Jason Matthews's Blog, page 32
June 9, 2011
Amazon Tags for US Kindle Ebooks are Back!
Good news for Indie authors who want to sell ebooks; Amazon Tags have returned for US Kindle ebooks. They disappeared about two weeks ago, oddly just for the US Kindles but not for paperbacks, hardcovers or for any versions in other countries. Understandably, there was much speculation as to why from both readers and writers alike. In fact, this blog posted an entry on the subject of where did they go? and listed the main (assumed) reasons.
Interestingly enough, there still hasn't been an official announcement from the world's largest bookseller. We're still wondering what the heck happened? Was it really just a glitch? A glitch that took two weeks to fix after speculation of so much tagging abuses? Strange indeed.
The reasons tags are a great way to help indies sell ebooks is because they're a search term many customers use when looking for a book on something like SEO, for example. And so if a reader searches products tagged with SEO, they'll find books like Get On Google Front Page. Works for me.
Welcome back, my little friends. We missed you.
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June 6, 2011
NCX Files for Ebook Navigation
For Indie authors who want to sell ebooks, it has become important to know about NCX files, which stands for Navigation Control for XML. This is especially important if your book is non-fiction and/or has important chapter titles and plans to be converted to epub format, which is the standard now used by Apple iBookstore, Barnes&Noble Nook and many others. In fact some retailers like Kobo are now requiring these NCX files, and many retailers like Apple and Barnes&Noble could make them mandatory soon for Indie authors selling ebooks.
NCX files and linked Table of Contents (TOC) are very similar elements for adding navigation within the book. It's easy to confuse the two. While it's smart and common to find a TOC at the very beginning with hyperlinks that connect chapter titles to locations within an ebook, it's also wise to do a similar thing with NCX files.
These NCX files are relatively new but quickly becoming mainstream. It's really just a simple way of telling conversion software how to identify the TOC and create a user-friendly map or means of accessing that element quickly from anywhere within the book. For example, if you were reading somewhere in the middle of an ebook and instantly wanted to see the chapter headings, the NCX file will allow for that. If the ebook did not contain this file and only provided a TOC for navigation links, then the reader would have to go back to the beginning. Not a huge deal, of course, but the NCX file does make this a bit simplified.
So how do you create them? For Indie authors planning to upload with Smashwords, which is a great idea, it can be done by following the explanations given in the Smashwords Style Guide and is really quite simple. Basically, all that's needed to create an NCX file is to list the chapter number and title in this fashion: Chapter 1: Example for the First Chapter. That would be the wording to go into the TOC as well as to begin the page where the first chapter is located. Then each subsequent chapter number and title would follow in the same manner throughout the TOC and the ebook. This way, the software used for converting documents, like Microsoft Word into things like epub files, can easily recognize the intent and create a handy navigation guide for readers anywhere within an ebook.
Another way to create NCX files is with html coding for a document. There's a nice Wikipedia article for EPUB that also has a section with examples for html coding that includes inserting the NCX file.
Of course for non-fiction and/or fiction with important chapter titles, you should also have a Table of Contents with hyperlinks to the actual places within the document. For authors still wanting to know more about creating a TOC, especially for Kindle ebooks, here is a previous post on adding linked TOCs.
And some books really don't require this at all. My second novel, Jim's Life, has such short chapters (and so many of them) there was never any need to title them or worry about a TOC or navigation. Maybe that's true for your ebook too, and so this won't be something to worry about. For many Indie writers, the NCX file could be mandatory soon so we might as well get familiar with it.
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May 31, 2011
Amazon Kindle Tags, Where'd They Go?
For Indie authors who want to sell ebooks and for readers who like to browse by subject matter, the tagging function for Amazon Kindle ebooks is… or should we say, was… a nice feature. Maybe a little too nice. Just last week this blog posted an entry on Indie writers using tags and even joining tag parties for compiling lots of tags quickly and making any ebook more visible to Amazon search engines. That may all have changed entirely, or at least for the near future.
