Jason Matthews's Blog, page 27

Google Plus +, Open Sign-Ups Free For All

Google Plus, Google Plus One, Google +, however you want to call, is no longer an invitation only social media site. Yes, this means anyone and everyone with a valid email and internet connection can join the site that's grown faster than Facebook and Twitter combined in their first 3 months of business with 20 million sign-ups in just the first month alone (existing social media infrastructure helped of course).

From the Google Plus team; Yes, finally the Google+ Invitations are now out and you can request your invitation immediately. Create Your Free Account.

From just a few weeks of using Google Plus, my experience is that this service is my overall favorite social media venue, better than Facebook and Twitter for networking with readers, writers and publishing people in general. The nice feature is creating individual circles for family, friends, colleagues, the softball gang, whatever you want and streaming (or viewing) those announces from just the people in that group.

There's a previous blog post in a bit more detail here, and this time just wanted to remind writers, readers, publishing people alike to please connect with me there; I'll add you to my circles. Just click on the photo or this link here – https://plus.google.com/117850331447734054313/

And if you think this is a nifty badge, you can make one easily for your own sites at http://turhan.me/+me/.

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Interactive Ebooks, The Next Big Thing

Hard to believe Amazon introduced the Kindle, the first e-reading device, in November of 2007. It's less than 4 years old. In human terms, it won't be entering kindergarten until next fall. By then, chances are most kindergarteners will have seen an interactive ebook. (There are already sites dedicated to the subject – http://interactive-ebooks.blogspot.com/.)

E-publishing is changing the industry on what appears to be a monthly basis. The latest phase is interactive ebooks ushered in by the tablet; Apple's iPad, Barnes & Noble's Nook Color, tablets by Motorola, Samsung, Dell, HP, and so many more will compete with each other in this arena and Amazon's soon to be released Coyote and Hollywood (shh, it's a secret).

What's the benefit to interactive ebooks? Probably easiest to see it with children's books. Interactive learning for the A-B-C's, counting numbers, even things like geography and vocabulary can be much more effective with video and audio to accompany the lesson. Plus the advances go beyond education. What fun for any reader when characters can be made either male of female with avatar features like hair and skin color options, height and weight, favorite activities, clothing, accessories, etc, can instantly be added to personalize the people in any story. Or a reader can actually upload her/his own photo and become the protagonist or antagonist of the story along with making decisions of how the plot plays out.

Beyond children's books, imagine the effect on readers when sound effects are heard at just the right moment, like a woman's scream or machine gun fire or the sound of a crowd cheering the game-winning play. Video's can be inserted as well, whether they accompany the text or as a comment/interview with the author, the characters and more.

Alternative endings can happen too. Reminds me of movies like Clue and Wayne's World, where they dabble with a few different endings. Reader, where would you like to go from here? You can decide a happy ending or a tragic one, and these other possibilities abound…

Some of this involves small additions for the author to consider, like integrated apps for avatars/audio/video inserts, while other aspects involve larger ones, like alternative plot twists. It all creates incredible possibilities for story telling and the reader experience becoming more personal. Makes me wonder if the gap between big publishers and Indie authors will widen or narrow based on this new paradigm. Will Indies be able to keep up with big money to develop new apps for interactive ebooks, or will Indies come up with outstanding ideas and methods all their own? One thing for sure, we'll see soon enough.

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Amazon Sales Rank, Secret Algorithm Exposed

Amazon Sales Rank, how do they figure it? A lot of Indie authors want to know exactly what to expect with sales rank when they sell ebooks on Amazon. For instance, how many ebook sales does it take to reach the 10,000 mark, or the 1,000 mark or *gasp* the top 100 best sellers? Like Fermat's Last Theorem and Google's algorithm for determining search results (minus about 200 factors), Amazon Sales Rank algorithm seems to be a highly guarded secret.

