Natalie Keller Reinert

Archive for Amazon

Paperback Release!

November 20, 2011 Amazon, ebooks, The Head and Not The Heart No comments

The third time is the charm, and we have a beautiful paperback edition of The Head and Not The Heart available, thanks to the wizards at CreateSpace, a couple of free templates, and about three zillion hours fighting with Gimp to produce a cover.

I also made this banner for use on my CreateSpace e-store:

Kind of basic, but it adds a little color to the site, which unfortunately isn’t very customizable.

CreateSpace gives you an “e-store” to sell your book from, in addition to Amazon. It isn’t an impressive site, but the royalties are twice what they give authors selling from Amazon. If I sold a hundred copies a month from my e-store, I’d actually have the equivalent of a part-time job.

At McDonald’s.

In Arkansas.

The problem is, I don’t feel thrilled about saying, “My book is available through CreateSpace!” I don’t mind Amazon… people expect books to be on sale through Amazon.

So then I thought about selling the book directly through my website, but after I did the numbers and looked at shipping, it seems like a better deal for everyone to do it through the CreateSpace storefront.

It will be available on Amazon in a few days, too. But any link from me will go to the CreateSpace page!

I think that the paperback is the way to go, and will open up the book to a lot of people who had read the great reviews but just aren’t buying e-books. Is a $12.95 paperback a better deal than a $2.99 e-book?

Well, do you have to pay an extra hundred bucks just to buy the reader for the paperback? I thought not. I’m not an e-book person, what can I say?

In the meantime, though, to celebrate the paperback release, the e-book remains priced at 99 cents at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords through the end of the month. (At Smashwords, you can download every version, including HTML and PDF, and authors get a better cut.)

The horse in the banner ad, by the way, is a Thoroughbred who was boarded at the old Grand Cypress Equestrian Center in Orlando, Florida, back when I was a manager there. I forget his name, but he was darling. His owner never forgot for a second that he had been a racehorse; she was so proud of his heritage!

Book Review: Hannah’s Home is Small Town Bliss

October 12, 2011 Amazon, Book Reviews, Horse Stories No comments

I loved this book. I loved it. LOVED it.

“Hannah’s Home” tells the story of a very compelling woman—equal parts tough broad, soft-hearted hairdresser, dedicated horsewoman, farmer to her core—who is forced to rebuild her life from the ground up, and finds home in the process.

Hannah's Home by MaryAnn Myers

Hannah is on her own. Well, not entirely. Her husband may have disappeared, but Hannah has the warmth of the small town she lives in, a circle of close friends who love her, and a leopard Appaloosa named for Billy Bob Thornton. And now, she has bought her own farm. Sure, it’s falling apart. Sure, there’s this sourpuss elderly man who is always appearing on her doorstep and calling her the worst insult a farmer can think of: “City Girl.” Sure, she isn’t sure how she’ll afford the mortgage AND food AND her horse.

But Hannah’s a tough country woman. Hannah will manage. Tough country women always manage. Spend enough time around horses, and you’ll meet women like Hannah. They’re practical. They’re fiercely independent. They’ve been let down, they’ve been disappointed, and they don’t have any expectations of princes on white horses coming to their rescue. As long as she has her horse and her truck, this kind of woman can handle anything that comes her way. In Hannah’s case, she’ll roll up her sleeves and move into a crumbling farmhouse (some people say it’s haunted) and ignore all the nay-sayers who tell her the whole place is just going to collapse around her ears.

Surrounding Hannah’s little tumble-down homestead is the rural community she’s spent her whole life in. Small town America is depicted in all its afghan-quilted, pie-on-the-windowsill glory, and if you’ve ever lived out in the boondocks, you might just find yourself missing it a little. From meeting the girls for Chili Night at the Honky Tonk to sweet-talking the prices down from the local junker, from overseeing the wakes at the town funeral parlor to building a small pie-baking empire, from a solitary tuna fish sandwich for dinner to boisterous pot-lucks with friends, “Hannah’s Home” embraces the warmth and comfort of life in small town America.

Just don’t read this book while you’re hungry. There’s enough comfort food in here to empty your pantry.

Get your copy! Hannah’s Home is Available in Kindle and Paperback here at Amazon.

Number One Horse Book Of All Time (For An Hour)

October 10, 2011 Amazon, ebooks No comments

One of the fun things about publishing on Amazon is seeing where your book ranks in common tags. The Head and Not The Heart is on top of “Horse Stories,” “Equestrian,” and #4 in “Horse Racing” books. It even comes in at number 18 as “Literary Fiction.”

