ePublishing… what the hey?
This post is written to anyone out there that has considered publishing an ebook and doesn’t know where to start. Although I’m far from an expert, I’ll share my personal publishing experiences.
When I was trying to decide where to publish, I played around on several sites…PubIt for Nook, lulu.com, KDP for Amazon, smashwords.com, and the list goes on. I found Amazon the most straight forward by far.
KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing at https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin) provides an easy to follow, step-by-step publishing flow and, once published, offer up to the second reports on how my sales are doing. Even my husband is addicted to checking my latest numbers.
Amazon offers the Author Central tool where I, as an author, can easily post my bio, pictures, and anything else I want to communicate. I haven’t figured out how to do this on the other retailers’ sites yet. I know it’s there somewhere but dang if I can figure it out and my tolerance for ‘digging’ on the Internet is about 5 minutes max.
Amazon offers KDP Select, which is a free, optional program that requires your book to be exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. It offers several nice features but the one I liked the best was the 5 free days.
Since I had decided to publish initially on Amazon and I had no idea what I was doing, I decided to enroll in this KDP Select program. I had nothing to lose. After I pressed the publish button and told my family I had a book out there, I was thrilled when I could watch the ‘Number Sold” column click to a number other than zero. But after all of my family and friends showed their support by purchasing a copy, the sales slowed to a slow drip. Then my first free day hit. I came home from work to a ‘Downloaded” number over 250. I screamed and quickly called my best friend and editor, Courtney, who screamed as well. I spent the evening refreshing the screen to get the latest numbers and to watch my book move up in rank. In the end, I had 347 downloads and made it as high as 18th free book in my category. Many may laugh at those numbers but I cried for joy. Downloading a free book doesn’t mean they actually read it or liked it but it does mean it’s swirling around in cyberspace. Someone in the UK might be sitting in a sidewalk cafe and reading my words right now. How cool is that? Maybe some of them will find they like the story and tell their friends, and so on…
I have read other author sites that say KDP Select isn’t worth it because it forces you to be exclusive. What they didn’t suggest is how about starting out on Amazon and take advantage of the KDP Select program to get the word out. There is no long term commitment and after the 90 days, you can publish to other sites. That’s what I did. I recently published book 2 and utilized the program again and I’m very pleased by the results.
Amazon isn’t perfect.
KDP won’t let you set your standard book price to free. Free days can only be offered through KDP Select. They will consider price matching a free price from another retailer but only at their discretion. I tried this for book one and I was denied. I think I’m too low on the totem pole to be considered.
For 0.99 priced book, they keep twice as much per book than most other sites. For a 0.99 book, I get 0.35.
If you send them an email question they’re not quick to respond and not always very friendly. In their defense, the other retailers aren’t any better. What ever happened to good customer service? I guess you have to be someone to get to be treated like you matter.
Amazon’s ebook style guide isn’t great and doesn’t help you prepare very well for the digital world.
Now here’s my plug for www.smashwords.com… a site I recommend you consider as a publishing option.
The style guide provided free from smashwords is a wonderful resource to help you figure out what to do or not do with your Word document to prepare it for publication.
They also do a much more thorough check of your book before publishing, which can prevent you posting formatting crap on accident.
They will publish your ebook to other retailers for a small fee per book. I didn’t have to do anything addition and my book popped up on Apple, Sony, Nook, etc. Very cool!
They will let you set a book’s default price to free.
Watch out if you are looking at the books available on this site without selecting a category and you have the adult filter turned off. This retailer seems to be quite popular for very explicit erotica. Wow! There are some really creative writers out there. *blush*
In the end, do whatever works for you. I’m going to stick to starting on Amazon’s KDP Select and, after the 90 days, utilize smashwords to continue to spread the word to other ebook retailers.
