Bill Hiatt's Blog, page 17

Tip #6, Part 3: Others

I can’t address the experience of dealing with Barnes and Noble and Apple directly, since I use Smashwords for both, but I should mention some of the unique features of each site.

Barnes and Noble evidently has an arrangement with Kirkus Reviews that permits B and N to republish Kirkus reviews in their entirety on the appropriate product pages. That’s an amazing bonus if you have a good Kirkus review and want to show it off. (Amazon, as noted earlier, doesn’t even provide a way of linking to a good external review, let alone making the whole text part of the product page.)

Apple distributes to more countries than anyone else I can think of, though the probability most people will buy books primarily in their first language somewhat reduces this advantage. However, Apple recently instituted unprecedented levels of recognition through its “Breakout Books” program for indie authors by showcasing the work of such authors who were selling well and getting good reviews. According to Mark Colker in his site notes, promotions in the Canada and Australia-New Zealand stores have already resulted in Smashwords authors rising high in the top selling lists for these stores. True, your book needs to be doing something already to get this kind of attention, but the opportunity is still unlike anything else available.

In terms of the most recent figures I have been able to find, Barnes and Noble accounts for 20% of ebook sales, while Apple has 10%, with some indication that both shares are rising. These are currently the two biggest outlets after Amazon, and it only makes good sense to market through both, whether you use Smashwords to distribute to them or distribute to them directly.

I couldn’t find sales figures for Google Books, but it seemed reasonable to me that, if it didn’t have a big market share right now, it was probably on the way up. Consequently, even though Smashwords did not distribute to Google Books, I figured I should invest the extra effort and distribute to them myself. I don’t regret that decision, though I will say that Google was more difficult to work with than either Amazon or Smashwords.

Part of the problem is the existence of Google Book Partners, a program in which Google advertises your books. Google websites do not make clear the relationship between this program and actually selling your ebooks through Google. It turns out that you have to join Google Book Partners first in order to be eligible to market your books through Google Books–or so I thought. Looking at the website more closely, it now looks as if Google Book Partners is an umbrella that encompasses two subdivisions, the preview program (free advertising) and Google ebooks (sales through Google). The fact that I still have to wonder about this suggests that Google is not articulating its structure very well. I had to do a lot of research to figure out what to do to market with them.

When I finally got to the right place, my book upload seemed to fail at first, I made the mistake of cancelling, the upload succeeded, and then the cancellation took effect. When I tried to re-upload, I was told the ISBN I used was already in use, which it was–on the previous upload attempt for the same book. Yes, tech support straightened the mess out for me, but I remained uneasy.  I was actually beginning to wonder if the whole struggle was worth it–and then I sold a book through Google, at which point I figured it was. (If you are an indie author, as I suspect you are if you are reading this post, you know how precious even a single sale can be during the early stages of your writing career.) Anyway, I stand by my earlier prediction that Google will end up as a major player in the ebook business, though they do need to work out a few kinks.

I will also say a word about the one sales channel I didn’t end up using that I had initially explored: Waterstones, a UK physical and online bookseller with a great reputation. Perhaps I still will use them, but the process looks daunting. Waterstones won’t deal directly with independent authors, so I would need to use a book aggregator, who would charge for formatting the book (though I could elect to do that on my own), taking care of the VAT requirements, registering with Nielsen’s (the British Bowker, ISBN distributor) and various other processes, each of which seems to require a separate fee and some of which require annual fees. I have sold all of about 1 book in the UK so far, and I thought I might sell more if I were available through Waterstones, but the process looks too expensive right now and at best a hypothetical prospect of a few additional sales.

 

Tip #6, Part 2: Smashwords

Smashwords is a much smaller operation than Amazon. I think I saw Mark Colker, Smashwords founder, quoted somewhere as saying that Amazon is 2000 times the size of Smashwords. That said, it is still a venue well worth considering. I might almost go as far as to say that it is a “must,” though not for the same reasons as Amazon.

The biggest selling point for Smashwords is that when you market with them, they will also distribute your book to most other vendors, including Barnes and Noble, Apple, Sony, Kobo, and several others, among them three different ebook channels for libraries. (Amazon is technically on their list as well, but the details haven’t really been worked out yet.) The only other sites I know of that perform this kind of service also charge for it, but Smashwords does not. That part of the process could be a real time saver. Since all the venues are free, and most offer generous royalties, often as much as 60%, I would advocate distributing with all of them–what do you have to lose? So why not let Smashwords do it for you? Well, actually there is a reason. If you do each venue separately, you get all the information directly. If you go through Smashwords, the vendors pass the sales and royalty information to Smashwords (very slowly), and so you don’t get the same kind of up-to-the-minute information you get from dealing with a vendor directly. You also don’t get all the information you would with a direct connection. For example, when I see a book sale from Apple, I can’t tell in which country the sale was made–and Apple has 45 separate, country specific distribution channels. Therefore, if you want complete information on your sales and want it quickly, it is better to deal with the other vendors directly. If, like me, you can’t really spare the amount of time you would need to do a separate setup for each distributor, then Smashwords is definitely for you.

