Andrew Seiple's Blog: Transmissions From the Teslaverse - Posts Tagged "amazon"

Welcome to another Writing 101 Monday!

Yep, I think I'll use Mondays to discuss the writing profession, and techniques, and the industry. (At least the little part I've seen of it. I'm still learning the ropes myself.)

So, a forum friend from Spacebattles wanted to know how the publishing process goes, if you go through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). There's some pretty good guides on the subject, but I can tell you how it went for me...

In a word? Easy. Here, let me give you an overview:

Basically, the first step is to head over to KDP.amazon.com, and sign up for an account. If you're in the US, this usually entails giving them your tax information. That's not a big problem, but it can cause a day or so delay as they check it and make sure it's on the line. You'll also need to supply information depending on how you want to receive royalties. If you want your royalties sent to an account, you'll need to provide account information, that sort of thing.

The next thing you'll need to do is format your manuscript so that the Kindle upload tool can convert it into a .mobi file. There are free e-books that tell you how to do this... though do note that if you're not using MS Word, you may have to adjust a bit. I use Openoffice, so I went and got a 99 cent ebook from Aaron Shepard on the subject. It walked me through the basics, and I'm glad I got it.

Once you've got the manuscript formatted and finished, I recommend using Caliber or some other method of file conversion to turn the file into a .mobi. Then try reading it with your Kindle, or Kindle emulator. Go through each page, and make sure your formatting is okay. Trust me, this will save a lot of fussing later.

You'll also need cover art. Go buy some, or draw it. If you buy it, make sure you have signed rights to use it for a cover. Trust me, you don't want this coming back on you later.

Then, once the manuscript is ready and you have your cover art handy, go into KDP and start a new project. There are a lot of fields to fill out, and the guides will step you through them. The most important ones, and the ones you should think about carefully, are as follows;

Description: This is the blurb that comes up when someone will look up your ebook on Amazon. Think of it as back-cover information, or inside-cover information. Make sure it's a good summary of your book, because if it's bad, it WILL hurt you.

Categories: These are basically genres. You get to choose two of them. Choose wisely! If you put your book in the wrong genre, then people may be upset when it's not what they wanted.

Keywords: This is the tricky part. Think of these as search engine bait. If people search Amazon for "superhero", and your book has the keyword superhero, then it'll come up. You get seven of them. They can be phrases.... Dire:Born has "strong female protagonist", for example. You don't have to use all the keyword slots, but the more you use, the more you'll appear to searching customers.

There are other fields, but they're mostly self-explanatory. You can look them up in guides, or with a good google search.

During the process, you'll be asked to upload your manuscript. Now, sometimes this takes a few tries... don't be discouraged if it errors out for no reason you can see. Save your current info, log out, close the browser, log back in and try again.

Once you've uploaded the manuscript, use the previewer tool to check it over. Now sometimes this tool errors out as well... this is why I recommend checking it via file conversion earlier in the process. (Remember that part? Cool.)

After that, it's mostly done. Ah, you'll have to choose royalties. Without getting complicated, basically if your e-book is between 2.99 and 9.99, you can choose 70% royalties. Any less or more, and you're limited to 35% royalties. So it goes.

And you'll need to choose whether or not you want to put it into Kindle Select. I could write dozens of posts about this, but... basically, unless you really want to sell through other online channels, it's a good idea. At least it is right now, the ebook industry is volatile, and if you're reading this five years later, I can't promise that it'll be as good an idea as it is right now.

With me so far? Cool. Alright, so once you've filled all the fields, uploaded your cover art and manuscript, and checked everything over to make sure it's good, then it's time to publish. PUSH THE BUTTON, FRANK!

Now go do something else. It doesn't instantly put your stuff in Amazon, there's folks who are going to go check it first to make sure it doesn't break their TOS. (That's Terms of Service, by the way.)

Generally it'll show up a few hours to a day afterward, with some variance.

Congratulations! You're now a published author! It's that easy.

After that, comes the tough job... marketing.

But I'll leave that for another week. Be well, friends!

So, when I was ready to start unveiling my work, and find a way to sell it to people, I started looking around. And two strategies started unfolding themselves, both seemed applicable at the time I was planning to enter the e-book game. circa 2015.

I could either go wide, and put my e-books up in as many storefronts as possible...

Or go deep, and drop them in Amazon, and only Amazon.

Going wide LOOKED like the better choice. Why stick to Amazon? If I went through Smashwords or used Caliber to turn the manuscript into many different formats, I could sell in the Apple Store, Kobo, the Barnes and Noble e-store, Smashwords itself, AND Amazon.

Whereas if I wen through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, that would only put me in Amazon.

And yet, most of the research I'd done was saying that authors in my shoes were making more sales in Amazon, than the rest combined.

Why?

I looked more closely, and the reason for that was a little program called Kindle Unlimited.

In a nutshell, it's an Amazon subscription service that functions like a library. When you sign up for it you pay a monthly fee, and can download any book in the KU program for free. You can keep up to 10 at any one time, if you want more free books than that, you have to delete one.

