This section contains useful information on publishing, or self-publishing or indie-publishing. If the task is too daunting for you or you just want to hand it over to someone else to do for you, then I’m your man. I have published 300 books so far in 18 months.
PLR blog content for Writers Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
PLR blog content is useful for reasons that will suit many people including discerning authors. This may seem strange since you would expect them to write their own material. The fact is that they do, but a great deal of work goes into writing a good article or post, and sometimes even authors just don’t have the time to produce writing of high quality. This is where good PLR blog content can be useful. A good PLR author will have done the necessary research for the piece.
Find a reputable PLR provider
There are reputable companies out there offering PLR articles. However, most of the firms you will find are just reselling other people’s work that has been spun and respun so many times that it doesn’t make sense any longer. Yet others are selling plagiarized content. If you find one that offers high-quality PLR content, then you should make a note of it.
Choose a PLR topic or keyword phrase
Once you have chosen a topic or keyword phrase to help you find the article you need, you need to decide what kind of article you want. Do you want an ezine article, how-to article, social media post, blog content, or something else?
Find PLR blog content based on that topic
There are several ways to find content. One option is to search The Internet. Another option is to use a paid service. Obviously, one method is cheaper and the other more time-consuming.
Add images, videos, links, etc.
Once you have found an article that you think would work well for your business, you need to ‘make it your own ‘. You can do this by adjusting the style of the piece to match your own. You can also add some additional elements to make it more appealing to your readers. This includes adding images, videos, links to other articles, and even testimonials.
Publish your PLR content!
Once you have produced a good article from your PLR blog content, you should publish it as soon as possible. It will help you build authority and credibility with readers and the search engines. Repeating this process regularly will help you build up your own collection of high-quality PLR blog content.
You can now read foreign translations of novels by the Welsh writer Owen Jones in thirty-seven languages. Full details are on this blog
There are now several companies offering to facilitate the creation of foreign translations. This could be paper documents, website even novels. In fact, it has never been easier easier to read novels by authors from different countries and cultures. For example, the Welsh writer Owen Jones has books in thirty-seven languages. So, it is easy to imagine that most people in the world have access this Welsh writer’s work.
The Foreign Translations of Books by Owen Jones.
Owen Jones has been the main instigator of the translation of his books, because he is a self-published, or indie-published author. This obviously means that he has no agent or traditional publishing house to organise this sort of work for him.
“It takes a lot of time to find apposite narrators and translators”, he say, “and then to work with them suggesting translations and explaining difficult sentences. Naturally, that detracts from the time spent writing. It is the balance that each indie-author has to work out for him- or herself. The choice is between more books, or a wider readership? It’s a toss-up. However, it was an easy decision for me because I have always travelled, and speak seven or eight languages. I wanted my International friends to be able to read my books, if they want to…” he adds with a smile.
Which books by Owen Jones have been translated.
Owen Jones published his first novel Behind The Smile – The Story of Lek, A Bar Girl in Pattaya, in 2012. It was an immediate hit with the visitors to, and expats in Pattaya, Thailand. It is 112,000 words long, which has an effect on the willingness of translators’ to take it on. Jones works with narrator and translator colleagues who will accept a share of the sales revenues as payment. It is known as royalty share. Typically, the author receives 15-30% of the revenue, and the translator 60-70% with the intermediary taking 10%. It means that colleagues are less likely to take a risk on a large book, in case they have chosen unwisely.
Who translated the books?
The native-speaker narrators and translators of each language in the agency carry out the work on the books. Then the author and the collaborator work together to preserve as much of the meaning of the original text as possible.
Where can I find out more about these books in non-English languages?
If you would like to learn more about these books in other languages, you can start on this blog, Megan Publishing Services. The title bar (at the top of the blog page) contains many links to the various books, foreign translations and in English… even non-English audiobooks!
Are the foreign translations more expensive?
No, at least not necessarily. The author and the agency then choose a single, global price, which means that a book could cost, say $4.99 (+ taxes) in every country. However, $4.99 could be cheap in, say, Norway, but expensive in Somalia. So, it can work out more expensive, but then the people who want to read literature in foreign translations tend to have better jobs, so maybe that isn’t that important.
Located in South Wales, Barry lies roughly south-west of the centre of the UK, in The Vale of Glamorgan about ten miles west of the capital of Wales, Cardiff. In ancient times, Barry Island was famous because St. Baruc lived on it. In olden days, it became infamous for pirates and wreckers. Barry Island ceased to be an island in the late Victorian era, when they dug out the docks, and used the spoil to make a land bridge to the mainland.
Barry Wales Heritage
When my grandparents were youngsters, Barry was the exporter of the most coal in the world. I believe that it still holds the world record of a million tons in one year. However, that was more than a hundred years ago. My parents told me stories of being able to walk across Barry Docks by hopping from ship to ship. They were so tightly packed in when they were teenagers. They also told me that Barry had the greatest difference between high and low tide of anywhere in the world. About 44 feet, I think.
Owen Jones – Welsh Writer
My name is Owen Jones, and I am a novelist from Barry Wales. The Colcot, to be specific, which is north-east of the town centre, on the way to Cardiff.
