"Price set by seller"

Read an excellent book that I intend on reviewing soon - luckily it was available through my library.

• As of this writing, it's priced at $9.99 for Kindle.  Amazon included their usual "Price set by seller", meaning "You want agency pricing?  Here's your agency pricing."
• Again, excellent book, but it's a decades old genre novel that should run $2.99-$4.99.
• For your extra money, the text was filled with as more typos than your typical self-published book ran through spell check a couple times.
• The author surely benefited from Traditional Publishing's marketing magic:  their "About the Author" listed the biography of a computer programmer specializing in geology.
• I'm sure their accountants know what the best price point is.  Based on the Amazon rank, the Kindle version has sold two copies in the last month.  That's probably a big $3.50 royalty check for the author.  Going self-published at $2.99 would have a higher return of around $4.20 and probably sell more copies.

I found this disappointing, especially since I've been coming across tons of 80s horror and action being reprinted at reasonable prices.

I'm half-convinced that the Big 5 traditional publishers want to destroy their customer base.  There are folks out there that devour genre fiction by the score, but they seem focused on the mainstream audience that maybe buys two bestsellers a year.

Self Publishing - Price Matters

When I was in Junior High I would buy almost every comic Marvel put out.  I then limited myself to anything with Spider-Man, Punisher, or Wolverine, which was still pretty much everything.  I cut down again when comics went up to 75 cents, and dropped the habit completely when they got to a dollar.

Fast forward a few years.  I had caught the comic bug again and hit my old comic book store, ready to clean it out now that my paycheck dwarfed my old allowance.  Until I saw the price tag.

Even before considering inflation, the cover price had more than doubled.  You also got less value for money, as stories were being dragged out to six issues to fit them in trade paperbacks.

What I think happened to comics is that the audience had changed - or rather stayed the same.  Comics weren't being bought by kids - they were being bought (mostly) by men in their 30s, people like me that read them as kids.  The audience was shrinking but they also were becoming more affluent and demanded things like multiple covers, big panels, and glossy pages.

Me, I was happy to collect the giant, newsprint, phonebook style reprints Marvel and DC were putting out.  I could never understand who bought these limited edition hardcover reprints with useless extras, until I hung out at some IT guy's house and saw bookshelves of them.  All unopened.

A lot of the stuff I'm into has a limited audience, and a lot of that audience has money to burn.  If your total audience is 200 people and 150 of them are willing to shell out extra for a premium edition, it doesn't make financial sense to come out with a paperback edition.

Recently there were a lot of articles about how ebook sales for traditional publishers went down after they got Amazon to raise their prices.  Sounds like basic economics to me, but the publishers were flabbergasted.  Many of them had even previously gone on the record saying book price doesn't matter.

There is one pulp reprint company that only releases limited edition hardcovers.  Luckily, they're massive, so the price-per-story comes out reasonable, but I don't shop there a lot.  I don't care if it's cloth bound or signed (By who?  These authors have been dead for decades.)

I recognize there is a market for premium hardcover.

There is no such thing as a premium ebook.

At least, there shouldn't be.  People who collect and display these things, or grab them for the perceived resale value, are not interested in expensive ebooks.  In theory you could have a version with extras but people buy ebooks to read, not to put on their shelf.

I have a lot of pulp reprint collections in my Wish List on Amazon and I check it regularly for price drops.  I could tell one company was experimenting with prices.  Newer titles went from $5.99 to $7.99, then $9.99.  Then they had a $2.99 sale.  I went mental and got about twenty titles.  The price has leveled out at $4.99 to $5.99 and I noticed they have more premium physical printings.

I don't have their ledgers, but I think they figured out their sweet spot for ebook prices.  Other publishers, not so much.

Another company that puts out pulp reprints charges $6.99 a title.  I've bought a couple and have many more in my wish list.  A lot of the titles are less than 200 pages, and seven bucks is just too much for me.  They aren't on Kindle Unlimited and they're not available to be ordered by my library.  This tells me they went out of their way to make sure you pay that seven bucks or you ain't reading it.  Looks like I ain't reading it.

In this instance I do know a little about their sales because they complain about it on social media.   Yeah, don't complain about sales in your official social media channel.

The place seems to average way less than one copy sold a month per title.  The moan in question was about a month they made less than $200 for their couple hundred titles.  Checking some random Amazon rankings, it looks about right.  Some titles have never sold a copy.

Lower your damn prices!

You literally have nothing to lose.  You might go too low and miss the opportunity of selling at a higher price, but you'd have to sell something at all before you worry about that.  In this case I think it's sheer stubbornness.  I'll keep their titles in my Wish List, though, in case they wise up.

Discoverability Myths and Keywords in Titles

tldr version: putting keywords in the title increases discoverability, discoverability doesn't appreciably drive sales, and algorithms are weird.

Back in the days before Yelp and the internet, if you needed a plumber you opened the phone book and called the one with the biggest ad or the one listed first.  This is why so many plumbers were called things like "AAAAAAAAAuger Plumbing".

Indie authors do the same thing today with regard to keywords.  You're allowed 7 keywords, but in practice it's really as many as you can fit with 400 characters.  Using these 400 characters to accurately describe elements of a book is generally acceptable.  Using them to stuff as many popular keywords that have nothing to do with your book - "Romance Coming of Age Clean Menage James Patterson Shifter Horror Cozy Mystery Erotica Fantasy" - not so good.

And if you put the keywords in the freaking title and subtitle, there is a special place in hell reserved for you.  The title is supposed to be what the book is called - what is on the actual cover.

"Hey, I read a great book last weekend."
"Really, what's it called?"
"THRILLER: MYSTERY The Sassafras Conundrum (THRILLER MYSTERY THRILLER THRILLER)"

That kind of thing.  It's against Amazon policy, and authors occasionally get an email telling them to change it.  There's a reason that people do that, and I tried to figure out if it works.

The idea is to improve discoverability.  For my example I used the keyword Horror.  There are 163,999 Kindle titles on Amazon related to horror, and just like poor Zany Zach's Plumbing, most of these folks are going to be buried deep deep down at the bottom.

Search Results	Sales Rank	Sales	Keywords in Title
1	35011	12	y
2	5312	6	y
3	51099	13	y
4	72639	14	y
5	859	3	n
6	8261	8	n
7	213499	17	y
8	187314	16	y
9	10614	11	n
10	5722	7	y
11	183690	15	y
12	9749	10	n
13	538,306	19	n
14	771	2	n
15	649	1	n
16	no sales	20	y
17	9385	9	n
18	381442	18	y
19	2150	5	n
20	909	4	n

Search Results: Rank of non-free titles in the order they appear using a keyword search sorted by relevance.

Sales Rank: Overall sales rank at Amazon, the lower the better.

Sales: In order of Sales Rank out of this list

Keywords in Title: Y means there is a keyword that isn't a part of the actual title, like "Horror: The Waffle House Massacre (Horror, Thriller, Romance)".  N means there isn't.  Something like "The Scarening: A Novel of Unrelenting Horror" or "Horror Tales for Tweens" gets an N as well, since it's organically part of the title or subtitle.

First a word about relevance searches.  The algorithm used is secret and probably a little messed up on purpose so folks can't reverse engineer it.  In theory this should show the most relevant, i.e. the most horror-y, results first, then sorted by popularity.  It actually works pretty well, as the shifter erotica doesn't show up for several pages.

Things change if you change the sorting preferences.  One would assume changing to "sort by price" would then by subsorted by relevance - in other words, the order of all the free books would stay the same between searches.  This is not the case - sort by price and all the dreck gets mixed back in.  I suspect it sorts by price, then popularity.

Back to our chart.  The first 20 books I picked happened to have 10 titles with keywords in the title and 10 without.  I noticed looking past 20 books that keywords got fewer and fewer.

Interestingly, only one title in the first 20 search results was in the top 20 paid bestsellers for horror.  This is 15 in our list, which was the 18th horror bestseller.  Another thing to keep in mind - Amazon has been accused of purposely pushing down titles from publishers that they're in a slap fight with.

Titles with keywords did much better in discoverability, taking 8 of the top 10 spots.  For sales, they did worse, taking only 2 of the top 10 spots.  Looking at overall Amazon rank, they did much worse.  Books without keywords had an average rank of 58165.  The book with no sales would rank over 2 million, so using that number, books with keywords had an average rank of 313,573.

Both sets had outliers, so if you take out the worst selling book of each, the difference is even more telling: 4816 without keywords, 126,192 without.

