Tag Archives: Amazon

I’m a Bookmaker

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I often get questions about getting published. My answer?

I have no clue. I’m definitely not an expert.

But you’ve been published. Look at all those books. And you publish a literary magazine.

And I do. And I admit I’m a little surprised when I look at my backlist. Because, yes. I have a lot of published books. And I’ve learned a lot about how to publish them. I know how to format a manuscript, how to upload it to Amazon and Smashwords, I’m usually able to edit my own stuff, and I’m slowly learning the ins and outs of designing my own cover and illustrating my books when necessary.

I try, very hard, to explain that my path to being published isn’t really going to work for everyone. I’m self-taught, but I know my limits and I know when I need to consult an expert. I’ve hired developmental editors, for example, because I know that’s not my field of expertise. I often hire someone to design covers for me, or at least I used to, back when I wrote novels. If I ever write another one, chances are I’ll hire someone for that, too.

With all that said, I have one bit of advice for new writers who want to self-publish. Don’t go to a self-publishing publisher. Do as much as you can yourself. And take an a la carte approach to the rest. Chances are very good if you go to a publisher who charges you to publish your book, you’ll be overcharged and your book will not be a quality product. You’ll make less on royalties from your book because the publisher will take a cut, and you’ll be overcharged for author copies of your book, making it difficult to sell them yourself and make a profit. (I know books are overpriced, but nobody really wants to pay $20-plus for a paperback book.)

And so…I’ve finally broken down and put all my knowledge into a short (about four and a half minutes) presentation. I may eventually start giving this presentation in person, but I’m not a great public speaker except when it comes to reading my poetry (and so far nobody’s wanted to pay to hear that). Plus, as I said, I don’t really consider myself an expert.

But I am a bookmaker.

Sum total of my knowledge about bookmaking, also available here: https://michellegflye.com/self-publishing-from-a-bookmakers-pov/

It’s Free!

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Forget my complicated relationship with Amazon for a bit. Right now, as we speak, my new book of love poetry, Where the Sidewalk Begins, is totally free for your Kindle. It’ll be that way until Sunday, and on Sunday at 11 a.m. I’m going to go live on Instagram and read parts of my book.

Which means if you want to read the book and request a poem to be read, you can do it.

Or you can read the book and ask me questions about it.

So you got some homework to do, and actually, so do I. Because I have a mind like a steel…tablespoon. It fills up quickly and stuff sloshes out. So the poetry I wrote and carefully selected and formatted and made into a book might have been forgotten by now, lol. And definitely any inspiration behind it. l

Tomorrow I’ll talk a little about why I’m a bit scared of the idea of going live. And why I’m going to do it anyway.

Dare I take that first step, feel heel strike hard stone, face the rest of my life…alone?

From “Where the Sidewalk Begins” by Michelle Garren-Flye
Photo by Michelle Garren-Flye Copyright 2023

It’s Complicated…

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Last year one of the local bars held a singles meet-and-greet where people were given their choices of cups. Red for in a committed relationship, green for available and yellow for “It’s complicated.”

I was interviewed for a local television news story last week. If you’d like to watch it, you can here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Rr4vjwxjk&t=15s. The reporter was young, enthusiastic and very, very capable. I admired her. She asked me a lot of insightful questions about bookselling. One of those questions was something like how did I feel about Amazon.

I’m not sure I answered her question very well, because, to be honest, my relationship with Amazon requires a yellow cup.

It’s complicated.

As a bookseller, do I resent Amazon? Not really, honestly. Amazon fulfills an entirely different purpose from what I do. I order supplies for my store from Amazon because I can find good deals, compare products easily and, quite honestly, it makes my life easier. At the end of the year, for instance, when I need to find receipts, it’s much easier if everything is on Amazon instead of a few here and a few there.

Does Amazon affect my business? Again, that’s complicated. I mean, yeah, probably. I don’t know what it was like being a bookseller before Amazon, though. And I don’t sell new books, at least not new bestsellers. I sell used books and local authors. And no, Nicholas Sparks isn’t one of “my” authors lol. My authors sell their books here at the store on consignment, which means if the books sell, they get a check.

Now, that brings me to a more interesting question. As a local author who publishes her books and sells them on Amazon’s self-publishing platform KDP, how do I feel about Amazon?

If I cared enough to dig into my true feelings about it, I’d probably resent them more. Their algorithms often hide independent authors like myself. The pitiful amount of royalty I receive from each sale on Amazon takes a while to add up to a measurable sum. I have tried their “marketing”, but it amounts to giving away books or paying more for each purchase due to empty “clicks” than I get from the sale.

Still, Amazon is exceedingly fair in their pricing for author copies and their system is incredibly easy to use. I currently have twenty-six personal titles on my KDP Bookshelf, and I have also used KDP to publish all the literary magazines for my store. When I am asked for advice on how to self-publish, I send authors to Amazon without a single qualm.