I grew up in Barry-Wales in the Fifties and Sixties, so just after the Second World War. Barry escaped relatively unscathed from the bombing, or so I gather, because nearby Cardiff was deemed a more important target. I enjoyed my youth there. It was busy and there was plenty to do. There seemed to be lots of work too, and there were leisure facilities galore. My particular favourites were Saturday Morning Cinema Club, and the outdoor public swimming baths, although various types of beach with clean water practically surroundBarry. The rip tides were dangerous though, so I preferred the pool.
Then I left Barry-Wales for university in Portsmouth for five years, and almost ten years abroad in The Netherlands. Eventually, I returned ‘for good’ in my early thirties. I remember feeling that I had to be shoehorned back into Barry after the freedom of living in continental Europe. I don’t mean political freedom of course, but the English Channel is quite a mental barrier. For example, if I became bored in The Netherlands, I could hitch-hike to the South of France in a day or so. From Barry, I would have to get to the channel (175 miles), cross that (about eight hours) and then start travelling again. It takes the edge off it.
Yes, flights were an option back then. However, they were not the mode of transport that sprang first to my mind, as they would nowadays. Doesn’t anyone hitch-hike any more? It’s probably deemed unsafe 🙁
Life in Barry Wales
I worked very happily with my brothers in my father’s local construction firm for about fifteen years until he died, work dried up, and we all went our separate ways. That was when Barry-Wales started to go down hill too. Perhaps, I’m exaggerating because my father died and our firm went bust, but I think that it is more than that. There were two big, Edwardian (or Georgian) pubs in the town centre – The Vic(toria Arms?) and the Windsor Hotel. In fact, both were built as hotels but never used as such. One day, the Vic closed down! It was such a shock.
Within a few years, they had knocked it down and replaced it with a Tesco’s. The huge Royal Hotel in Cadoxton is now a Tesco’s too… and the massive Barry Hotel became a theme ‘disco’ for a while before also closing down. The same fate befell the large Romilly Snooker Hall. The council filled in our swimming pool too and built houses on it. Pubs and clubs, not to mention shops, were closing down at an alarming rate. Even Butlin’s Holiday camp on Barry Island, which had already changed hands several times, was demolished to build houses.
In my youth, it had brought in 3,000 happy, enthusiastic visitors a week in the summer. Those, mostly young, holiday-makers, rarely left the Island and its Pleasure Park and brought in a lot of money. A large proportion of Barry’s youth got their first job in Butlin’s or on the fairground. I did too, ‘on the jets’! Cheap flights to Spain and all-inclusive holidays probably killed that cash cow.
Barry’s Death Rattle
A sure sign that Barry had given up any lingering hopes of becoming a prosperous industrial town ever again was when they filled in Barry docks and built upon it. Tourism finally died too when the once beautiful Barry Island beach lost all its sand, because of dredging near Bristol. How many hundreds of thousands of people used to go to that beach every year? Miners saved up all year round for two weeks’ holiday on Barry Island for decades. The renowned and much-awaited Miners’ Fortnight, when money was no object and people partied for weeks on end. All gone now. It’s not so much that these things have gone, but that there are no modern equivalents!
When they close Cardiff Wales Airport, and the subject is always on the agenda, Barry Wales can just roll over and go to sleep like Rip van Winkel, although it will probably never rise again. The people of Barry have always loved Rhoose Airport, as we still call it.
It is best not to treat the above events as a trustworthy timeline, I don’t remember the exact order, but it isn’t really important, because they happened so quickly – within two decades.
Exile from Barry Wales
At this point, I went to live in Thailand, but still returned every now and again with my Thai wife. We even tried living there between 2018 and 2020, but Priti Patel was too powerful and spitefully made obtaining a residence permit too difficult, so we returned to Thailand just before Covid-19 broke loose. I was more than pleased to get out of Barry, which had become a very sad, pale reflection of what it had been even in my memory, although my wife loved it there. She hadn’t known it before – in its glory days though, and perhaps, nether had I.
We will always return to Barry-Wales, for a holiday, but it is now just a dead, residential suburb of Cardiff, where most of those who have a job go to work, and those with any money go to spend it.
PS: I recently read that Barry wales now has the third largest difference between high and low tide. It’s very sad that it has lost the distinction of first place, but it seems rather apt in a way 🙁
In this article, we’ll show you how to write your first book as an indie author based on the first-hand knowledge of Owen Jones, the indie author of 50+ novels and 125 manuals in English over the last twelve years.
Writing your first book as an indie author is a great way to share your knowledge and experience with others. It’s also a good way to earn some money. Whether you earn more if you’re self-published or not is difficult to say. However, this guide will teach you how to start writing your first book today.
Fiction or Non-fiction.
The first consideration is whether it is your intention is to write fiction of non-fiction. Perhaps you already have an idea for a gripping novel, or a non-fiction topic that fascinates you. If you don’t already have an idea for a novel, which can also be non-fiction of course, it is difficult to just invent one on the spot. Unless, perhaps you go for the life and times of a local celebrity past or present.