This tells us a few things.  Keywords in titles improve discoverability.  A low selling book gets displayed ahead of better selling books.  I'm going to zoom in on our worst selling book.  As of this writing it has not sold a single copy.  There are 16 keywords in the title, many of them duplicates.  The actual title has three words and "scream" is misspelled.  If you do a search for "horror", this book appears three pages before Stephen King.  Pretty awesome, right?

You missed the part where I said it had zero sales.

Now, an argument could be made that these books would sell even worse without keywords in the titles.  Maybe so, maybe not, though some couldn't sell much worse.  However, I think we can put to rest the myth that discoverability is the key to success.  There are several titles in the top 10 search results that maybe sell a title a month, while Stephen King is doing fine languishing on page 7.

Looking at it from the other direction, none of the top 100 paid horror titles start with a keyword.

Could the keywords in titles do more harm than good?  There's no way to tell from these numbers, but as a reader browsing through titles, I look at "HORROR SUSPENSE THRILLER" the same way I do "RESIDENT" on my mail.

Adventures in Self-Publishing: Google

I want Google Books to do well.  I want there to be a second absurdly big company selling ebooks. iTunes hates its customers as much as it hates proper capitalization, and Barnes & Noble just ain't hacking it either.  I don't see any other major player competing with the 'Zon.  Which is a shame, because Google is so bad at it.

I've never tried to publish on Google, and I understand they're not taking folks off the street, so my experience is second hand, mainly through confused authors trying to figure their system out.

The main complaint is pricing.  Google has the right in their contracts to slash the list price to nothing, and Amazon has the right in it's contract to price match it.  So Google drops the price of your book to 12 cents.  They still pay the full royalty (bleeding buckets of money in the process), but with few sales because nobody buys from Google.  Amazon price matches, giving you 9 cents a copy.

During the last Black Friday, Google was slashing everything.  Authors were jacking up the price hoping that the final result would be their actual desired list price.  The ended up pricing a $2.99 book at $69 to get the list price stable.  Then they found out they still got paid the full royalty on the $69.  Lots of prices got jacked up that weekend.

Amazon sucks at all thing mobile.  Their attempt at a phone, their shopping app, their app store, the Kindle app - all horrible.  Unfortunately, Google sucks at all things book.

Maybe it's the one book I've bought from them.  I can read it on the Google Play website on a PC, but only if I'm logged on to that particular Google account.  If I want to use another Google sign-on, I'll get kicked out, and have to do a workaround like opening a different kind of browser.  The text doesn't resize well on Firefox and bookmarks disappear or can't be deleted.  I usually use Chrome anyway, but a text reader should be able to work anywhere in 2015.

I clicked to download the PDF, but you don't get a real PDF.  You get an ascm file, which requires a different form of Adobe and lots of signing on and an internet connection every time you want to look at the book you paid for.  I finally got a version that reads offline without a password, but every time I open it Adobe tries to spend ten minutes re-downloading it.  And when I read it, there's a two second lag every time I try to scroll.

Amazon is smart enough to know that this level of DRM is counter-productive.  Step Two trouble shooting any DRM issue is always "look for pirated copy".  It should never be easier to steal than it is to buy.

Hopefully the largest data collecting organization in human history can manage to figure out how to sell letters on a screen.  Right after the world's largest bookseller figures out how to keep bookmarks from disappearing.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Whining About Whining About Formatting

I've bought a couple of ebooks that were not only poorly formatted, the publishers knew they were poorly formatted and offered excuses in the blurb or the text itself.

The issue with both these books was the same.  The publisher has a nice little PDF they probably spent a lot of money and/or effort formatting that they used to give their printer.  The physical book came first, and they wanted to get away with just uploading the PDF to Amazon and calling it a day.

The problem is, PDFs don't play nice with Kindle.  They basically act as a series of snapshots of the pages.  To read on on an actual Kindle, you have to zoom in on a quarter of a page, then zoom out and zoom back, and maybe there's a trick to it, but it's basically unreadable.  Phones are worse.  They kind of work on PCs and tablets, but even then it's not always ideal.

The first book was a scholarly work which said in the blurb that they could only have a PDF version because of all the graphs and charts that wouldn't work on the Kindle.  I'm a third of the way through, with no graphs or charts yet.  But at least they were up front.

The second book was from a Fortean small press that doesn't make a lot of money.  I know this because the publisher mentioned it in the actual text of the book.  Several times.  The ebook actually opens with a chapter about how you should have bought the physical book instead.  This time around, the publisher blamed the "limitations in the technology", because evidently nobody has invented a thing that displays both text and pictures.

This aggravates me to no end, because it's bull and they know it's bull.  Formatting a PDF for your galley proof is way, way harder than formatting an ebook, so these folks know better.

There are a few exceptions.  Some things like comic books, travel books, some magazines, things where it's either all pictures or the text needs to be lined up with images.  These books were neither.  There were some pictures, but they stood alone between sections of text.  Nothing mobi or epub can't handle.

Some PDF files you can convert to DOC or copy and paste the text out of.  These are easy.  Convert to text using the nuclear option (convert to a txt file and lose all the formatting), then go back to clean it up and add minimal formatting.

The Fortean book was formatted more like a series of pictures, and one couldn't directly convert the text, not that I tried to hack it into readable shape.  Go back to an earlier version, maybe a DOC file the author submitted, or run it through an OCR program and clean it up.

Neither mentioned footnotes, and those can be a legit pain in the butt.  The only time I've used footnotes in an ebook as a reader was an Alan Partridge book, and they worked wonderfully well.  Just click on the number like a link, read it, and click "back" to return to your place.

Footnotes are simple, but tedious.  Have the footnotes at the end of your book.  Make a bookmark at the note, then a hyperlink from the number in the text.  For added points, you can have a bookmark and hyperlink going the opposite direction as well.  Simple, but if there are hundreds of them it can take a while.

Both publishers could make a case that the ebook version won't recoup the time/cost to properly format it, and they may be right.  In which case, don't release it in the first place.

Having known some graphic design / layout folks, I suspect the issue is one of attitude rather than ability.  To put it nicely, some of them are insane control freaks.  Layout, font, font size, page breaks, everything has to be in their control.  And ebooks aren't about that.  You control what letters show up in which order and that's about it.

Adventures in Self-Publishing - Updates

A few notes and updates:

Smashwords has been taking a full three days for their pre-screening before they even think about submitting to vendors.  Even cover changes are taking this long.  However, they are still my distant second largest storefront after Amazon.

Draft2Digital has a feature where it automatically generates and "Also by" pages with links that are specific to the individual vendors.  When you add a new title, it can automatically add it to the list and update all your previous books to include the new information.  The only downside to D2D is their automated screening for objectionable material for certain vendors.  I'm assuming its automated, as it can reject items with a couple hours of submission.  There is some inconsistency - recently it rejected four titles for iTunes and Kobo, but accepted a Collection with the same titles inside.  It rejected some titles with no keywords, so it must look at the actual content itself.  Either they have a program that looks at combinations of words to measure creepiness, or they have staff that skims the books for same - either way.

Draft2Digital gets the books in the stores quicker than Smashwords, even taking out Smashwords pre-screening process.  D2D got a book into Kobo in a few hours on a Sunday night - some of my titles never end up in Kobo via Smashwords, and I have no idea if they got rejected or it just never got delivered.  I'm in a place now where I submit everything to D2D, and only use Smashwords for their own storefront and the vendors I couldn't get into with D2D.

Twitter doesn't seem to be a particular fruitful avenue for advertising books.  If one already has a presence and following there, the occasional announcement of a new title can't hurt, but just dropping ads doesn't get much mileage.  Their analytics page is garbage.  I know there can be differences in the way the same data is collected, where the daily cut-off points are, etc, but the best you can figure from Twitter's own analytics page is whether one tweet got more clicks relative to another.  Maybe.

You can pull it up to show all your tweets on the left side, with the totals on the right.  On my particular page, I have maybe 3-4 link clicks on the left, and like 20 on the right.  And Amazon affiliates counts like 150 for the same links over the same period.

The more stats I see on ebook sales, the fewer reliable trends I'm able to develop.  The term "your mileage may vary" definitely applies.  I've collected some data on a variety of other folks' titles to account for the fact that my titles are flatlined.  Monday is supposed to be the biggest online shopping day, but it's my worst day for ebooks.  Friday nights and Saturdays are slow, but things posted Saturday get clicked on Sunday.

There are only two reliable trends I've noticed - there's a bump at the beginning of the month (paychecks?) and holidays are always slow.

There's a ton of data out there on ebook buying trends.  Will they apply to your book?  Depends.  A particular advertiser might work wonders for Romance but get nothing for Sci-Fi.  Mystery fans might be all over twitter, but maybe the Horror folks are all on Pinterest.  And this doesn't even begin to touch individual differences.  Some of the top selling writers work in the lowest level genres.  Horror sells well for Stephen King, not so much for everyone else.