I got a little sidetracked with this post. I started out to tell you Where the Sidewalk Begins, my book of love poems, is now available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover. But I got distracted thinking about my feelings. Anyway, starting tomorrow and running through Sunday, Where the Sidewalk Begins is FREE on Kindle. And on Sunday at 11 a.m., I’m going to do another live poetry reading from the book.

I dreamed I fell in love with none other than the moon…

from “Wow” by Michelle Garren-Flye
Photo by Michelle Garren-Flye Copyright 2023

Five Star Review for UnSong!

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I cannot tell you how much it means to find a positive new review for one of your books. The surge of triumph, heartwarming and uplifting… For poets, this feeling may be elusive, but it’s just as powerful, if not more so. It’s why we writers risk rejection so willingly. Because we’re basically junkies for that feeling.

So you can imagine how I felt when I found this review on Amazon:

Thank you, Anna! 🙂

If you haven’t read UnSong yet, you’re missing out. Reviewers (my fellow poets) had already proclaimed it “wicked-smart” (Dennis Mahagin, author of Grand Mal), “joyful and optimistic” (Alice Osborn, author of Heroes Without Capes), and “a dash of light to repel the darkness” (Sam Love, author of Awakening: Musings on Planetary Survival). Now it’s got five stars on Amazon!

I don’t have a problem with Amazon. Not really.

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This weekend a friend tagged me in a post on Facebook. It was an article by Adam Stern in The Chicago Tribune entitled “Independent Bookstores are More Than Stores”.

This article gave me a lot of feels.

First, as a reader, I totally agree with him. I remember as a kid haunting local bookstores. I would sometimes spend hours browsing bookstore shelves. That’s how I discovered Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony and even Jane Austen. We had a used bookstore in our town called The Book Nook. I would often trade books in there. I’d bring in a stack of dog-eared novels and leave with another. I believe that’s where I first made the acquaintance of Stephen King. There is absolutely nothing like browsing a bookstore’s shelves and taking home a new book by a new author you might never have tried before.

And yes, this experience is slowly dying off.

Second, as an author, I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon. They make it easy for me to publish my books. It costs me nothing but time to put my book up for sale on Amazon. BUT they make it easy for anyone to publish their books. Forgive me for sounding a little uppity here, but when I decide to publish something, it’s gone through intensive editing. I self-edit, but I am an editor, so I can do it. My books are not the stream-of-consciousness, unedited, full-of-typos books that have given independent/self-publishing a bad name. In fact, I would venture to say that my books are better edited than some bestsellers. But it’s difficult for readers to trust self-published books because anyone can self-publish. Hence, the love/hate relationship.

I cannot hate on Amazon when they provide essential tools for me, though.

Third, as a bookstore owner. Okay, I should hate Amazon, right? Again, there’s mixed feelings here. My store serves a different purpose than Amazon. You will not find the latest Oprah pick (does she still do that?), the newest best seller, the trendiest hot read on my shelves. I have well-loved classics, dog-eared novels, a decent selection of nonfiction, and LOCAL, INDEPENDENTLY-PUBLISHED AUTHORS. So as far as that goes, I don’t have a problem with Amazon. When someone comes in and asks for Nicholas Sparks’s latest or the new book by Barack Obama, I cheerfully refer them to Books-A-Million or Amazon. “But I want to keep my money local and help you,” they say. “So browse the shelves and find something you like from what I have,” I reply.

That’s my problem (and, I guess, Stern’s) with Amazon. But it’s not just Amazon. It’s big publishing in general. And people like Oprah who presume to know what other people should read. They have the influence and resources to push the same authors over and over again. The same ideas get consumed over and over. Just because I can publish my well-edited, pretty damn readable book doesn’t mean it’s going to be discovered by readers who have been conditioned to want to read the latest bestseller, the latest trendy nonfiction, the latest thing Oprah said was good.

So, to those who call me up and ask for the book they heard about on Good Morning America this morning, I say, “If you truly want to help your community and keep your money local, have a look at our local author section. There’s some good stuff in there that you will never know about if you don’t give it a try.”

My independently published graphic novel.

Hourglass gets five stars!: Reviewer calls it “Stunning”

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The first review is in on Hourglass! And it’s good. As an author I can always appreciate when other authors talk about breathing a sigh of relief when they get the first good feedback on their books. I mean, we all know our creation is great. Fantastic, even. Doesn’t even matter what you think.

But we still wait for the reviews.

Well, my first one is in, and it’s five stars. Imagine, if you will, how relieved I was. Graphic novel/comic book is a bit of a stretch for me, a romance writer and poet. Plus, I’m just not sure what to call this thing, either. Too short to be a graphic novel, based on my poetry, not really a comic book… It’s like an illustrated poetry book with a storyline to tie the poems together.

Anyway, my very kind reviewer said this about my baby book: “filled with stunning art, photography, and poetry, and the message is lovely.”

Picture the big grin on my face when I read that! Actually, no need to picture it. Here you go:

A bit of fact and a bit of fiction in this one. Mostly, that’s me, though. Self portrait by Michelle Garren Flye

I hope you’ll decide to try out Hourglass. Someone called it my “passion project”, and they’re not wrong. I want to be good at this. I want to publish comic books where every page is a work of art. I don’t know if I’m capable of that yet, but I’m gonna keep on trying.

