How To Self Publish, Part 3
In our last installment, we left our intrepid author standing there with a professionally-edited, professionally-designed book in hand, ready to sell!
So I did what everyone does: put the book up on Amazon and watch the cash roll in!
Well, not exactly. But putting the book on Amazon (and Nook and Kobo) was easy. So easy that you should never pay anybody else to do it. Except me.
An aside about ISBNs:
Should you get an ISBN? Up to you. You don't need one to sell on Amazon, Nook, or Kobo, though iBooks does require one. You can get 10 ISBNs for 300 bucks. They can also make it easier to place your book in a bookstore, but, let's face it, you're probably not getting your book into too many bookstores. (Unless you've written something about the local area--I've noticed that bookstores in beach and resort communities tend to stock self-published books about their regions).
I didn't think an ISBN was worth it because I don't think it's going to unlock many more sales. I've read that you can expect to sell about as much on iBooks as you do on Nook, which is about 25% of what you sell on Amazon. So an ISBN feels like a big investment for not too much payback.
If you want an ISBN, you can buy one from Bowker here. I have to recommend against buying any of Bowker's self-publishing packages, though. (Or, really, most people's). They will charge you $139 to convert your Word file to an ebook file and put your book into ebook retailers. This is something you can do by yourself with 10 bucks to Pressbooks and about a half an hour to upload your book to all the leading ebook retailers.
Okay. So I uploaded the book to sell on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo.
Now what? Well, I needed some reviews so that people would believe it was a real book. I looked up bloggers who had reviewed my traditionally-published books. The majority of them don't review self-published books, but I identified 30 who didn't have an explicit prohibition on self-published books. Three of them responded to me.
Okay, so three reviews. (Thanks! And they were all very positive, which was awesome.) Now to secure some reviews from readers. This proved very difficult. I found out that whereas I am a loudmouth who loves posting his opinions everywhere, most people really don't want to post a review anywhere for any reason. To wit: I've sold a little over 200 copies of Enter the Bluebird, which, as of this writing, has 16 reviews on Amazon and 10 reviews on Goodreads. I've started asking people for reviews when they buy the book directly for me. This remains a challenge.
Pricing: I initially put the book at $2.99, which is the minimum price you can set and still get the 70% royalty. I've tinkered with this a little, including some sales (I put it on sale for $1.45 on my 45th birthday, for example). I don't feel like downloading all the data and sorting it and such, but I'm relatively sure that the majority of copies I've sold have been at below $2.99. But would that price have been effective if it weren't a "sale"? I dunno.
Aside about KDP select, or Amazon exclusivity. Should you do this?
Maybe. There are pros and cons. Most of your sales will come from Kindle, and KDP select allows you to milk certain benefits out of Amazon, like getting a 70% royalty on books priced under $2.99 and participation in Kindle Countdown Deals.
On the other hand, if you're helping Amazon build a monopoly, that's going to be bad for you and everybody else in the long run.
I had Enter the Bluebird on KDP select for a while. I think my participation in this program netted me about six bucks I wouldn't have seen otherwise. Six bucks is six bucks, but I think that's a worthwhile price to pay for not creating a bookselling monopoly. You'll have to do KDP select in order to be part of the Kindle Unlimited deal. Enter the Bluebird has been read twice by Kindle Unlimited readers, and I do not have any idea how much money this is going to translate into. They've promised me a share of the general fund. So I'm currently making this book available without having any idea how much I'll be paid per read, which is a pretty shitty business plan.
I've done some other stuff to try to promote the book, but here's the thing that seems to work the best: actually selling hard copies myself. I've brought hard copies to a couple of library events (that I was invited to because of my traditionally-published books) and a couple of writing-centered events and even my local farmers market. Since I buy the hard copies for about 3 bucks, I can sell them for 10 bucks (or less) and actually clear about six bucks a copy. At $2.99, I'd need to sell 3 ebooks to make that much.
Come back tomorrow for conclusions!
