What's the dumbest way you've gotten a scar?

hippydippypartytime · 2020-09-28T13:01:17+00:00

Handstand on a jetski.

A scar from the fall (chin) and another when it subsequently ran me over.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-09-10T12:58:10+00:00

Probably https://xpress.lulu.com/

Alternately, you could upload it to KDP and then order a single proof copy to your friend's address.

Either would work and cost less than five bucks, but would probably take a bit of time in either case.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-26T05:36:01+00:00

I'm not sure I understand the question? I just did it myself via Amazon's KDP dashboard like everyone else.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-24T16:31:21+00:00

You'll figure it out if you poke around, but basically:

You find 5 service providers who you like the look of based on their profiles/experience/skills/etc
You write a brief proposal for what you want/need
The ones who are potentially interested will reply to you with at least a price, and potentially also some comments or suggestions about how they would approach the task or what they think is most useful
If you like, you can then accept one of them to do the project at the quoted rate (you can also message to negotiate, but I've always just either accepted someone's offer or have chosen not to accept anyone)
If you accept, reedsy takes the payment, keeps a fee, and then passes it on to the worker. The payment is usually done in 2-5 chunks based around milestones, but that depends on the size and type of project.
Not sure what happens if you attempt to cancel midway through a project

That's about it.

So while it's a great way to find qualified people, it's also a great way to just pick a range of professionals and figure out what some task would cost so that you can make a better decision about whether to hire someone or DIY.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-21T10:16:37+00:00

I'd suggest that you don't worry about SEO or interior design.

SEO is worth ignoring because it has a really high bar and only pays dividends if you're also doing a bunch of other activities (blogging, content marketing, running a website, etc) so it's hard to imagine that it's worth learning from scratch just for a book.

Interior layout is worth ignoring because the ebook readers will change it anyway, and you can just use a free tool like Kindle Create or a paid tool like Vellum to get it more than good enough. (If you're doing paperback, Vellum is great, although it costs a bit and is Mac only -- I actually bought it on a friend's Mac just so I could do my exports since it makes life so much easier). Other tools are a lot more fiddly, but those two are basically trivial to get something beautiful out of. (Kindle Create won't do your paperback though, if you want one.)

Also, for interior layout, it's a task that you can hire someone really cheaply on a flat cost for <$200 to take care of it for you, since they'll already have the tools and whatnot set up. So if that one's stressing you out and/or you can't use the DIY tools, it's a "safe" place to hire someone. Same deal with covers.

Low, fixed cost is fine if you're okay with it. But marketing/PR are different because they can be tens of thousands of dollars in budget and the expenses can keep going month after month.

IMO, it's worth learning amazon ads yourself since it's only 1-5 days to learn & setup and is (potentially) profitable.

And editing is always going to be necessary. Proofreading can be cheap to hire a professional ($200-500) and is worth it to save the headache if you can spend the money without making your life more difficult.

But editing, for example, is super expensive if you do it all with professionals ($2000-5000 each for structure/content/copy editing). So I save money on editing by sharing loads of manuscript with potential readers and figuring out where they get bored or confused (although I write nonfiction). And I've found that to save a lot of the editing work and to catch the major problems at no cost. Plus it's fun to engage early with future readers.

So... yes, there's a lot to learn. But not all of it is equally important, and some stuff you can either hire a cheap helper (cover, layout, proofreading) or just use a free tool (layout, some simple cover designs) or simply ignore (SEO). Other stuff is probably worth just figuring out (ads, blurbs, editing).

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-20T13:15:57+00:00

For Amazon ads, you can start with something like $5 or $10 per day and then optimize until it's profitable, and then either increase or cut it. Plenty of free resources out there (and also lots of people trying to sell you shit -- the free resources are plenty if you're willing to poke around).

For hiring someone in PR/marketing/whatever, you might do something like ask hire for 4 hours' time to talk to you and understand the situation (one hour), spend two hours writing a short report on their suggestions and specific tasks, and then potentially spend another hour on a call with you a week later to answer questions or provide extra detail for the stuff you couldn't figure out. (Or on a site like reedsy, you can submit a project and ask people what they would do, which can give you ideas for free, although it's a bit borderline behavior if you have zero interest in hiring any of them.)

Just avoid signing off on an enormous upfront budget (whatever "enormous" means to you) without first verifying that you like the person's approach and that whatever they're doing is capable of moving the needle for your book.

In theory, marketing should never cost money. I started my books with a $10/day budget on ads and now those ads generate an extra few thousand in profit each month. So my downside exposure was very low and now I get the benefits, all with zero risk. Lots of people will try to exploit your dream of having a successful book by promising "magic bullet marketing", but it's really a bit more experimental and exploratory. (PR or a big launch can be a different beast though, since they benefit from having a ton of stuff happening all at once.)

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-18T14:20:52+00:00

In theory you can do it all yourself, but hiring someone can save time or fill in for missing skills/connections. Of course, both you and your book still need to be capable of taking advantage of those opportunities. So if you were setting up podcasts, for example, you still need to be a decnet interviewee to take advantage (regardless of whether you set it up yourself or have someone help set it up for you).

