Children’s Book #4 | Three self-publishing lessons learned

Posted on May 5, 2014 by kareninglis

I’m delighted to announce that my latest children’s book Henry Haynes and The Great Escape – a graphic novel for ages 6-8 is finally out. This fun, fast-paced page-turner with short chapters is aimed at early readers from age 6 as well as slighter older ones looking for a quick and entertaining read. It also includes the first two chapters of Eeek! The Runaway Alien – my popular graphic novel for age 7-10 years in which an alien runs away to Earth for the World Cup!

Henry Haynes and The Great Escape book cover

Click to buy on Amazon

To celebrate Henry Haynes’s launch I’m running a Goodreads Giveaway – on which more below. Also read on to find out about new self-publishing lessons I learned.

First, here’s the all-important back cover blurb 🙂

Henry Haynes and The Great Escape back cover image and blurb

Fun and fast-paced for ages 6-8

Goodreads Giveway – ends May 12th

If you’re in the UK, USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, or Singapore I’m running a Goodreads Giveway. If you happen to be a lucky winner please take the time to leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. Follow the link to find out more – and good luck! (For info, the giveaway started today, May 5th and not May 2nd as shown…)

Three new self-publishing lessons learned…

Each time I publish a new book I learn something new. Three things I’ve learned with Henry Haynes’s release relate to:

  • Supported and unsupported fonts
  • CreateSpace UK’s ‘cream’ paper colour
  • Using the same ISBN for Lightening Source and Createspace when selecting the CS for UK distribution

I cover what I learned about fonts below. In the interests of keeping this post to a manageable length, I will post about page colour and ISBNs later this week. Continue reading →

Posted in Blog Update, Children's Books, Self-publishing | 5 Comments

Self-publishing for Children/YA Live Q&A – Tues 18 March

Posted on March 12, 2014 by kareninglis

For anyone who attended the talk our huge apologies that the system crashed half way through – Shelli and I carried on going through the questions until the full hour was up and it was only afterwards that we realised that the system may have broken. We think there is a possibility that the talk was recorded – if it was, we will make a link available in the next couple of days. Otherwise I will post here again with a revised date for the talk – our apologies once again. Karen

YA and Children’s Authors – Live Self-publishing Q&A Session
Tues 18 March 12 noon PDT/3pm EST / 7pm GMT  Free Event! All Welcome!

Just a quick post to to let you know that I shall be answering questions along with YA Indie Author, Shelli Johannes at a live Q&A session to be hosted by The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) on YouTube next Tuesday 18 March from 7-8pm UK time/3-4pm EST.

The event is free and you don’t need to be a member of ALLi to attend.

ALLi Director, Orna Ross, will be fielding your questions which you can send in advance using the form link below. You’ll also find a link to the YouTube page for the event below.

Shelli (AKA S.R. Johannes) is based in Atlanta, and is the award-winning author of the Amazon bestselling YA thrillers, ‘Untraceable’ and ‘Uncontrollable’. Her third book in the series, ‘Unstoppable’ is scheduled for release in May. As well as being the YA Adviser for ALLi, Shelli organises the highly successful indie author online conference, IndieRecon, and is a founder member of author co-operative, The Indelibles.

As most of you will know, I am based in London, and was an early adopter of children’s self-publishing in the UK . I’ve  successfully placed my three children’s books The Secret Lake, Eeek! The Runaway Alien and Ferdinand Fox’s Big Sleep in bricks and mortar stores in London and have to date sold over 7,000 books across Kindle and print. I regularly take my books into schools, and I’ve also recently self-published an interactive iPad book app version of Ferdinand Fox’s Big Sleep.

Send us your questions

If you’d like to ask me or Shelli about any aspect of self-publishing for our markets, please add your question on this form in advance and we’ll try to include it in the schedule.

You’ll also be able to comment during the session using the YouTube chat functionality.

How to join the event

Just turn up to http://www.youtube.com/user/IndieAuthorALLi at 3pm EST / 12 noon PDT* / 7pm GMT (London)  We hope to see you there!

Please tell your friends 🙂

*Please double check this time if you’re on the west coast of the USA – I think I have this right taking into account daylight savings changes over there.  If in doubt, the EST and GMT times are definitely correct!

Posted in Blog Update, Children's Books, Self-publishing | 6 Comments

Kids’ App Marketing: The Double-edged Sword of the App Store Kids’ Category

Posted on February 16, 2014 by kareninglis

It’s three months since I launched Ferdinand Fox’s Big Sleep interactive storybook app for iPad and I still feel somewhat of an intruder into a world that I don’t quite know enough about. However I thought I’d share here my initial marketing experiences and my thoughts on the App Store Kids’ Category.

Ferdinand Fox’s Big Sleep marketing update

As I mentioned in my earlier post Creating a Children’s Book App, Ferdinand Fox’s Big Sleep had over 1,500 downloads when I set it at free during its two-week launch period in mid October.

Since going to paid (at £1.49/$1.99) and at the time of writing it averages 12 downloads a week with mini spikes on odd days. I have no idea whether this is terrible, or simply average for an independently produced children’s book app as I’m not aware of app developers openly sharing stats – however I can hardly claim that the volume downloads are great! Nevertheless I’m pleased at the consistency of downloads – and at the very favourable feedback the app has received for being both educational and fun, and an app that parents can explore together with little ones in the way they might a print picture book.

At the time of writing it has garnered 18 customer reviews between the US, UK, Australia and Croatia (most 5-Star) as well as fantastic feedback from educational app review sites. You can download it onto your iPad or take a closer look here. If you’ve young children I can promise that you won’t be disappointed.

