It was another pretty eventful week, as I get a tiny bit closer to the first publication date for my series. I spent a fair amount of time this week going through edits, but there was also some good book news arriving in my inbox.
Up the Creek is on Netgalley
I used a paid service to make an e-galley or ebook ARC of Up the Creek available to reviewers on Netgalley, and it is now live. I’m not sure how important it is, but I should make a point of boosting this on social media to make sure I get my money’s worth. So, I’ll have to get on that.
For those who don’t know what Netgalley is, it’s a service for distributing ebook advanced editions to reviewers. Netgalley is used by traditional publishers as well as indie authors. You can set up your own account with Netgalley, which can be pricey or use a paid service to make your book available on Netgalley. I booked my Netgalley spot with BooksGoSocial.com to make it a little more affordable than going through Netgalley directly.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my goal is to get as many reviews on Up the Creek I can, and so that is why I decided to make the book available through Netgalley. Will it be worth it? Time will tell. Because I don’t have my own account on Netgalley I will not know the results of having my book on the site until I receive my report from Books Go Social at the end of the promo. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.
Editing Book 4
This week I received the first pass of copy edits on book 4 in my series, Blood Answer, back from my editor. So, I spent much of my time this week going through and taking a look at all of her much needed fixes and corrections. This is getting to be something of a routine for me, but since this is only a four-book series, this will be the last time I’m doing this for the series.
The bulk of her edits were cleaning up clunky, too-wordy sentences, fixing some character names that I inadvertently misremembered and making some edits for clarity. It really is a huge help to have a professional pair of eyes to go through a manuscript, and I do feel like the money I spend on editorial services is money well-spent.
Google Alert
I sometimes find I’m the last to learn things. One of the things I did a long time ago was set up a Google Alert for my name. Google Alerts can be used to track new information appearing online on your choice of keywords. Once you set one up Google will then send you an alert email anytime they detect a new page featuring your keywords.
Look, I’m not going to lie. This works pretty well if you have a unique name like Alissa Grosso and not so well if you have a name like John Smith or something else pretty common. The bulk of the Google Alerts I receive are for updates I make to my own website, and since I used my name in this post, I’ll likely also receive an alert about it. I get a depressing number of alerts about one of my books showing up on a book piracy site. I also receive alerts on a semi regular basis about honor roll lists that have been posted on local newspaper websites. In this case it’s usually that someone on the list is named Alissa and someone else on the list has the last name Grosso. So, most of the Google Alerts I get can safely be ignored, but occasionally I receive one that’s genuinely useful.
This week I got one regarding the Amazon product detail page for Up the Creek. The preorder of the ebook has been up there for awhile, but thanks to this week’s Google Alert I learned that the Ingram Spark print editions are now there as well as being available for preorder. As I’ve mentioned previously I will be publishing a paperback directly through Amazon’s KDP print, but for whatever reason, Amazon does not allow you to post print editions for preorder, so I have to wait to make the KDP paperback edition live until closer to my publication date. Presumably it will join that same product detail page when I do, but for now the preorder is live for the other editions.
So besides posting about Netgalley availability, I can also add some preorder links to my website, which no doubt will get me another Google Alert. So, I guess I better sign off and get to work!
