What is MineEye ?
MineEye is a like-minded community of artists, writers and musicians from all over the world that have met on social media. From the start, we fell into friendship, have always been mutually-supportive of each others endeavours and have created a warm and positive network. We believe that talent should be nurtured and reinforced – expressing yourself and your art can be a challenge and is not always an easy journey, so we help each other in every way we can. Sometimes, a kind word at the right time can make all the difference !
Why an Online Bookshop – hasn’t this been done before ?
Yes. However, we believe that the time is ripe for a better way. A nicer way. Something that is more effective for new writers starting out. The established “big boys” in the online literary world are major commercial organisations, they have targets to meet and shareholders to satisfy, every day, every year. The reality is that they do not have the time or inclination to positively engage with new writers or actively promote their work. If you join them, you may get lucky – the right idea at the right time. Or your book may languish amongst hundreds of thousands of others – neglected, overlooked and no-one knows that it is there.
What makes MineEye different is that we welcome new or lesser-known writers into our community and publish their works online. We will not offer physical books for sale as we do not have a gigantic warehouse to put them in ! So we will focus on “online” book sales for Kindles and popular e-readers.
We will actively promote your book on social media, using our network of 70,000 followers !
We will not take commission from every book you sell – you keep every cent, every penny. We charge our authors an annual subscription of $2.99 per year to cover our costs. Also, in the future, we will charge a “one-off” fee to load a book onto MineEye, simply because we have to pay our people to handle the volume of requests. Once your book is online, you never have to pay the “one-off” fee again, it stays there for ever ! Note that, at present, this upload service is free of charge. The annual subscription fee covers the ongoing promotional effort. And you keep everything that MineEye customers pay for your book. Again – no commissions.
How do i join ?
It costs nothing to register on MineEye – simply click on the Login link and join us.
How do I become an author on MineEye ?
Click on the “Become an Author” link, pay your $2.99 annual subscription and your registration will upgrade from a customer to an author. Once that is done, you will be able to access other links such as Author’s Cafe, our writers’ forum page and most importantly, publish your book !
How do I publish my book ?
Please note that MineEye is an online bookstore where customers buy and download your book, then send it to their Kindle or e-reader device. We cannot sell books in print because we don’t have a warehouse – yet ! Also, we ask that your book is complete in every respect – it needs to have been converted to an e-reader format before we can publish it and you will need great looking artwork, plus a few promotional paragraphs of text, so that we can help you sell your book.
So, if your book has been converted to a Kindle or e-reader format, you have your artwork and your promotional words, you are almost ready to go.
We ask that you join MineEye as an Author and pay an annual subscription first. Once you have done this, you will see a new page appear on your menu, called “Publish My Book !”. Go to this page and fill out the form which will ask you to upload your book and your artwork in doing so. After you press the Submit button, someone will check your copy, arrange and upload your book onto MineEye. Once uploaded, your book will remain on MineEye and will be actively promoted. Thereafter, all you have to pay is the annual subscription fee – the ‘Publish My Book’ fee is only levied once !
What if my book is not in Kindle or e-reader format yet ?
There are several online companies that offer to convert your book from Microsoft Word into Kindle (.mobi) or general e-reader format (.epub).
This is a relatively straightforward task and most PC users will be able to do this themselves using programs that you can download, such as Amazon’s KindleGen. That said, it can be quite labour-intensive: you might find that all the paragraph indentations are out of alignment right through your book from beginning to end !
Or you might find that there are strange control characters such as ‘¶’ appearing randomly, that have to be corrected.
Getting the font size right can be a challenge so that the written page is not too big or too small on the e-reader. Not hard… but it can take a lot of experimentation.
We have found that it can take up to eight hours to get a well-written book in Word format, to look good on a Kindle.
If you would like us to do this for you, we charge an additional, set fee of $199 to convert your book into Kindle format.