Readers can click on the tags for the book on its page to show whether or not they approve of its belonging to that category. I am a little amused that fewer people clicked “Equestrian Fiction” than they did the other tags, even though I am #2 in that category, right next to one of my new favorite equestrian writers, MaryAnn Myers, and a romance book by Bev Pettersen.

If any of you are bored and looking for something to do, the number of clicks on these tags, as well as Facebook Likes and Google +1s and whatever else (and starred reviews! Please!) do a lot for the the book’s visibility on Amazon and Google. Some authors seem to have nothing but time to promote their book with thousands of tweets, posts, reviews, comments, and guest blogs, but I really just can’t do it. I need The Head and Not The Heart to sort of promote itself.

Speaking of time and having too much work to do… I could look at categories and standings all day, but that probably isn’t the best use of my time. I do have to finalize that proof of The Head and Not The Heart in paperback, after all… (I’m almost done with it! I’ll do it tonight! I promise!)

For now, I’m working on a short story this afternoon. I’m going to drink this cup of tea and scribble down the rest of this story. It’s unrelated to anything else I’ve ever worked on, which makes it almost like a little vacation.

Paperback Update!!

September 12, 2011 Amazon, The Head and Not The Heart No comments

I ordered the proofs for the paperback edition of The Head and Not The Heart last night! I was meticulous in my editing and formatting this time around, having learned quite a lot from my first e-formatting adventures, so let’s hope that it translates into a beautiful book and I don’t have to do rounds and rounds and rounds of editing.

The book will be available from Amazon.com, and you can be sure I’ll let you know when it’s up!

Reader Review for The Head and Not The Heart

September 3, 2011 Amazon, The Head and Not The Heart No comments

I’ve sent out coupons to several bloggers so that they can review The Head and Not The Heart on their horse blogs. In the meantime, I’ve gotten a nice review from an equestrian and horse racing enthusiast, which makes me very happy!

Natalie gets it 100% right on both the emotions and the details when it comes to horses and horse racing. The story is absolutely perfect. I felt the emotions right along with Alex as she struggled to decide if her life in Ocala, Fla. with horses is what she really should be doing. I’ve grown up around horses and do believe even those who have not will understand and fall in love with this story. It shows you the real deal the struggles of the world of horse racing. The details are spot on. The writing is so well done.

-H.Tonini

The review is repeated at Barnes & Noble and I have to say, it makes me feel really good to know that the audience “in-the-know,” the equestrians, are recognizing this as a strong and accurate work. I wanted to reflect the emotions of working in the horse business, without resorting to sentimentality, and reviews are saying that I’ve succeeded.

This is one of the moments when two years of work and twenty years of getting beaten up by horses feels quite worthwhile!

Oh Hey Amazon!

August 31, 2011 Amazon, Book Marketing, The Head and Not The Heart No comments

I put off adding The Head and Not The Heart to Amazon because I had published it with Smashwords already, and Smashwords was supposed to “ship” it to Amazon – whatever that means.

But it had been a month and it wasn’t going anywhere.

My original cover image, with Baskerville font

Meanwhile, I’m not getting any sort of statistics from iTunes or Barnes & Noble – besides occasional, mysterious up and down movements in the rankings – and it was just killing me to not know if people are reading my book or not.

So, despite a fundamental lack of time which plagues me day in and day out, I decided to try and format the manuscript to upload to the Kindle store. Because of course their formatting instructions were completely different (and not nearly as friendly) as Smashwords’ were. And I’d already spent a good six hours formatting the manuscript for Smashwords.

I thought I’d found a loophole, then, when I realized that Pages for Mac has a “save as ePub” feature. Excitement! Joy! I exported, I uploaded, I waited, I clicked preview…

It was a disaster. The justification was all over the place. There were no margins – the letters practically fell off the edge of the page. Paragraphs that had italicized words within them were in a different font and size.

The Amazon cover, with a heavier font. Not too bad.

I sighed. I just didn’t have time to re-format this entire book just for Amazon. I started to feel less-than-friendly towards Amazon. Why so difficult and arcane, World Leader in E-Book Sales? Huh?

Then I remembered that my book looks splendid in Nook format, and that’s an ePub file. Which I have on my computer. I rummaged in files until I found it. Again, I uploaded, I waited, I clicked preview…

It looks perfect.

So, other than having to redo the cover art, because Amazon didn’t like the narrow Baskerville font I’d chosen for the lettering (WHATEVER, Amazon!) it only took me an extra…. four hours… to reformat the book for their Kindle site.

Luckily, though, that should make it pretty easy to upload my free short stories, as well!