Independent Publishing

To Heck With the ‘Consensus’: Try it Anyway

There are Blogs or Sites within the writer-author community here on WordPress doing great, and there are those not doing great, just as there are authors mega-selling and those who aren’t. I’m not going to get into the reasons for that (except to say that if you aren’t a ‘celebrity’ you’re likely not going to be a ‘mega-seller’ until you become one!)

And how does one become a ‘celebrity’? I’ll sum it up in one word: consensus.

Here is how the consensus works, for examples.

Continue reading “To Heck With the ‘Consensus’: Try it Anyway”

About the Prodigal Band Trilogy: the Main Characters, Part 1

In the previous post and other various posts, I stated that my main characters morphed from a gang or clique of boys in the area I grew up, Long Island and New York City, to rock musicians from England–a decision influenced by, first, the fact that I actually made it into a local band; second, rock music was my main connection to youth culture of my generation (60s and 70s); third, my fave bands of that era–and the most influential bands of that era–were Brits, and I had visited England as well as attended the 1970 Isle of Wight Rock Festival which featured the Who, Traffic, ELP, Led Zeppelin, and Jimi Hendrix (who died in London a few weeks later) and others of note (some whom I missed since we had to leave early to get the flight back to the States).

Continue reading “About the Prodigal Band Trilogy: the Main Characters, Part 1”

About The Prodigal Band Trilogy: The Theme-Good Triumphs over Evil

I began writing a book that would eventually work its way into three books that make up the Prodigal Band Trilogy–Battle of the Band, The Prophesied Band, and The Prodigal Band–back in the late 1960s in diary form as the characters morphed from just a group of guys in a gang or a clique, with or without girlfriends, living on Long Island-then-New York City, to rock musicians with or without girlfriends, living in England. Why the morph? Because of my own interest in rock music as well as actually having participated in a local band for a few months, and having gone to England in 1970, as well as the notion I had the rock bands from England were more worthy overall than American ones (and Brit bands were my fave bands anyway.) These topics have been discussed in previous posts here and on my blog.

The names and looks of the characters were created in the mid-60s with other characters being created in the mid-80s, which was when I started getting serious about the books, which was still just one book novel. But instead of a diary to write stuff that would later make up the book(s), I just wrote on notepad paper with pen.

Read the rest here.

Keys to Formatting E-books for EPub and Various E-book Platforms Besides Kindle

I do hope that the author of books who also has the desire or urge to format their printed books into E-Books isn’t just considering formatting for Amazon Kindle. For one thing, Amazon’s payout looks to be a pittance compared to some of the other platforms, especially Lulu. Now I do intend to format for Kindle because everyone and his or her mother has a Kindle device, right? And I know it is a very good idea to format for Kindle–for one thing, a friend of mine who downloaded my Prodigal Band FREE PDF complained that it was hard for her to read the PDF on her Kindle! That is likely because the Kindle Create format is different from a PDF format, which is simply an export from Word or WordPerfect. So, to satisfy folks who only have a Kindle reader which uses MOBI formatting, I will just have to accept a lower payout. Oh well, such is Amazon and it’s money-craving owner, Jeff Bezos, who will never have enough money (and, BTW, he is NOT “the richest man in the world”–which he knows and that is likely why he craves more and more money…it’ll take him years to catch up to the richest man in the world, which is the head of the Rothschild Banking dynasty, not Bezos! Bezos is “only”” worth a trillion or so. Rothschild, who OWNES the Federal Reserve Band and other central banks, is likely half-way to quadrillionaire status….a quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeros! or the number 10 to the 15th power!). When you have this kind of money, money becomes meaningless in a way.

Continue reading “Keys to Formatting E-books for EPub and Various E-book Platforms Besides Kindle”

If I Can Start Self-Publishing With Almost No Money in the Age Before Online Self-Publishing and Social Media, Almost ANY Writer Can Do It Today

I have been on the WordPress Writer/Author scene since mid-February, 2018, and have read dozens of posts by newbies and established writers-authors and bloggers who have advice on writing and self-publishing. Read the advice, but, folks, you have to figure this one out yourselves, even if you lose money in the process. I am what one would call a “tactile learner,” that is, I learn by doing.

For instance, I learned by foolishly trying to transfer a domain from BlueHost, who claimed to be ICANN registered but aren’t (or else why would they send me an e-mail stating I needed to go through whois@BlueHost.com, when Whois is part of ICANN? WHOIS LOOK-UP is indeed part of ICANN), that transferring a domain is a fool’s errand unless you already have done such a thing in the past and succeeded. So, all I could do was withdraw my complaint against BlueHost. BlueHost can throw my domain I paid for in the trash, or hand it over to some whatever for free. When the domain comes up for renewal I will not be renewing it.

Back to the original storyline.

Read the rest here.

Good News! This Site Is Succeeding!

Sorry about the lack of posts here and on my Omega Books blog. But it has been a very busy last couple of weeks. For one thing I have been ‘re-hired’ by the local POA board to help mentor the new POA office manager, about ten hours a week at 15 an hour.

Plus I am mentoring a Christian writer who is working on his first fiction novel, and has a WordPress blog as well.