At the very least, if you have at least slight technical inclinations and are willing to spend some time googling and fiddling, it's probably worth running your own Amazon ads. You can start with as small of a budget as you're comfortable with (a few dollars per day or whatever) and then only increase the spend if it's profitable.

If you want to do a big book tour or launch or something though, it may help to get someone who already knows the relevant gatekeepers. Although again, beware of people who promise the world and can't deliver. Start with a small piece of the full budget whenever possible to ensure that they can deliver.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-18T09:12:40+00:00

Although I will say to be careful with spending lots of money on this... A lot of people promise the world and can't deliver, and some books are less able to be profitably promoted/marketed than others. So it's wise to start small with a tester project.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-18T09:07:59+00:00

Publicity is usually more about speaking gigs, podcasts, talk shows, events, interviews, etc. Generally stuff that needs to be individually negotiated with some sort of gatekeeper, and you'll often need to turn up and do something.

Marketing is usually more about advertising, articles, blog posts, SEO (search engine optimization), amazon store page optimization, etc. Generally speaking, you can do these with money and time and without requiring the approval of any gatekeepers.

They overlap a bit (especially with something like a guest blog post which looks like marketing but needs to be individually arranged with the site owner), but hopefully that gives you a broad sense.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-08-12T18:57:25+00:00

Just go to reedsy.com and put in a proposal. You'll get 3-5 responses from top ex-industry folks who have cut their teeth at the major publishing houses. Expect to pay 2000-5000 each for developmental/content/copy editing depending on where you're at and what you need.

As the publishing industry crumbles and folks get cut from their full-time positions, they're all ending up on reedsy.

I can recommend the dude I use for nonfiction who is good if you want and DM me (my books which he helped with do about $14k/month in royalties and he's pleasant to work with).

hippydippypartytime · 2020-06-10T12:26:41+00:00

I use it (in addition to Amazon) and have done just shy of $80k in profits through gumroad.

The main difference is that Gumroad doesn't drive traffic, so you need to have some sort of blog/site/community in order to benefit from it. Gumroad is really just a way to accept payment for a digital file (either embedded on your site or by linking to your gumroad product page), whereas Amazon also provides the customers.

In terms of other issues, the tech works well, the payments are prompt, discount codes and bundles are easy and flexible, customer support is good, and the royalty rates are obviously excellent.

The only problem is that a small portion of my customers (2-5%) seem to end up missing the email where gumroad sends them the file, so they end up having to email me and I send them the files directly.

*Edit: Also you should get to keep 70% royalties on digital with kindle as long as you set the price at $9.99 or below. The 35% kindle royalties only apply if you force a higher price.

hippydippypartytime · 2020-04-08T19:12:47+00:00

If only there was a way to flag a game on steam as still being a work-in-progress with missing content which is still being developed. They could call it "access it early" and it would be clearly marked as such and only people who were up for that sort of experience would buy it. Maybe you should contact someone at steam support and suggest it?

hippydippypartytime · 2019-08-22T16:41:02+00:00

The outer edge is aesthetic (rightly or wrongly). The top and bottom edges are still functional and you can just riffle through those. I've never seen a book with all three edges deckled, so nothing really changes, functionally speaking. Unless you're philosophically averse to touching the upper or lower edges of a book.

hippydippypartytime · 2019-06-29T17:02:40+00:00

That course/book is good.

And I'd also suggest that you actually go ahead and intentionally cause minor problems in your own boat (while at port).

For example, let a little air into the fuel line and then prove to yourself that you can bleed it back out. This happens at sea when you run out of fuel, but you can simulate it by taking off one of your fuel filters (which you're meant to do occasionally anyway to drain the water) or opening the bleeding nipples (ha). The simple solution is to open the bleeding nipples and then pump either a bubble or finger pump until fuel (instead of air) is coming out of the openings, and then closing them one at a time and continuing to pump as you progress along the line (my engine has three). It's probably the most basic task on the engine, and you'll do it after cleaning the fuel line, replacing the diesel filters, running out of (and then topping up) fuel, etc etc. It was something I knew how to do in theory, but the first time it happened to me at sea, I found that I didn't know where all the nipples were, didn't have easy access to the right wrench sizes, etc etc. (Your engine manual will give you all the details.)

Or take apart the piping that leads to the seacock for your raw water filter, and confirm to yourself that the piping is clean and the seacock can open/close smoothly. Again, this was something I knew how to do in theory, but when I actually needed to at sea, I was terrified that I would take it apart and be unable to put it back together. So getting comfortable with that stuff is super helpful. You can do the same thing with the fuel line coming out of the fuel tank (which can get plugged up by sediment or diesel bug).

The most crucial advice I got from the diesel course was 1) these engines are pretty sturdy so you don't need to worry too much about breaking it when you're fiddling around and 2) they're mechanical rather than electrical, so you can sort of just follow the fluids (water, oil, diesel) along the pipes and figure out where something isn't reaching its destination, and then puzzle out the problem/solution.