It's human nature to want to understand things. Unfortunately, Amazon won't give us an X + Y + Z = Sales Rank equation. They have said, "As an added service for customers, authors, publishers, artists, labels, and studios, we show how items in our catalog are selling. The lower the number, the higher the sales for that particular item. The calculation is based on Amazon.com sales and is updated each hour to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold on Amazon.com."

The first question that comes to mind is how many ebooks does Amazon sell? There are plenty of ebooks with no sales ever, therefore no sales ranking, which makes it difficult to know how many are really out there. 5 million ebooks? 7 million? 10 million? Since books have shown up in the 4 million range with at least one sale, it's safe to assume this number is reaching 10 million.

Just my opinions but what seems to be true (and these are estimated numbers based on Amazon US Kindle ebooks);

a book must have a sale (even just one) to be ranked.
it only takes a few sales to leap from the millions to the hundred thousands, as in going from a ranking of 4,156,977 to 357,954 after just 3 sales.
it only takes about a dozen monthly sales to break the 100,000 mark.
then to break the 10,000 mark, the 1,000 mark and the top 100 mark – the sales have to multiply in geometric progression (a heck of a lot).
to be in the top 100 best selling books, (estimating here) sales must routinely be well over 200 sales/day.
from the above info, an important factor appears to be how many recent sales have occurred.

Okay, this can't be rocket science. Sales happen over time. Factors are pretty limited: total number of sales ever (history) and recent number of sales (the past month, week, day, hour). Since Amazon updates rankings hourly, it can be deduced that Amazon factors at least 2 major numbers into the equation: the total number of sales ever, history, and the total number of sales hourly. In my experience of watching the numbers move up and down, there have been many hours of the day where some of my books didn't sell any copies and the ranking only changed slightly, so it also seems logical that daily sales and weekly or even monthly sales must also play into this equation. In fact, it's logical that all of these factors play a role, perhaps some more than other and perhaps from hourly to daily to weekly to monthly in importance. That's got to be it or close to it; what else could possibly go into the equation?

Here's a telling comparison. The #1 best selling book from 2009 (New Moon, Book 2 of Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer) shows a current Amazon sales rank of #936. Another book that was published just 4 months ago in May 2011 (The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan) is currently ranked #2 on Amazon. Yet another book published last month in August 2011 (Thunder Dog by Michael Hingson) is ranked #4. There is no way the latter books have anywhere near the total number of sales as New Moon. This would seem to indicate that hourly sales are far more important to the equation than total sales ever (history). Apparently Amazon places a huge priority on ranking what is hot right now and certainly makes recent sales the number one factor. In fact, 4 of the top 10 bestsellers were published this year while the oldest book in the top 10 is from 2002, another is from 2007 and the rest from 2009 or more recent. Ah-hah, time is by far the number one ingredient. (This is great news for Indie authors; get your sales rolling and you could make the top of the charts in little time as there is much evidence that exposure from the top of the charts boosts sales dramatically.)

Something like this below could be the secret equation to determine sales ranking or how one book compares to all other Amazon books:

hourly (# of sales) x daily/2 x weekly/3 x monthly/4 x history/10 or more = Sales Corresponding Coefficient (SCC)

This way the main ingredient is time, namely hourly and daily, with slightly less emphasis on weekly and even less on monthly and last on history. The SCC of any book with substantial sales can be a huge number; the highest number would have the lowest sales ranking. It should also be noted than a zero (0) for any of these categories other than history should not make the formula reduce itself to zero. Perhaps every other category besides history should have a 1 added to the equation to force a real number to be the outcome.

What happens to books with the exact same number of SCC? Whichever book has been on the shelf longer would rank lower.

What about price affecting ranking? This has been mentioned but seems seriously doubtful. Evidence does suggest that lowering the book's price can lead to more sales and free books get downloaded like crazy, but it's hard to imagine Amazon would want to encourage the cheaper books to have a better ranking as they would make less money that way. Could the opposite be true, could higher priced books get better ranking? Perhaps but doubtful again, since the top 10 bestsellers currently have 4 books priced at 99 cents.