Choose Your First Book as an Indie Author
However, if you love what you do, then you might enjoy writing about it. Furthermore, if you enjoy writing about something, the chances are that you’ll be happy about researching and learning more about it every day. So, choose a topic that interests you, and you’ll find yourself naturally gravitating toward it. Like ‘Making Wine from the Grapes In the Garden’.
To Plan Or Not To Plan?
Or in writers’ technical terms, are you a planner or a pantser? As in ‘flying by the seat of…’ I personally do a bit of both, however, I plan less in a novel that I do for a manual. After all, a manual is factual, so in our example, if you forget to talk about feeding your grapes it’s a pretty serious omission, but if I forget to tell you something about a character in a novel, the chances are that you’ll never know about it. Still, before I start to write a book, I think about it for a few days and write down all relevant thoughts. With my novels, I usually know where I want to start and where I want to finish, but I’m not sure how to get there. It’s a lot like being in Cardiff and wanting to drive to Portsmouth with time being unimportant. You put those two points into a route planner and you get various routes. The way points are your initial chapter headings.
Start Writing!
So, I now have my starting point, a few cities along the way and my destination, but that doesn’t mean that I have to go that way when I get into my car. I may have to divert because of roadworks, or I may fancy stopping off of in a pretty little village for lunch. It is the same with a work of fiction for me. Sometimes, the final destination changes too! And titles change all the time, especially if your characters talk to you as mine do.
How Long Is The Journey?
A popular saying amongst writers is that the book is finished when the story is over, but it’s not always as simple as that. In Daddy’s Hobby (above), the protagonist, Lek, would not stop talking to me…telling me what to write and how to say it. It was my first novel, but I had done some research and it told me that a first novel should not be much more than 100,000 words. I tried to stop several ties, but Lek would not keep quiet. When I got to 112,000 I just went on strike. However, she still kept talking to me, so I started a sequel. By the way, that series ran to over 800,000 words in seven volumes! It is easier with non-fiction. When you have told the person’s factual story, or you have explained how to grow grapes and turn them into wine, the book is over.
Editing, Proofreading, Formatting and the Cover.
Now, you have a different set of decisions to make. Do you edit, proofread, format and publish the book yourself or farm it out? A lot of indie authors find this the boring bit, although there is worse to come, more on which later. I do it all myself, but it is not so easy. The way I look at it though is that it is better to discover your weaknesses and learn from your mistakes. I have learned that if I read through it immediately, I will miss most of my typos. It is a common phenomenon. Your brain remembers what it wanted to write, and that is what you see – even in a 100k-word novel! It is quite amazing So, I wait a fortnight, but during that time, I design the book cover in my head, and write a title, subtitle, and description (blurb) for the book. Give your thoughts on the cover to a professional cover designer and let them get on with that, while you write, rewrite and perfect the blurb. If you have any of the fortnight left, create an author’s blog, and write as many different draft Tweets as you can.
Marketing Your First Book as an Indie Author
There are many, many opinions on this topic. Some say to start marketing as soon as you start writing, if not before! So, their theory is that you explain the journey, a sort of running commentary, as your book progresses. Some actually tell the (bones of) the story too. Others just talk about the nuts and bolts of writing or / and the emotions that it generates. I usually start my promo in the two weeks before editing starts.
TIP: as I write, I might mention something I am not sure about, say the date of a famous battle. I mark these uncertainties with ***, so I know to check them on the edit.
My routine is to start sending out Tweets and other promo material to social media now. I combine the editing and formatting and read through my book twice, which often takes a week. Then, I correct every mistake that I see as soon as I see it, and I eliminate the ***’s. Then, I scan the book fairly quickly to see if the formatting is regular. I find that this is more important than getting it ‘right’.
H1 for the title; H2 for chapter titles; all chapters start on a new right-hand page, etc, etc. Then, I do a search the text for *** and eliminate any that remain.
Finally, I read through it again slowly for the last time. Everything has to be perfect in my eyes now, because that is it. Many authors will then send the completed product to beta readers, friends and family, who will point out even more errors. This can be embarrassing, but not as much as if you publish with them in the book.
Publishing Your First Book as an Indie Author
You don’t have a lot of options as an indie writer. You will become an indie publisher to, and the best way to start is at Amazon KDP. It’s pretty straight-forward to complete an ebook, paperback and hardback within a couple of hours. When you are done, your book will be published within 72 hours. Then real work of selling your first book as an indie author begins.
However, that is a whole other story – a sequel perhaps 🙂
I feel that I have already written too much of late about my new book covers, but it is a very important strategy in my plans for the future
I have quite a few books, but most of them were written years ago and the covers are stale. So, they need replacing. There is no argument about that. However, at what pace?
Obviously, cost is a constraint. People say that the benefits that the new covers will bring in… increased revenue… will pay for future investment. However, it doesn’t always work like that. Returns can be slower than hoped for.
Unexpected Results of Cover Changes
This can be because old customers don’t recognise the new covers or series formats. The benefits of change can be slow to accrue. Slower than hoped for, or expected anyway.
One thing that keeps me hopeful though is that I receive compliments on my new book covers several times a week, and mostly from people I don’t know.