The take away - if you like working with data, sign up for Amazon Affiliates and get a ton of tracking IDs.  I think you can get 100 of them.  Then develop your own data, do split tests, knock yourself out.  Otherwise, just concentrate on getting your next book out.

Adventures in Self-Publishing: Going Free

You can make a title free, either as part of a KDP Select promo or permanently.  Some pros & cons to this.
Pros:

• The possibility of a higher ranking in various free categories (for whatever that's worth)
• More readers
• More readers that will buy your other books, especially if you make the first in a series free
• More reviews
• More "Also boughts" in the Amazon environment
• You get to see the little green line squiggle a little bit on your KDP dashboard, which is better than nothing
• Nobody, and I mean nobody, bought your book, so you might as well
• On occasion, you will get a few extra paid sales after the end of a free promotion, folks catching it after the free period and paying for it anyway, or by accident

And the cons, which are mostly the same as the pros:

• The ratio of downloads to reviews is much, much lower for freebies
• You lose out on the opportunity costs of someone who might have paid for the book.  Don't worry, they wouldn't have.  Especially for a one day promo, figure if that reader wanted to pay for your book, they would have already.  And don't, don't, don't get in your head things like "I gave away a hundred books, if I had charged I would have made -" no, you wouldn't have
• You often get a lot more negative reviews with giveaways.  People that don't like your book before they even read it won't pay money for it, but they will get it for free and poop on it in a review.  "This doesn't look like my type of book, I didn't read it, 1 star".
• The "also boughts" may be wonky as well, but I think this is getting better.  When freebies were rarer, some folks would just download everything, so you get also boughts of cookbooks and self-help books, etc.  Now, you couldn't download every free book if you tried, so folks are more likely to download in their favorite genre.  For myself, the freebies have given appropriate "also boughts"
• Free doesn't mean poop anymore, so it might not help you that much

 My first KDP free promo in 2014 I got something like 350 downloads in two days.  Now in 2015, I get like 60 with more popular titles.  I've read blogs of other folks moving like 20,000 freebies a day, but these are more popular writers, and often back when free meant something more.  There are something like 50,000+ free titles on Kindle, so it's not that big a deal now.

Some general tips for a limited time promotion:

• In KDP Select you get 5 free days a period.  Use them one at a time, no more than two - the numbers scale off dramatically after the first day
• I've heard various reports of whether weekdays or weekends work better, but don't do holidays
• Promote the heck out of your giveaway

As for the last one, there are plenty of free places to promote your free books.  First up, Amazon and Goodreads message boards (you need to have an account to post):

• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=TxL9PK83CQD854
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx1FE106DTKH66H
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx1ECMXDFLM5UFO
• https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/812347?page=5&utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_digest
• https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/842673-book-giveaways
• https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/783177-authors-list-your-free-e-books-here
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=TxV7M18C3XM7MU
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx2O45LCC63YSI
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx3712Y2N72O2GT
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=TxHZWB6BFD5NVQ
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx34PZ1GY15QHES
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx1V2M4YEKCZ5YH
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx2HZ258YBMMV7K
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx2VHCHHQYV0RJY
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx3T7K3GLO2H3FQ
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx2JD2DY68K37A3
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx20SLRAKKF3GW6
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx1IMLTQ0HKGX61
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx38TES6Q3FJN5X
• http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdThread=Tx2V3M766HE0UTN
• http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-forum/meet%20our%20authors/ref=cm_cd_search_res_ti?ie=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2UYC1FC06SU8S&cdMsgNo=1&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx32QOBHER7D0RX&cdMsgID=Mx1K73GYJYJ962Y#Mx1K73GYJYJ962Y

Then there's facebook - I won't list all the groups as there are a billion of them, just search for "Free book" and "free kindle".  You need to join groups to post.  I wouldn't bother posting to the wall on a page.

Next up are the promotional websites.  The premium free ebook promotional company is Bookbub.com.  They will not accept you, and it's $500+ if they did.  Following them is ereadernewstoday.com, with maybe thefussylibrarian.com and freebooksy.com.  They charge, and they have certain standards (# of reviews, average review, etc).

For entry-level losers like us, there are still plenty of places to promote.  These websites will take your submissions because:

• The hope to upsell you to their paid promotions
• They want to add you to their mailing lists so they can brag about their numbers
• They are entry-level websites trying to get customers
• They want to add your contact info to spam lists
• They want Amazon Affiliate money

Once a website gets successful enough, they'll start charging for submissions, and raise their standards for what they'll accept.  Below is a list of websites where I promote my freebies.  All are free, none require any bizarre hoops to jump through except maybe joining their mailing list, and none have minimum requirements.  This will have changed by the time you read this, so read their terms.

• http://bookpraiser.com/submit-book/
• http://itswritenow.com/submit-your-book/
• http://awesomegang.com/submit-your-book/
• http://www.ebooklister.net/submit.php
• http://www.freebookdude.com/2014/03/list-your-free-amazon-kindle-books.html
• http://www.eroticaeveryday.com/submit-your-books/
• http://ohfb.com/author-free-kindle-book-submission.html
• http://www.ebookstamp.com/free-ebook-promotion.html
• http://www.book-circle.com/submit-free-kindle-ebook-listing/
• http://ebookspice.com/submissions/submission-form-kdp-free
• http://igniteyourbook.com/free-ebook-submission/
• http://freebooksy.com/editorial-submissions
• http://www.frugal-freebies.com/p/submit-freebie.html
• https://www.facebook.com/IndieHouseBooks
• http://kindlebookpromos.luckycinda.com/?page_id=283
• http://www.pixelofink.com/sfkb/
• http://www.pixelofink.com/sskb/
• http://indiebookoftheday.com/authors/free-on-kindle-listing/
• http://wantonreads.com/tell-us-about-your-book/
• http://pretty-hot.com/submit-your-book/
• http://www.readfree.ly/submityourfreebook/
• http://www.iloveebooks.com/for-authors.html
• http://ebookasaurus.com/free-book-listing/
• http://bookpinning.com/?sws=home/submit-book
• http://newfreekindlebooks.com/authors/
• http://www.armadilloebooks.com/submit-free-ebooks/

Most of these won't actually do anything with your submission.  They fill their slots with paid advertising, and fill in the extras with freebies.  And that's fine, it makes perfect sense for them to do that.  The last promotion I did, I got listed by Awesome Gang, Ebooklister, Frugal Freebies, Pretty Hot, and Ebookasaurus.  Three others posted on the wrong day, and nothing else from the others.  Your mileage may vary.

If you don't have time to post to all of these, you might want to narrow it down by looking at the quality of the website.  Some of these promote more through their mailing list, on facebook, or on twitter.  But if they mainly promote through their website, look at the website as if you were a reader.  Some of these are 100% about marketing to authors and you have a hard time even finding where the free books are advertised.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Amazon keywords revisited

Some updates on what I've learned about keywords in Amazon.  From what I can tell, the search results are based on:

• Title
• Subtitle
• Series Title
• Author 
• Publisher
• Category and subcategory
• Keywords

Period.  Not descriptions, despite what I might have said earlier.  Also, the keywords are very flexible.  I never get my boolean search operator whatevers right, so I don't know the right word for this, but you probably don't either.  In your keywords, if you have a phrase or even just several words separated by commas, the search can find it even with just one word there.

My example:
Victim City Stories Issue 1
Category FICTION > Crime
Category FICTION > Mystery & Detective > Hard-Boiled
Keywords: Pulp, Masked Hero, Slasher

The book shows up under searches for:

• crime slasher
• "masked hero"
• masked slasher
• masked slashers
• pulp slasher
• masked crime
• masked (on like page 20)
• masked victim
• victim pulp

Note that "masked" works without "hero", so any combination of any part of the elements will give a return.

It did not show up under:

• mask slasher, masked criminals - the search is fuzzy enough for plurals, but not a whole lot else
• victim pulp crime masked potato - though it did pop up below the "no match" dialogue
• "victim pulp" - if there are quotes in the search, the keywords need to be in the right order
• masked protector - a phrase from the product description but not in the keywords

Amazon does allow phrases in the keywords, so I would suggest going a little crazy there.  There is a limit of 400 characters, and I wouldn't be too spammy - "hot sex naked steampunk Harry Potter billionaire game of thrones leaked nudes" - Amazon may eventually crack down (or not - the unofficial standard may just be 400 characters and they don't care how many terms you cram in), and the Harry Potter bit will actually get you a "no-no" email from Amazon.  But I think it would be fair to do something like: "mythological centaur horse person, curvy plump big boned large healthy bbw, rich wealthy billionaire millionaire".  Arguably, you could get rid of the commas altogether and have one big keyword string, but I like to at least pretend to be following the spirit of the thing.