Why? Because Amazon has removed the tag section from their Kindle ebooks for US authors. While the tag function still exists currently for Amazon UK, Germany and other countries, it is presently not existing here in America. Interestingly enough, the Amazon US paperbacks are still functioning as usual with tags, so perhaps this is either a temporary thing or perhaps those will soon disappear as well.
We don't really know the exact reasons, and Amazon hasn't come out with an announcement, but there are a few obvious possibilities being widely discussed in the forums. Here are the most accepted Kindle-tag-killing culprits:
1. The boycott anything over $9.99 thread and others like it. Kindle readers often complain about the high price of some ebooks, especially those from the big publishing companies, which tend to represent best-sellers and tend to be similarly priced to paperbacks. These ebooks also cost the publishers hardly anything to produce – so the obvious complaint becomes, why should an ebook cost the same as a paperback? Some of the more outspoken readers promoted boycotts and left tags for high priced ebooks including "9.99boycott," "ripoff," "agency 5 price fixing," "overpriced," etc. Their efforts were not small ripples in the pond either, as many readers simply refused to buy ebooks with high prices, especially if they were tipped off with these tags. Result: big publishers complaining to Amazon.
2. Indie authors and tagging parties. A verified book purchase is not required to tag a specific book. Since any purchase (ever) on Amazon is the only requirement to be a customer in good standing and to enable tagging, many authors (including yours truly) participated in tagging parties to boost the number of tags by subject matter and (hopefully) appeal to more customers. Done with integrity, this seems like a rather harmless practice to help the small self-publisher compete with the traditional publishing houses. Done without integrity, this practice can be riddled with abuses. For example, fake tags, like award winner (for books without awards), romance (for a book that is not romance genre), Harry Potter (when the book has nothing to do with Harry Potter), or Stephen King (you get the picture), or any misrepresentation of a book to capitalize on all the common searches that occur for popular subjects and authors is a bad practice. Once a book is tagged with a misleading tag, and all the Indie authors are blindly copying and pasting tags to help each other… a book may rise to top of search results under false premises. Result: disgruntled readers complaining to Amazon.
3. Mean-spirited tags. It's a shame that people can become bitter enemies through forums and online chats, but it happens often. When that occurs with authors and readers, one way for readers to lash out is to leave bad tags on an author's book. These could be anything from "spammer," "Christian crap," "author fakes 5 star reviews," "author behaving badly," "shameless self promoter," etc. Of course, sometimes the tags are true while sometimes they aren't. It's hard for a reader to know what to believe these days when it comes to tags (reviews too). But when mean-spirited tags get left on an author's book (especially to a self-published author), it hurts. Result: Indie authors complaining to Amazon.
What's the future for all these tags and all these complaints? Don't know but interested. One solution echoed by many is to design a system which only allows verified purchasers of a book to leave tags for it. That should cut down on the tagging done without integrity. In the meantime, readers and authors and publishers will be watching Amazon closely to see how this pans out.
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May 22, 2011
Tagging Books-Tag My Book, Does it Help with Amazon Search Results?
For authors who want to sell ebooks or paperbacks, having their Amazon books tagged seems like it can be a big deal. Tag-my-book parties are even common now at most forums for writers including Amazon author forums, Goodreads, Authonomy and more. But does it really help?
What exactly are tags for books, you might ask? If you visit any book at Amazon, try one of mine for example, and scroll down past the product description and reviews, you'll find a list of tags that customers (or others) have used to identify genres and subject matter of a book. This is meant to be helpful to browsers searching for books of similar nature and for Amazon to group books accordingly. In my example some of the tags will be: self publishing, sell ebooks, ebook business, writers, kindle, online marketing, etc. You can click on an individual tags and find a huge list of books with the same tag, usually ranked from highest number to lowest. Therefore, the consensus of many authors is that having more tags is great and having lots of commonly used tags is even better.