This theory is just my opinion; Amazon sales ranking places priority over recentness of sales by hour, day, week and month while also factoring in a small percentage for total sales history. It's a a fun thing to conjecture upon but probably not too helpful in selling ebooks. If you want to read more on the subject by some pretty focused people who have spent far more history on this, a Google search or these links might be useful – http://ebmv.blogspot.com/ and http://futureperfectpublishing.com/2008/01/27/dark-mysteries-of-the-amazon-sales-rank/.

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Paperback Dolls, Indie Author Reviews and More

Although this blog usually reports on all things related to Indie authors who sell ebooks, an exception seemed appropriate for Paperback Dolls, an international site with impressive stats - 58,020 unique visitors and 87,584 page loads from May to December of 2010 alone. (Actually not that much of an exception since CreateSpace is my recommended place to self-publish with Amazon's print-on-demand company, which is also free.) Paperback Dolls is composed of 10 ladies who simply love reading and writing reviews. What great names they have too. Noa, Day, Kitt, Desilula, Elvie, Mona, Suz, Lil, Believer and Alli each have varied backgrounds and tastes for reading, but they all love it and just might review your book.

How does an Indie author go about getting reviewed? From their website:

Authors, Publishers, and Publicists,
Thank you for considering Paperback Dolls.
Inquiry Time Frame:
All inquiries will be read within three days of submission, after which any acceptance confirmations will be sent. We apologize that we are unable to accept every inquiry, but please be assured that we are always happy to consider any and all new inquiries.
Genres We Typically Review:
Noa-Romance, Mystery, Thrillers, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, Historical Fiction, Biographies, History, and Young Adult.
Day- *No longer taking review requests at this time.
Kitt- *No longer taking review requests at this time.
Elvie-Fiction, Historical Romance, Paranormal Romance, Fantasy, Mystery.
Desi- Young Adult, Middle-grade, Childrens
Alli- Chick-lit, Women's fiction
Suz- Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, Erotica (ebooks only)
Believer- Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance
Lil- Contemprary fiction, Paranormal, Urban Fantasy
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See their Review Policy for complete updates. A request for more info and a possible review was sent by me about a week ago, haven't heard back yet so perhaps my genres didn't excite them (understandable).

They also do Giveaways and allow space on their site for Advertisers and Affiliates. Really it looks like a perfect opportunity for writers of romance, paranormal romance, thrillers, young adult, urban fantasy and anything related to women in general. Just make sure to get some paperbacks made with CreateSpace if you haven't already.

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Amazon Author Central for Indie Authors

Amazon Author Central is a fantastic resource for Indie authors selling ebooks and paperbacks, which makes is surprising to find many writers not utilizing this free warehouse of tools.

If you have ebooks for sale on Amazon and you're not yet using author central, the first thing to do is to create an author profile. This is what browsers will see when they click the hyperlink of your author name listed under all of your books on the product page. Believe it or not, many Indie authors haven't filled in this information or have done so sparsely, and thus when someone clicks on their name the search results in either little about the author or, even worse, a list of books written by people with a similar name. By simply creating a profile and matching it to your list of books, any browser can learn so much more about you, which often leads to sales. Many elements can go into your profile: an author biography with website URLs (if you have them), at least one good photo and preferably more, a list of all of your ebooks and paperbacks, updates from your blogs (if applicable), your twitter feed and any related videos you might have.

1. Create a Profile – this will end up being found by many browsers on your book product page as a hyperlink of your author name and will read like this, Visit Amazon's Jason Matthews Page. Once that's done, you can Add Books to make the link work for all of them.

2. Now upload some photos, especially a face shot. I prefer doing multiple photos. Amazon prefers the photos are of you, but you can try adding family members or locations and see if it's accepted.

3. Write a biography. I like keeping it short and sweet, but you can write more. Readers love a little info on the author. What else do you do? What motivates you to write? What issues are you working on? How can people contact you (no HTML but you can leave URLs)?

