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I've been standardizing my stuff for the last week or so and a few of mine got adult filtered as well, it looks like they were pretty much all because of the cover. Pretty much anything that shows any sort of skin gets the tag. I'm well beyond the point of caring about the stupid tag by this point but I'm going to keep that in mind for the rest of my stuff. Ask them to take it off? It couldn't hurt if you feel like going through that hassle.
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Jan 16, 2016 16:06
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angel opportunity posted:My erotica bundle, which I haven't touched in months and which was still making like $200/month got adult filtered sometime in the last few weeks (I only noticed now). I guess they are REALLY cracking down on erotica now. I think if anyone is still in erotica...now would be a good time to start writing romance. It happens.
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Jan 16, 2016 18:30
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:So for a while Amazon posted the December reports. Dec KENPC Rate was $0.00461. el oh loving el at anyone who claims that the KU rate isn't just a number Amazon pulls out of their rear end every month. They chopped off more than 10% of the month, the rate went down 6%, and then when they fixed it, the rate remained the same (6% down). If it were related to some pot number determined by subscriptions and they made this correction, the rate would have dropped a further 10%+.
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Jan 16, 2016 19:14
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Bardeh posted:The book is sitting at around 500k rank ... A week later and the book is just below 35K rank now, 919 in kindle horror, 189 in ghosts, so the video and the 99 cent sale has been working. SO FOR NEXT TIME, (before you get started) I'll combine all of this effort when the book goes live.
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Jan 16, 2016 20:32
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I'm not sure you're trying to say that rank is good or not, but you really want to understand the Amazon ranking system. If you're going to be self-publishing you should know how much money different ranks make. Rank 35,000 is generally around one sale per day. Assuming you published on your own, and that no one else were taking a cut from this book, at $2.99 that's maybe $60/month. If the book were in KU (I can't remember if it is?) it might make some more money than that, but 30,000 rank is basically token income. As the book gets older, hitting even rank 35,000 will become harder, and it will hold that rank for less time. Two or three sales can take a book from rank 1,000,000 to 35,000, whereas you need hundreds of sales to go from 35,000 to 1,000, and thousands of sales to go from 1,000 to 100. In the genre you are doing, you should be aiming at getting something priced at $2.99 planted at rank 1,000-3,000 and in KU. Your genre is less crowded than romance, and you could potentially sit at a rank like that for a good amount of time if your book has appeal. This would bring you in a steady and worthwhile amount of money. If you release a new novel every month--or even every other month--all your old novels (including this one that you hosed up the launch on) have the potential to grab sales from people buying your back catalog. Get enough books out hovering at ~3,000 rank and you'll start to have some decent income coming in. Rank 35,000 is just not going to do this though. Nor is rank 10,000. I had an erotica short ($2.99 in KU) that came out early this month go to rank 3,000, hover around rank 10,000 for a good while, and now it's at rank 20,000. It will fall off the face of the planet any day now, and it's only made $70. Your book never got higher than 35k, and you have to give whatever percentage of less than $100 you have made to the people who botched your launch. Pretty much the only way that novel is going to make money now is if you get another book out that actually hits a good rank. That is the only form of promo that will help this first book, and writing another book will also let you not gently caress up the launch next time (and hopefully make some real money on the second book!)
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Jan 16, 2016 21:05
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angel opportunity posted:I'm not sure you're trying to say that rank is good or not, but you really want to understand the Amazon ranking system. If you're going to be self-publishing you should know how much money different ranks make. Is your strategy nothing more than - 2 months: write and publish another book - day of launch: 99 cents, email all your subscribers - at some point move it to $2.99 - repeat Do you do any public marketing at all, or has your catalog grown so much that word-of-mouth and "suggested/related items" are all you need to get the next book moving up the charts?
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Jan 16, 2016 21:45
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lol one my arc readers just said: "I received an ARC in lieu of an honest review and with all sincerity, get this book!" Don't think she knows what 'in lieu' means and I'm worried I might get in trouble now...
