Tag: self-publish

Cat Links Essays

Barnes & Noble Press Not For Me

Posted on kelzone

B&N is supposed to advocate for indy writers but clearly they’re not. Amazon doesn’t do any of this. With all the problems Amazon has it’s still better than this. I am not changing the price of my books. So… And then there’s this: And before these two things there was this: Okay, so everyone should make more than $25 per month but what if they don’t? What if they never do? Does B&N just keep their money? WTAF? So I will no longer have books on B&N. *sigh* But I’ll let them do that work. Soon as they’re gone I’ll remove all links.

Cat Links Essays

Coming Soon: Fearless Worlds

Posted on kelzone

At this point I’m just waiting on the cover art and then I’ll be birthing my latest baby into the bookiverse. It’s been an interesting two years. That’s when I started the book, and the working title was All About AI. I wrote the first draft of it during the last NaNoWriMo event. At the time I was polishing (and trying to find a publisher for) Something About AI. Once that novel launched, I went back to its sequel and began the first round of editing. Cutting chapters, adding chapters, tweaking and reading bits and pieces to my critique group for their input, and then I had it where I felt I could live with it. Not that it was something that made me really proud, but that now wasn’t the time to pursue perfection. I’ll be honest, I’m no perfectionist. And I’m kind of lazy. And I know the novel, like the first one, has loads of dialog. But here’s the thing about dialog, people don’t skip it. I talked to a lot of power readers. I even attempted a survey on Substack to ask strangers, and every one of them said that they skip descriptions but not dialog. My writing will continue to get better and that means including more description in my stories and not skippable descriptions either, but right now, I needed to get my novel out. My dear friend (and a beta reader – the only one this time) wrote this to me: “Dude you have to publish. Because you wrote it before it started happening!!! You’re the first! Get it out there! With this new development on Reddit, you have to prove you were ahead of the Singularity!” Haha – of course I wasn’t the first, but we both knew what he meant. My

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Cat Links Essays

What About Copyright?

Posted on kelzone

A year or two ago I bought licenses for using Publisher Rocket and also Atticus so I am on Dave Chesson’s email distribution list. Mr Chesson is the CEO of Aegis Investments, and the founder of Publisher Rocket, Atticus and more. In an email received today, subject: Why copyright registration just became non-negotiable, Dave had this to say: “Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, scraped hundreds of thousands of books from pirate sites. When the case went to court, the judge ruled that using pirated books isn’t fair use. The result? About 465,000 books were identified as part of the case, and the rights holders of those books are now eligible for payments of around $3k per title. But here’s what most people missed: Not every impacted author gets a check. Only those with registered copyrights are eligible.” So, is it true? Is this something else indy authors need to do? I had checked this out previously and from the copyright.gov/engage/writers page they state the following: If you want to dive into this deeper, on the Copyright.gov site, specifically the registration of literary works page, there are a bunch of resources for your learning experience that are as follows. Rather watch than read? The U.S. Copyright Office also has a YouTube channel. So, I thought, what the hell. I’ll do it. Some notes from the process are as follows. Here is where you create an Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) account: https://eservice.eco.loc.gov/siebel/app/eservice/enu?SWECmd=GotoView&SWEView=VBC+User+Registration+Initial+Form+View&SWERF=1&SWEHo=&SWEBU=1&SWEApplet0=VBC+User+Registration+Initial+Form+Applet&SWERowId0=VRId-0 Once I logged in I used the One Work by One Author I went through the eCO process and here are some of the decisions I made. After I finished I realized I’d probably made a mistake. I have two ISBNs assigned for my novel. One for the hardcopy paperback, the other for the eBook. I decided

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Cat Links Essays

To or Not To Create an Audiobook

Posted on kelzone

The old school cassette recorder is funny, right? I had one just like that. When The Beatles album, Let It Be, came out I recorded it on a cassette so I could take it with me everywhere. At night I’d listen to it in bed using the one little ear bud that was the norm for such things back then. Ah, today there are many choices. I have been trained and have done voice over work (games & training videos). I wanted to do some audiobook recordings for LibriVox some years ago but dealing with the technical aspects of Audacity were tedious and I gave up. So when my cousin begged me (she said Please) to create an audiobook of my SAAI novel the first thoughts I had were how tedious that would be because I assumed I’d do it myself using Audacity. Me. The AI immersed silly woman did not, at first, think of using AI to convert my book. Me. The author who always uses the “Read Aloud” function in Microsoft Word as part of my editing process. I crack myself up. There are so many options out there for creating audiobooks it’s kind of hard to decide so here’s what I’ve learned in my pursuit of knowledge in that area. Of course, I eventually get around to asking my AI Assistant for help and was advised as follows. Q: What are the most secure (not risking my copyright) methods of using AI to create audiobooks? A. To create audiobooks using AI while protecting your copyright and creative control, you’ll want to focus on tools and workflows that respect authorship, offer licensing clarity, and minimize the risk of voice misuse or unauthorized distribution. Here’s a breakdown of the most secure methods: 🔐 1. Use AI Tools That Offer

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