Author: Melissa Bowersock

Melissa Bowersock is an eclectic, award-winning author who writes in a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres. She has been both traditionally and independently published and lives in a small community in northern Arizona. Learn more about Melissa from her Amazon author page and her blog.

SELF-e: Connecting Indie Authors with Libraries

Library Journal SELF-e LogoRecently I was notified that my novel, Stone’s Ghost, was selected for the SELF-e program. This is a fairly new program designed to connect indie authors with libraries and create a win-win partnership. Authors provide their eBooks to the program for free; no royalties are paid to the author. The libraries then provide the books free to their patrons. In the past, indie authors have had difficulty getting their books into the library systems, but this new partnership will mitigate that hurdle and the author will have nationwide exposure. This is no small measure, since the Library Journal deduced that, “Over 50 percent of all library users go on to purchase eBooks by an author they were introduced to in the library.”

In order to find out more about this growing new system, I went to the source, Mitchell Davis. That name may be familiar to you. Mitchell was one of the original founders of BookSurge, which was sold to Amazon in 2005 and became CreateSpace. Continue reading “SELF-e: Connecting Indie Authors with Libraries”

How to Make a Book Perma-Free on Amazon

A Novel Idea by Melissa BowersockI was inspired by IU’s administrators when they came up with the nifty concept of First Chapters, a sampler collection of the first chapters of 22 minion novels. I thought this was a great way to take some new books for a test drive, especially since I can usually make up my mind about a book within the first few pages.  So, duly inspired and with the admin’s blessing, I created my own version, composed of the first chapters of my twelve (to date) novels. Not wanting to steal IU’s thunder with a similar name, I chose A Novel Idea for mine. Not terribly original, but it seemed to fit.

My plan was to make this eBook perma-free so readers anytime, anywhere, could take my first chapters out for a spin and see how they liked them.

There are several avenues to getting eBooks online, and of course Amazon is the 500-pound gorilla, so it gets the most bananas for the buck. However, when uploading a book to KDP, you do not get the option of choosing perma-free for a price. In order to accomplish this, you have to do a little end-around that behemoth primate. Here’s what I did. Continue reading “How to Make a Book Perma-Free on Amazon”

My Expensive But Not-So-Horrible Vanity Press Experience

Predatory Publisher Month at Indies UnlimitedIn contrast to some of the horror stories we’re hearing this month on #PublishingFoul, I thought it might be a good time to tell a somewhat mitigating story about the not-so-bad but still expensive lessons. The truth is, not every publishing horror story is awful. Along any continuum, you’re going to have a range of experiences, some worse, some better.

Back in the 90s, I had already had two books traditionally published, but the climate was rapidly changing. The bigger houses were getting very conservative and they were more and more unwilling to take a chance on an unknown or almost-unknown. If the author was not already a name, they weren’t biting.  Luckily for writers, there were plenty of small presses springing up across the country to take up the slack. Well, luckily for some, not so much for others, as we’ve seen. Continue reading “My Expensive But Not-So-Horrible Vanity Press Experience”

My Bad Experience with PublishAmerica/America Star Books

Predatory Publisher Month at Indies UnlimitedSome of you may be familiar with PublishAmerica, who some time ago changed their name to America Star Books. I did a post on the change last year and touched on my own story then, but I want to go into a bit more detail about their racket and how I extricated myself.

My run-in with them started in the 90s. I had had five books published already, two by a New York house and three by small presses, when I stumbled across their site. Their mantra at the time was, “We don’t want your money — we want your book!” Continue reading “My Bad Experience with PublishAmerica/America Star Books”