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Jan 16, 2016 21:45
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angel opportunity posted:lol one my arc readers just said: "I received an ARC in lieu of an honest review and with all sincerity, get this book!"
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Jan 16, 2016 21:47
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It's perfectly fine to solicit reviews from ARCs. It's super sketchy to demand positive reviews from them and Amazon will probably remove them? Not sure about that last part.
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Jan 16, 2016 21:50
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magnificent7 posted:Okay. So, first off, thanks for the info, super helpful. I think this is the last push I'm giving this book for now so I can hurry up and finish the one I'm working on now. Take everything I say with a grain of salt, because I do romance (and I'm also not exactly tearing up the charts yet). My romance is ranking much higher than my erotica ever did though. I am doing some research on non-romance genres and self-pub in case I ever strike it rich and have extra time to try my hand at sci-fi or fantasy. I'm a pretty big advocate of free promos on launch. There's a number of reasons for this, but the most commonsense one is that there are millions of books on the Amazon store (and thousands coming out every day). How are you, a no-name author, going to get your book in front of people? You put it in KU and make it free for 3-5 days. Paid ads for a book doing a free promo tend to be cheaper, and if your cover and blurb are appealing you can get thousands of people grabbing your book for free. The free store has its own ranking system, and thus all those subgenres do as well. It wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that you could hit top 10 in some free sub-categories if you do stuff well and pay for some promotion during the free period. This gets your book in front of people and helps build you an audience, especially if you're releasing a book every month. Another reason a free promo is effective is because the "also bought by" list under your book will populate from free downloads  The more people who buy (or in this case the more people who get it for free) your book, the more accurate and on-point that list will be. Say that 300 of the people who download your book for free also paid $2.99 for some book that is rank 500, this puts YOUR BOOK on the "also bought by" list of the rank 500 book. That is important viability for you, and if you are on a number of those lists, your book will actually become visible on Amazon, and people will hopefully buy it. I think your cover, blurb, and hook are good enough that this strategy would have worked fairly well for Snapshot, but I don't know how big the market is for books like Snapshot. If there's no real market for this kind of book (I'm not saying there isn't, I just am not going to research it because I don't really care  ) then this strategy will be less effective, because few people are going to grab your book even if it's free and in front of their face on a mailing list that you bought an ad in. Paid advertisements on mailing lists are almost always much cheaper if your book is free vs. $0.99. And finally, I suspect that the free rank actually has SOME effect on initial paid rank. I generally see a correlation between my peak free rank and my initial paid store rank. This could just be due to also bought lists, but it could also be an effect on the algorithms. I don't really know. So you do all this, and when your book switches to pay it's ideally on also bought lists, and it's $0.99 (low barrier to entry), and hopefully some of those free people have left you good reviews too. Your book lands with an initial rank better than 5,000 or something, and people actually see it now, and they keep buying it because your sub-genre is probably not that big and not that crowded (??? Again I'm just assuming this), so your book can hopefully just kind of plant itself around that decent rank and earn over $20/day for quite a long time. If it's really good or really appealing to a certain market, you may do much better than that...I don't really know. You can build up lists of advance review people (which is what most of the romance authors do) so that when the book goes live you have like 30-100 people leaving reviews immediately. This gives everyone the impression your book is awesome, and they have very little apprehension about picking it up. The $0.99 price point will ensure that you keep selling copies and holding a good rank, and while you hold a good rank, the KU reads will bring in your real income. I see most non-romance holding ranks like this at $2.99, however, so it's feasible that you just never do $0.99 on your book, and $2.99 is as low as it goes. I'd expect this would mean fewer sales per day, but it's much more money. You'd hope that the sales would keep up enough even at $2.99 to hold your rank reasonably high. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 22:00
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Roar posted:It's perfectly fine to solicit reviews from ARCs. It's super sketchy to demand positive reviews from them and Amazon will probably remove them? Not sure about that last part. I didn't. I sent her a free ARC copy and asked her to leave an honest review. She was trying to sound fancy and use the phrase "in lieu" thinking it means "for" and she threw that out there not having any idea what it means...now I'm worried that people will think I did ask her to leave a dishonest review, which I 100% did not do
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Jan 16, 2016 22:01
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angel opportunity posted:Take everything I say with a grain of salt, because I do romance (and I'm also not exactly tearing up the charts yet). Also holy crap way to break the tables or whatever the kids call it.
