We have a winner!

I have a story to publish! And it is great!  The Locked Room by John Derderian is the winner of my publishing contest and I am quite pleased.  Although I did not have that many to choose from I was very happy with this polished, engaging story.  What put it over the edge was that his writing style is rather good and I could not put it down.  There are a few things I want to improve so it will be easier to sell, but hopefully that will not be too hard. (famous last words).
Now on to marketing.  Just like everything else so far, I have no idea how to do that either, but I am sure that I can muddle through.  Wish us luck!

The Entries are In

My get published contest ended yesterday, and I did not get that many submissions.  Thankfully two of them are really good, so I will be reading and rereading them to choose a winner.  Or maybe I will just publish both, I am not sure yet.
I am less optimistic about my chances of making it big with this business now.  I looked at the stats for my website and even though I posted the contest several places and drummed up interest on several websites, I only got 60 even to visit the site, let alone submit a story.  When I am asking people to actually spend money on buying a book, I am sure it will be even harder.  I am starting to realize that even for modest returns I will still have to work a lot.  I guess I knew that going in, it is just hard to lose the dream of big bucks.

I can See!

Or rather you can see my site.  Now when you look for it on google, my site pops right up.  Hooray!  I guess that metatag thing really works.
In two days my first contest ends and so far I only have three submissions.  Kind of sad if you ask me, I can only hope that more people are procrastinating until the last second and I will be deluged with entries on Friday.  I guess I should not care how many submissions I get, only hope there is at least one wonderful undiscovered talent.

The Good and The Bad

I figured out metatags! Metatags are short descriptions of your site that the search engines use to find and display your site.  So now that I wrote it, my site is more visible and usable for search engines.  Now when you find Tricorp Publishing with a search engine you will see a description of my website instead of the first two sentences it happens to find.  Of course so far it is still invisible, but that should change soon now that I am getting hits and have improved most of the site.

On the bad side, a blow to the publishing dream is that Amazon no longer allows indie publishers to list their ebooks for free.  This sounds counter-intuitive, but since I cannot list books for free it will be harder to make money on them.  I was counting on the advertising that comes from offering a book for free, it sometimes gets you into the top ten lists and then you can change it to five bucks and make a killing with all that free advertising that comes from being on the top ten lists.  So now instead of just listing the book for free and letting the Kindle store do the work for me, now I have to do a lot more work advertising.  Bummer.  Well I suppose I will just have to roll up my sleeves and work the internet.

It starts...

So far my company has been relatively invisible, only people reading this blog have known it even existed.  But that changed when I posted that contest on Friday.  Since Writing.com is ranked high on Google, as soon as I posted that contest my publishing company was visible.  Not my website yet, that still won't show up on searches, but my contest shows up.  I got a lot of interest but not many story submissions yet.  I realized that putting the contest's due date on March 15th was going to drive me nuts.  I cannot do much without an author so I would have to wait until after that to get going on the business.
So I created a separate contest on my website withe a due date of this Friday the 26th.  Then I hopped onto a writing site and mentioned I was looking for authors.  I got a lot of responses and some really in depth questions.  I considered acting all professional and what not, but I was totally honest with them about me just starting up.  I even got a through proofreading out of them for my website, :-).  Here is the link to the forum, I might add a FAQ page to my website with all their questions. Since then I have had over 30 hits to my website and an actual submission for my contest.  Hooray!  A slow start to be sure, but much better than anything I have had before.

Get Published

I am hosting a contest to get published on my favorite writing site Writing.com.  Here is the link.  Basically I am looking for a short Sci Fi or Fantasy novel.  Feel free to enter if you want.  If you don't want to join Writing.com and you still want to enter, shoot me an email at tricorppublishing@gmail.com.  Doesn't that sound all official? As always feel free to comment so I know I am not talking to myself.

On another note, Kindle publishing is not easy!  I wanted to test the waters before I publish for real and it is not easy.  For other ebook stores like Smashwords you just have a word doc and convert it and you are done.  For the kindle that is not so easy.  You need to convert it before you convert it and there is always errors.  Then once you are done with that you need to add extra code so you can have a links for chapters and what not.  I considered having someone do it for me, but that would cost way more than my budget will allow. I guess I will just have to muddle through. For those of you keeping track my budget is now down to $42.01 and I still have not made a dime.

My New Website

Well here it is, my website debut!  tricorppublishing.com (Feel free to imagine fireworks and a great fanfare)

You will note that some of the site is made up at this point because I am still working out how I am going to do this.  If you see any errors or misspellings let me know!