In the meantime, if you read Hourglass, maybe you can give me an idea of how YOU think I should market it. But definitely let me know what you think.

First Review of Becoming Magic: 5 Stars on Amazon!

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Real reviews mean a lot to authors. Think about that. We actively encourage others to tell us what they really think. And no author I know would ever consider helpful any review that was less than honest, no matter how much it stroked their ego.

With that said, I was thrilled—and relieved—that my first review for Becoming Magic on Amazon was five stars. It comes, full disclosure, from an acquaintance who is a very talented magician and writer, Arjay (R.J.) Lewis. Arjay was the magical consultant on Becoming Magic, and he’s helped me design a magical holiday show for my next book Dickens Magic—plus I’ve read several of his books. So when I read his review of Becoming Magic, it was a little bit like both Stephen and Mac King had combined into one joint force to praise my book. You can read the whole thing here, but here’s the part that meant the most to me:

…Flye boldly takes on a #metoo concept, which not only explains why our heroine is reluctant, but makes understandable the hero’s confusion as to why his advances are being rejected. It was a difficult choice, because in the hands of lesser writer, it could’ve been a cheap and tawdry device. But in Flye’s excellent craftsmanship, it is handled artfully and the reader understands both sides of the conflict.

This book means a lot to me because in a way it marks my own rebirth as a writer. When #metoo came along, I realized I was guilty of perpetuating in my writing what could be seen as dangerous situations for women—in Island Magic, the heroine is actually kidnapped by the hero. Though I’ve never gone for rape fantasies and my only bondage romance (Escape Magic) was actually pretty positive in that the heroine was the escape magician, I’ve sworn off some of the favorite tropes of romances and am striving to rebuild my own corner of the romance genre with more positive heroes, heroines and romantic situations.

Time will be the only thing that will tell if romance readers are willing to accept a new kind of romance. But at least one reviewer thought it worked, and that means a lot.

Becoming Magic Release Day Reflections with Contest

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IMG_3805I haven’t spent a great deal of time worrying about the release of Becoming Magic today, in spite of a glitch at Amazon that has prevented the Kindle version from being available. Oh well, that’s life.

No, instead, I’ve been participating in a Facebook moon photography “contest” hosted by a fellow author, Robert Beatty, author of the fantastic Serafina series. I love taking pictures of the moon, so I chimed in with my Juneau Moon, seen at the left.

Photography got me thinking about some of my other favorite things to photograph. My very favorite thing of all to photograph (besides my kids) are flowers. So, since I happen to have some very pretty roses sitting on my kitchen counter, I snapped a pic of one of those and posted it on Facebook. Because, hey, I’m a romance author, right? Red roses are my thing. I’m calling this one Kitchen Rose. (If you look hard at the bottom right corner, you can see breakfast.)

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And of course, no day would be quite complete without taking a picture of my cat. Her name is Calliope, who was the muse of poetry. She posed quite prettily for me with my daughter’s sneakers, but you can tell my floor needs sweeping!

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What’s your favorite thing to photograph? Do you have a favorite photo on your phone right now? Would you like to win a print copy of Becoming Magic? Visit my Facebook page here: Michelle Garren Flye, author and post your favorite picture of the moon, a pretty flower or your pet. I’ll choose my favorite and send you a print copy of Becoming Magic.

Release Day Warning: Amazon is a no go!

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Sadly, Becoming Magic is NOT up in the Kindle store in spite of everything having been done right by me. I’ve sent them a message and hopefully it’ll be fixed within 24 hours. In the meantime, I’m sending everyone to Smashwords who have a lovely big sale going on in which ALL of my other books have a 100% off coupon (SS100) for the month of July only. And Becoming Magic is only $2.99, so you could catch up on all the Sleight of Hand books for the single price of $2.99—who wouldn’t want to do that? Check it out here: Smashwords Summer Sale!

Prose Poem: Here Goes by Michelle Garren Flye

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pexels-photo-533671.jpegHere Goes

By Michelle Garren Flye

Time for you to take the wheel. I’m tired and lost. You can find the way out. You have Snapchat and Twitter and the iPhone X—all I have is Goggle. I mean Google. And Amazon. Hey, I can buy us a Garmin. Maybe that would help. You know when I was your age, we had Rand McNally Road Atlases.

I don’t know when we got to this point. You an adult and me old. I remember when I looked at the world the way you can now: like it was mine to take. It’s not mine anymore. I failed. I didn’t do any of the things I meant to do. I didn’t fix the environment or get rid of guns or stop wars or any of the stuff I thought I would do. I don’t know how I got lost. Do you?

Can you see the road? Of course you can. Your eyes are young and your gaze is clear. I bet the way ahead looks straight to you. It gets harder later. Find your way now before your vision is clouded with smog and illusion.

Here goes. Take the wheel. Take the wheel and drive.