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Jan 16, 2016 22:27
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angel opportunity posted:I didn't. I sent her a free ARC copy and asked her to leave an honest review. She was trying to sound fancy and use the phrase "in lieu" thinking it means "for" and she threw that out there not having any idea what it means...now I'm worried that people will think I did ask her to leave a dishonest review, which I 100% did not do
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Jan 17, 2016 00:09
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angel opportunity posted:I didn't. I sent her a free ARC copy and asked her to leave an honest review. She was trying to sound fancy and use the phrase "in lieu" thinking it means "for" and she threw that out there not having any idea what it means...now I'm worried that people will think I did ask her to leave a dishonest review, which I 100% did not do If it makes you feel any better, about 75% of the time I see people use the phrase "in lieu of", they mean it the incorrect way your reviewer did. So yeah, I don't think you have much to worry about.
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Jan 17, 2016 01:09
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Question: I've been prepping to launch myself wholeheartedly into self publishing romance and I've been reading up a lot of things here and also on a paywall forum mentioned previously in the thread. In said forum, people often ask for things like reviews, etc, but someone in one of the threads said that Amazon frowns on authors reviewing books in the genre they're writing for. Is this true, and if I review a bunch of things prior to actually publishing my own things, will that still have the same negative effect?
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Jan 17, 2016 04:25
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angel opportunity posted:lol one my arc readers just said: "I received an ARC in lieu of an honest review and with all sincerity, get this book!" Lots of ARC readers say that, albeit without the godawful word choice. You won't get in any trouble at all.
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Jan 17, 2016 05:11
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skellycakes posted:Question: I've been prepping to launch myself wholeheartedly into self publishing romance and I've been reading up a lot of things here and also on a paywall forum mentioned previously in the thread. In said forum, people often ask for things like reviews, etc, but someone in one of the threads said that Amazon frowns on authors reviewing books in the genre they're writing for. Is this true, and if I review a bunch of things prior to actually publishing my own things, will that still have the same negative effect? I see people on that forum doing that and I always think it seems really dumb and not worth it to do. I'm paranoid enough that I don't leave reviews at all--on any books--on my KDP accounts, and I specifically tell my mom and wife (who both know my pen name) to never leave reviews on any of my books. I'm sure that's being paranoid, but you're never going to build a career off of begging for reviews from friends, family, or other authors. I don't feel it's ever worth the risk of those few extra reviews.
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Jan 17, 2016 05:41
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angel opportunity posted:I see people on that forum doing that and I always think it seems really dumb and not worth it to do. I'm paranoid enough that I don't leave reviews at all--on any books--on my KDP accounts, and I specifically tell my mom and wife (who both know my pen name) to never leave reviews on any of my books. That sounds fair! I knew it was a huge no-no about the whole people-in-you-life-and-specifically-in-your-house leaving a review, but I've been devouring these books (mostly ones in the top of their respective genres, not ones linked in that forum!) for research purposes anyway, and having since learned about how important reviews are I figured I could throw someone a bone or two if I just happened to stumble into their work.
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Jan 17, 2016 06:02
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angel opportunity posted:lol one my arc readers just said: "I received an ARC in lieu of an honest review and with all sincerity, get this book!" I think she might have meant something like "I received an ARC[, and] in lieu of [a lengthy] review and with all sincerity, get this book! [Because I am bad at expressing my like for this book in any actual detail.]"