Finally, a couple who run a news website that may be one of the few ‘non-click-bait’ alt-news sites out there, and consider me a friend of sorts, have posted FREE ADVERTISING for my two printed books and my FREE PDF e-book! Because of these free ads, I am now getting at least one or two and sometimes more DOWNLOADS of my free e-book as well as now book sales, daily! I recently sent a copy of Battle of the Band to Hawaii! The book buyer lives on the ‘Big Island’ where that volcano is, so prayers for her are in order. Keep safe my friend, and God be with you!

Hopefully soon I will be putting up a PayPal button link so one can buy my books using e-checks, which is a lot easier payment method than sending cash or check. Further, it will allow me to post more exact shipping charges. The book I sent to Hawaii was shipped a lot cheaper than I thought it would be shipped, so I’ll owe the buyer a refund of sorts. I would rather have gotten it right the first time!

Get the Word Out About Your Books? Start with Your Neighbors

As I have said in previous posts about how I began selling my first self-published novel, Battle of the Band, in 1996 WITH NO MONEY SPENT ON ADVERTISING, I was able to sell between 200 and 300 books within the first two years of its publishing and printing SOLELY by selling at the following:

Local writer conferences (I belong to Texas Mountain Trail Writers)
Neighborhood stores on consignment
BookZone, an early indy book publishing platform that did charge a small fee.
Just talking about the books to neighbors
Local events such as the Fourth of July parade and vendor fair, again paying a small fee to set up a booth.
“Press releases” in local papers.

Continue reading “Get the Word Out About Your Books? Start with Your Neighbors”

Finally! The Prodigal Band FREE PDF Download is Available!

Again, FINALLY! After working for a month thanks to BlueHost’s screw-up and my own pissy reaction to this screw up, and a week of setting up this site having almost no tech background at all (since html went by the wayside years ago), I, by, indeed, the Grace of God, have finally gotten my finalized The Prodigal Band FREE PDF registered at the Library of Congress yesterday (April 30, 2018) and the site set up yesterday afternoon and evening.

Further, I “cleaned up” the manuscript text some. Thanks to Allyson Kennedy of Authoring Arrowheads I was motivated to get rid of SOME of the cussing through my characters (but not all of it…I want my characters I created as a teenager to be seen as real people, and don’t most folks cuss every now and then, including Christians?), and wanted to clean up some of the “sex scenes” because, after all, someone under the age of 21 might want to download the book–I really don’t want to be sued by their parents for ‘indecent exposure’! So that, instead of “so-and-so” did “such-and-such” to “so-and-so” in a more graphic way, I changed it to “so-and-so” “made love” or “had sex” or “lit into” or some other much less graphic type language.

Why? “Edify” as the Apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:29. It’s in the Bible.

Generally I do not assign a “genre” to my books. Allyson Kennedy, for instance, writes Christian fiction. Now, anyone can read Christian fiction, but I assume mostly Christians read Christian fiction. I am Christian, but my “mission from God” (and I cam NOT stealing from the movie Blues Brothers here!) is to write to NON-Christians. Thus, I would call this e-book (and my two printed books Battle of the Band and The Prophesied Band) within the “spiritual” genre if there is such a thing. It was GOD, not me or my parents or ancestors, that gave me the talent and motivation to write these books.

Here is the link to the page from where one can download the FREE PDF (I could link directly to the e-book for download, but below the link is the entire Prologue to read, and then one can decide if they want the FREE e-book or not):

The Prodigal Band FREE PDF

Welcome to Another Fine Adventure With OmegaBooks! This Could Be It, Folks!

After NOT BEING ABLE to transfer my ‘omegabooks.net’ domain from BlueHost, as if they were stealing my paid for domain just because they could–maybe they didn’t and maybe I screwed up but I’ll never know the truth of it…BlueHost employees work for BlueHost, not their customers….I mean, isn’t that the mindset these days?–because when I unlocked the domain on BlueHost, then got a “secret code” called an EPP after I removed Privacy from the domain on BlueHost (it was the “privacy” thing that got me into trouble in the first place, but I am 65, am not a techie, so what did I know?), I got an e-mail from WordPress about “following instructions on an e-mail from ‘whois@BlueHost.com'” and, since BlueHost DELETED my domain site, I could NOT access any e-mail at ‘whois@BlueHost.com’! And no techie help at BlueHost solved this issue, so now basically BlueHost controls my paid for domain, ‘omegabooks.net.’

So this is what I am doing. WordPress, for some reason–good for WordPress–gave me a free domain, namely, what you see in the URL location atop your browser, ‘omegabooksnet.wordpress.com’ that is a FREE DOMAIN that I can turn into an actual ‘omegabooks.net’ website on WordPress WITHOUT having to pay for the domain again! But I will have to pay the $96 for the Premium plan. Fine. I was going to do this anyway if BlueHost would have done the right thing and allowed the domain to be transferred.

So it is this site on where I will either post the FREE PDF version of The Prodigal Band, or a link to it on a cloud server or whatever. Plus, I will be selling, either using PayPal or Amazon or some other platform my two already printed first two novels of the Prodigal Band Trilogy, Battle of the Band and The Prophesied Band. I will also be linking back and forth from my other Omega Books site