With this in mind, I'm going to drastically alter my keyword strategy and see if that does me any good.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Blogs

First off, let's talk about other folks' blogs.  Getting reviewed, interviewed, etc, by a book blog is great exposure.  However, if you're a misanthropic hermit with social skills that make even the internet embarrassed for you, things may be tough going, as it takes a bit of networking.  I've struck out in this field myself.  I looked for active book review blogs in my genre that take ebook submissions that aren't respectable enough to snub me and for which I can find a contact email and sent them an epub and mobi of what I was shilling.  I initially asked first as a courtesy, but since ebooks are so tiny I don't think it rude to just email the thing.  And don't nag them about when they're going to give you your Five Star review.

Message boards and other community websites can be a good resource, but keep in mind that Shameless Self Promotion is pretty much universally frowned upon.  Your best bet is to have genuine interactions with other members and don't do any promotion at all aside from maybe a link in your signature or profile page.

Another route is to run your own blog, with the occasional self-promotion and maybe links in the sidebar ---->

But make sure to have actual content, and it doesn't hurt for that content to be related to your books in some way.  Turns out having reviews of theme park queues doesn't help sell masked hero torture porn.

James Reasoner does this right, and I'm not just saying that because I get half my traffic from his site.  He's got movie reviews, book reviews, talks about the writing process, some nostalgia - I have some limited experience myself with paperback spinners in small Texas town drugstores, and they are pure magic.  As a result of being a regular reader of his blog, I've ended up checking out some of his stuff on Amazon, even though I'm not especially into Westerns by Americans.

But only do it if you enjoy it, and if you have the time.  Blogging can be a time suck, but it can also be good practice stringing words together.  And it's the perfect warm up for self-publishing.  I understand the anxiety of putting something out there for the whole world to see.  But don't worry.  Nobody's looking.

Adventures in Self-Publishing - Draft2Digital

I had the opportunity to use Draft2Digital, and there are some elements I like which give it an edge over Smashwords.

I found the interface friendlier, and the conversion process was much friendlier.  There is also an feature where it will auto-add certain elements to the converted file, such as a copyright page, title page, etc.  Draft2Digital did not like my Table of Contents, even though Amazon and Smashwords processed it with no issue.  They have their own TOC generator, but it's pretty basic and can't be fiddled with much.  I can see folks fighting with this feature.

The main reason I switched to Draft2Digital is that I can have multiple pen names per account and per title with no difficulties.  Smashwords really needs to implement this.

I never have problems with Smashwords' meatgrinder, but they have never accepted one of my covers the first time around.  Each time I've submitted one, there's some new rule that wasn't there (or wasn't enforced) the last time.

Draft2Digital gets the books up in the stores quicker, if only because I haven't had to spend the extra day or more messing with Smashwords approval process.  Smashwords has had some issues in the past with slow uploads to the stores, but they've been doing much better for me lately, taking about a day.

Draft2Digital pays monthly as opposed to quarterly at Smashwords.  As written out, the formula for royalties differs, but the payout is about the same - for a $2.99 title, the author royalty is $1.78 at Draft2Digital and $1.79 at Smashwords.  This may vary depending on cover price and venue.

What I really, really like about Draft2Digital is that not only do they show on their website where a book is in the publishing process, they provide direct links to the product page and send you an email letting you know it's there.  With Smashwords, obsessive people like me have to keep doing title searches at each venue to see if it's been published.

Smashwords has its own storefront, and has a few extra venues that Draft2Digital doesn't (well, pretty much just Oyster), but you can do like I do and sign up for both services, making sure to check that the sales channels don't overlap.  I'll talk about this later, but for me, Smashwords is a distant 2nd place to Amazon, coming in ahead of both B&N and iTunes.

Draft2Digital does some kind of prescreening for naughtiness and won't distribute some titles to Apple, Kobo, or Scribd, but Barnes & Noble seems to be ok.  The process is automated, as one of my titles got rejected within minutes of being submitted.  In my instance, it was for having the keyword "memory loss", which got it flagged for being "nonconsensual".  They sent me an automated email explaining their policy, the broad reason why it was blocked, and links to the appeal process, all of which I found very transparent.  The website won't let you just resubmit changes of a particular book to those blocked retailers once they've been rejected once without going through the appeals process, though you can make changes in general to less prudish retailers.

Draft2Digital has a payment threshold of $10 for paypal, $25 for check.  They also do direct deposit, but it doesn't say what the threshold is for that.  I suck at selling books at Draft2Digital as badly as I do at Smashwords, and have yet to be paid at either, but again, not their fault.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Twitter

Start off with a couple accounts at least, as it's harder to separate your Spam and Interact personas here than at facebook.

Spam Mode:
Here is how the game works.  Create a separate account, as your feed will be a mess after this.  Follow a bunch of authors - it doesn't hurt to stick to a similar genre.  They will (hopefully) follow you back.  Authors will then follow you, hoping you like them back, which you should do.  If you follow 20 people and 10000 people follow you, you're either real-life famous, buying followers, or a jerk.

Now you have an account like one of mine.  I have about 1000 followers.  I don't read their posts, and they don't read mine.  There are maybe 10 actual readers in there, and I'm sure they've muted me.

Now, retweet some of those folks' posts.  Hopefully, they'll be nice and retweet yours, but more likely they've hired a company to set up a computer program to randomly retweet junk.

Now you're in a position to tweet an ad, get it retweeted, and hopefully out of the tens of thousands of timelines it show up in, maybe 10 people will actually have it appear on their screen.

The analytics page of twitter is good for tracking this.  It's kind of buried.  First, log onto twitter, then open another tab and search for twitter analytics.  It should get you there the first time, and after that you can get to it through the "twitter ads" option from your twitter page.

Remember, we're not paying any money here, and they're only giving you this info to make you want to pay for stuff.  There are a lot of numbers about favorites and retweets and blah blah, we're only interested in link clicks.  It doesn't matter what your reach or exposure or whatever is if nobody is clicking through.

Using hashtags does work here, especially those for retweet groups such as #IARTG.  I've seen a notable increase in clicks when using these.  Be a good citizen and retweet some other folks.

I haven't bothered spamming twitter much, but some authors literally tweet every 30 seconds, or rather their automated programs do.  I followed one idiot who literally had the same ad tweeted a least a hundred times a minute.  Great way to get blocked.

Announce Mode:
As with Facebook, just announce when there's actual news.  The idea here is that someone who likes your stuff will be able to find out about new titles.  But don't announce from an account you spam from, as you'll get muted the tenth time the reader sees the same ad.

Interact Mode:
Much the same as Facebook, but again, don't spam from that account.  The #amwriting hashtag is routinely one of the most trending, and is a good way to get genuine followers.  But don't spam it, i.e., "Buy my book #amwriting".  Say something clever or insightful or cute about what you've just written.

Writing twitter copy is good practice in brevity, but the returns here are less than Facebook from most reports I've seen.

Adventures in Self-Publishing - Facebook

Yes, the cool kids have all since moved on, and nobody under 30 bothers anymore, and you only keep your account open so Grandma can send you pictures, but Facebook is still probably the best general platform for authors

First off, you might want to create a new account (or two or three) just for your marketing.  You can't post to a group under anything other than your user name, so if you have a personal account under your real name you might not want to use it.

If you want to jack up your "friends" or likes, just randomly friend some authors, and you'll get a flood of folks who you'll never talk to filling up your feed.

Spam Mode:
The best place to spam is in groups, but only in groups where it's okay.  Do a search for "kindle" or "ebook", etc, and join the zillions of groups available.  Note that some are specifically for free books, $0.99 books, kindle unlimited, etc.

There are also groups for specific genres - these are even better, though make sure you fit that genre.  Also, take a look at the posts before you just spam away.  If there is mostly discussion, you may just want to post via Announce Mode, as described below.  If the feed is nothing but Amazon links, spam away.  Keep an eye on the rules - most groups have a few.  I've had my hand slapped twice: once for accidentally posting a $2.99 book in a $0.99 group, and once for my book not having enough rape in it.  Welcome to the internet.

The posts should start out with a line to get your attention, as well as a link to Amazon.  You can babble on to your heart's content after that, but have something that a reader can pick up on in the first lines before the "See More" jump.  Also, experiment with line breaks, etc, to see how much text you can get in before that jump.