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Jan 18, 2016 22:06
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This is probably a dumb question, but in regards to having things thrown behind the adult filter/"dungeon'd"... that all happens based on what you put in your blurb and keywords, yeah? And I imagine using keywords that'd throw you into an "erotica" subcategory means you're basically willfully putting yourself there, correct? I just wanted to be sure because while I would probably throw erotica behind a filter to keep my hypothetical 13 year old from stumbling into poetic and artfully written vampire blowjobs, I guess I could see an argument behind "erom" or "sort of tastefully written erotica" being a few steps above blatant, super bizarre smut (like a guy having gay sex with a book or some lady being bred by a billionaire tentacle, which are all things I stumbled over the last few days trying to get a handle on what kind of things went where.) In that same vein, if you're writing PI, does that auto throw you into the dungeon? I read something about the word "step brother" tossing you into the dungeon, but I've ran into a lot of step brother romance wholly on accident in totally not erotica categories that's selling bucketloads of stuff. I guess I just would really like if someone could explain what gets dungeoned and what doesn't and exactly how much being dungeoned destroys your chance at sales! Been looking around for this and having a hard time finding any concrete information. PS I'm not looking to write intense erotica or anything (though I'm sure I could do it, it doesn't seem too profitable right now); I really just wanna write eroms. Edit: Fuego Fish, I picked up your book today because it sounds cool and also because your avatar is adorable. 
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Jan 21, 2016 04:29
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skellycakes posted:like a guy having gay sex with a book This is just normal bud stuff
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Jan 21, 2016 04:32
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PI was banned on Amazon several years ago so I wouldn't even bother (though some special snowflakes still snuck in). Actually using the Erotica subcategory is suicide for your story because it'll probably get auto-filtered. More indepth discussion breaks the mod's rules about super-romance unfortunately.
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Jan 21, 2016 04:38
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Roar posted:PI was banned on Amazon several years ago so I wouldn't even bother (though some special snowflakes still snuck in). Actually using the Erotica subcategory is suicide for your story because it'll probably get auto-filtered. This is actually all I needed to know, so thanks! I'm really surprised that PI was banned because I legit found a whole plethora of really well selling books with such subtitles as A STEPBROTHER ROMANCE by some lady named Sabrina Paige. She has titles such as Prince Albert and Prick with 100's of reviews. Does amazon ban this stuff for the plebs but let the heavy hitters keep going? One of her books (Prince Albert, lol) is literally ranked #28 in just Books > Romance, so how do they get off banning something and then letting that go through? Can it all be chalked up to just Amazon being dirtbags?
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Jan 21, 2016 05:03
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PI is not banned. You just have to use the special codewords and tiptoe so hard around it that it's very difficult to market, and if you mis-step you get thrown into the adult only dungeon and your sales die. In Romance (not erotica!) you can use the word "stepbrother" because those aren't actually PI style stepbrothers, they are grown adults whose parents are re-marrying each other later in life, and the hero/heroine have just recently met each other etc.
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Jan 21, 2016 05:05
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angel opportunity posted:PI is not banned. You just have to use the special codewords and tiptoe so hard around it that it's very difficult to market, and if you mis-step you get thrown into the adult only dungeon and your sales die. Ahhh thanks, this clears a lot of things up! You're a hero.
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Jan 21, 2016 05:16
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angel opportunity posted:PI is not banned. Ah, well that explains the special snowflakes then. All I know is that I had about six books get blocked in a week back in 2013 so v  v.
Roar fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 11:37
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Looks like Amazon is gonna more heavily crowdsource their quality control. Mark Dawson over on Kboards just posted this email he got over an old book that users flagged for content errors:quote:Our shared goal is to provide the best digital reading experience for customers on Kindle. When customers contact us with quality issues in a book you published, we validate the issues and send them immediately to you to fix. I feel bad for the authors who will get flagged for US/UK spelling differences.
