M. Eigh's Blog - Posts Tagged "self-publishing"

Thank you Germany, for Making My Book a Bestseller on Your Unification Day

On a theoretical level, we are all very familiar with Occam’s razor (or Ockham’s razor,) which says that all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one. But in practice, when we are scrambling for a solution, we always fall for the potion, elixir or the secret formula of alchemy.

Take a casual look at the Web Marketing, book Publishing or Authorship category on Amazon and you get the picture instantly. Everybody is trying to sell you a pipe dream. The “self help” books in those categories follow a pattern: “How I Made [Insert a Number Comparable to a Lottery Winning Here] by Selling My Kindle Book in [Insert a Better-than-Expected Short Time Here]” or “How to Sell [Insert an Astronomical Number that Often Appears in a NASA Document] Copies of My eBook.”

Sad, but true. Why not? If people who normally don’t read or write books can waste a few dollars a week on lottery tickets, the average Indie authors or self publishers are entitled to wasting some of their hard-earned royalty money on fantastical tales.

But the truth always prevails. What sounds too good to be true is usually too good to be true. The perfect analogy of this shocking phenomenon is the golf industry. If you ask a PGA pro what he envies Tiger or Phil most, the answer is guaranteed to be “their short games.” The pros know what really matters. But if you look at what the average weekend golfers spend money on, it’s normally the drivers. They dish out $400 to buy the latest model every year. In addition, they also spend a few hundred dollars a year on practice ranges where they hit those drivers in search for that perfect swing and drive, just like the average Indie authors are looking for that bestseller that will change their fate forever.

But, just as with weekend golfers, there are some cooler heads. The smart amateur golfers practice on their short games and end up beating their peers on the weekend rounds. Victory also comes cheap to them, as they never buy the latest model of drivers, nor do they ever read those “How to Hit Over 300 Yards with Your Driver” type of self-help books.

I will be the first one to admit that my books on Kindle book descriptions do not offer the miraculous home run that will immediately change your sales rank on Amazon. Rather, it showcases the best practices of effective Kindle book descriptions. For the formulas presented in my books to work, the readers are required to work — well, someone has to enter verbiages, images, videos, Flash or jQuery widgets as well as social media widgets into the book descriptions; you can do it yourself, but you can also hire someone to do it for you.

It’s wonderful to see that there are some cooler heads in the Indie author crowd. This morning when I woke up, my book How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages. has jumped to the # 1 Bestseller spot in the Web Marketing category on Amazon.de:

How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages

Hats off to my German fellow authors for being able to tell the real science from fantasies. After all, 50% of Germany’s GDP comes from export. And little or none of Germany’s export falls into the fantasy category. (No, Bollywood cheap budget movies do not come from Germany.) They make high-quality, superbly engineered products that requires meticulous craftsmanship and take-no-prisoners quality control. No wonder they will fall in love with my no-nonsense book.