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Amazon Select book lending program
Hey, when did they (as in GRs) start listing Books mentioned in this topic over to the right??? This site just gets better and better.Really.
KO
Okay.Funny.
I've been busy...writing...and, as you well know I don't hang out in the groups, but here I am with all of you.
: )
Katherine, I didn't notice it till yesterday and I'm here 'round the clock.Andre, um, maybe not golf...
Andre, we look at things differently. For me it isn't about ego or sales. It's about readers. The money is too little to get excited about, anyway. Two books that nobody was buying are selling and being borrowed. Ditto for one that I didn't even put in the Kindle Store until KDP Select came along.Getting readers, or at least potential readers, is much nicer than having a file aging on the Amazon servers. I value the purchases and borrows far more than the downloads (even though there were thousands more downloads) because I think they have a better chance of being read.
Writing is something I do regardless of what readers choose to do, but writing is, after all, a form of communication and it's nice to think that maybe there's someone receiving the communication I'm sending out. And if someone responds to it on some level, that's an intimacy like no other. I realize that's not how some writers look at it, but I can't imagine writing to be famous or writing to get rich. Both those goals seem so outside the act of writing, they make no sense to me.
Well, it appears that my sales have petered out. "Let's Do Lunch" is dropping like a rock, with only 2 sales total, today, 11 borrows, 20 returns to date.
The updated mockup for 'Swallow the Moon' came back. Much better looking. I'm back to work on it tomorrow.
Mod
Now that we have that off our chests, can we get down to work?
What category do you suggest I put Dakota's books into?
If you have more than enough money, please send me some. I have almost enough, but I really want some new windows.I just found your free shorts here tonight:
http://us.kogrid.com
I'll go look at categories and get back to you...
Okay, now for the categories (you can choose only two):Under "sports & recreation" choose "motor sports"
under "fiction" choose "action & adventure"
Mod
I just wonder if I'm not cutting a rod for my own back by putting a novel into what's arguably a non-fiction category, though I see another novel in it.
Doesn't update immediately. We'll see what happens when I rise this arvo.
Mod
That's interesting. I'd heard Amazon stopped doing that price matching. Guess I heard wrong.I wouldn't worry about putting fiction in a non-fiction category. You get to choose seven words for keywords (but you can use more if you use a phrase). How about: Le Mans, racing, suspense, thriller, romance, strong women, cars
Andre, Iditarod is under 'sport' so why not 'Le Mans'?What I've noticed over the past week is that Treespeaker, which hasn't sold in Britain for months, took a sudden plunge...and I mean plunge. Normally the fall is very gradual. Obviously anything not in the Christmas time fray suffered severely, at least in Britain.
Everything came to a screeching halt yesterday. When Konrath, Crouch and Eisler came on board.This may or may not settle down, but for now, forget it. Give it until after New Year's Day for things to settle down.
Mod
Mod
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #57,702 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#50 in Kindle Store > Books > Nonfiction > Sports > Motor Sports
Yay! That's more like it.
****
(1) At least to the jerk who wrote to me that that "yorna fukn ingrayt trad douchebag" who "stoal peeps downs" and then "complanes yo'r hogfest isnn the hole BBQ". About the only word with more than one syllable this clown spells right is "douchebag"! Says much for sex education in whatever hellhole of congenital incest he comes from. To add insult to injury, his screen monicker is "Red-cuartains in my-truck" (sic, both spelling and punctuation is copied and pasted). It took him three tries to get my email right, and he left the record of the returns on the post too, so now I have a path right into his computer. Who thinks I should send his Congressman an abusive letter from his computer?
***
Remember, I forecast this would happen. I am one scary psychologist. (Almost as scary as Sierra is a taxonomist!)
I leave for another day the question of what this redneck, who probably has more curtains in his truck than his house, is doing in literature, and also the corollary question of whether it is snobbish even to ask the question. (Over on the Kindleboards, when I first arrived, I received similar letters, albeit with more evidence of an active spellchecker, in my private mailbox from people who're now quick to agree with me.)
For now I'm sitting here trying to visualise the conversation in his roadhouse, shouted over the duelling banjos a la James Dickey, as he discusses literature with his friends. Does his wife look bored, or does she pitch in with life experiences picked up from the Harlequin list? I picture her as something like Michelle Pfeifer in the (much underrated) film Nadine... At what point does his wife stab him with the beer bottle she's drinking from, or do his friends take him outside and beat these notions out of him before she can stab him?
On such questions the universe turns.
Ah, but Andre, look at the 'voice' he has in his writing! :D
Where is the link for this. I need a laugh.
Mod
That 'voice' would pall on me at the second par. The only writer of dialect I can read is Leo Q. Rosten. On the other hand, "yorna fukn ingrayt trad douchebag" has a certain Kentucky truckstop swing to it, almost folk poetry, and what else is the blues?
***
And here comes the returns, second line. It's a novel, not nonfiction.