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Jan 21, 2016 16:45
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More work for editors! *rubs hands together gleefully*
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Jan 21, 2016 16:58
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Looks like Amazon is gonna more heavily crowdsource their quality control. Mark Dawson over on Kboards just posted this email he got over an old book that users flagged for content errors: How long before obnoxious people use this to get a spurious warning put on books that anger them for non-quality reasons?
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Jan 21, 2016 19:01
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Pinky Artichoke posted:How long before obnoxious people use this to get a spurious warning put on books that anger them for non-quality reasons? Suppppppposedly Amazon will "verify" their complaints before posting the notice on your product page. I'll save EngineerSean the effort and just post his thoughts now: HAHAHAHAHAHA!
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Jan 21, 2016 19:05
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All of this "quality checking" concerns me with my romance pen names. However my thriller mystery pen name, I'm in the middle of going through final edits on book 1 with an editor, and it should pass muster no problem.
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Jan 21, 2016 19:18
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Jalumibnkrayal posted:Suppppppposedly Amazon will "verify" their complaints before posting the notice on your product page. I'll save EngineerSean the effort and just post his thoughts now: HAHAHAHAHAHA! thanks
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Jan 21, 2016 19:29
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The women that run my HOA must need some extra work to gently caress with me now that my lawn is within specs.
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Jan 21, 2016 19:30
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I got thirty two of these in 2015, here are my favorites: Kindle Location: 309 ; Description: "eeked" should be "eked" Kindle Location: 1735 ; Description: "splooshing" should be "sploshing"
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Jan 21, 2016 19:35
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So I just got my first piece of physical fan mail, but the company that runs my virtual address wants a hundred loving dollars to forward a letter to me (USA address to USA address). Way to piss on my parade, Viabox.
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Jan 22, 2016 01:34
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I don't get the quality e-mails, but I do get the upload spelling errors where they don't matter at all. There are a whole bunch of sex acts best not discussed in polite company that Amazon doesn't think are words. Sean, I sploshed just reading your post.
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Jan 22, 2016 01:37
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Hey guys, I'm the kind of goon who is knee deep in one novel and has ideas about other projects when he should be just loving cranking out them words instead of surfing the forums but here we are: Has anyone considered/managed to use Patreon to similar/greater effect then that traditional self publishing platforms? I'm just curious, to be honest.
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Jan 22, 2016 16:32
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Bacon Terrorist posted:Hey guys, I'm the kind of goon who is knee deep in one novel and has ideas about other projects when he should be just loving cranking out them words instead of surfing the forums but here we are: I seriously do not think it would work. What is your plan? To ask for monthly payments to support you writing novels? Amazon's system is a thing that allows people to pay you for writing novels. Further, Kindle Unlimited is a $10/month system where your readers can support you via monthly payments to read your stuff (and you get paid). KU has the side advantage, for anyone who would actually be willing to pay $10/month to support you specifically, of giving them free reads on all kinds of other books for that $10/month. If you have enough readers interested in your stuff for Patreon to make ANY sense, then Amazon would simply be better. If you get decent sales and KU reads on Amazon, your rank increases and that is FREE ADVERTISING that Patreon will not give you. Without more information about your plan or what you are writing, that's all I can say.
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Jan 22, 2016 16:46
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angel opportunity posted:I seriously do not think it would work. Yeah, I figured Amazon is the better option. It's not my plan per se, just I was over there the other day after being linked by Kinda Funny Games and saw they had a writer category, though my initial thought was 'how the hell does that work?' So I figured you guys are the most knowledgeable people I have access to solve that mystery. Thanks for the swift reply
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Jan 22, 2016 17:14
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Bacon Terrorist posted:Hey guys, I'm the kind of goon who is knee deep in one novel and has ideas about other projects when he should be just loving cranking out them words instead of surfing the forums but here we are: You're just spinning your wheels. Amazon isn't ideal, but it's the best way to play this game. Close your browser and go write. You know that's the real answer.
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Jan 22, 2016 17:17
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