-released novella, Cold-Blooded, The Mattie Saunders Series Book II, is about 100 pages and would cost $700.00 to be copyedited by Bookbaby

If I sell the e-book edition of Cold-Blooded for $3.99 on Amazon my royalty will be $1.40, which means I'd have to sell 500 copies to pay for the copy editing alone (in my dreams). So I'd rather recruit non-professionals who are committed to making my work error free.

Beta readers can be anyone, though I tend to shy away from friends and absolutely won't use family. I'm not asking them to review or comment on the story (though I don't discourage it), just read it and make note of the errors. Right now I have two who had previously reviewed my books (favourably). I contacted them to see if they'd like to beta-read my new works. The other one is a friend. None are professionals and they all do it for a free copy of the finished book with their name on the acknowledgements page.

Prior to sending the manuscript to my beta readers, I've developed a process to make it as error-free as possible.

1. Each time I sit down to write I re-read and revise what I wrote during the previous session.

2. After I finish a rough draft I revise it thoroughly, then let it rest.

3. After I've got the story out of my system, which means I no longer have instant recall for each line written (minimum three months), I pull it out and revise it again with fresh eyes.

4. Then comes the computer spell-check.

Then I send it out to my three beta readers.

I used to be pretty confident once I'd done all that I'd caught at least most of the typos and filled in the dropped words, but it's embarrassing how many errors they still find. It's also remarkable how what one misses the other catches.

Once they get back to me I do the corrections which entails another revision. Finally, uploading it to Smashwords, Kindle and Draft2Digital gives me another opportunity to check it since I always do a visual review for formatting glitches.

I strongly urge you to begin recruiting beta readers - from your email list, through your website, on social media, a supportive friend, a note pinned on the bulletin board in the local library, or like I'm doing here in a Booklikes blog (see below). You simply cannot have too many and they tend to fall away.

If you're patient, methodical and persevere you can self-published a respectable book.

Besides, there are no guarantees a professionally edited, self-published book will have any more success than one that is carefully vetted by a group amateurs committed to making your work the best it can be.

Plus you'll save a lot of money.

Stay calm, be brave, watch for the signs

30

If you'd like to become a beta reader and have an opportunity to read (and improve) my new work free, please send me an email at rod_raglin@yahoo.com

Web links associated with this article:

Bookbaby Editing Services https://www.bookbaby.com/book-editing-services

Kindle Direct Publishing https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US

Draft2Digital https://www.draft2digital.com

Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com

Rod Raglin's Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

What should I say about this book?! It is a little diamond! If I had to use some words for it, these would be: fresh, funny, glamorous, stylish, adorable but even serious as it has to do with a really important issue. Depression.

Let's take it from the start. I love chick lit. You know I do, I told you that at my last post. I love the humorous ways it deals with some problems and issues, either these are relationships, or anything more serious. This one has to do with depression. Depression is a serious medical illness. It is a state of low mood (melancholy), that affects a person's thoughts, activities, feelings and generally life. It makes us feel sad, anxious, hopeless and having a low self-esteem. The great trap is that sometimes the person who is under the affect of depression, cannot even recognize it, unless someone else make it clear to them, and most of the times it is hard to admit and accept it.

Our story has to do with a British young lady, Leila, who works at a great magazine and is in a relationship with James, a man that travels a lot and never has enough time for her. After some situations she decides to break up with him and make up her life... READ MORE ON Eve's Bookish World