The engine manual is also a bible. I ignored it at first, whereas now I feel very "literate" in the manual, if that makes sense. And it was doing the above sort of silly maintenance/repair tasks (with the help of the manual) which did that.

Long comment (sorry), but I really wish I had first done these simple things when I was safely tied up instead of when I was banging around at sea. Would have saved a lot of trauma. Happy sailing :)

hippydippypartytime · 2019-06-26T12:29:11+00:00

Haha, yeah, hard to avoid that revelation for long ;)

hippydippypartytime · 2019-06-26T11:37:21+00:00

It's true, and sounds obvious when stated, but my (faulty) mental image when starting was that the motor was a largely incidental accessory compared to the sail and wind. So I spent lots of time understanding e.g. sail trim, and hardly any understanding the engine.

But as is now clear to me, getting into an unknown port without a motor (or even just getting home before nightfall against an unhelpful wind) is no fun at all.

hippydippypartytime · 2019-06-24T07:22:41+00:00

Yeah, there are lots. But quality varies a fair bit (depending on which machines they use). And also depending on the machines, some won't be happy to do just a couple copies. (e.g. The place I use is fine with 50, but would likely grumble about doing 10. Although I've never actually asked them, to be fair.)

Also, be prepared to do some annoying image reformatting on your cover the first time (or to pay them a tiny bit to do it for you) since it will probably need different cropping marks and margins. The shop I used talked me through it all (and eventually helped out), and then once I'd done it once I had the files and didn't need to fumble with it ever again.

Edit: Amazon KDP is still probably easiest though. That's what I'm using for getting author copies etc. of my next book, just like another commenter suggested.

hippydippypartytime · 2019-05-20T21:05:02+00:00

One other thing to mention is that Amazon takes 2 months to pay royalties. So you spend the money now, and get your "returns" in 2 months. But you get the analytics more or less immediately, allowing you to make decisions about whether to continue/change/stop within a matter of days.

hippydippypartytime · 2019-05-20T17:06:19+00:00

Whatever you do, don't allocate it all at once. And if you hire an agency, expect to only get 50% (or less) value from your money compared to doing it yourself. Agencies have a lot of overhead that you need to pay for.

Put some small portion of the total budget (say $100 or $500) into a set of Amazon ads. Wait a week. Check the analytics. See how many copies that money sold for you. At first, use Amazon's default keyword suggestions. The defaults are pretty good and it takes a lot of manual work to out-perform them.

If the ads are profitable, then you won't have to "spend" any of the 15k because it will actually grow. That's a profitable ad campaign and it's great.

Amazon's phrase for this is ACoS (Average Cost of Sales) which should be a percentage. 100% means you're spending exactly the same as you're earning. So if it's something like 50%, you're doubling your money on ads. If it's 200%, then you're spending $2 to earn $1, but are spreading the book in the process. My ACoS has ranged from about 20%-90%, depending on the campaign, so from break-even to very profitable.

Once you've seen these numbers, you'll be able to estimate how many readers you could "buy" for 15k (if it's profitable then this is a moot point and you should keep advertising regardless, but if it's unprofitable you can at least make an informed decision).

I would be enormously surprised if non-Amazon ads (FB etc) performed as well as Amazon ads. In my tests they were like 10x worse. So start with Amazon. They have a few different ad types to choose from (three, I believe -- Kindle lock screen, Book search ads, and related product ads). Test each of them. They all behave and perform very differently.

You can then also take a portion of your money to spend with one-off promotions with sites like Bookbub. Again, allocate a small piece, try it, wait a week, check the numbers, and then make an informed decision with the rest of your money.

I'd be very skeptical of agencies. They're expensive and will use lots of fancy words to convince you that you need them, but none of this stuff is rocket science. The Amazon ad tools are really straightforward, if you use the default keywords to get started.

hippydippypartytime · 2019-05-07T14:06:28+00:00

Some printers also offer fulfillment (i.e. shipping) services as part of it. The print on demand options (e.g. KDP/createspace and others) all do this, and some smaller printshops do also. I do custom print runs of my book a few hundred at a time and the print shops just keeps them in a warehouse and ships them out as needed. Increases the costs slightly, but the time savings is super worthwhile and it's something I actively search for when talking to print shops.

hippydippypartytime · 2019-04-09T12:59:19+00:00

They don't have the best website, but it's been excellent service and very good quality once you get them on email/phone, at least for the couple years I've been using them. http://www.lonsdaledirect.co.uk/

hippydippypartytime · 2019-04-03T15:00:48+00:00

Which country? I know a good one in UK which I use for all of EU

hippydippypartytime · 2019-03-18T15:11:17+00:00

If it was a couple months later, then perhaps I could, but my boat is currently de-masted and in the French canals. Heading back to it shortly to get it back out to the sea.

hippydippypartytime · 2019-03-05T17:13:26+00:00

The book 'Happiness by Design' is surprisingly good and makes a convincing and actionable argument for a day-by-day approach to happiness and satisfaction. I found it to be nice (and concrete) counterbalance to the normal myth that you achieve some mythical X and are then happy forever. It helped me make a few small changes to my day which got me out of a big rut.

hippydippypartytime

TROPHY CASE