What are commonly used tags? Words like Kindle, adventure, fantasy, romance, humor, fiction, science fiction, history, young adult, vampire, christian fiction… the list goes on. Amazon has a page of commonly searched tags here. But tags don't have to be so general; they can be much more specific as many of mine are like social marketing and ebook publishing.
How does a Tag Party work? A collection of authors (and sometimes readers/family/friends) agree to add tags, up to 15 per person, to each others books. A forum list develops with an agreement to tag everyone on the list and get tagged too. The more people in the party, the better. Once several dozen to over a hundred people are tagging each others books, in little time a book can achieve a high number of tags.
However, at first glance it appears this helps with visibility and book sales, but that really hasn't been proven to me yet. For example, currently my book has more tags for the tag term "epublishing" than any other Amazon book and will come up #1 if you click a tag that says "epublishing." But if you type the same term "epublishing" into an Amazon search box, my book doesn't even appear in the top 100 results. Odd, isn't it? The question becomes; what percentage of Amazon buyers really search for new books by using tags? Conversely, we know that many book buyers, myself included, search for books by typing terms into the search box.
The tag term "sell ebooks" currently places my book #2 in a tag search, but if you type that into a book search it comes up as #1 probably because those words are a part of the title. So, I'm still in the school of thought that keywords in the title are far more important than a huge number of tags. I'd still like to know, do the tags help? Maybe. I know of at least one reader, from her forum comments, who says she uses tags to search for new books of a certain subject. Maybe there's more people like her, but I believe she represents the exception and not the rule.
Still, when it comes to selling both ebooks and paperbacks, Independent authors (Indies) should try a bit of everything and hope it helps. There are several good places to join tagging parties. You can find them on Amazon Kindle discussions at the Meet Our Authors Forum and currently at the Kindle Book Forum, though that might get moved to the former due to Amazon's restructuring of what they consider to be blatant self-promotion. You can also find taggers at Goodreads, Authonomy and even some of the Indie groups on Facebook.
By far the best place I've found to date is at Kindle Direct Publishing New April 2011 Tag My Book. This group is serious and selective on who they accept. You will have to get your tagging act together, however, or you will not be tagged. This means you will have to learn how to copy and paste the author's preferred 15 tags and do it for everyone on the list before you will be added to the list. There's a thorough explanation for newbies at the start of the thread. Once that's done, the tags on your books will increase by HUGE amounts. If you think you can handle that, try this exceptional tagging group.
Also for trans-continental efforts, notice that for a US Amazon author to tag a UK Amazon book, she/he must have made a purchase from UK Amazon. This rule is true regardless of the country of the author's origin and the country of Amazon products (US, UK, Germany, Japan, France, etc.)
Any other highly recommended groups or opinions on this? Please share them in the comments section.
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May 17, 2011
Amazon Cracks Down On Indies Self Promotion, No More Indie Author Spam
In a move clearly designed to keep both Kindle forum users and Indie authors happy, Amazon has created a special place within the discussions just for self promotion (although this probably makes far more pure readers happy than authors). It was bound to happen as Kindle owners who use the forums to discuss the e-reading device and their favorite ebooks were mostly tired of being perpetually bombarded with promotional spam from self-published, Indie authors.
Amazon recently created a new community for authors. The `Meet Our Authors' community is designed to give authors a space to engage with one another and promote their latest and greatest works.
With the advent of the new community, we will no longer allow self promotional posts in other communities. Starting on Monday, May 16th, all "shameless self promotion" activity will be limited to the `Meet Our Authors' community. Promotional threads outside of these forums will be removed.
We invite authors and interested readers to come join the discussion at:
http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors
What do you think? Wise move or just putting all those Indies out on their own little island like Gilligan and the castaways?