If you post a picture (likely your cover, but it could be a separate ad), you get to better control what it looks like, but you can't have it link through to your Amazon page.  If you don't upload a separate picture, the preview picture from Amazon will show up, but it will only be the middle third in a lower resolution, but you can click through.  Decide which your happier with - if the Amazon preview looks good, I'd stick with that.

Of course, the link doesn't have to be with Amazon, but have a link somewhere.  In most of these general book groups, you can post once a day and not get on anyone's nerves.  One thing - don't go too fast!  On my first KDP free day, I slammed through dozens of groups - click group, paste, post, click next group -  with such machine-like efficiency that Facebook became convinced I was a robot.  As a result, every time I try to post a link to my first book, I have to enter an unreadable captcha, and anyone clicking on the link is told it's a dangerous virus.  Link shorteners do not get around this, and it's been a pain in my butt ever since.

Spamming doesn't work with every book or genre, but it works to a certain extent.  If I don't do it for a week or so, my sales start to drop.  But as a part-time job, you'd be better off doing tech support or working at McDonald's.  Luckily, it's easy and brainless, so I can do it while watching TV or when I get bored at work.

I would not bother posting on the wall of somebody's page - it's getting hard to find those posts even if you hunt for them.

Announce Mode:
Some of the genre discussion groups allow posting ads, but I would go into Announce Mode here, only posting when there's a new title or a sale.  Or just post way less frequently - get a sense of how other folks do it before plastering your stuff everywhere.

You can also announce in a page.  This is more about announcing to existing fans, as one has to like your page to get it in their feed, and probably not even then.  I've liked scores of author's pages and I still only get promoted content and the occasional dog video in my feed.

Interact Mode:
Be interesting enough in your own timeline or page that people will want to follow you, and do just limited announcements.  Joe Lansdale does this right - a little talk about his books, a little talk about the writing process, the occasional plug.

Involve yourself in conversations about writing, but don't plug your own stuff.  The idea here is that people will become interested in you and click over to your profile and then want to read your stuff.  I would only recommend this if you actual want to be in these conversations, as faking it is pretty transparent and will turn people off.

Also, I'd avoid politics and religion, as you'll alienate half your audience once you jump on a soapbox. 

Adventures in Self Publishing - Misc Social Media

We'll focus a little closer on stuff that does (kinda) work later: Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Blogs, Promotional Websites

Here's stuff that is perhaps less valuable, though that may change as time goes on.

Pintrest - folks reportedly spend the most per click on things they find here, but for fashion, jewelry, DIY, crafts, not so much for books.  You can have a little gallery of covers, or things that inspired your book, and it is a nice place to collect a bunch of YouTube videos, but I haven't heard a lot about this being successful for authors.

Instagram - even fewer options here for authors

Vine, YouTube, etc - about the only use for these are to showcase...

Book Trailers - the most over-hyped trend of recent years, in my opinion.  There might be a larger market for Young Adult books, and audiences in future years may respond to these better, but it basically just shows the cover and some copy in a format that takes longer than just reading it.  One issue is that nobody sits down at a computer and says "Show me trailers of books in this genre" - they would have to go hunting for your particular book, and to do that they would already need to know about it.

Google + - I tried, but I can't find places to spam ads like Facebook, there was maybe one group or circle or sphere or whatever with 100 people in a genre I was interested in, and the whole thing smells like a con.  They brag about their numbers and how popular they are, but I'm not buying it.  They give you an account if you open any kind of Google account (gmail, YouTube, etc), and most people don't even know they have one.  This blog here has had around 11,000 views as of this writing, after over a year in existence and over 300 posts, and most of those are by Eastern European scrapers or myself.  One of my google+ accounts that I didn't know existed had 70,000 views the first month it opened, with zero content and not even a user photo.  Sure.

Library Thing and Shelfari I can't figure out the point of.

Bublish is a good example of what to look out for when checking out any website.  You want to be where the readers are.  I can go on Goodreads and just dial up a book for reviews and such.  As a reader, I can't even tell what Bublish is, and had to go to Facebook to find a link back to actual content - mainly author profiles and excerpts.  We'll look at this later when we talk about promotional websites, but if the front page is more marketing to authors than content for readers, that's a warning sign.

One thing about a lot of social media - it should be content, or pointing to content.  I've seen Facebook posts to YouTube ads to check out the Instagram account of a picture of someone's Twitter handle - it has to go somewhere, sooner better than later.  It's fine to have a tweet saying "new post on my blog", but don't go in circles, and don't use one social media account just to publicize another and then back again.  WWE is horrible with this - one would think the pay-per-views were just advertising for their twitter account.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Reviews

There's a prevailing view that you won't sell any books until you have reviews, and it's hard to have reviews if you haven't sold any books.  This stress has tipped some authors over the edge, and lightened quite a few wallets.  What's an author to do?

Here are some legit and semi-legit means of getting reviews:

Waiting for them organically: This may have the best results, but can take time.  Depending on the book, one has to have from 100 to 5000 customers to get one review.  While time consuming, this is the most ethical and perhaps the most effective way.  This is an audience that wanted to read your book so badly they sought it out and paid money for it, and then felt so strongly about it they went out of their way to say something.

Give books away: either free KDP Select days, permafree, or handing them out on the street corner.  This will get more takers, but a much lower percentage of folks will actually read the book, much less review it.  Also, you get folks that don't want to read your book, but downloaded it because it was free.  I've read (and experienced) accounts of reviews garnered from free giveaways that go like: "This isn't my kind of book, but it was free.  I didn't bother reading it.  One star."

Give review copies to bloggers: Find blogs that review books similar to your own and email them, asking if it's ok to send them a review copy and what format they would like.  Keep in mind they have no obligation to give you a good review, any review, or even respond to your email.  You start to get in a grey ethical area with how you do this, as sometimes authors will submit their review copy preloaded on a new iPad or some such shenanigans.

Solicit reviews from existing readers: Here's a method I've tried with no results, but it's worked for some.  At the end of the Kindle file, ask readers to review on Amazon (or Goodreads or wherever) and email you their contact information, offering a free ebook if they do.  Even though you're not specifying that it has to be a positive review, it probably would be - if they think your book sucked, they probably wouldn't want another.  This also gets a titch grey, as you are basically bribing readers for reviews, but it's not the same as flat out buying positive reviews from folks that never looked at it.

Then we have our grey areas:

Professional paid reviews:  These would be like Kirkus Indie and the like.  You pay money (up to $500 or so), and get a review, which is not guaranteed to be positive.  I don't think I've ever run across anyone who was happy with the results here.  Of course, authors that get bad reviews (and paid a premium for it) are going to be very sad.  But even authors that got positive reviews complain that the review just repeated the plot, didn't talk about the actual book much, or was otherwise lazy.

"Honest" review swaps: I've got a zillion offers for these over Facebook and Twitter.  Two authors agree to read each other's work and give an "honest" review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever.  Sometimes this is baldfaced fraud - neither author really reads the book at all and gives a generic 5 star review ("Couldn't put it down!  The characters and plot were fantastic!").  Even if there isn't the intention of fraud, people are inclined to do nice things for people that do nice things for them.  I would avoid any quid pro quo arrangement.

And then we have full blown fraud: writing your own reviews under sock puppet accounts, paying for positive reviews over fiverr, getting your friends to write them, etc.  Don't do this.  It's transparent, people figure this stuff out, and there are consequences.  I've run across indie books with sales lower than mine that have been out for a month and literally have like 50 five-star reviews.  People see through this kind of stuff, folks at Goodreads will lynch you, and eventually Amazon will start cracking down.

Which brings us to our next topic - what to do about negative reviews?

First and foremost, don't try to respond to them!  I've seen otherwise rational self-publishing blogs explode into insanity as they become convinced that the Illuminati is out to destroy them.  Reviewers get doxxed, flame wars burn across Goodreads - nothing good can come of all this.

Am I being sabotaged?
Probably not.  There are some folks that see publishing as a zero-sum game.  If someone is reading your Tree Elf Dystopian Romance, then they're not reading mine.  It doesn't help that Amazon is giving bonuses to the top 100 sellers in various genres under KDP Select, because that actually does benefit one author to tear another down.  Other than that, it's not really competing.  DC is rubbing their hands together over the success of Marvel films, because they know it means that interest in superheroes in general is going up, which will benefit them.  However, there is no shortage of malicious jerks on the internet, so nothing's impossible.  But more likely, authors are just not dealing well with the fact that somebody doesn't like their books.

One quick note about Amazon's "Verified Purchase" tag.  When one reviews a book, they have the option or not to click this, it's not automatic.  Update: Just tested, and it is automatic.  However, keep in mind, especially with Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime, someone could be reading the book under their spouse's account or something.  Anyway, if you get a quick one-star "Sucks, don't bother" that isn't verified, it could be an honest review by an actual reader that thinks you suck, not a random troll or saboteur.  Free books do count as verified purchases, and I've read conflicting reports of whether you have to actually ready 20% of the book for it to count.