That is encouraging, because even using the best cover design company in the world, it is a big step to rebrand… expensive too.
The company that I use allows an infinite number of remakes, but, which is perfect for the novice, even if a little embarrassing. It is far better to have thought about what information you want your new book cover to display beforehand. My tip is get a book off your shelf that is ‘similar’ to yours, ie if yours is in a series use one from a series as an example to copy.
My New Book Covers Checklist
So, my checklist for book cover design is: you will need the book title and your name for a start. Other options include: a subtitle, a series name, the number of the book in the series, and collaborators. Then on the back cover: a description or blurb, an author bio (and photo?), the title(s) (again?), and the cover designer. All the while remembering that you will need to leave enough room for the barcode.
Check out where I buy my new book covers on this link:
I’m sorry if I’m boring you, my regular readers, but I currently have a Book Cover Obsession.
As you probably know, I wasn’t like this even a couple of months ago, but that is a sign of how rapidly these things can get a hold of you. Or, me at any rate.
In my defence, book covers are extremely important to a writer, but I just hadn’t realised how much before.
My Book Covers
As people, we are admonished not to judge a book by its cover, but the plain fact is that we all do that several times a day. So, I am getting to grips with this now, and am commissioning 2-3 covers a month. Today, I was trying to decide which the next two should be, and I noticed that my two worst selling books have black covers! Well, have black as the predominant colour (or shade, for the pedants).
Obsession
I hadn’t realised that before, but why hadn’t I? Probably, because I made them, and think that they fit the story perfectly. However, when you analyse it, I know the story, but a potential reader does not! It could be off-putting, I suppose. It was amateurish, but now I a using professional book cover designers.
Someone said that black on the cover is acceptable, if there is a death in the story. Well, there is, but the book browser doesn’t know that. I think that people can get too bogged down in symbolism. Another person Tweeted that two bullet holes on the cover of a murder mystery might signify that it is the second volume… Really? My guess would have been that the shooter was a poor shot.
Interpretation
Not only that, but not everyone takes the same thing home from reading the same book. I have talked to many readers over the last ten years who loved a book of mine, but had a totally different take on what it was about… and their interpretation was just as valid as mine.
There is one fantastic reviewer who actually taught me what two of y books were really about! How about that?
It’s why I love reviews. I often learn things about my books that I didn’t know, and I mean that quite literally. However, when will this book cover obsession pass? I don’t know… when all my novels have better cloths, I suppose.
I need to learn how to edit in Photoshop, and my proficiency level is rock-base bottom.
‘Why?’ are you asking? Well I’ll get into that in a moment.
I’ve written extensively recently about the quality of my book covers… or it is not that so much. They were excellent book covers in their day between five and ten years ago, but now they look a little jaded, old-fashioned even.
So, as I have written before, I have started to commission new book covers, and the firm that I have chosen also sends a ‘master’ in Photoshop format. This is perfect for me, because many of my books have been translated, so ‘all’ I have to do is change the text for the cover design of the translation.
Herein lies the rub. My Photoshop Proficiency is zero, and, I don’t even have the Photoshop application, which is rather expensive, I think.
An Alternative to Photoshop
Well, there is a fix for not having Photoshop; Gimp is a free alternative. However, both Gimp and Photoshop seem horrendously difficult to learn from where I am now.
Perhaps, I could get the book cover editing done on Fiverr, but something tells me that it is better to learn how to make the changes myself.
So, that’s what I’m going to do. I reckon that it will take at least a week to get my Photoshop proficiency up to the level necessary for photo editing, but so be it. You can find examples of my efforts on this blog. Click ‘Foreign Translations’ in the title bar and choose a language or book title.
GIMP
Update: I have spent a week learning Gimp now, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of its capabilities. There is so much mouse work! You have to click an are to select it, then click a function to bring up first-level options; then click on a ‘topic’ to bring up more options, and so on until you find the function you want. This is sort of to be expected, but it is really difficult to remember which functions are three or four levels below a top-level word.
There is no way that I will be able to learn Photoshop or Gimp in a month… six months is probably closer to the mark.
I have noticed recently that this blog, Megan Publishing Services (MPS) is beginning to receive lots of visits from people searching for foreign translations. So, I would like to clarify what kind of foreign translations they an expect to find when they click through to us.
Foreign Translations
There are three main variations of what I think this phrase can mean. So, let’s take a look at them.
Languages Translation Service
Basically, MPS does not provide a foreign languages translation service as such. However, there are many companies that allow you to type in a few words, some up to several thousand, and receive an automated translation in the language of any country instantly. Most of these are pretty good if you keep what you want translated short and simple. They work best if you want a fairly accurate translation within a language group. By this I mean, German, Dutch and English is a group with a similar culture; so is Italian, French and Spanish. They work far less reliably if you are translating from say English into Yoruba, Thai or even Russian. In fact, you should never reply on these apps for more than a rough idea about the target language, because they make ludicrous mistakes very often. They translate words, not ideas.