If you are interested in lots of information about your book, Smashwords does beat Amazon in one area: it lets you track site statistics such as how often your page is visited, how many samples are downloaded, and how many downloads paying customers make. With Amazon you get sales figures, but not the other information, and that extra information can be useful in helping to gauge the effectiveness of advertising efforts, even if those page visits don’t always result in sales.

Smashwords also does some of the messy work of file conversion for you, probably a must since, unlike Amazon, Smashwords distributes in multiple formats. It did recently introduce the option to upload your own epub, but otherwise you upload a Word document, and the Smashwords “meat grinder” program generates the 8 different formats that Smashwords distributes on its own site (including the epub file that is then sent to the other distribution channels). Again, though, there is a little bit of a catch: if the Word document has issues such as hidden formatting of which you are unaware, the resulting conversions can be nonviable messes. For this reason be sure to read all the information available on the Smashwords site if you are not familiar with the way ebook conversions work. Even if you are, download the resulting conversions, particularly the mobi and epub ones, and check them to make sure they work properly. (Load the mobi one on your Kindle or Kindle software, and load the epud on Adobe Digital Editions.) Just look through the books; you can typically tell very quickly if there are problems. Fix them and upload again. Though Smashwords isn’t overly picky about what it distributes, if you want to have Smashwords distribute to some or all of the other outlets, your files need to pass through the Smashwords vetting process for inclusion in the premium catalog, and any obvious layout weirdness is going to keep your work out.

What if you can’t figure out what the problem with your Word file is? Well, you can pay someone else to do that for you, but before taking that step, there are a couple other things you can try. A lot of people advocate the “nuclear method” (saving the file in txt format to wipe out all of the formatting). The only problem with that approach is that it really does wipe out all formatting, not just the parts you want to get rid of. If, for example, you have italics, you have to go back manually and restore all of it, a labor-intensive, tedious process at best. Before you do that, try saving the file as .rft (rich text format) first. That is the native format for composing programs like Scrivener and Word Pad. It retains most visible formatting but doesn’t support a lot of Word’s hidden formatting, so with luck you can nuke the troublesome part without losing everything. Anyway, rft is worth a shot. You do need to resave the file as doc before uploading to Smashwords, so if you use Word to do that, be sure to turn off autoformatting first, just in case.

I have also mentioned another of Smashwords’ advantage, a unique one as far as I know: customers can download your book in pretty much whatever format suits them. If they change devices later, they can download a different format later without paying an additional charge. That feature seems likely to attract customers to Smashwords and certainly works to your advantage if you market through them. Even better, if you revise your book, Smashwords makes the revised version available to former customers virtually immediately. (On Amazon the same process takes four weeks, and as I pointed out in an earlier post, sometimes doesn’t complete properly. On the other hand, in the case of big revisions, Amazon will email former customers to notify them of the availability of the update, which I don’t think Smashwords does.)

The Smashwords product page doesn’t look quite as slick as Amazon’s, but in some ways I prefer Smashwords’ approach. You as writer can customize a little more than Amazon allows, and Smashwords puts any book videos on the product page, so if you have a nice video ad, you can get it out there, not bury it on the author page as you have to do with Amazon.

As with Amazon, I found dealing with Smashwords to be a pleasant experience. The functions the site performs it performs well. If there are any major headaches involved, I haven’t discovered them yet.

 

Only a Few Days Left for the “Love Your Library” Contest

Remember that the contest closes on February 14 at 8:00 pm Pacific time. This is a great chance to win prizes for yourself and help your local library in the process.

I haven’t exactly been deluged with entries, which makes me fear everyone is waiting until the last minute. Remember that, if you do that, there is some possibility that the site will freeze up on you. Earlier entries are always better.

Full contest information is available at http://billhiatt.com/?page_id=140

 

Tip #6: Amazon? Smashwords? Google Play? Which Distributors Should You Use? (Part 1: Amazon)

The question of who should distribute your work is an important one if you are a self-published writer. While I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other, I do have experience with practically every major distributor, and so I will share that experience for what it is worth.

First, the good news.  Every major ebook outlet will let you offer your book through them at no cost to you (though they do, of course, take a share of the sales, but typically much less than a traditional publisher would get). Generally, it is hard to argue with free. Also, aside from just displaying the book, all distributors have other built-in promotional mechanisms, like the old “Customers who bought this title also bought…” display on Amazon.

Of course, unless lightning strikes, you will spend time and/or money promoting the book, so the whole process of self-publishing is really not free. I have read about a few writers who just put their book up for sale and had it start selling really well, but most of us need to find ways to get the books moving, or they just sit there after a brief flurry of initial interest. (In at least some of the venues, books are more visible when they are first published.) I don’t have enough data to know if the venues you pick influence your sales all that much, but venues do definitely offer different author experiences.

AMAZON

Amazon, as one of the early popularizers of self-publishing via ebooks, deserves some credit for broadening the alternatives available to perspective authors.  The figures I have seen suggests that Amazon holds about 60% of the ebook market, so it is hard to imagine not making your book available through such a large sales channel.  That said, there are no shortage of writers on the Kindle forums denouncing Amazon for various reasons. My own experience has been generally very positive, though there are a few areas in which I would like to see improvement.

