Libra Shrugged: How Facebook’s dream of controlling the world’s money crashed and burned. 2 NOV 2020

[reddragdiva]

jesus fuck, self publishing.

so IT’S A HAPPENER YAY W00T

publishing date is 2 NOV 2020.

book page: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/libra/

so i need to get text to amazon 3 days before, and smashwords wants ten days before. (i might push smashwords date back.)

at this point 95% of my problems are marketing and promotion.

the other 5% are re-remembering mercifully repressed details of the self-publishing process, given the inarguable certainty of universal laws that computers are dogshit. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

in more comforting news, here's past asset bubble veteran Inch to offer calming advice on writing:

Comments

[sabotabby]

Yay new book!

[greylock]

Is bitcoin still a thing?
It seems so 2018.

I have vague recollections of what this book is about. Is this your second bitcoin one?

(2020 has been a trip - I mean, your daughter is a teen now, right? - but I am sure a sequence of events happened once.)

[reddragdiva]

Facebook! Horrible nerds! Getting their comeuppance!

the whole dumb idea came from bitcoin fans, but note how I managed to leave bitcoin entirely out of the description

[greylock]

Librecoin factoids randomly popped into my head today.

I have so few fucks to give about Facebook (or any cryptocurrency), I'd quite forgotten that footnote in Zuck's hubris.

[theandrewhickey]

Recommendation for future books -- use Draft2Digital rather than Smashwords. It's much better at international payments and tax stuff, has an interface that seems designed some time later than 1993, doesn't just repeatedly throw a million errors every time you upload an ebook until you sacrifice a goat, has dynamically-updating author information (so every time you publish a new book, the "also by this author" pages in the old books and the author bio auto-update), and creates nifty author pages like https://books2read.com/ap/vxbkLR/andrew-hickey and book pages like https://books2read.com/b/mVrzYM , which will take people to their retailer of choice.

[theandrewhickey]

Ignore that. I now see you've used D2D *and* Smashwords. I personally can't be bothered selling through Smashwords any more, because 99% of its usefulness is as a distributor, but clearly you have more patience than me ;)

[reddragdiva]

yes I took your advice on smashwords ;-) I only put it up on Smashwords cos d2d doesn't do them, and they still have some brand name as an outlet. (Though Apple is really the distant second after Kindle.)

[theandrewhickey]

Yeah, my sales go Kindle >>>>> Apple >>> Kobo >>>>>>>>> everything else.
One other bit of advice -- I'd put it out as a hardback as well, through Lulu. Not because you'll get many sales that way (though you might get a few -- I usually get the odd sale that way) but because when people look at Amazon and see the ebook for £5 and the paperback for £10 (or whatever), both of those suddenly look cheaper if there's a £20 hardback there as well. You can use the same PDF file and cover art you used for the paperback, so there's no real additional effort
Plus if, once Covid is over if ever, you decide you want to do speaking gigs or signings or something, a small stack of hardbacks along with the paperbacks can look impressive.

[reddragdiva]

ooooooooooooooooh. I should definitely do that, then.

[reddragdiva]

I'm also considering an audiobook. You should try those, given your podcasts work well.

[ludy]

Inch looks very wise

[reddragdiva]

i can tell you, he's been through some shit. Here's Inch, his Ty slightly askew, hitting the sauce after having seen what his crypto portfolio did in the past week

[ludy]

:)

[rosefox]

Congratulations!

Since my entire job is helping self-published authors market their books, let me know if I can be of any help. :)

[reddragdiva]

:-D Well, I'm going through various checklists of things to do, and they all say much the same things, so I suspect that ACTUALLY DOING THEM is the key thing.

At the moment it's a few text documents with to-do lists. "go through all my media contacts from the past three years" is still a to-do item, for example ...

so it's self-published, which means that the rational thing to do with a random epub or PDF in the inbox is ignore it - so just spamming copies is out. I need to build up rep in a planned manner ...

[lovingboth]

Random PDFs get more attention if they know how much the previous one sold...

[foxfirefey]

One more preorder from me!