How to get your Star Ratings from Book Reviews inside your Kindle Book

I've been reading a book about promoting e-books (I'll blog more later on how to sell a million e-books by John Locke) and one thing he said seemed fairly straightforward: - make sure you have some good reader reviews in the beginning of your e-book. It puts readers in the right mood to enjoy your story.

So, I went and collected some kind words that readers had posted about my books (modest cough!) and cut and pasted them into the front of the book that I was editing. The stars vanished. So, I wrote by hand, 4 stars. It means the same, I know four out of five stars means the same, but words just don't have the same impact as a row of stars - I so wanted to see stars.

Well, I finally worked out how to get the image of stars into your e-book to show off your reader reviews. This is how I did it.

1. Collect your reviews and paste them into a Word document. The stars will show as pretty stars.

2. Format the document until it looks pretty.

3. Press the 'print screen' button on your computer.

4. Open the programme 'Paint' which is loaded free on most computers. It hides in accessories.

5. Save that document as a JPEG.

6. Open the JPEG in Picture Editor - or whatever software you use. Picture Editor is the free default one that comes with Office.

7. Select 'edit picture' and crop away all the edges that contain a photograph of your toolbars etc.

8. Resave the cropped photo.

9. Paste as an image at the beginning of your manuscript.

10. Lock the image in place by clicking on 'In line with text.'

11. Ta da! Reader reviews with pretty stars.

It's probably better not to resize the image - I made mine larger after pasting it into the text, and have since noticed that it looks strange in a couple of readers, so I'll have to enlarge the document, then go through the above steps as well. The text hasn't been updated on Amazon yet (or it hadn't last time I looked) so check it out on Smashwords if you want to see how it looks.

A Change of Heart on Smashwords

Hope this is useful.

Marketing Mix and E-books

Well, I put the price of my books down today. If you already bought one at a higher price, leave your contact details, tell me which book you bought and when, and I'll send you a coupon for a free book (of your choice). The reason I put down the price is that I was reading what other authors do and think about pricing, and I realised that I was charging too much. John Loke, for example, has about 6 books in the Amazon top 100 - and his philosophy is to charge 99 cents and, like Tescos, pile 'em high and sell them cheap. It seemed like a good idea to me. I had been thinking of a book more like a paper book - but an e-book doesn't carry those expenses of print, packing, postage, carriage, shelf space, stocktaking, warehousing and so on - so it's not fair to charge for it. So that's price sorted! So far as product goes, my Regency is far and away the most popular of the books I've published so far, which I'm thrilled about, because I love Regencies! There's a top 100 author with several Regencies in the list, which gives me something to aspire to. Place - well, Amazon seems to have the most sales, however, I have not yet published anything to All About Romance, which is surely a place a romantic novelist should be!

So far as marketing goes, John Loke said find out who likes your kind of book, go round to where they are, and shove it down their throat! Well, in essence, he's right. I know from experience that people who want to read my books because they know me never like my romances - because they don't like romances. Romance readers, on the other hand, love them. And that's not quite accurate, because people who like spicy romances don't like my sweet romances, that's how specialised the world is. People know what they like. QED, it's a total waste of time to try and market my books to anyone other than sweet romance lovers.

Anyway, I'm off to Greece for 2 weeks - I'm going to lie on the beach, think about everything I found out over the last couple of months, and write me a Regency.

One last thought, I'm actually really glad I just got some books out before I even knew what I was doing, because it is so easy to change things with e-publishing. I just won't be able to grumble at Microsoft for doing the same thing now! Isn't there a fancy word for it? When you throw things out and make improvements on the fly? It's not a bad way to progress.

How to make book covers for e-books

As you can see, I am far from being an expert, but then, I'm a writer not a graphics artist!

The key to the process is to find a good photograph - the better the photo, the less you have to do. I have found Morguefile http://www.morguefile.com/ to be the best source of free images that allow comercial use. All their images are free to use as book covers, so you don't have the experience of finding the perfect photo only to find it says strictly no commercial use and their photos will open with Adobe Photoshop, which I coiuldn't make images from StcXchng do (http://www.sxc.hu/.) although I'm sure that's just me.

I tried all kinds of free programmes - but they were either too simple and wouldn't do what I wanted, or they were too difficult. Fine for an expert, but no good for someone with no skill who just wants to get the job done. So, do you know anybody who can use Adobe Photoshop? Ask them to spend an hour or so showing you the basics (I am slow with things like this, and it took me 2 hours. Thanks to my colleague Matt Briggs for putting up with me!) After than, you will be familiar enough to be able to find what you need in Photoshop for Dummies or a similar reference guide.

You then open a new document in Photoshop, set it to the required size (Kindle suggest 800x1280 pixels) and then download your chosen photo. You click on 'open with photoshop' and it will open in a new document. You can then cut and paste the part of the photo you want into your already waiting document.

Then you add a couple of textboxes and type in the title and your name. There is a good range of fonts to choose from and Matt suggested using the 'eyedropper' tool. This will pick up a colour from the photo and you can use it for the text, which makes the colour scheme look pulled together.

Light backgrounds don't work on the tiny thumbprints that e-books show, so you can colour the background of the document and just shrink the photo slightly so that the background acts as a border.

It may sound simple - but it's taken me about 3 weeks to learn this. Let me know if you know any good tricks that make covers look better.



Free Romantic e-books for Reviewers

I'm so pleased with my new covers - oh, I know they are not quite professional, but as thumb-sized placeholders they do the job. Now, I need people to see my books. I'm told that reviews are vital - so here's an offer - if you would like to read and review any of my e-books, leave a comment or email me at louisearmstrong58@btinternet.com and I will send you a coupon that you can use on Smashwords (all formats are available) for a free copy. You enter a code at the checkout and then download a book for free. This is a genuine offer - you are free to leave honest feedback. If you like my sweet romances then hurray! If not, then I'll learn something.

What Would You Write if You Couldn't Fail?

One of the books that I have put out as an e-book was firmly turned down by my editor - but I'd finished it anyway, and I liked it even if she didn't, so I put it out to see what would happen. It has sold a few copies already - and done better than some of the previously published titles. It's taken me a while to absorb the implications, but basically, with e-publishing, you cannot fail. There is no gatekeeper to say 'my readers wouldn't like this book'. The readers themselves get to decide.

So what will I write? Well, you know what? I always liked Regency romances. They are hard to sell, but they suit my style - lots of fun and frolics and not too much navel gazing. We are going to Greece for 2 weeks, so I just might treat myself and write a Regency.

But it's a liberating thought, isn't it? You can't fail.

To Update, or not to Update?

Well, I sold my first e-book - I couldn't resist clicking on the little link that tells you how many books have been sold. What a thrill - it's all going to be worth it. I have found a 69-page instruction book on how to format a book for e-publishing - and realise that I have not being doing it properly. Now I'm not sure if I should remove the books that are already up there, or just carry on and then go back and tidy up the original books. I'll probably just leave them for now.

I'm working on the very first romance I ever sold right now, and it wasn't that long ago (honestly) but how the world has changed! My heroine has videos. There are no mobile phones - not even the secret agent hero has one! She lives in Japan and her family write letters to her. No email, no Facebook. Her father loses some 'slides' that he needs for a lecture. Nobody looks anything up on the Internet, and people smoke in restaurants. Would you update it or not? I think probably not, on the whole, it's of its time, let it stay there.