|
magnificent7 posted:Hmm. Great insight. Thanks. You're in luck! http://www.patreon.com/ psychopomp posted:Now I'm gearing up to do a Kickstarter for a film project with a $25,000 budget and the number alone intimidates me. There's a lot of math that goes into figuring out stretch goals and reward tiers. Way more complicated than it was the first time around. A few years ago when I was paying more attention to crowdfunding, I know a lot of folks got blindsided by tax issues. Something about doing the project at the end of the year and not spending the money until the next calendar year. It might be worth talking to an accountant if you hadn't planned on doing so already.
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2014 13:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 05:02 |
|
|
Kindle Scout is now live. If any goons need nominations I've got three for the cause.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2014 23:03
|
|
|
AgentCooper posted:General Question: It sounds to me like the all-important blurb is really similar to what you'd try to send agents in a query letter, minus maybe the bio info and word count/genre descriptors. If I had a decent letter (resulting in multiple partial requests at the very least) would it be stupid to use it as the blurb? That probably depends on your genre. The blurb is audience-facing, so it just needs to appeal to your audience. Agents have to weigh industry knowledge to decide if your book is worth their time. I think readers are easier to win over if you target your blurb towards them. A great example of this is the Urban Romance genre. Look at this blurb: quote:Growing up with everything and having it all taken from her because of her lifestyle, Chelsea White grew up with everything. Her parents made sure she was well taken care of, but all of that stopped once she chose the streets instead of college. Jason was an old friend of hers who loved her dearly. He did everything in his power to help Chelsea, but he was no match to what he was losing her to. . . . the streets. It's not even a "good" blurb, right? But...this book is ranked #500 in the entire Amazon store. It's moving about 150 copies a day. Knowing your audience is everything, otherwise you might lose them if you didn't know that knowing your audience is everything.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2014 03:28
|
|
|
Kindle Unlimited launched in Spain and Italy. I've made a grand total of 2.21 Euros out of those marketplaces in the past 90 days, so yay?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2014 00:48
|
|
|
Self-publishing is no substitute for therapy, friend.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2014 01:54
|
|
|
One star. Too short. Couldn't cum.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2014 20:18
|
|
|
Assuming the KU borrows are reasonable, October was my first four figure month. Thanks to Sean, Moana, Sundae and the other regulars who help newbs like me. No joke: this is a life changing thread. I just picked up that Let's Get Visible book and The Indie Author Power Pack. Reading through them now.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2014 04:06
|
|
|
My writer's group is divided into three camps: 1. Journalers. Folks who are writing for personal fulfillment, not for anything anyone else will read. Cool, more power to you. 2. Published folks. There's two of us, the other being an author who just published her first novel. I'm reading it and I really like it. Her parent is an author, so she was raised in that environment and knows what the business side of it is. 3. Writers who are "working on" 100-300k epics in fantasy/sci-fi/dystopian future stuff. These are all projects with 5-10 years sunk into them already. I think one of them is working on a trilogy simultaneously, not a single word published yet. I'd kill to have that kind of confidence in what I do. I hope they all knock it out of the park on their first book, because drat that's a lot of time.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2014 20:54
|
|
|
KU borrow rate is $1.33. drat, 20 cent plummet.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2014 03:10
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:I'm #10 KDP All Star which means they're going to pay me a middle class salary on top of the upper class salary I made in October. Congrats! I'm nowhere near this level, but is it per pen name or per KDP account? I imagine it's per pen name, because they promote you.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2014 12:44
|
|
|
ravenkult posted:Over at my premade cover store, everything is 50% off the list price (Code: FIFTY). They're going fast, but quite a few left still. Valid until the end of the year. Oh, Death looks gorgeous. Definitely getting some True Detective vibes from that.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2014 16:44
|
|
|
Ha! Just emailed KDP support to have them update the page count on my hottest book right now. It didn't have one, and that was preventing me from ranking in the Short Reads categories. So they fixed it, and I knocked Dean Koontz out of the top ten in a little category. Stupid thing to get hyped about, but I'll take it.  Edit: ^^ It's not uncommon for it to take some time to, essentially, launch a new business from scratch. Especially one where you have to learn to do everything yourself or hire the right freelancers. My first month in this I made four dollars. My second month I made zero dollars. It gets better. 