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #20,902 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#21 in Kindle Store > Books > Nonfiction > Sports > Motor Sports
#87 in Books > Sports, Hobbies & Games > Motor Sports
Mod
He sent me a private letter to my CoolMain Press mailbox.
At least he was smart enough not to put on a public forum.
Mod
I now want to go around telling people, "Your hogfest isn't the whole BBQ!" That's a weird angle of attack as well. Ingrate? I'm guessing people who've complained don't like some trad person competing against them given your previous editorial advantages, exposure*, et cetera, but ingrate makes it sound like he cares that you're not honoring your old publisher or something.
*In so far as the additional of previously trad authors legitimizes "self-publishing", I would think most indie/self-pubbed writers would actually encourage it.
Mod
The indies who most need "legitimising" are also the ones with the biggest chips on their shoulders.
My previous publishers were all already overrun by conglomerate accountants when I left, the agreeable publishers and editors gone; that was in itself a breach of contract, because they shouldn't have fired my editors without my agreement, and I would never agree.
A few months ago I almost gave rights of my books over to a company that represents ebook authors, collects their money from retailers etc (thus making it easier to collect from sales in Germany, pay the correct taxes, etc). Of course they wanted a fee for publishing the book and then another small fee for collecting etc, but it wasn't exorbitant. I decided against it because none of the books represented seemed to be doing any better than me anyway. Yesterday I got a newsletter from the company. They are now 'tiering' their publications. On top are the previously published authors ie traditionally published. Next are those deemed 'publishable' by the company. On the bottom are those who want to publish anyway, even though the company doesn't think they're worthy. They get charged the most! Commission on books sold has doubled.
Thanking my lucky stars I didn't hand over the money or the rights. Even the previously traditionally published authors are nowhere near any bestseller lists.
Katie wrote: "A few months ago I almost gave rights of my books over to a company that represents ebook authors, collects their money from retailers etc (thus making it easier to collect from sales in Germany, p..."Yeah, just launch the book with KDP and keep the money. LOL It may not have been a bad deal, just better this way,
Mod
"We experienced a temporary issue where your book's free promotion scheduled on December 25, 2011 wasn’t correctly applied."
Doesn't tell us what happened, but "temporary" probably means they think they've fixed it permanently. I suspect the system just overloaded on Christmas and there weren't enough hot bodies to fix everything at Amazon's normally much faster pace.
"We'd be glad to arrange for you to have an extra day of promotion for your book."
Well, both days were ruined, but this is halfway there, so I'll just take it and not waste time corresponding about it. Here's the interesting bit, to be read with "arrange" above (rather than, say, "give" or "allow"):
"Please provide the ASIN and new promotion date at least three days advance to ensure proper scheduling."
That to me implies that any manual adjustment of the computer-arranged and -counted free days takes two or three days to arrange. I understand why -- there are probably only one or two, or at most a handful, of programmers permitted to make exceptions to such a core piece of programming, or the whole bloody thing will soon implode in a mess of undocumented "final fix" patches fighting each other. If I'm right, that also accounts for the glitch MEYERSCO suffered taking so long to fix.
That closes the matter: as an unfortunate accident that they probably dealt with as fast as could be expected under the circumstances.
***
From this and from discussion with Gordon Ryan, who has invested some thought it it, I've concluded (for now anyway) that the optimum free promotion period is three days, watched closely, with the third day cancelled if the second looks like petering out. Because the start and end times are over the North American Pacific rim, very awkward (GMT might have been smarter -- spin a globe with your head as the sun), this requires hour by hour monitoring to determine a pattern in geographic parts where it is people's waking hours, rather than just the few hours before the last moment (8pm, Pacific Time), when you can schedule or cancel a free day, when most of the world is asleep, and when sales will anyway show a falling trends (unless you're tremendously big in California...)
What are you going to do with the other days?My numbers went like this:
2740
1307
1321
733
769
938
They fell off and picked back up again. And no, I don't know where the extra day came from. Might have been time-lines.
Wish I'd saved my chart because my numbers went the opposite way, K.A. Looks like there's nothing scientific to what happens.Andre, you got the very same response I did when my glitch hit days earlier. It's boilerplate.
They use Pacific time because they're measuring days in their time zone at headquarters. It makes sense to them, but not necessarily the rest of the world.
Mod
Clear as mud? Or a gamble. Or perhaps a universal truth?
Standard marketing wisdom is that these things all have some variant of the bell curve, a slope, a steep ascent, a short-lived peak, a fast descent (less steep than the ascent but still a roller coaster) to a trough, a slow climb out of the trough to a relatively stable plateau.
Kat's numbers have this form. If she had known to take readings at shorter periods in the 2740 number she would be able to draw the initial slop, the peak, the descent. The next three numbers are the slowing before the turn at the bottom of the descent and then on fifth and sixth days the start of the slow climb, chopped off because the price changed....
Caution, eh? There's no reason to believe anyone else's numbers will be stretched out over the same period.
Patricia wrote: "Andre, you got the very same response I did when my glitch hit days earlier. It's boilerplate."
Boilerplate. Makes me feel so valued.