4. Add the feed to your blog or blogs. This will look something like http://ebooksuccess4free.wordpress.com/feed/ or http://www.thebigbangauthor.com/atom.xml. It will enable Amazon browsers to see your most recent posts and also give them the link to your blog and to subscribe/follow it. (If you don't have blog, seriously consider getting one, even a free one with WordPress or Blogger.)

5. Add your Twitter account. This will post your latest tweets, so keep them interesting and/or appropriate for book browsers to see.

6. Add video if you have anything related to your book or just something that will allow readers to get to know you better. It could be anything as long as it helps people see the real you and want to check out your book.

7. Set up the Search Inside the Book feature, if it's not already done.

8. Join Amazon Associates for making money on referral links to Amazon products (depending of which state/country you live in). It's a great way to create links, banners, favorite badges and custom widgets like this carousel at one of my blogs.

There's also good data for sales information by geography and a reviews page to quickly find all customer comments. See the FAQ's page and Help page for more info.

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Pixel of Ink, Free & Bargain Kindle or Nook Books

Pixel of Ink features daily publishing announcements of free and bargain ebooks for Kindle or Nook. It's a great site for both price-conscious readers and Indie authors. The blog is updated multiple times per day by administrator, Sharon Rosen, so if freebies and great deals sound good–you may want to subscribe to it.

The genre tags are: Business, Children's Books, Christian Fiction, Cookbooks, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Nonfiction, Romance, Science Fiction and Young Adult. There's also a page for Useful Links, an Author's Corner where Indies can request to be featured or share success stories, and Recommended Resources for Writers.

From the Pixel Of Ink website, here's what you'll find for both the Kindle and Nook:

Free eBooks – both the Limited Time Offers and often forgotten but Popular Classics
Bargain eBooks that are highly rated (4-stars and up) yet a bargain at under $1, under $3, or under $5
Kindle accessories that are an absolute steal of a deal (i.e. 50% off or more)

Prices & availability are accurate at the time of posting and are subject to change, and may differ from one country to another.

Indie authors sometimes price books for free or 99 cents to generate lots of reader downloads. It is common for authors to experience hundreds to thousands of downloads each week their ebooks are available for free. Once a solid reader base has been established and a "buzz" has been generated, they can often raise prices and continue to have good sales.

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Indie Authors, Google Plus +1 Me

As a reminder to Indie authors, you'll see it referred to as Google Plus, Google + or Google +1, and it's the latest greatest social media site on the planet. There's a previous blog post in a bit more detail here, and this time just wanted to remind writers, readers, publishing people alike to please connect with me. Just click on this link here – https://plus.google.com/117850331447734054313/

And if you think this is a nifty badge, you can make one easily for your own sites at http://turhan.me/+me/.

However, some people might say, "Great, do I really need or even want to get involved in yet another social media site? Already feeling stretched as it is, y'know." That's an understandable feeling. But Google Plus is different and poised for good things in my opinion. It's sort of the best of both Facebook and Twitter, although the design is presently just for personal profiles and not for businesses. Rest assured, Google is working on that and says business profiles should be active within a few months. The ability to separate friends, family, followers and other groups (like business contacts) into individual categories (who only see what you want them to see) is what makes Google Plus a savvy social media site. Over 20 million people have joined in a short time and many more are signing up everyday.

If you haven't received an invitation yet, just send out an email to your pals and family asking for one. Someone you know should have invites to give. Everyone gets 150 invites to distribute, and most people have plenty left over so it shouldn't be a big deal. If that doesn't work out contact me at jason (at) thelittleuniverse (dot) com and I'll get you in there as long as my invites hold out.