Bad reviews are not the end of the world, and may be beneficial.  When I check reviews, and not just for books, I check the one-star reviews first.  If they're thoughtful with specific gripes spelled out, I'm inclined to think the product sucks.  If they're MISPELED ALL CAPS RANTS or from someone with unreasonable expectations, or if it's clear the reviewer is not in the market for that product, that says good things.  I don't even bother reading five stars reviews for books.

I've bought books because of one-star reviews: "The most disgusting thing I've ever read"  "This gave me nightmares for weeks".  And one-star reviews can produce positive reviews in response: "I don't know what the reviewer below was talking about, these are the best cotton swabs ever."  And I'm not the only one.  Some book bloggers have reported that they get more Amazon Affiliate earnings from their negative reviews than their positive ones.

Overall, be thankful and gracious that someone took the time to read your book at all.  All my negative reviews were by folks that flat out said they didn't read it.  Seeing as how I have a review series titled "Things I Didn't Finish", well, that's just karma.

And reviews may not be all that important after all.  Many authors report an inverse relationship - their bestsellers get worse or fewer reviews out of their titles.

And, yeah, there's also the possibility that you just suck.  But don't let that stop you.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Marketing

It's easy to get carried away with marketing your self published book, and there are plenty of folk waiting to take your money.  From buying twitter followers to buying reviews to paying "street teams" - with the possible exception of Bookbub (which won't accept you), I haven't heard any good things about any of it.  Luckily, there are plenty of free alternatives.

I'll do the conclusion first in case you want to skip this section - the best way to sell more books is to write more books.  Not only are there more books to sell, readers are more likely to buy books from someone with a larger catalog.  So focus on writing more, not marketing more.  If your first book doesn't sell, write another one, don't sink money into trying to buy Facebook likes.

Let me get some stuff out of the way.  You can hustle around to get interviewed by bloggers or for podcasts, or even a local morning news show.  I've heard that writing traditional press releases has had some benefit - you'll get clueless editors looking to fill human interest space and think "Local author self-publishes Amazon Top 10 Bestseller" actually means something.  All that's fine, but it requires interacting with human beings, something a lot of writers, including myself, have no interest in.

There are also blog hops, blog tours, release parties, and other things that I can't figure out what they are, but they also require basic human interaction, so I'm out.

All the stats I've seen say that the way readers find new authors is by browsing Amazon or word of mouth.  For the Amazon browsers, you'll need a good cover, a good product description, and at least have the sample portion of the actual text be in good shape.  Then job done.

Word of mouth involves actual people talking to each other, either in real life or through social media.  You can't flat out create it, and it's questionable how much you can influence it.  But for a beginning author, it doesn't hurt to at least get your product out there in the internet ether one way or another.

First, some generic best practices.  Stuff with pictures sells more than text only.  Have a link in the top third of the message, and for heaven's sake, have a link period.  I'm flummoxed to see a post on Facebook or elsewhere that reads: "I just finished my book, it is the most awesome book ever, please buy it," and there is maybe a picture of the cover, and no link.  I've actually wanted to buy the book, or at least look at the Amazon page, and so I open up my browser on my phone, only I forgot how the author's name is spelled, so I go back to Facebook, then re-open a browser, and by then I've been distracted by something shiny and can't be bothered anymore.

I'd recommend against using URL shorteners.  Facebook and Twitter already shorten URLs, some work computers will filter it out, and I myself won't click on a link if I don't know where it goes.

Some authors think it's crass to self promote and want to keep it to a minimum, and that's fine, but make it easy for your readers to at least find where to buy your stuff.  I'll pick on someone again: Don Pendleton.  This is a perfectly fine author website, with a biography, bibliography, etc.  This is particularly useful here, as Don Pendleton is a house name as well as an actual person, and it can be difficult to sort through the hundreds of books he didn't write.

What this website does not have are links to buy anything.  Now, it might not be the intention of the site to push product, but it stands to reason if someone is interested in the books of Don Pendleton, they are interesting in reading said books, and are going to likely need to buy them. Doesn't mean there needs to be a zillion pop-up ads, or even a separate "Store" page, but just some hyperlinks to Amazon or wherever would help without being too intrusive.

There are three broad categories a marketing approach can take.  All have their place, and you can carry out all three at once (though you may need multiple social media accounts).  These three modes I'm calling: Announce, Interact, Spam.

Announce: With this mode, you only post when there is something new.  A new title, a new cover, a sale, something like that.  Forget about establishing brand awareness and audience engagement bladdy blah - just bug people when there's something to tell them.  This works well in conjunction with...

Interact: Have genuine interactions with other other human beings in the realm of publishing.  This could be having clever or insightful things to say on twitter, having discussions in Facebook groups or message boards, things like that.  In doing this, do no (or next to no) promotion at all, aside from maybe a link to your blog or author page in the signature.  The idea here is that people will be interested in you, and therefore might later be interested in your work.  But, this won't work if you're also flinging...

Spam: Now, technically it's not spam if it's in the appropriate place, and there are places for it, mainly specific Facebook groups and Twitter.  This is just flat out posting: "Buy my book", over and over again.  There is a right way of doing this that doesn't turn people off.

We'll go over some of the specific social media platforms, but always keep in mind that at this level, you'll maybe get at most an extra buy or two after hours of spamming.  Do it if you like doing it, but you'll be better served by spending that time working on your next book.

Adventures in Self Publishing - KDP Select

OK, last topic on Amazon for now, then it's on to marketing.

Authors have the option to go exclusive with Amazon and join KDP select.  The benefits include:

• Being included in the Kindle Unlimited Program and Kindle Owner's Lending Library.
• Being able to set your books for free for five days every 90 or making your book a Kindle Countdown Deal for five days every 90.

Drawbacks include:

• Being included in the Kindle Unlimited Program and Kindle Owner's Lending Library.
• Not being able to sell at any other retailer.

I don't really get the Kindle Countdown deals, as you can lower your price any time you want.  You have a slight advantage in that you can stay at 70% royalty below $2.99, and you get a little ticking clock thing.  Some folks have reported this being a good marketing tool.

The free days are useful, but not amazing, especially considering you can set your books to free elsewhere without any problems.  If you have a second book in a series coming out, you can set the first one to free for a couple days to bring in new readers.  We'll talk a little bit later about marketing your free days.

I've heard talk that being in KDP Select gets you "promoted" more by Amazon, meaning KDP Select titles show up more often in "You might also like" results and elsewhere, but I've also heard that they used to do that but don't anymore.  When KDP Select started, people would say that their Amazon sales went up after they joined, but I haven't heard talk like that in some time.  Now, the major difference is Kindle Unlimited, which is either a plus or minus, depending on how high you can get away with selling your books.

Kindle Unlimited is like Scribd or Oyster, except suckier.  Subscribers pay $10 a month and can read as many KDP Select books they want, out of 700,000 titles.  On the author side, Amazon has a fund of about $2 million that they equally spread out every month for every borrowed title that has been at least 10% finished.  You don't know what your per-borrow payment is until the 15th of the following month.  It's been hovering around $1.40 a borrow.

To add insult to injury, you'll get emails saying "Due to the popularity of the Kindle Unlimited program, we're adding $50 zillion to this month's fund".  You won't see a dime of that.  Those are bonuses to the top 100 sellers in various markets.  You won't be one of them.

I can't see any medium-or-above level publishing house putting their books in KDP Select.  $1.40 is way too low, even for a moderate level indie author, and most businesses aren't going to throw in with a scheme that has no guarantees of per-unit price.

I can't see Amazon sustaining Kindle Unlimited for very long.  It's pretty expensive for an all-you-can-eat crappy indie buying plan.  I get one free borrow a month through Kindle Prime, and I struggle to find titles I want to read.  I can only see two potential markets for KU. 1) Readers who read at least 4 indie books a month and 2) Readers of erotica.  And 1 is probably also 2.  It's also too easy a system to game, which is probably why they keep their fund the same level.

So is KU worth it?  It is if $1.40 a read is a good thing.  So it would be great for me, if I could even get borrows.  Sad face.

I've seen moderate level indie authors complain that KU is lowering their sales, and it might be.  Some complain that it's devaluing the worth of books in general, but I'd say the market does that.  An example: One commenter spoke of reviews that say something like "Not worth buying, wait for a free day or get it through KU" as an example of KU devaluing books.  I'll be less charitable and say the reviewer was saying the book wasn't very good.