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May 13, 2011
SlingWords Post – Indie Authors: Better Keywords Sell More Books
I was honored to be guest poster today on a great blog called SlingWords. You can read the brief post (500 words) on learning to use keywords more wisely, especially designed for Indie authors who want to sell ebooks.
http://slingwords.blogspot.com/2011/05/indie-authors-better-keywords-sell-more.html
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May 10, 2011
Add a TOC Table Of Contents Bookmark to Kindle Ebooks
A lot of people use slightly more complex methods of formatting ebooks than I do. Mobipocket Creator and HTML files are common, but I've found great results can be had simply by directly uploading Microsoft Word Doc (.doc) to Amazon Kindle, Barnes&Noble Nook and Apple iPad.
For non-fiction titles and books with a Table of Contents section, one extra thing readers will appreciate is the inclusion of a TOC link. This isn't just a page at the beginning with Chapter headings and hyperlinks to places within the document, but also a TOC bookmark, which the e-readers (like the Kindle) will automatically recognize and add to their Menu option. It's quite simple if you're familiar with adding a bookmark in Word.
All you need to do is place the cursor at the beginning of the page for the Table of Contents. Then click Insert and choose Bookmark. When the Bookmark tab opens, type in "toc" without the quotes and Add it. Once saved and uploaded to Kindle, for example, that will become a Menu option for Kindle readers to go to the Table of Contents from anywhere in the ebook.
This method also works for the Cover image by bookmarking it with "cover" and also where the book really begins (like the intro or prologue) by bookmarking that with "start." (Again, do not actually type the "quotes" as I have for the demonstration, but type the words: toc, cover and start.)
Obviously these are just little things that make it nicer for readers, especially for books with TOCs. How will you know if you've done it correctly? When you Preview your edited version at kdp.amazon.com, the Preview Kindle has a Menu button that lets you select those options. See where it goes. If it's not right, make the correction and try again. One of the best aspects of e-publishing is the ability to make changes quickly and easily.
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May 3, 2011
Smart Keyword Research Comes First
Excerpt from the book, Get On Google Front Page…
Keywords are essential to help search engines link your sites and books to certain words, terms or phrases. Keywords can be individual words like "diet" or "weight loss," a set of words like "healthy weight loss," or even phrases containing many words such as "eat all you want and still lose weight." This is also the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords, or the difference between targeting broad markets under heavy competition with other advertisers versus niche markets with less competition. It's best to add keywords (both short-tail and long) to every site, blog, URL, title, article and location that has boxes for them, keywords that describe the content of what your site is about. But before we get into the details of how and where to insert keywords, we're going to discuss at length how to discover which are your very best keywords.
Your very best keywords describe your website (and book's) content and are being searched by lots of people with relatively low competition.
Okay, that was a mouthful but true. Certain keywords will only help if people are actually searching for them, and your site is relevant to that subject, and (hopefully) there is not a ton of competition. If the competition is low, then you're golden and the climb to the front page can be quick. If the competition is high, you can still get to the top but it will take great SEO habits and more time.
Read the free Authonomy chapter here on this subject.
Read the first several chapters of this book's free sample.
Get On Google Front Page – Amazon US paperback and ebook – PDF version handy with links for your computer
Amazon UK paperback – UK ebook
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April 27, 2011
Sell Ebooks at Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Japan
For Indie authors who want to sell ebooks to Amazon Kindle readers around the world, the opportunities are expanding faster than you can say, "Amazon where?" In just the past week, Kindle authors were introduced to the new German author central for selling Englischsprachige Bücher, books in English. Today author central informed me that France and Japan are now online too. Even though it's likely to be much slower selling English Kindle ebooks via Amazon in these others countries, it's still great news since English is the world's most common 2nd language! From their email;
We're writing to tell you about some new author-focused features!
You've always been able to add blog feeds in Author Central, and now you can add a Twitter account too. Once you add your account, we'll display your most recent Tweet on the Author Page. Check out the Donna J. Shepherd Author Page to see what it looks like, and then add your own in Author Central.
Book Extras from Shelfari
Shelfari's book-loving community edits details called Book Extras. For each book you can add a list of characters, quotes, locations, and more.