Translate to Different Languages
This is pretty much the same as above, but I take it to mean not online, and not instantaneous. For example, you could submit a document to a human translator, who will give it the personal attention it deserves for a fee. We don’t provide this service either, although we, who are associated with this blog, speak eight different languages between us. Again, there are several companies that specialise in linking a professional to a private ‘gig’ for a small fee.
Foreign Language Services
Having said all that, there are two foreign language services that we can provide.
Authors
1] You will notice that Owen Jones has had many of his books translated in foreign languages. As I am writing this, the total is forty different foreign tongues. We use two companies to perform these tasks. Both will try to facilitate the finding of a translator in the language of your choice. However, it is not guaranteed, and things can and do go wrong. If you want your book translated, we can supervise the task. Or just help you find a translator, who will work for a set fee, or a percentage of the sales proceeds (60-75%). It can take from days to months to find someone suitable, although we can arrange that for you. 2] If you produce an online publication, or want to, you can choose from about 125 niche ebooks of about fifteen 500-word articles to use in it. This is useful if you want quick targeted content, say to start a blog, or to use while sick or on holiday. Some of these ebooks have been translated into several important international languages.
Readers
There are more than 800 publications in forty languages on this site. If you liked one of our books in say, English, and you want your Spanish friend to read it, this is very often possible. Just look up the title in the relevant section on the title bar. I hope that this article has clarified what we at MPS mean by ‘Foreign Translations’, and, as always, if you think that we can help, just drop me an email or use the contact form above.
The strength of this blog, Megan Publishing Services, is the number of other languages that my books are in on it. At least, that’s one of the ways that I see it. I have written fifty-odd novels and about a hundred and twenty-five other books, and people I have never met from lands far and wide have wanted to translate them. This represents a colossal amount of work, effort and collaboration from people right around the globe. I live in Thailand, but I have worked with narrators from Canada to Australia, Europe and the Americas. Then there are translators living from Peru to Mongolia, and most countries in between including all the larger European languages and several Asian and African ones too from Afrikaans to Russian.
At the time of writing, there are about seven hundred translations and narrations in about thirty-five other languages on the Megan Publishing Services blog.
Other Languages
Today, I added books translated into eight more languages new to the blog, namely: Czech, Chinese, Hungarian, Macedonian, Slovak, Telugu, Turkish and Urdu.
And I have more to add. Off the top of my head, I can say that I need to add: Hauza, Igbo, Mongolian, Northern and Southern Soto, and Zulu.
Sadly, no one has offered to translate a book into my own language, Welsh, yet. I’m working on it though. To clarify, I come from Wales, but write in English.
When I have posted a page for all of the other languages that my books exist in, I will add links to each of the books and, possibly, the translators and narrators, so that readers and listeners can get to know the better. I hope that we can help them along in their careers.
Support Narrators and Translators
So,if you are not a native English-speaker, please, follow the link below to see whether I have anything in your language, and know that if you actually buy a book, you will be encouraging the narrators, translators and me to keep this project going.
Thanks to all who have contributed foreign translations, and to all of you who have bought them!
The link to the list of other languages covered so far is: Languages on MPS
As many of you know, I finished writing Dead Centre II at the end of last month. It was also the first book that I had written solely on a tablet – a Kindle Fire HDX. I had never tried editing a novel on a tablet though, so my next task was to try that.
Editing a novel on a tablet has been a disaster!
I will explain. The Kindle Fire HDX has sixteen gigabytes or memory, so plenty you would think. And, yes, indeed it is! If you only write a couple of thousand words a day and then upload them to the main computer. It works very well if you then just tag them on the end of your novel..
The size of the Kindle (in the photo), compared with my Asus, is tiny, yet it has ten hours of battery life compared with the Asus’ two and a half. It makes it the ideal medium to use when I’m out for the day but still working. That was why I thought I’d try editing a novel on a tablet as well.
Kindle Fire HDX
However, although it can easily read books much larger than the 75,000 words in Dead Centre 2, it is not equipped to hold them in memory for editing. While it can cope with editing an article or a chapter with ease, editing a novel on a tablet like the Kindle Fire is awesomely tedious.
The first problem with editing a novel on a tablet is that the internal gubbins of the tiny machine is so overwhelmed that it sometimes can’t find the time to load the keyboard. If you can persuade it to do that, and there are a few tricks you can play on it, it takes seconds to carry out each command. Usually, between one and sixty, unfortunately, but it can take longer.
So, say in your typing frenzy, you allowed the predictive selection of ‘standardised’ for ‘stand-up’, you would need to backspace seven times and type ‘-up’ (i.e, three characters). That is ten operations, which could easily take five to ten minutes.
Now, I like the app called My Office, I think (a large ‘W’ on a red square), but I’m afraid it can’t cope with editing a novel on a tablet. Writing, yes, but editing, no. When writing on the Kindle Fire, I achieved speeds of 600 words an hour. That is comparable with my speed on my Asus, although I can write faster anually, although I hate typing up.
Dog Root in a Tree Stump
Dog root in a tree stump
A photo for those of you who couldn’t see the root outside my office window. A root-branch transformed itself into the head of a dog overnight! See it, clearly marked? You will probably need to enlarge the image to see it easily. However, she is there looking up to two o’ clock.