First let’s talk about the positive side of the Amazon experience. Assuming you know what you are doing, setting up your book in mobi format to upload to Amazon is easy. [If you don't know what you are doing, I would suggest investing in the relatively cheap Scrivener software from http://literatureandlatte.com/ Scrivener allows you to edit your material in rtf format (thus avoiding hidden Word format that can wreak havoc with ebook conversion) and is a fairly decent vehicle for composing your novel in the first place, but it really shines when it comes to publishing the material. Scrivener produces a mobi file without issues every time because it makes effective use of Amazon's own free Kindlegen program. It can also do epub and other formats if you need them for another venue.] Anyway, setting up a new title, uploading, and setting pricing information in the various countries is all relatively intuitive and painless. Within a few hours, your book is available for sale. Amazon’s product page is generally well set up and customizable in several ways, as is its author page. Amazon offers a great deal of information about sales, though occasionally updates lag a little bit. (Given the size of the operation, that’s forgivable.) Amazon also, though I’m not sure what triggers this behavior, occasionally sends out emails to advertise a book to people who may have made similar purchases. In addition, Amazon will sometimes make Indie books part of the 4-for-3 promotion (buy four books and get the cheapest one free). My book was in that promotion for some time, though I noticed it ceased to be once I left Select, so that may be an unmentioned perk of being in Select, or the end of the promotion might just have been coincidental.

However, there are some areas that Amazon could do better, as I mentioned earlier. The one I have had the most recent experience with is updating a title. (If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know about my mistake in not paying for a professional edit before the initial release of the book.) I did one update almost right after my first upload, one after I had prepared the book for CreateSpace distribution, and one after I got the file back from a professional editor. The actual update was entirely painless, but Amazon is supposed to have a procedure for deciding how to notifiy previous purchasers that the book has been updated, either via email or through making the book updateable through the “manage your Kindle” function. I have notified support of updates three times, they have started the process three times, and…nothing. Previous purchasers never get an email, and I know from watching my own copy that it never shows as updateable when I do the manage my Kindle routine. When I pointed this problem out after the second time, the support people were very apologetic and told me how to update my copy, but I got no real response to the question of when early purchasers would be able to update. This problem won’t be an issue for you if your original upload was perfect, but it will be if, like me, you update the book and want your earlier purchasers (often friends and family) to have access to that update.

Another annoyance, though a lesser one, is that I would like to have more control over my product page. I don’t begrudge Amazon the ability to control the space, which they providing free, after all, but sometimes it would be nice to include, for example, a link to the Kirkus review of Living with Your Past Selves. Amazon doesn’t allow links in any of the content you can post on your page, I think in part to avoid authors linking to another site from which their book can be purchased. This concern is reasonable, but I can’t help but think Amazon could prohibit this behavior without prohibiting all links. I’m also not a big fan of burying the book video on the author page, which I suspect most people never bother with.

I’m also troubled by the lack of integration among different services under the Amazon umbrella. For instance, Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace have some integration, and each division encourages you to publish with the other, but there are weird inconsistencies between them. KDP offers the opportunity to attach a series name and number to the book. CreateSpace has a subtitle option and a volume number option, but that doesn’t produce quite the same result. Also, the categories are somewhat different, a variation that seems hard to explain, though it hasn’t yet really caused a problem for me.  Also different is the way the two divisions handle author biographies, with the result that, once I had claimed both versions, two different versions of my biography were visible on the product page (one of the them bizarrely in editorial reviews). Personally, I’d rather use all the space I can for the book itself and keep my bio, fascinating as it is, to a minimum. Most irritating of all, though, is the fact that my KDP and CreateSpace versions of the book originally displayed as two separate products. Support connected them for me very quickly once I pointed out the discrepancy, but one would think such a simple operation could be automatic. Finally, instead of having one author central, or at least one for each language, so one could use the same material for The U.S., Canada, and the U.K., Amazon has a separate one for each country, meaning that an author has to submit materially separately to each one. Just for good measure, each one varies in terms of the kind of material it will accept. There are other examples, but you get the point.

All of that said, I have to go back to a point I made originally–you would have to be crazy not to use a venue that boasts 60% of all ebook sales. Yes, there are a few areas I would like to see Amazon tweak, but the basic process of distributing your book through Amazon is easy, and the product page is generally well laid out. However, I would not join KDP Select (which gives you some advantages, like the ability to offer books free on a promotional basis). From what I can tell from the Kindle forums, the free promos don’t produce the eventual increase in paid sales they used to, and there are sometimes issues with the promo starting on time or ending on time. When you have to pay a heavy price–exclusivity with Amazon–Select just doesn’t offer enough.  Giving up 60% of the market would be crazy, but giving up the other 40%  seems only a little less crazy. (If Select included reviews by editors from Amazon Publishing and/or other review partners, for instance, I’d say jump on it, but that isn’t the case.)