Now you can see your book's Book Extras in your Author Central account. Visit the "Books" tab, click on your book, and view the Book Extras tab. You can then add or edit Book Extras by visiting Shelfari through a link that allows us to identify you as an author and give you a special Author badge in Shelfari.
Book Extras are available to readers on the Kindle and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch, so get your extras out there.
Public Notes
Kindle users can now make their book notes and highlights available for others to see. As an author, you can connect with readers in a new way as you annotate your own books and the books that influence you.
Seth Godin and Karen McQuestion are among the authors who have added Public Notes to their own books. To review and turn on Public Notes in your books, track your reading activities, and see Popular Highlights and your annotations, go to https://kindle.amazon.com.
Author Central for Amazon.fr
Are any of your books available on Amazon.fr? If so, Author Central is now available at https://authorcentral.amazon.fr.
Text on Author Central for Amazon.fr is in French, but the support team will be glad to assist you in English. Author Central is also available for The United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan.
Start publishing today with Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing
With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) you can self-publish your books on the Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and now the Amazon.de Kindle Stores. It's free, fast, and easy. Books self-published through KDP can participate in the 70% royalty program and are available for purchase on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android-based devices. With KDP, you can self-publish books in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian and specify pricing in US dollars, Pounds Sterling, and Euros. To learn more, visit http://kdp.amazon.com today.
As always, if you have questions or feedback we'd love to hear from you.
The Author Central Team
http://authorcentral.amazon.com
I found Google Translate to be helpful when needing to copy and paste sections of text from these other websites even though the process is fairly intuitive.
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April 25, 2011
CreateSpace Offers Proof Skips for Limited Time
For a limited time, now until May 27, 2011, CreateSpace is offering experienced authors the option to skip the proofing process and just upload live POD books which can be purchased by the public so long as they pass initial inspection. If you've been waiting to update your Print On Demand paperbacks with them, now's the best time. From their announcement;
As an experienced CreateSpace author, we need your help. In our continual effort to improve the book setup process, we want you to try a new option in your account. When you upload files from now through May 27, you can choose to order a book proof or skip the proofing process altogether.
As part of this limited trial we'll ask you to complete a survey about your experience. Your feedback is important, and it will help us decide if we should keep this option and invite more authors to try it out.
We look forward to hearing what you think!
Warm Regards,
CreateSpace
What does this really mean? Okay, normally when an author makes a paperback book with the free, no assistance beyond the forums, do-it-yourself style of CreateSpace, Amazon's POD (print on demand) publishing company, there are few steps to the process. Steps 1 and 2 are uploading proper formatted interior and cover files in pdf format. Step 3 is submitting those formatted files for review. If your files pass inspection, step 4 is normally ordering a proof copy. The proof copy gets physically made as a paperback and mailed to the author at cost including shipping, which typically runs around $10. Step 5 is either approving the proof copy (which means you like it and want it on sale now) or disapproving it and starting the whole process again with corrected files. (The first couple of times I did this, it was a real chore! Now it's very familiar and much easier.)
In essence, CreateSpace is saying, "we trust our experienced authors to know if they've done the process correctly and would like to avoid the $10 and the week of waiting." It probably came about from the veterans getting tired of going through the whole process every few months when they fixed a few typos pointed out by readers.
Sounds like a good deal to me and I hope it lasts, especially after having done 5 titles with CreateSpace (plus updates or fixing typos) and feeling comfortable with the method. I happen to LOVE this company and am very happy with their set-up, finished product, customer service, pricing, royalties, checks directly deposited to my bank account, everything. They've really perfected the art of self-publishing paperbacks at no cost for do-it-yourselfers like me. Highly recommended, even in my book on making and selling ebooks.
For a less experienced author, it's probably still wise to order a proof copy and make sure you're happy with it. Can't wait one week and shell out $10? Better that than having a book with mistakes go out and sell a dozen copies before you realize it.
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