Marie Silk’s Comments (group member since Jan 03, 2017)

Marie Silk’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

It's very upsetting that scammers are doing this. I just looked at the page for this particular book and it has no rank information (the same was true when I read this blog post a month ago) so maybe Amazon is doing something about it ???

I will hand out some bookmarks (Pacific Northwest) :)

I regret buying a pack of 10 ISBNs instead of 100. I blew through the first 10 in a matter of months and had to spring for the 100-pack anyway.

Hi Dennis, sorry I don't post Kindle Scout nominations but I wish you luck.

Prakash and Laurie, I got yours up today. Alex, I put up "Where There's a Will" a little while ago :).

Prakash wrote: "Hi Marie
Here is my book
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Shackle...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/..."

Hi Prakash, is your book on countdown? Can you please let me know the end date of the sale? Thank you!

L.E. wrote: "I will have a new novel ready maybe in a couple of months. Thought it was done but a beta reader pointed out some problem areas. I hope to have those cleared up in a month.

How soon do you need to..."

Just let me know the day before or the day the promotion starts and please let me know when it ends.

Adam wrote: "Are you still doing these posts?"

Yes :) as long as my Facebook business page is working. Sometimes it gets a bit glitchy.

Agree with Aislinn that it would benefit with details on characters' ages and a little more setting.

Something doesn't sound quite right to me about "that all changes". Maybe "everything changes" would flow a bit better?

Ooh, great news :) I'm interested in both!

You might check out other similar collections and see how they are priced. My novels (historical fiction) are a little on the shorter side at 42K to 49K words each and I price them at 2.99.

Good luck with your new release, Amy!

In the way it used to be, KDP let you upload a draft that you could mark as "not the final version", but you had a deadline 10 days before the book went live to upload the final. If you did not upload the final, KDP would ban you from preorders for a year. Now the way they have it set up is they will release to readers whatever file you uploaded before the preorder gets locked 3 days prior to release. I don't think there is an option to postpone or cancel. So of course it is best to have the final file submitted well in advance.

You don't have to upload the final version when you set up a preorder, but you do have to upload it well before the 3 day deadline, which can be more like 4 days considering different time zones. KDP will lock your preorder from any changes (price, content, etc) at the deadline time. I've uploaded rough drafts and unfinished manuscripts just to get the preorder going. It's risky business though if you forget to upload the final or are a minute late on the deadline. For me, I like to have my final submitted 7 days prior to the deadline just to be safe. When you do upload your final draft, you absolutely must make sure to do the "save and continue" all the way to "submit for preorder". If you skip the last step, your readers will get the original file you uploaded and not the final. Good luck :).

Header looked normal for me.

Great writing tips, lol!

Food for thought, thank you.

Okay, thank you Erin!

*waves hello back* :)

Thank you, Erin. My dashboard shows the number of times my audiobook has sold but there is nowhere that I can find that shows royalty amounts. That's what I'm looking for.

I went through ACX's exclusive contract in which they control the pricing. The royalties are higher if you go exclusive with them. I just wish there was a better way to see how much they will pay out each month. I'm assuming royalties are paid monthly...right? How much of a delay is there between sales and payout?

I'm having trouble with interpreting the ACX dashboard. Is there somewhere they tell you how much royalties you get per sale, or even how much your audiobook is listed for? I can't find this information.

It's a good question. I have a similar situation with my current series but it seems readers are happy with it. The first book involves a murder mystery and has almost no romance, the next books have romance and no murders, then the last books have murder mysteries again :).

Based on what you have said here about your books, I think it would be best published as a series. It leaves you some flexibility with whether you want to write more books for it (I originally thought I would only write two books for my series...now it's at eight books long) and the readers who enjoyed the characters of the first book will likely want to read about them in more situations. Good luck :).

Great write up. Although on #8, I have done much differently. I guess I assume that the reviewer already has 500 emails with the subject line "Book Review" so I've always put my book title and sometimes the genre in the subject line, along with "Review Request". I figure that this way, the recipient doesn't have to trawl through a lot of emails with the same subject line to find that one book that sounded interesting. I personally have an aversion to vague subject lines so maybe it is just me :).