Jalumibnkrayal fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Nov 18, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2014 23:04
|
|
|
thehomemaster posted:A few questions. As far as most of us are concerned, there's little difference between self-pub and traditional pub. Traditional pub has an upper hand when it comes to marketing, but how significant that advantage is varies. As long as you research the categories you're looking to write in and you can produce lots of content, you'll do well. You can check Amazon yourself to see what the bestselling categories are, and this will be good practice. You'll be spending a lot of time researching stuff on Amazon. Keep in mind that you're probably looking at 90 day delay between you selling a book and you getting paid for that book. Obviously, keep your day job and work on writing on the side. Right now Amazon is dominating the market, so small changes on their end have pretty extreme ripples. Like how we're all being paid less and less each month for our books in the KDP Select program. For many the program is still worth it, but in a month or two that might change.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2014 02:39
|
|
|
SaviourX posted:So with the mad holiday season approaching, what's everyone doing to prepare or promote their works? I'm just going to try to have a bunch of new releases from mid-December through mid-January.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2014 14:08
|
|
|
Bolverkur posted:Book won't be sold on Amazon physically, I just want to give people a free code that they can claim on Amazon for the ebook. There is no way for us little fish to do this. Amazon doesn't have a system for us to generate book download codes (and certainly not for free).
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2014 16:08
|
|
|
Sulla-Marius 88 posted:My first book went live this morning on Amazon (can't link, let's just say it's 10k words) and I got my first sale this evening! In theory I'm now a professional author, except: Congrats. It's easy to post about writing, it's something else entirely to do actually publish. Try not to be neurotic about refreshing your KDP chart. Just set a certain time of day and check it at that time.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2014 04:02
|
|
|
Bobby Deluxe posted:The universally cited truth is no, unless you're already famous for other stuff. If you have a lot of short stories in the same genre, you might be better off trying to edit / link them into one 50k narrative and market that instead. Let me play devil's advocate and say that if you've already written the content, self-publishing it is like another hour worth of work, if that. Why would you not put something out there and see if it catches fire? Kindle Unlimited is opening doors for new authors, because there's no longer any risk for the reader. If you get tons of 1 star reviews and death threats, you'll have to go through the grueling one minute procedure of coming up with a new pen name and writing it down in front of your keyboard.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2014 16:18
|
|
|
Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Is there a limit to how often you can update book details and re-publish, or does it affect ranking etc? I just updated my keywords and threw a few more in (still a far far cry from the 399 characters that most people put in but I'm still learning) and it should hopefully be done within 12 hours or so. But I'm wondering if there's any downside to doing that, seeing as it's still available while under review. There's no limits on updating your book. It will not affect ranking if you're just updating and republishing (IE keeping the same ASN). Each time you republish it has to be approved. Depending on your genre, this could be a dice roll on getting an Amazon employee who thinks your chupacabra gangbang epic should be adult filtered. It's also worth noting that you can update the blurb of your book through AuthorCentral. This has the advantage of happening pretty much instantly and not going through republish or review. This will overwrite changes you make through KDP later, however. So once you change a blurb via AC, you need to continue updating it through AC.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2014 19:44
|
|
|
The Fuzzy Hulk posted:I am really interested in this, how exactly do you update a blurb on author central? I hate waiting days for a simple "If you like this book check out this new release" to show up. Just click on a book in your list of books. Then you should see a button to edit the product description. Take not that you cannot use all the HTML tags that you can in the KDP system. And it can add in extra line breaks sometimes. So just check your book's page after you make the change. Edit: Looks like the first batch of Kindle Scout books have been selected. https://kindlescout.amazon.com/selected 8 books, no Romance. I'm surprised by that. Jalumibnkrayal fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Dec 2, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2014 23:48
|
|
|
EngineerSean posted:He and his wife have 200 books out under WMG but they're ranked 400k before you even leave the first page of ten. 200 books x 5 sales per month x $2 = $2000 a month between the two of them.   I think he needs to answer his own WIBBOW test. It might be the first I've seen where the answer has swung over into the "Nope" category. That cover is for a book listed in the Culinary, Crime Thriller, and Mystery categories.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2014 17:58