My experiment with editing a novel on a tablet has put me back a few days. Mainly because I did stick with it for fourteen of the twenty chapters. However, that means that I have to crack on now.
Today, some friends suggested that I should consider republishing books from my flagship series Behind The Smile. However, I find it almost impossible to contemplate.
That is a huge concept to get my head around.
It has produced most of my sales for the last decade!
Republishing
Their suggestion was made because we were talking about my book sales, which have been slowing down for about a year. So, they thought that it might be worth rebranding, and then republishing the books in this series.
I am not completely sure what they mean by that. I think that it probably has to do with altering the titles, the blurbs and the genre, and then encapsulating all that in new covers in order to make the series more selectable by a new readership. In fact, a large part of this proposed rebranding would be to create new covers to reflect the new genre.
On the face of it, I like the idea. But when you dig down into what republishing books entails, it involves a massive amount of time and work. After all, I have spent ten years building up a readership for the series as it is and looks now. It is recognisable as it is.
If I change everything, I will have to unpublish the existing series of seven volumes, thereby losing all possible sales on them, and republish the new ones… Effectively starting from scratch again.
Rebranding Books
It is a big gamble.
In an attempt to find out more, I did a search on ‘rebranding books’, and came up with several very interesting articles. These authors didn’t actually go the whole hog of ‘rebranding and then republishing books, but they talked about cover make-overs.
One article was about the legendary Dune by Frank Herbert. I think I remember rightly that it was first published in 1965. Anyway, the interesting bit is that the whole series of five books has had completely new covers every five years ever since!
Rewriting?
Look the article up, it opened my eyes. I have always written and published books, slapped a cover on them and that was it. However, apparently cover design is also prey to fashion, which is very difficult to pin down, as we all know – look at clothing!
So, I will start with new covers, but I will keep rebranding and republishing open in my mind as an option.
What do readers think of this marketing tactic, and have any authors who come here any experience with rebranding and/or republishing books?
Regards,
Owen
If you like vampire stories but are a bit bored with the old model, try this humorous, even funny vampire story set in a remote village.
I want to tell you an amusing story that my stepfather told me the other day. He can tell it in his own words. Over to you, Dad.
Thanks, Chalita.
I started to eat curry when I moved to Portsmouth as a student in the Seventies. In those days, nearly all 'curry restaurants' were Indian, or so we thought. I usually ate a moderately hot curry, but sometimes, if it was on the menu, I would choose the Malaysian curry, which was milder and contained pineapple chunks and slices of banana. I liked it with paratha or chapatis.
Thai curry
Thirty years later, I moved to Thailand to live with my Thai girlfriend and we got married. She is the best cook I have ever lived with without a shadow of a doubt, and her curries are fantastic. Her Thai curries, that is. She won't cook Indian food because she says that the smell of the spices lingers too long.
And she's right. Thai cooking smells do not linger.
Anyway, after a few years, I remembered my previous penchant for Malaysian fruit curry and asked her to make me one.
'Never!' she replied. 'If you want Malaysian food, go to Malaysia. This is Thailand!'.
An overreaction, I thought, but then Thais are rightly proud of the esteem, with which the world holds their cuisine, so I never mentioned it again.
About ten years on, my wife was going to an all day wedding event out of the village. They start early, five or six a.m. and finish late afternoon, and I had long since stopped attending them if I couldn't walk home when bored.
As usual, before leaving, she checked that I had clean clothes, a few chores to do, and plenty of food. The main course was a large bowl of my favourite Thai curry Penang, which is fairly hot with a coconut milk base.
I have never mentioned this to anyone before, but I think that Penang is in Malaysia.
Thai Fruit Curry
Anyway, at midday, I thought I would have my curry and then go for a few beers in the village. It was Saturday after all, not that that had anything to do with it. I was just about to get my rice out of the steamer, when I had a brain-wave. There was diced pineapple in the fridge left over from the night before; there were bananas in the bowl and no wife to stop me!
I mixed the fruit, two handfuls of pineapple chunks and three sliced bananas, into the Penang and ate it with toast. It was fantastic! I enjoyed every mouthful. Happy memories of student days and nights long past!
I washed the dishes and went for a shower.
It was there, under the cool water, that I started to get flatulence. I was filling up with wind, but I couldn't get rid of it. It soon became uncomfortable and even painful.
I dried off and lay on my bed in a foetal position in the hope of squeezing some of the gas out, but in vain.
When my wife got home at five o'clock, I was still on the bed suffering, but the pressure in my stomach was causing acid reflux and the taste was revolting.
I recounted my story, but there was nothing she could do to help.
'You know that we use two or three bananas as a cure for diarrhoea', she said. 'What possessed you to bung yourself up with a stomach full of hot curry?'
I couldn't think of a decent reason, but I suffered one of the most uncomfortable nights in my life.
Malaysians might use bananas in mild curries, but Thais don't know what a mild curry is, so never add bananas to theirs.
I don't any more either.
The moral of the story is:
'Don't try to teach your Granny how to suck eggs!'
Here is another article on food:
Thai Food in Our House
The Ultimate Promo Package is Megan Publishing Services’ prime advertising deal, which is designed to give a three-stage boost to the book or artwork that you want to promote.