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Bookstackreviews.com, Coming November 2011

Here's a chance for Indie authors to get in on the ground floor at a review site that has potential (imho). Bookstackreviews hasn't opening its doors yet, aiming for November, but they're already taking submissions for books to be read/reviewed. It's free for Indies and done through KDP Amazon. The manner in which they acquire the submission is unique, therefore it seemed a blog post was in order. Here's how you submit to them from their site:

1) Head to https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/reports and sign in.

2) Click "Actions" then "edit book details."

3) Scroll down to part 5. Upload your Book file and click "Browse."

4) Select the book file that you originally uploaded to Amazon and click "Upload."

5) Once it has uploaded click "Preview" and then select "Download HTML."

6) DO NOT click "Save and continue" or Save as draft. Just close the browser window. No changes have taken place.

7) Email that file along with your name, the book cover image, the book's name and genre to submit@bookstackreviews.com

By following this method it ensures the book appears exactly as it would on Amazon. (Word or PDF documents will appear different than the Amazon version as we do review.)

A bonus for newbies is that this process gets writers familiar with self-publishing at KDP Amazon. No, you don't have to actually publish your book on Amazon as it can simply be left in Draft status or even deleted after you've completed the submission to Bookstackreviews. Although it probably will need to be published before November when the site goes live. This submission method also keeps things consistent for the reviewers (probably many Kindle owners) who will be able to comment on the author's formatting for ebooks as well.

The advent of e-publishing has enabled millions of new writers to publish books, especially ebooks, flooding the reading market like never before. It's a good thing and a not-so-good thing depending on who you ask. The biggest complaints from readers are the ever-increasing number of bad books to sort through, books with typos, poor formatting, flow, plot, crappy writing in general. This results in screams for more Gatekeepers, trusted readers who identify the best Indies from those giving independent authors a bad rap. But who has time to read all those books? Instead of genuine reviews of Indie authors, many sites are happy to promote new books with reviews included that are typically copied and pasted from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. That's why a venue like Bookstackreviews has potential since they seem to be prepared to write a genuine review including what they liked and didn't like about every book.

Makes me wonder how many readers they employ or how they find them? Get ready for a flood of new submissions.

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The Reader's Guide, For Kindle and Nook Readers

The Reader's Guide is a blog updated multiple times per day with recommendations for new Kindle or Nook books. Browsers can peruse recommendations by genre and their preferred price range (free, under $1/$3/$5/$10 or over $10). Books are also categorized as Kindle Daily Deals, Amazon Bestsellers and Amazon Deals.

From their website: The Reader's Guide publishes information on quality reads and bargain ebooks for both Kindle and Nook. The Reader's Guide is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC and Linkshare Affiliates Program – advertising programs designed for sites to earn advertising fees. Both price and availability are subject to change, and may differ depending on your country.

When asked how they go about making selections for books to promote, the site administrator said, "We watch for sales, newer ebooks, and ebooks that are well rated and recommended. Kindleboards is great for finding discounted books." The representative also mentioned being flooded with recent emails for submissions (even though they don't ask for them) and never having listed any non-fiction titles, although they just promoted their first with How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free.

What does this mean to Indie authors trying to market ebooks and paperbacks for Kindle or Nook? Good question. If you're lucky (or clever) enough to get your books listed there, then it could be a great boost to sales.

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Write and Share

Write and Share is a fairly new site designed to help writers and readers network with each other and beyond. It was started by Naomi Chance, a writer who finished her first novel in 2010 and then ran into challenges/road blocks with what to do next (sounds very familiar). Naomi started Write and Share to promote not only her own writing but also that of others in similar situations, and now the site's primarily geared to discovering unpublished writers and Indie authors.

From their site:

Write & Share is a FREE site for writers and poets who are looking to promote their work, improve their writing and get published. As a member you can:

Create a personal profile to showcase your work.
Post your work to gain advice and tips on writing.
Share your experiences and help new and upcoming talent.

At Write and Share you can create a profile, upload an avatar and submit stories to be freely read. They also have sections for Writing Advice and general Forums. Naomi has created a great place to help all Indie authors, and hopefully the site will continue with a bright future.

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