Mod
If I decide that Amazon's Select free days is nothing but a mass hysteria of gadarene sheep mindlessly building Amazon's numbers while gaining no advantage for themselves, then I'll do nothing with the free days. It may be that Select is worth it for the loans alone. Or it may be that Select is worthless to those with other opportunities, in which case I'll drop it altogether.
Or I might yet discover that the copies we gave away bring in reviews or word of mouth or lasting kudos that can be traded for sales, and then I'll use the remaining 7 free days between the two books more effectively than to gain a miserable 3K downloads. (Not all the fault is with Amazon's slack response to the glitch. I wasn't ready, and I didn't know enough about how the free program works, as Sierra demonstrated.)
The rest is ego-tripping. My ego doesn't need to go touring, it gets stroked enough at home, and my writers are with me because they're not ego-trippers but grafters who stick close to their work.
Patience. We have to wait for the evidence to come in before we can decide anything. Presently there is no information except of the "my dick is bigger than your dick" variety, on which no one except teenage boys make decisions.
My dick is rather small, actually, but my sales are bigger than ever before. I appreciate the opportunity Amazon has given indies, regardless of their motive.
Mod
Patricia wrote: "My dick is rather small, actually, but my sales are bigger than ever before. I appreciate the opportunity Amazon has given indies, regardless of their motive."Me, too. What I gave away was tiny compared to some, but gigantic compared to where I was. And I'm still getting a couple of sales and/or borrows per day which is good for me. I didn't go into this expecting to take the world by storm and I am not disappointed.
Progress is all that matters to me at this point. I'm glad to have accomplished something.
I have to admit to feeling more than a little 'chuffed' when I find threads like this -http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/7...
Talking about the KDP Select thingy...how often are the 'Six weeks prior' reports updated? I have nothing on mine since Dec 24th but I would have thought if it was once a week it would have updated by now.
I don't know the word "chuffed" but after reading the thread, I'm assuming that's a good thing. :)The six weeks prior section doesn't get updated till a day or two after a new week has been completed. Today is the end of the month so our reports will go blank and our month's royalties will show up in a report soon. I wonder if Amazon has worked out yet what it's paying for borrows. If so, it should show up in the report that will likely be available on Monday or Tuesday.
Mod
Sierra and Katie: Sorry, i didn't realise you two were teenage boys.
I'm going to be sorry to see this month end.Though I'm hoping some of this will cary over to the New Year. A few sales a week will keep me from going crazy again.
Until Feb., anyways - then you can watch me go insane when I put 'Swallow the Moon' on KDP Select. I'll be sitting on the KDP site, refreshing every 2 minutes.
I've been trying to decide whether to put 'Mark of the Dragon Queen' on to KDP Select when I launch it sometime this week. But I think I'll let it sail out on its own for a while, see how the waters are and then give it a boost later when the initial momentum has worn off. I'll enrol it so it can be borrowed, just not use the free days for a while.By the way, why do Americans spell 'enrol' as 'enroll' when they seem intent on knocking 'l's off every other word -like 'travelled'?
Katie, we take the Ls off travelled every time we see it, then have to put them somewhere -- so we decided enrol was as good a word as any to take on all those extras.Andre, I am not a teenage boy. I'm a grown man.
Andre,What does grafters mean in this context? I don't know if I'm hitting a dialect difference or just suffering due to general ignorance, but I'm having trouble parsing your sentence in a non-gardening way.
BACK to OP and KDP Select - I've enrolled 'Swallow the Moon' into KDP - however I've not scheduled a free date.
I'm going to wait - because I want the book to still be 'hot' when I re-release it.
I've enrolled 'Mark of the Dragon Queen' as well, but I won't use the free days for a while. I want to see how initial sales go first and get a few reviews. I have had one borrow already.I can't get over how many more refunds I'm getting on KDP select books though. I've never had any on Treespeaker.
I've had 20 refunds so far. Most I think from the "Erotic/Adult Fiction" charts.
Mod
What does grafters mean in this context? I don't know if I'm hitting a dialect difference or just suffering due to general ignorance, but I'm having trouble parsing your sentence in a non-g..."
A "grafter" is vernacular for a hard worker.
Now here's a dialect difference for you. How is "cropping the long acre" related to grafting?
Mod
Books mentioned in this topic
Deliverance (other topics)LE MANS a novel (other topics)
Treespeaker (other topics)
Two Shorts (other topics)
The Meyersco Helix (other topics)
More...
Sure, it was an ego trip and have picked up sales that you didn't have before.
But I was already on the paid bestseller lists, as I expect Gordon was, and Andrew would eventually have arrived there. So far it looks like all the experiment did, with or without Amazon's "assistance", was to interrupt his progress, so we're going to have to do it the hard way all over again.
I was really looking for a way of establishing Dakota quickly, and that didn't work. The categories her book is in:
Books > Literature & Fiction
Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Suspense
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Suspense
You may be on to something here, Sierra. Maybe I should let Dakota take her chances with the golf swingers in sports books.