NB: The Ultimate Promo Package is subject to limited availability because I need to read each book in order to provide a review – no more than one package a week (not per person – in total)!
Stage One: Lift off provides a powerful push to get your work noticed. Within a month, but at your own pace, we will produce an author interview, a book review, and a book sales’ page, which means that it will receive a random share of 30,000 banner adverts on MPS (Megan Publishing Services) a day and I will promote them on at least a dozen of the top Social media platforms
Stage Two: After-burner consists of creating six Tweets based on, and so uniquely relevant, to your work, which will be promoted across the Internet. The book review will be posted to Amazon US, Amazon UK and Goodreads. The Amazon US review will be available on ALL Amazon franchises around the world.
Stage Three: Cruising means promoting your work using three of your Tweets posted to my ever-growing band of 75,000 artistic reading and writing Twitter followers three times a day (every eight hours) for 365 days, which means that they will be seen potentially 82,125,000 times. Note that posting the Tweets every eight hours means complete global coverage within peak periods (due to the various time zones).
In short, the Ultimate Book Promo Package includes:
A review of your novel on my high-traffic website, Amazon and Goodreads (permanent placements).
Six Tweets based on your novel for you to use. I will send three of these Tweets to 75,000 of my followers three times a day for 365 days or at least 82,125,000 potential impressions.
An author interview about yourself and up to three of your books (permanent page).
A sales page for one of your books on Megan Publishing Services for one month.
Random banner ads out of approx 30,000 per day for one month (linked to sales page above).
Promotion of all website pages to more than a dozen Social Media accounts, including: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Livejournal, Plurk, Digg, Diigo, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Blogger, Surfit, Favoritus, Folk’d, G+, Favoritus and more.
First come, first served due to limited availability (I have to read the books myself, in between writing my own) – no more than one package per week!
I want to share a story about hiring a virtual assistant with you.
It is a true and very sad story concerning a friend of mine that happened yesterday.
He is a writer, a successful writer, I would say, since he earns enough to support himself and his family, although he is not ‘well-known’ and you won’t find his books in the local supermarket.
Staff needed
Anyway, several years ago, he started having his books narrated through ACX, which is Audible, which is Amazon. They give authors two hundred coupon codes per book so that they can give reviewers a free book.
My friend had 10,000 of them in August of 2020 and had no idea what to do with them. He had used only 213 over two years by then.
I will allow him to continue the story.
Audiobooks
“One day, it dawned on me that Audible would pay me the price of the book for giving it away, so I thought about how to capitalise on that, while promoting myself at the same time.
“I started to promote my codes to Facebook groups dedicated to books, and found that there were dozens of groups for authors to promote their audiobooks to avid listeners.
“Within a short time, I was giving away 300-400 codes a month and making a decent extra income.
“I was very pleased with myself, as you can imagine.
“However, this extended marketing brought with it the attention of so-called virtual assistants. God knows why they have that title, because they are real people, not machines or algorithms.
Virtual Assistant
“I resisted their offers of help for months, but then accepted one. My idea was that I would load my codes into a site built for that purpose, and then promote the URL of that site, so that those interested could retrieve codes as they wanted them. ACX is happy with this system, and even recommends a site to use. I used it”.
“The deal with the virtual assistant, VA, was that I would continue to promote the codes to Facebook Groups, while he sought blogs and the like to promote to. It worked, and my income tripled in a month!
“That happy state of affairs continued for three or four months and my income even rose every month until it reached $4,988 last June. I was as happy as a sandboy.
“Until yesterday, that is, when emails from narrators began to pour in asking why ACX had sent them an email notifying them that all their free codes for my books were henceforth invalid.
Authors Beware!
“I didn’t get the $4,988 from ACX. I received $198.10. ACX has not contacted me, but they have told my narrators that they have detected ‘fraudulent activity’ on my account. All payments and all codes have been blocked.
“I don’t know why, and maybe never will, since ACX is not talking to me. It is very sad, and I feel somewhat ashamed at losing $500 a week. However, what is worse is not knowing what I am being accused of, or what I did wrong.
VA – Virtual Assistant – “Very ‘Andy”
“I can only assume that the VA was bending the rules.
“So, my fellow authors, beware of some sweet-talking virtual assistants because they can ruin your business and leave you with nothing, while they can always find another mug to milk”.
I think that you will agree that it is a very sad story, but I put it here to give authors something to think about, when they feel inclined to form an association with a Virtual Assistant they don’t know at all.
The previous one was seven years old and the designers had stopped keeping it up to date several years ago. Therefore, as WordPress developed, certain key features had ceased to work.
The result was that it was becoming tedious to update.
I, and my colleagues and friends chose the new blog theme that you see before you at this moment. The designers have produced it especially for authors and publishers just like me 🙂
We set our new blog theme up quite quickly, although that is not to say that this new theme is without its problems, not the least of which is the slow response from the support desk and the lack of a clear, easily referenceable manual.
