I also take care of submissions for the
young adult imprint from Melange called Fire and Ice. That means checking the
email account daily and looking for new submissions. Reading through the first
few chapters and requesting a full manuscript if the portion sent shows
potential or sending a rejection letter if the manuscript does not seem like a
good fit for Fire and Ice.
I use a free text editor on my Kindle Fire
to read the submissions on the go, that way I can dedicate my computer time to
my many, many other tasks, and use my Kindle for reading.
Submissions is probably my most time
consuming job and probably one of the most rewarding.
FORMATTING
EBOOKS
The final job that I have involves the
actual book releases. As stated before, I am in charge of getting all books for
sale on the company websites. I am also in charge of loading the books for sale
on the website's shopping cart as well as getting ready and loading for sale at
Smashwords and Amazon Kindle.
When I started out doing the formatting for
Smashwords and Amazon it was a little intimidating but I've since got the work
flow down pat, I don't even have to really think about what I'm doing—which is
a good thing since Netflix and Hulu are my constant companions when doing most
of my work, with submissions being the exception.
Formatting for Smashwords and Amazon
involves a lot of copying and pasting. I have a Word document saved as a
template with all of the styles cleared out. Then I copy the book in, chapter
by chapter, removing all of the crazy formatting that ends up hidden in a
manuscript. (Seriously, open a Word doc and look at the styles. There are tons
of them!) Ideally, at the end, a manuscript will have no more than 5-8
different styles. The more styles you have, the more work you're making an
e-reader do. When you have more styles you're setting yourself up for errors in
translation from source file to e-reader. At the back of each book I select a
few of our other titles that may be relevant to readers of the book I'm
formatting and insert the cover and the story summary to entice readers to
consider other books published by our company.
Formatting a book can take anywhere from
half an hour to five hours, depending on how many hidden styles there are that
need removing.
Once the book is formatted, including a
table of contents, I load at Amazon and preview the book, checking to make sure
that each chapter link in the table of contents is functioning correctly,
bringing the reader to the correct page. When I'm satisfied I finish entering
the information and move on to Smashwords, doing the same thing.
Between all of these jobs I try to make
myself on hand to all of our authors. I set up a private Facebook group just
for staff and authors so that questions can be easily asked and answered quickly.
The group is also used to share ideas for promoting one another's books. I've
never worked for another publishing company, but I'm so proud to say that the
Melange authors and staff that I have had the privilege of working with feel
like family and we all work hard to help one another out.
(And did I mention I do all of this with a
two year old running around during the day and an additional six year old in
the evening and summers???)
Find Caroline Online:
Want me to Review Your Book?As I’ve stated many times, I love reading! If you’re an author or a publisher and want me to read your book, go ahead and send me either the whole book (kindle format please!) or a blurb telling me what the book is about.
I can’t promise I’ll review every book that is request of me. Let’s be honest, if you write a slasher/horror book and I read YA romance, am I really your target audience? No. But, if there’s a chance I might like it, send it on over! Check out my other reviews and my Goodreads ratings to see what I like and don’t like.
http://booksyayesplease.wordpress.com/
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Great post. Caroline, how do you keep up? I love the idea of including blurbs of other books at the end!
ReplyDeleteI barely keep up! And to add to it, I'm starting another part time job next week! Ahhhh!
ReplyDeleteWow! Very busy person. I'm meeting a lot of those lately. What is it about writers that they have to keep busy?
ReplyDelete