KU authors are a bit like the day laborers at Home Depot, in that they may siphon off some of the readership from slightly more expensive, slightly better written indie books.  But then again, there are like 50,000 free books in Amazon, and if a reader wants to stay cheap, they'll never have to spend a dime.

On one end, you have actual, real authors, selling for $7-$10 and not touching KU with a ten foot pole.  Then you have losers that have problems even giving books away, like me.  Then there are the folks in the middle, that can sell for more than $1.40, but might be hurt by readers willing to go a little down in quality to save a little money.  That's the market.

If you don't want to stay in KU, you can opt out of KDP Select after 90 days.  Make sure to check the box in your KDP Bookshelf to not auto-renew.  I've seen a lot of hyperbole about how KU is the end of publishing, but I can't see it continuing as anything but a smut buffet.  Folks that are too cheap to buy a $4.99 ebook by their favorite author aren't going to shell out $120 a year to settle for worse.

So, is KU right for you?  Try it out.  Then don't renew and try selling at Barnes & Noble and iTunes.  If you do better in KU than not, jump back in.  The only thing to keep in mind is that if you unpublish from B&N or wherever, then resubmit your book, you lose things like sales rank and reviews.  Otherwise it's easy, especially compared to getting out of a book contract in the real publishing world.

You can mix and match as well, putting some titles in and some out.  Authors will find that some titles do better at iTunes for some reason, some at Amazon, some have more borrows, some have more sales.  It can be pretty unpredictable.

An exception to some of the above is short stories.  You actually get more from a borrow than a buy if the title is $0.99, and KU seems a good deal for both writers and readers of short fiction.  

Adventures in Self-Publishing - Amazon KDP Tips

Some random Amazon tips:

Open an Author Central account at authorcentral.amazon.com, using the same account as KDP.  There are options to upload a picture, videos, link up your twitter account, put up a bio, etc.  If you don't want to do all those things you don't have to, but you do want to do this: Go to "Books" and click on "Add More Books", then add your books.  You can use as many pen names as you want and they'll be organized by a dropdown in the menu. UPDATE: Author Central (though not KDP Select) tops out at 3 pen names, but you can open a second Author Central account, even using the same email address.  Contact support if you need more than 3 pen names n Author Central.

You want to do this so if someone says, "I liked this book, I want to buy another book by the same author", they can click on your name in a product page and it will show all of your titles, leaving out the noise of similarly named authors.  I'm going to pick on somebody here: John Russo, though it's probably the fault of his publishers.

If you search for John Russo, a lot of stuff comes up, some of it not by the coauthor of Night of the Living Dead.  If I click on his name, depending on which title I started with, I go to one of at least three Author Central accounts for him.  Most of his books aren't attached to any accounts.  There is no single place that lists all of his books and just his books.

It takes like a minute to open a basic Author Central account and organize your books.  Do it.

Another tip with Author Central is that if you update your product description here instead of the KDP submission page it updates in less than an hour rather than a day or more.  Keep in mind that if you later use the KDP page to resubmit something (to change the cover, for instance), it will prefill the description box with the last one you used at KDP, not the most current one from Author Central.

You can also use Author Central to add "From the author" and reviews to your product description.  Don't look at the Sales Info.  That stuff is just to fluff or demolish your ego.  If you want to keep stats, look at actual sales from your KDP dashboard, not your rank.  I don't care how many authors sell better or worse than me, I just want to know how many I'm selling.

To illustrate how meaningless this stuff is, let's look at one of the greatest books ever written: Victim City Stories Issue 1.  According to my Author Central stats, it hovers around the 10,000 spot in the overall bestseller list, out of 1.4 million books.  It's well within the top 1% of all books ever written, sitting alongside the Bible and William Shakespeare.  It's made $3.  Even if the free issues were actual sales, I'd still make more money working a couple hours at McDonalds a day.

You may decide to temporarily lower the price of a book below $2.99, forcing you to pick the 35% royalty option.  If you bring the price back up, remember to change it back to 70%.

Don't, don't, don't have more than one Amazon account for things like affiliates, Author Central, and KDP.  If you have a second Amazon account as a customer, don't try to be sneaky and use your affiliate links  - it won't work.  If you have more than one KDP account, you will get banned.  Amazon has excellent support for multiple pen names, so you don't really need more than one account.

If you want to have your book set at permafree, here's the method that worked for me (thanks to Nathalie Ayni):

• You can't be in KDP select for this method, as you will need to set your books at free at Kobo, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble
• From the KDP website, go to "Contact Us", click "Pricing & Royalties", then click "Other".  DON'T click "Price Matching"
• Say something like "My book, Bred by the Billionaire Werewolf Biker [Amazon link] is available for free at other retailers.  I would like to have it available for free here at Amazon", then provide links to your book at the other websites.
• KDP has two canned responses.  One is "We could, but we're not going to", which is what people get if you ask under "Price Matching".  The other is "OK, go confirm it".  The responses are word-for-word the same for various people, so there must be a semi-automated system.  For whatever reason, if you make the request under "Other", it gets to people that actually do it.
• If it doesn't work, wait a week or so and try again.  It might just depend on the person you get
• Note that the old price will still show up on your KDP dashboard, and it may or may not be free for other Amazon territories.

There are other methods, but they never worked for me.  This worked in under 12 hours.

Kindle returns: Customers can "return" a Kindle book within 7 days.  This causes some consternation to some folks, as maybe the customer is being cheap and getting their money back, or they download it just long enough to strip the DRM and pirate it, but I wouldn't get too worked up.   I'm a lot more charitable.  Since the introduction of Kindle Unlimited, you see the word "FREE" a whole lot.  Combine this with Amazon's hair-trigger "one click" system, the fact that things like reward points and some gift cards can't be used on Kindle books, their awful mobile app, and folks with big thumbs - I can see someone either accidentally ordering a book, or ordering a book that charged real money when they thought it wouldn't.

Adventures in Self Publishing - KDP metadata

When a customer does a search in Amazon, the order in which things are returned are based on their popularity and their relevance to the search terms.  You can't directly control your popularity, but you can put enough metadata into Amazon's system so that customers can find you.  If a customer searches for "cozy mystery divorced detective with a limp profiles serial killers at beachside resorts during holidays leaked nude Metallica", and your book fits the bill, you want to let the search engine find you.

There are people that get paid a lot to know more about this than me, but here's what I know.  The searches look for things in the following fields: author, title, subtitle, description, categories, keywords.  It weighs relevance with the popularity and rating of the title.  Amazon keeps it very secret what importance each of these have or what the exact formulas are.

From the KDP submission screen, you get two categories, which you pick from a drill down, and seven keywords, which are freeform.  Keywords can also be categories, kinda.  From a combination of these, your book can be placed in browseable/rankable categories.  These categories are outlined here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A200PDGPEIQX41

Note that the browseable/rankable categories differ from the categories in the KDP screen.  You could put your title under "Mysteries>Cozy" in KDP and pick a keyword "island" and you will show up in the category "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Settings/Islands".  Some on the link above don't actually exist when browsing in Amazon - I couldn't find Erotica>Horror, but that may be an exception.

These are different from what comes up in an actual search.  At the bottom of a title's product details, there is the Amazon Best Seller Rank.  Your title seems to be shown to rank in two categories, regardless of the number of categories your book is in.  You don't get to pick which two categories are shown, but I'm assuming the title will still show up when browsing by category even if they aren't on your product page.

I don't have numbers, but I'm guessing most customers look for books through the search field at the top of every page.  To browse by category, one would have to click on the left sidebar through a bunch of confusing screens to get to a particular subgenre.  One can also click on the link within a particular book's product page for the bestseller's list.  Any of these options are cumbersome, and I have trouble getting to a bestseller list when I'm trying.  Most folks will just search.

So let's use the best selling book that I will admit to writing - Victim City Stories Issue 1.  As of this writing, it's number 11 in Mystery, Thriller, Suspense>Crime Fiction>Vigilante Justice>Free.  Out of a field of 12.  Hooray for me.

If one looks at the bestsellers in that category from the bestsellers screen, under the free Top 100 for Vigilante Justice, it appears on the first page at number 11.  If you browse by the category Vigilante Justice and sort by price low to high (so free are first) it shows up way lower, on page 10 of the results.  If you just do a search in the Kindle Store for "Vigilante Justice" and sort low to high, I'm on page 2.  If you then click the sidebar for the category Vigilante Justice, I'm the fifth item on the first page.  So if you're looking for free Vigilante Justice ebooks, mine will rank very differently depending on how you look, even with the same price point, popularity, rank, and keywords.

Your rank will influence where you are in search results, but you can also use it to advertise, though once you're in KDP, you realize how worthless these bragging rights really are.  I've had a Top Ten Amazon Bestseller than has made me less than $3.