Download Ferdinand Fox's Big Sleep interactive iPad kids book app from the App Store 

The clock strikes three - image from Ferdinand Fox's Big Sleep app

Jump-starting my app marketing via review sites

Given that app discoverability via the App Store is so problematic (on which more below) it was vital to give parents and teachers ways to find out about Ferdinand Fox by other means – and to have endorsements to link to in social media posts. I therefore paid small fees (ranging from as little as $15 to one at a slightly hefty $65) to receive expedited reviews on the educational review sites below. Paying for reviews goes against all of my gut instinct principles (I’ve never paid for a review for any of my children’s books), however having done my research, the alternative as far as I could work out, was to wait six months to a year for a ‘free’ review, and possibly never hear back at all owing to the sheer volume of apps being submitted! (Expedited reviews tend to be actioned within a couple of weeks.) Continue reading →

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Income Tax on royalties for UK authors and other news…

Posted on January 17, 2013 by kareninglis

Tax on your book sales if you’re a UK author

Happy New Year! It’s ‘that time of year’ when tax doesn’t have to be taxing, but always somehow is! So I thought I’d post a topic on how you declare and pay tax on your income from book royalties if you’re a UK author. If you’ve only just started selling, don’t worry – a tax year runs from 6th April to 5th April each year.  So tax returns due in by the end of this January are only relevant for sales made up to 5 April 2012. But if you made income before last April and don’t currently fill in a tax return, it’s time to get your skates on!

Read my post on paying tax on your books if you’re a UK author

Update on my first picture book – Ferdinand Fox’s Big Sleep

Ferdinand Fox's Big Sleep

Ferdinand Fox’s Big Sleep – my first picture book – is now out in the USA and has received three 5-Star reviews following a Goodreads giveaway!  Do check it out if you’re based in the USA and have children aged 2-5! It should be out in the UK soon – sorting out the interior paper and distribution plans is taking longer than anticipated! Once it is out I will post a blog on what I have learnt – producing a picture book offers new challenges! My illustrator, Damir, has done a fantastic job – check out the first few pages on Amazon here using the ‘look inside’ feature!

Fantastic feedback on The Secret Lake from an International Rights Director

The Secret Lake by Karen Inglis

I was delighted to receive an email just before Christmas from the International Rights Director of a leading UK Literary Agent who had read The Secret Lake.  Her opening words to me were, “I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed reading The Secret Lake…” She then went on to tell me that she had passed it to a few of her overseas contacts for an initial review. Unfortunately, as things stand, those she spoke to felt that it is too rooted in British culture to be suitable for translation – however she has said she will keep it in mind nevertheless. That is possibly the best rejection letter that I have ever had!

The Secret Lake now has a total of 36 reviews between Amazon UK and USA – and most are 5 Stars.  It’s selling between 100 – 150 copies a month on Kindle and is regularly in the top 100 for Action and Adventure for children’s books in the Kindle store. The print sales are still very steady – and I’m planning more school visits in the coming year. If you have 8-11 year-olds who love mystery and adventure, please do check it out. If they leave a review on The Secret Lake’s website I reply to them personally!

Eeek selected by Julia Eccleshare of The Guardian and the Literacy Trust & being used in UK schools!

Eeek! book cover image

My other exciting piece of news from 2012 is that Eeek! The Runaway Alien was selected for this list for reluctant readers on the LoveReading4KidsUK website.  LoveReading also has it listed under Books for Boys, Books for age 7+ and Books for age 9+. Given that Julia Eccleshare and the Literacy Trust curate the reluctant readers’ list I am delighted! You’ll also find a useful PDF download on reluctant readers if you follow the link above.

Eeek is also now being used as class readers and in book clubs in schools, all of whom seem to have discovered it on the grapevine! And I received the most wonderful package of 30 drawings of aliens from a class of 7 and 8-year olds from the Leeds school!  I’ve no idea how they found me, but I’m glad that they did! See what LoveReading has to say about Eeek or click on the book cover above to see the Amazon reviews.

New Year’s Resolution

I’ve been incredibly busy over the past year with the day job (I commission content and write professionally for business) – however my resolution for 2013 is to cut those days back to allow me to focus more time on my writing.  I therefore hope and expect to post updates to the blog a little more regularly!

My site will, however, remain largely informational and I will update relevant pages as things change in the market.  By all means let me know if you spot anything that you think is out of date!

Happy New Year!

Karen

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Just a quick note to let you know that I have updated my blog post on Tax on US Royalties to cover two extra important points.

(If you’ve not read it, this blog post is about how to get a US Tax ID to prevent tax being deducted at source from your royalties on US sales.)

The updates are:

  1. You can apply for EIN (Employer Identification Number) quickly and easily by ‘phone not only if you are a limited company (which is the route I took), but also if you are a sole trader – I hadn’t covered the sole trader point previously simply because I applied as a limited company. (To become a sole trader in the UK you need to register as self-employed with HM Revenue & Customs and complete a Self Assessment tax return each year to declare your business income.)
  2. I’ve recently read that if you are an individual applying for an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) things just got more tricky – it seems that since the summer of 2012 they are now sending original passports off to Texas as part of the ITIN approval process.  However one author did find a workaround for this – see the post for more info.

I hope the updated information is of help to anyone still thinking of applying for a US tax ID – as ever, applying as a business seems so much more straightforward!

Best wishes,

Karen

Posted on October 19, 2012 by kareninglis | Leave a comment