Tomas’s Comments (group member since May 15, 2018)

Tomas’s comments from the Support for Indie Authors group.

It's definitely not new.
Amazon can match the lowest world-wide price anytime, but I doubt they manually check every single book out there. They may actively check "the big fish" but, most of the time, they do it when someone reports a lower price.

Are you publishing it through a platform that then distributes it to many retailers, or a direct upload? And if yes, can you check the prices on each retailer - Amazon matches the lowest price for "wide" books, so maybe the conditions changed somewhere beyond your direct reach.

Well, what I said to the cover designer was a "680-page PDF, so that *should* be 340 pages".
Anyway, I've sent her a screenshot with the dimension Amazon wants, and will wait a day or two for a fix. I'm just surprised and looking into the reasons to make sure I don't repeat the mistake with the eventual sequels.

Okay, I'm back.
The book is 679 pages long.
So, naturally, as books tend to be printed on both sides of a page, I divided that by two (so 340 sheets) and told that to my cover designer.
But the Amazon UI is now giving me an error regarding the dimensions, as if it actually wanted 680-page thickness.
The preview appears okay with print on both sides of a page, so...
what the hell?

I like the way it sounds - short and snappy - but it doesn't seem like something in my usual preferences, so it's possible I'd just pass on that information alone.

Eileen, the split may be harder to execute than it sounds - each part would need to work as a standalone book structure-wise (especially when it comes to having its own finale - something that turned me from splitting my own book). Likewise, if the ebook is already out, splitting the paperback may be a bad move.

As for length and popularity... genre matters a lot. In some genres, 300 pages may be a lot, in others, 500+ is okay.
And... sure, a 700-page book may seem daunting, but what sounds better... 700-page book for the price of one book, or 3 250-page books each at full cost? Personally, if I see an interesting book at $5 and 500+ pages, I may take it over a series of 200-page books at $3 each.

The price does seem high, but so is the page count. Not only will the seller take a cut, but so will the middle-man (Ingram, in your case), which is why Amazon may seem the cheapest - if you sell there directly, there's only their cut (and the costs).

When it comes to self-publishing paperbacks, there are usually two opposite approaches: the minimal and the maximal.

The minimal approach is to price it low - so that your profit is quite small (let's say, $1). After all, most self-published authors won't sell many paperbacks unless they became very famous, and digital sales are where the profit is.

The maximal approach is that you price it quite high (around $20 for books of usual size, would be probably $30+ for you). You won't get many sales either (point made above), so you maximize the profit from each sale. The side-bonus, at least on Amazon, is that it shows the price difference between print and Kindle version, so if you sell paperback for $30 and ebook for $3, it highlights a 90% price difference.

I've given it a try when they added it (10/2020), and it was quite buggy - the book was stuck in "updates pending" for eternity, no matter how many times the support "fixed" it, until I removed it from the series. I won't try again until I have book two actually about to release.

For fiction, having the series bundled correctly is a good move, because it allows for buying "smart bundle" - one-click purchase of all books in series you don't own yet. And you can generate one link - just for the series' page - to use, rather than X individual links.
For biographies, not sure.

By my experience, Google docs are slow on long text. When I used it in my alpha draft (2016-ish), to share the story with two fellow gamers, just 10 chapters (~25k words) were laggy. Not sure if anything changed from then...

To me, it seems like 6x9 is the most common, even though the first time I held one (after years of "pocket books" - 10,5 x 17cm so I guess 4x6?) it felt quite large.

Here comes another!
Context: starting a new file, reinstalling the OS... just about anything that means you're starting with your custom vocabulary erased.

Jay wrote: “Readers don’t notice point-of-view errors. They simply sense that the writing is bad.”

Not always the case, I had one who was great in spotting PoV issues. Then, as far as I know, she's a voracious reader, so maybe it's because of THAT part.

I had some mixed success with the site betareader.io. Groups here on Goodreads may be worth a try. In essence, anywhere potential beta readers may hang around, but it takes a while to find someone.

My beta readers were a mix of sources - some found here on GR, some on the mentioned site, some are people I follow on their blog and I did a swap when they were searching for betas of their own...

Grasshopper wrote: ""

You're repeatedly breaching the "no link" rule. I deleted your post and am putting a suggestion to the group leader to ban you from the group.

Ginevra wrote: "But also, those Instagram accounts offering reviews have too many followers. They seem fake. When you scroll in their comments, it's a bunch of, "Amazing! Great! Awesome! Wow, need to read!" You can see these guys aren't readers about to buy your stuff..."

Good observation to mention. Quantity doesn't mean quality, unfortunately, and I receive a lot of "get thousands of followers" spam offers on my blog, so making this type of scripts/bots is probably laughably easy for someone who knows what they're doing.

As it was said before, if something sounds too good to be true, it's likely a trap. You can make some research, if you have the time for it, or stay away and be safe.

Apart from outright dubious businesses, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some legit ones. Maybe a good way to 'probe' them would be to see who they reviewed last, see if you can contact the author, and ask about the company.

I wouldn't go in there without some preparation and verification.

Hákon wrote: "I'm getting a bit odd friend requests on a regular basis now, but that is a different story."

There was a wave of friend requests or status likes here on GR from stolen profiles that were inactive for 2-3 years, then suddenly liked (or even rated) lots of random statuses/books (or sent friend requests) in the timespan of minutes, then went dormant again. Most of them had a link to Russian sites that, based on how the link looked, were either p0rn sites or something along that line.

David wrote: "It must be a seasonal thing. I'm in the middle of a wave of review offers now, like I was six months ago."

Most of the suspicious activity comes in waves. Before Xmass, when people were shopping for presents online, there was a wave of delivery scams, mostly "your package is on hold because you haven't paid €0,1 import fee" or "your package couldn't be delivered because we couldn't catch you at home".

After NYE, there will be a lot of "quit smoking" or "get fit fast" scams (because of resolutions), and I think this may be the reason for review scams - if people made a resolution to get their books seen a bit more.

The ol' good stuff doesn't stop, though. I have received the classic "I won 1,2 billion EURO in POWERBALL" on my work mail before Xmass. Yeah, € in an American lottery, sounds legit.

Good points, Noor, though... how does one find those places without being told about them? And how many of them are somewhere reputable instead of FakeNewsBook?

I've heard that cross-promotions work, but it doesn't seem like I would make my way to be a part of one while having nothing to offer myself.

Daniel wrote: "So stack your promotions together and spread them out. I suggest running a site on Friday, another on Saturday and Sunday, etc. in a row. That way you see a strong weekend of sales and Amazon ranking likes it when you have more than one day of sales spike."

This is recommended, and David Gaughran has a few more analyses on why that matters. Anyway, just mentioning this so people know that spreading the promos may be the better way.

The tough issue for me (and I guess for anyone else) is that most of the promotion sites require a set amount of ratings/reviews, and those are the first obstacle for most people. I have exactly... 0, and no idea where to get any. I doubt that running a promotion while having no reviews would do any good, because I don't think people would buy a book without review even on a discount, unless it seems like it's right for their tastes.

Either way, thanks for all you've shared, Daniel. I'll try some of what you mentioned sooner or later.