Blog Support
In these days of Covid-19, support must be difficult, since call centres are all closed, or should be, I imagine. Either that or they are running at one-third to a quarter capacity. Anyway, the support team does answer eventually, but it can take days, which seems like years, if you are anxious to get a new blog theme up and running!
If they had a comprehensive or even just a decent manual for the theme, I am sure that my friends and I could have sorted it out for ourselves much more quickly. However, the guide, such that it is, is on line and nothing more than a bunch of hyperlinks. After clicking on a few of them, I don’t know where I am any more.
My biggest mistake with the new blog theme was to impose it directly on top of the old one. I advise you to open a fresh instance of WordPress somewhere, and practise there until perfect. That way, you won’t lose your blog for a couple of days, like I did.
What a panic that was, I can tell you!
The new theme is huge though. My blog is quite large anyway for a one-man band, Owen Jones, the former owner, had created nearly three thousand entries. Two thousand of them were posts and pages! Still, I was stunned to find that the blog had swollen to 4.4 GB after applying the new theme!
Theme Features
To be honest, I have only set up the barest blog from the resources available in this theme. I am aware of what else it can do, but time has so far prevented me from learning how to implement more. Features, such as the direct sale of books (without paying Amazon, Apple or anyone else); the rental of blog space to advertisers such as authors, publishers or just about anyone; and so much more.
In fact, I have just decided that the next feature I want to implement is ‘the shop’. I am going to call it ‘Megan’s Market’, where I intend to sell readers’ and writers’ paraphernalia. It will also be able to handle the sale of ebooks, my own and those of others.
I hope that you will support me in these ventures, especially the direct sale of ebooks. If you are a regular visitor, you will notice me adding these extra features to our new blog theme over the coming month(s) 🙂
On the other hand, if you would like to purchase your own copy of this theme, called ‘Publisher’, or one like it but geared in a different direction, the owners are currently, as I write, offering a discount of 45%!
The man, the entity, as I have learned to describe him, whom I have known as my father for all of my life, is Colin Jones. He gave me a few carrier bags in 1999 and asked me to read the contents and to write a book on it, if I could. Well, this is it: The Eternal Plan – Revealed.
At that time, I could not and time did not seem pressing so I put the bags in my safe at home. He passed away a few years later on his 72 birthday, the 21st February.
I, and all of our family were devastated, but I did nothing about ‘his papers’. I had no idea what to do.
A few years later, I moved abroad and wrote a novel. That took five years, although it is still unpublished. In 2011, I started a new venture publishing ebooks that I had written myself.
The courage to write these ebooks had come from writing the first book. I looked for ways to circumvent traditional publishing and came across Amazon’s Kindle.
I learned how to publish my ebooks through them and realised how to publish Dad’s book.
It took me a long time, but I think that I was guided by Spirit. I was a slow learner.
My Dad, Colin Jones, would never have said that these writings are his own. Rather he would say that he was inspired, in the true sense of the word. People told him what to write.
All of our family witnessed this over five or six decades. Sometimes, Dad would be sitting with us watching TV, but Dad’s eyes would be shut and he would be writing the pieces that you see in this ebook. He did automatic drawings too.
My brothers and I are very privileged to have been born with such a person, but as with most instances with parents, we realised it too late.
I hope that you enjoy the tranquil, yet so powerful words and ideas rxpressed in the The Eternal Plan – Revealed. I will expand it in later editions and eventually compile a sequel.
One last point, my father’s mother, Lavinia Jones, founded a spiritualist church in Barry, South Wales, where we lived and that church on Butrill’s Road is still running to this day.
Links to the Various The Eternal Plan – Revealed Websites
The audiobook is narrated by Steve Olsen, whose melodic, soft American accent expresses both the tranquility and the power of the words. Listen to the sample below or follow the link to the free audiobook.
The Eternal Plan – Revealed is in audiobook, ebook and paperback formats on Amazon and also available in other languages! See Foreign Translations above.
The Humorous Tale of a Contemporary Vampire Family
by
Owen Jones
Narrated by
Melanie Crawley
Heng Lee is a goat-herd in the remote mountains north-east of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, very close to the border with Laos. It is a tight-knit community where everyone knows one another.
Heng gets sick all of a sudden, but not too sick to take the goats out, until one day he has to go to see the local shaman, because he has started fainting.
There are no medical doctors in the vicinity and the Shaman has been good enough for most people for centuries.
The Shaman takes some specimens and comes to the conclusion that Heng’s kidneys have stopped functioning and so has little time left to live.
The battle is on to save Heng’s life, but there are other forces at work too.
What will become of Heng, his family and the rest of the community, if he takes the Shaman’s advice?
A Story of Love, Intrigue and the Underworld on the Costa del Sol
by
Owen Jones
Narrated by
William Merryn Hill
Daisy, the proud daughter of a wealthy ex-London gangster, John, and his Spanish wife, Teresa, grew up in Marbella on the Costa del Sol, aka, the Costa del Crime. She idolised her parents and sought to impress her ageing father by helping him run the family businesses after uni. However, a disastrous error of judgement ends in family tragedy, and her mother puts Daisy on a safer path of helping the local community as a penance. Daisy’s Chain is a tragic tale with a pleasantly happy ending.