On the author side, authors get paid a fraction of a cent for every page read through the KU program. It's been around half a cent for a while, with occasional dips up and down. And after a while? It adds up.

However, the only way to put a book in KU, is to agree to make it exclusive to Amazon for as long as it's in KU.

So you have to go deep...

I did the math, and that decided me. I went deep, with no hesitation. And so far it's paid off. It didn't matter much when the only thing that was out there was my shorter fiction, but Dire:Born? That puppy's 320 pages. Which means $1.50 to $1.60 in my pocket for every full read through KU. That's a little worse than half my take for a direct e-book sale, but I don't mind. My take on it is...

1. People who might not read it are checking it out because it costs them nothing.

2. Essentially it's a win/win scenario. To them it's free, to me it's like selling the book with a steep discount.

3. The number of books in KU is smaller than the Amazon catalogue on the whole, so I have more of a chance of being read.

4. If someone uses KU to read my book for free and REALLY likes it, they might buy a copy later to keep permanently. Not a common occurrence, but it HAS happened.

5. KU grants access to a few marketing methods and specials that I'd have to pay money to get otherwise.

So.

Yeah, I went deep, and it's been working out so far. But...

The e-book market is constantly shifting. Recently Apple's been gaining on Amazon, with their ibooks program. Amazon's still the elephant in the room, but it may not be that way forever.

So for now, I'm going deep. But once I get my first trilogy complete?

Wellp, it'll be time to sit down, look at the way the wind is going, and maybe consider going wide...

Have you read Hugh Howey's blog? No? Well, it's a good read. You can find it over at http://www.hughhowey.com/

Hugh Howey's a very successful self-published author. He wrote a book called Wool, that got snapped up by a publisher, but he was sitting on quite a successful career before he became a published author. His bio's on the site, it's worth a read if you've got a few minutes.

The man's good. He's also had mixed experience with his forays into trade publishing, and has been an outspoken proponent of self-publishing, ever since.

I bring it up because his September 6 blog post is all about the state of Trade Publishing, and it doesn't look too good to him.

http://www.hughhowey.com/a-peek-behin...

Now... he is a hell of a writer, but I'm not sure just how much of a perspective he's got on big publishing. So take his post with a grain of salt.

That said, I find myself in agreement with what he's saying. The big publishing companies, on the whole, seem to be dropping the ball with ebooks. Remember a few years back, when published ebook prices on Amazon rose inexplicably? That was due to a lawsuit put forward by a major publisher.

What was happening, was that Amazon was marking the prices on published ebooks down. "Aha!" you might think. "No wonder the publisher was upset! They were seeing smaller royalties!"

Funny thing was, they weren't. Amazon was cutting prices down, but they were paying publishers the full royalty amount for the uncut price.

Essentially, they were slashing their own profit margins, and taking a loss.

Why?

Simple. Other ebook vendors couldn't match their prices. Amazon gained market share hand over fist. And with more copies sold, publishing houses were making a hell of a lot of money from Amazon as well. Amazon had set up a win-win situation, for everyone but the other ebook vendors.

So... why the lawsuit?

That, my friends, is a very good question. Because what the lawsuit DID, was pretty much destroy the ebook sales for the major publishing houses. Amazon couldn't adjust the price, so the ebook prices rose to the jacked-up sums that publishing houses demand.

Trade publishing doesn't really seem to GET ebooks. With the exception of Baen, mind you, whose free library project has been a breath of awesome air.

The only explanation I can think of as to why trade publishing blew off their own toes, is that they are trying to limit Amazon's influence by any means possible.

But... well, it didn't work.

The first reason that it failed, was that Amazon had already gotten too much market share for a move like this to matter.

The second reason is because of people like ME.

I put out good quality ebooks for prices that are more of a match for the existing market. I'm just one guy, but I can put out a handful of books a year. And there are many, many people like me, or better than me. And now that the big name publishers are abandoning the field, we're filling the void.

The demand's still out there. Kindle Unlimited wouldn't exist if the demand wasn't there. And for now, at least, we're doing good business. And New York's not seeing a cent of it.

I don't share Hugh's certainty that publishing is going to collapse any time soon. But I am pretty certain that it's going to change. Heck, the grudging acceptance that self-publishing has achieved in six or seven short years is a sign of that, people acknowledging reality.

Hopefully the trade publishers can acknowledge reality, before it's too late. Much as I don't like some of their business practices, they're nice to have around. Besides, I haven't entirely given up my dream of being on bookstore shelves some day...

Took a while to get the cover art together, and edit the danged thing, but finally everything is complete! Muhahahahhahaa!

That does feel kind of good, the whole fiendish laugh thing. I see why Dire does it.

Anyway, my first box set is up. Books one through three of the Dire Saga, all ready to go for the holidays. Also in Kindle Unlimited for those who peruse that venue.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N53O0W7

I honestly don't know how this will go. I'm mainly putting it out there in preparation for book four in March, so I have no expectations. Still, I think it'll do all right.

...and ah my friends and oh my foes, it's lookin' fine. I couldn't be happier!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072WL4XF5

(Do note that depending on your country, the link will vary. Might have to do some searching if you're outside of the US.)