Additionally, use your keywords to further narrow down what your sub-genre is, even if they're not in official categories.  Doing a search for Masked Hero in the Kindle Store, Victim City Stories is the 3rd return, and the first that's not a comic.  I've beat out Batman novelizations, Zorro, everybody.  Hooray for me.  If everybody wanted "Masked Hero" books, I'd be the first they'd see.  If I just used the category Thriller or Mystery, you'd die of old age before you came across this title.

It's the difference between being a small fish in a big pond, or a big fish in a small pond.  It hasn't worked as well for me, but other indie writers have found they do better the more niche a genre they write in - though here we're talking about how niche a genre you classify yourself in keywords.  I haven't found a ton of tips on metadata online except to be honest and be narrow.  Also, if you pick a narrow category, the title will show up in the parent categories.  So Mystery>Cozy will also include Mystery.

Be wary of anyone offering paid advice for metadata - it looks shady as hell.  It probably works, but shady.  James Patterson seems to be a big name.  Let's look him up in Amazon, and sort by publication date so we can find the latest book he put his name on.  Note that after you sort through all the preorders, Patterson himself is only like every fifth item.  Some of the noise here is books about him, or a book by Bob Patterson and James Nobody, but a lot of these are books that literally have "James Patterson" as a keyword.  This is cheap, dishonest, against KDP policy, and probably works.  Don't do it.  If James Patterson gives you a review that says "This book is as good as the books that I, James Patterson, write", you can put that in your review section.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Amazon KDP

Submitting a book over Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing website is amazingly easy.  If you've got all your material prepared, it takes a couple minutes at most.

Use your real name, and if you already have an Amazon customer account, just use that to start.  They will need your real name and SS#, as you're getting paid and doing taxes and such.  You can use a pen name for the actual books, and shy of a subpoena or such, your real name won't get attached to your Vampire SEAL Team Menage series.

Have your text in a .doc file and your cover in a jpg.  The title and subtitle should actually be on the cover.  If it's in a series, let them know.  There seems to be a cyclical thing in book marketing whether a series (or number) is a good or bad thing.

You can try to be a fancy ass like me and make up a publisher name, but I don't think it does any good.  I think most people don't care, and they few that do probably appreciate authors doing it for themselves.

Now your description.  This is incredibly important!  You have free billboard space in the largest book market in human history!  Use it!  Seriously, I've run into tons of books that have this blank or near blank.  When book shopping, I end up clicking over to Goodreads just to find out what the book is about.  Often the customer comments do a better job than the publisher.  Let the customer know what your story is about.  Don't just throw out advertising buzzwords - what's it about?  "A single mother cop hunts down a killer", "Four high school friends search for treasure and find love", "A kid goes to magic school".  Readers can be weirdly specific in what they like, so let them know.  And not only do you want to hook a potential customer, but the wordage in the description gets mixed in with the metadata when doing a search.

Like everything else, you can change it whenever you want, either through the KDP submission page or Author Central, which I find easier.  You're a writer, kind of, so you should challenge yourself to write the best ad copy for your work as possible.  Make it a habit to revisit your descriptions on a regular basis to punch them up.  And for heaven's sake, check your spelling and grammar!  Let the reader have to pay before finding out you're incompetent.

Next up, contributors, which will most likely just be the author.  You can put literally anything here you want.  In theory, you'll get caught if you put James Patterson or Stephen King, but there's no verification process up front.  Later, you can synch up the titles in Author Central so Amazon knows who wrote what.

Next is categories and keywords.  I'll go into those in more detail next time.

Check the layout in the previewer.  If it looks funky, you'll need to reformat.  There may or may not be a bug with the iPhone option - the centering always looks wonky, but I've heard that on an actual iPhone it's okay.

Next, set your price.  $2.99.  There's a lot of debate and... no, $2.99.  Unless you want to do an introductory deal or some such, in which case you might as well do that one free (I'll cover that later).  The way Amazon's pricing structure works, anything less than $2.99 gets only 35% royalties.  You may sell more books at $0.99, but not seven times more.  Authors have experimented with lowering the price, and most find they don't sell any more at $0.99 than $2.99.

"But I worked really hard on it, poured out my heart and soul, and it's worth more to me!"  Well, you're not the one buying it.  It might hurt your pride to sell your baby for so cheap, but it will hurt worse when nobody buys it.  And let's be honest, it's probably not even worth $2.99.  If a reader wants to waste time slogging through some garbage indie book, there are plenty of free ones to choose from.  If it turns out you don't suck and end up selling a million copies, up the price, or make the next one ten bucks.

We'll talk later about whether it's worth it to go KDP select or not.

Adventures in Self Publishing - Where to Sell

Unless you're opposed to it on principle, Amazon will be your main market.  On rare occasions authors will find a particular title does better somewhere else, but if you only want to mess with one market, go with Amazon.  Weirdly, Amazon is far and away the best selling ebook retailer, but the most popular format is epub, which is not the format Amazon sells.  I'm guessing pirating has something to do with that.

I don't have specific numbers, but based on what I hear from authors, Barnes & Noble is still clinging on at a distant second, with iTunes third.  iTunes seems not to have caught on as much as people had thought for books.  Fourth would probably be Kobo, which I understand is bigger in Europe.

Consider using an aggregator.  This is a service that takes your book submission and then submits those to the various markets, taking a small cut for their service.  Some markets don't accept submissions directly from indie authors, and some are too difficult to even try to deal with (iTunes in particular).  The good thing with aggregators is that you can mix & match.  You can have an account directly with Amazon and B&N, then use an aggregator to submit to Overdrive, Oyster, etc.

Aggregators include Smashwords, Draft2Digital, and Lulu.

I haven't used Lulu, but just looking at their site, they seem more focused on fleecing writers ($99 to convert to epub - every other market I've seen converts for free), though they may be better for print on demand than ebooks.  Draft2Digital I haven't worked with, but I've heard good things.

I have a love/hate relationship with Smashwords.  I like their general vibe and I like them as a customer.  In addition to distributing, they have their own store, and you can choose what format to download from.  I don't sell much, but I find I shift more freebies through Smashwords directly than with B&N or iTunes.  You can set your books for free without jumping through any hoops.  Text is submitted as a .doc file and sent through what they call the "meatgrinder", which converts it to several formats.  The meatgrinder is reportedly notoriously picky, but I've never had a problem with it, just use as little formatting as possible.

I've had a few minor issues.  Sometimes a book won't go through to a particular retailer, and I get a kinda "you don't sell enough for us to care" vibe from support, which is fair enough.  I found that just resubmitting the same file or cover will start the process again and sometimes jump start things.

They do not adequately support multiple pen names or multiple authors.  You have one pen name per account, period.  If you want another pen name, open another account under a different email address (something that would get you in trouble at Amazon, so don't do that there).  I had two author names on a cover (both of them me - there was a good reason for it), and they sent a message saying I needed to contact support to let them know who the primary author was, etc.  I did, and got a canned response saying to basically do the same thing again, but to also create ghost accounts for the other author.  At that point I took my ball and went home, taking the opportunity to go exclusive on Amazon (more on that later).

To their credit, the titles disappeared from all the retailers within 24 hours, which is pretty good turnaround.  Hopefully they'll add support for multiple pen names, because I do like dealing with them, and continue to do so with some single author titles.

One of the issues that authors will face with aggregators is "censorship".  I put air quotes around it because I know that it's not really censorship, the government isn't involved, nobody's going to jail, and if a company doesn't want to sell something they don't have to.  Again, just remember that nobody reads this stuff.  I've got all kinds of nastiness in my books and it's available everywhere.  If one puts something in the category of "Erotica", tag it as adults only, and have keywords like "incest", "bestiality", etc, yeah, it might not make it to all the retailers.

Smashwords has guidelines (no rape, no underage stuff, incest, bestiality) but sells and supports it anyway.  An aggregator may take the route of only distributing certain stuff to certain markets, while they might also take the route of not accepting erotica at all and avoiding the hassle.  Additionally, most of the smaller companies use paypal, and they are notoriously conservative about naughty stuff, so I could see a crackdown in the future.

Amazon pays after 2-3 months (at the end of the month, two months after the sale), no minimum with direct deposit (or if there is, it's under $1).  For a beginning author who also sucks at selling books, it's nice to get that little $1.70 deposit and not have to wait a year to hit some minimum balance.

Smashwords pays after 3-6 months (at the end of the quarter after they get paid, which may be at the end of the previous quarter).  Minimum $10, payable over paypal.  I have yet to be paid by Smashwords, though that's entirely my fault for sucking.