I am still working on making my website visible, right now if you search for it on google it won't show up.  Apparently you need to design it so that the search engines can see it and it looks like a reputable website.  If I had the coding know how I would add a meta-tag that describes the site in the HTML code in the website.  Apparently that should make it more visible.  But my skills are still a little lacking.  So instead what I will do is submit them to the search engine directly, at these links; http://www.google.com/addurl/ and www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx.  With the second option the sites specifically state that you are not guaranteed to be listed, only that they will look at you.  I never knew that google was so discerning in its tastes.  Especially with the trash that comes up when I look for stuff like free games (don't bother, most of it is terrible).

A professional Website

I have offically published my first work, a short little Sci-Fi story.  It was fun, but more of an experiment in the publishing process than anything.  If you want to check it out on Amazon, here you go.  I hope to do a better job and make a slicker cover next time.

I wonder if this blog will ever hurt my chances of success later down the line. I can see the headlines now, "Tricorp Publishing's dirty little secret, he does not know what he is doing!" I guess I can cross that bridge if and when I ever get successful. Maybe I can just take this blog down after I get my first million. Or maybe after my first Billion, after all I do not want to disappoint my many adoring fans.

All kidding aside I am still wondering what it takes to look professional. So far I have created a website (I will update on that tomorrow) but I am still working on making it look slick. What is it that we expect when we buy a product from a big name professional company? How do you distill that special something that makes a customer want to pull out their wallet? I have looked at some of the competition and it looks good. A good example is http://www.randomhouse.com/ but I would be happy to look something like http://www.mundania.com/. As long as I don't look like this: http://www.diskuspublishing.com/ I am happy.

Answers

Research in the internet age is wonderful.  If I had yesterday's questions before the internet I would have given up in despair, but luckily thanks to the magic of the intertubes I have several answers.  First off making my own webpage is easy and there are several companies out there that want to help me out, for a small fee.  I could get a professional slick website with great design from Register.com and a great shopping cart from 1&1internet.com and advertising from godaddy.com and be up and going right away; and all for about 50 bucks a month.  I am not sure I want to blow my whole budget in one month so I think I will just buy a domain name from one of them, less than ten bucks should get me a year.  Then I can use one of the many free website builders out there to create a webpage.  I have used googlepages before but this time I think I will use yahoo or microsoft office's free builders.  Check back in a few days and I will have my first draft of that webpage up.

From what I can glean from the internet since I don't need partners or extra capital I can just start selling eBooks, I don't need any special licence.  Correct me in the comments if you know better.  Of course I will have to pay extra taxes, I better set aside some of my profits for that.  Assuming I ever get any.

So how do I do this?

First things first.  Umm. What should I do first?  Now that I sit down and think about it, there is a long list of things to do.  I guess I can start off with a name, how about Tricorp Publishing? I have loved the name Tricorp since I was young and I think it sounds very professional.

How do you start a company?  I suppose I should get a website, how do you do that?  And do I need to incorporate? Is there a licence I need, or special taxes I need to pay? I wonder if that is why business take so much start up money, because there are a lot of start-up costs.

Should I publish one of my own books or some one else's? If I publish my own, I guess it would be harder to edit, because I think everything I write is wonderful.  I better publish someone else's because I have no problem tearing it apart.  At least I know the mechanics of publishing on the Kindle because I have already looked into that.

And finally, how do I act like I know what I am doing even though I don't?

What I am doing here

Hi there this is Adam, I am a regular Joe, but I am going to pretend to be a bigshot publisher. In the next few months I am going to create my own publishing company and test the theory that I can do everything the big publishing companies can do and create a bestselling book. I am realistic about my budget though and so I will just be publishing eBooks. Since my wife got me a Kindle that is all I have been reading anyway.

This means that I plan on creating an eBook publishing company from scratch and taking someone's manuscript and turning it into a bestselling eBook on Amazon's Kindle.

Do I think I can do it? I hope so, the extra money would be nice. But that is not the reason I am doing this. I am doing this because many big publishers are charging 15 dollars for an eBook. There should be a big difference between the price of a paperback and an eBook but in many cases they are the same price. If it costs substantially less to create something, then it should cost much less to buy it. The big six publishers claim that the inflated price for an eBook is justified because they still have to edit and market the book and that cost is the big reason that they charge so much for the book. Hogwash!

I am going to do all the editing and marketing myself to see if I can prove them wrong. Here are my criteria for success: In eight months if I can get a book on Amazon Kindle's top ten eBooks and earn at least two grand doing it, I will consider myself a huge success. My budget: 50 bucks, a true shoestring budget, but of course I won't be paying myself.

Can I do it? Lets find out.