|
|
|
Some folks ran sales rank tests on Amazon.de http://www.selfpublisherbibel.de/test-how-amazons-algorithms-really-work-myth-and-reality/ They conclude that (for purposes of calculating rank), a sale loses half its potency each day. Kinda neat.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2014 20:57
|
|
|
By The Horns posted:This is like my holy grail of blog posts. Thanks! NP. What I would have liked to see is whether or not free KDP promos "pause" your sales decay. So if I sell a book on Sunday, then run a free promo Mon-Fri, on Saturday is my sale from 6 days ago now worth ~0.0125 or 0.50 of a "rank point". It's really hard to test this now because with Kindle Unlimited, I get lots of people that borrow my free book instead of buying it for $0. God bless the person at Amazon who decided the "Read this for Free (with Kindle Unlimited)" button was positioned above the "Buy Now with 1 Click" button. Bobby Deluxe posted:So I'm having trouble with blurbs. Anyone have any good guides bookmarked? Feel free to PM me if you want me to take a look at it. I'm only mildly successful at this because folks in this thread helped me out with stuff like covers and blurbs.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 15:14
|
|
|
Sulla-Marius 88 posted:KU is only available for US and UK customers at the moment from what I can tell. I have friends in the UK and the US but I figure it'd be easier to get set up in the UK because I live in Italy and have a bank account that, while Italian, is a sub-branch of a UK bank (BNL which is a part of BNP). I don't know the logic is kind of shoddy there, I'm just desperate. I saw veiled references to getting access to KU for non-US/UK but Google turned up nothing. KU launched for Italy last month according to http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/11/04/kindle-unlimited-launches-spain-italy/#.VIJMbYuJnzI
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2014 01:24
|
|
|
No Gravitas posted:Good advice. I deployed my secret weapon: Dana Alphasmart. I do all my writing on an Alphasmart Neo and I have four backup units in case this one ever dies.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 15:55
|
|
|
Sundae posted:Okay, I have to ask: Why an Alphasmart over any given laptop? I see a lot of people using those things, and I don't understand the appeal. It's all about the distraction free environment. When I go to my writing groups, everyone pulls out their laptops and they type a few words. Then they look at their screen and delete what they wrote. Then they get bored and tab over to Instagram. Then something on Instagram gets them excited and they spend the rest of the night on Instagram. I pull out my electronic typewriter, put my headphones in, and I write until my pomodoro app tells me to take a break. I do it because there's nothing else for me to do. The Alphasmart also has the benefits of having a genuinely nice keyboard and a year+ battery life on 3 AA batteries. It weighs less than two pounds, I can probably drop it from 4-5 feet onto concrete without any real repercussion, and if it does break it's maybe $30 for another one. It's also the absolute last thing a thief would walk out of a coffee shop with while I'm in the bathroom. Some folks are coming out with the overly elaborate hipsterized Hemingwrite that has some nice features (e-ink screen, dropbox cloud connectivity for backups) but will probably be hundreds of dollars.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 17:17
|
|
|
Just had a title go from Draft -> In Review -> Live in less than an hour, so maybe things are catching up.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2014 23:22
|
|
|
Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Jesus. What was the title, "Gardening Tips for White Christian Octogenarians"? I wonder if you found someone rushing to meet a quota. Definitely not the case.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2014 00:20
|
|
|
Sulla-Marius 88 posted:I don't think I'll ever be in a position to find out first-hand, but out of curiosity - if someone writes a review for something you've published on KDP, does Amazon email you a notification? Or is there a way to list reviews or do you have to check every store for every title? There's definitely no email notification. You can check your AuthorCentral page and click on the Customer Reviews button at the top. This will list all your reviews for products under that pen name. Edit: But it can take a day or two to populate with new ones unfortunately. So if you need up to the minute info, you have to check each title individually on Amazon. Edit2: $1.39 borrow rate for November. I think this is the first official increase in payout since KU began. A strange but pleasant surprise. Jalumibnkrayal fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Dec 15, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2014 17:03
|
|
|
ravenkult posted:You know, I'm not cool with calling returns ''stealing.'' I mean if you get a shitload of returns I bet you get pissed off after a while, but there are a lot of lovely books out there I wish I could return (I never have, I usually forget). Thank you. I had a long reply but just deleted it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2014 18:17
|
|
|
Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Well I don't think anybody is saying that all returns are theft. The problem is that it's hard to quantify the difference between a genuinely dissatisfied reader and somebody who just doesn't feel like paying money to read a book. Amazon doesn't give us enough data to truly recognise that distinction. I mean you're breaking it down to two options, either all returns are theft or all returns are because the book is lovely and the reader felt ripped off. And how can you say "Oh my book is of very high quality, it's utterly clear from the outset what it is going to contain and what the reader will get out of it, and what types of readers should be interested" and retain any semblance of objectivity? I've enjoyed watching you argue against yourself. It was a close match, but in the end you came out on top. You're right, anyone who gets a single return and then gets worried about customers stealing thousands of ebooks is not being objective.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2014 19:44
|
|
|
Sundae posted:So how was 2014 for everyone? 2014 was awesome. So many milestones achieved. Learned a ton, got to help other writers navigate the waters of self-pubbing. Got an email list going for fans (I HAVE FANS!). Earning a solid income that I hope to grow at a reasonable rate in 2015. My biggest decision is whether to give the Appalachian Trail another try this spring. I wish Amazon would let me pre-load everything to release a book without doing their pre-order bullshit. All I want is a "pretend I physically push Publish on the following day:" button. If I go on the trail, my publishing schedule would slow down or perhaps stop for six months. That's probably not going to be easy to recover from.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2014 01:33
|
|
|
She will always keep dancing in our hearts.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2014 17:46
|
|
|
PoshAlligator posted:As in me, I am the voice actor. I wonder the same thing, especially when it comes to my kinda stuff. The inability to set the price means you can't be as active in promotions. The only numbers I've seen for stuff on my genre talk about double digit earnings per year per book. But these were books that looked like poo poo with ranks over a million.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2014 20:14
|
|
|
It isn't set until the 15th of the following month. So we won't know what we've earned per borrow in December for another two weeks. There is no rhyme or reason to the payout amounts. Amazon announces some arbitrary pool size (January is 3mil) but then they add money to it anyway. In November it was 3mil and then they added another 3.5mil to the pot. It was the first month where the pay per borrow increased since the launch of the kindle unlimited program. I've resorted to just thinking of it as a dollar per borrow. Probably won't be disappointed if that's your basis for revenue projections. Edit: And yeah, when the report comes out on the 15th we just do a little division and figure out the borrow rate.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2015 01:41
|
|
|
Fanky Malloons posted:Anyway, I'm aware that the endeavour would be a whole poo poo-ton of work, and so I'm reluctant to go for it if the fact that it's short fiction is going to leave it dead in the water. I suppose I could re-configure the idea into a novel or something, but for some reason I really enjoy the idea of building a little world this way. What do you guys think? I think you should set yourself up for success and write it as a novel.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2015 03:03
|
|
|
Fanky Malloons posted:Thanks for the advice, goons! I'm definitely still in the planning stages of this, as I'm currently supposed to be writing my MA thesis ( Good luck, keep us posted!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2015 00:03
|
|
) so I will take some more time to re-think the format along these lines before I get stuck in.
|
Looks like Kindlemas is over for me. Had an incredible few days right after Christmas, and the elevated sales continued until Jan 5th. Then my borrows dropped 30%, and they're still falling.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2015 20:34
|
|
|
chthonic bell posted:Also: speaking of marketing. I've read your posts about sending out ARCs, but you said you got people's attention via a mailing list, which I obviously don't have yet. Are there other ways of finding reviewers? Legitimate reviewers, of course. What might help is having a very strong and convenient call-to-action in your backmatter. An embedded link that brings them right to their Amazon account where they can leave a review for your book. Book blog tours and stuff sound time consuming, and that's probably time better spent writing your next book. Nothing is better promo for your current book than your next book (with the exception of something like BookBub).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2015 03:59
|
|
|
thehomemaster posted:I figure this is the best place to ask. You most likely have a different interface than self-published folks. We don't have Vendor Central at all. We use Kindle Direct Publishing, as Archangel explains.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2015 14:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 05:02 |
|
|
Yooper posted:Just got approved for my first BookBub! Congrats! What genre and how many reviews did your book have? I'm not up to writing novels yet, but once I do I'll be looking into BookBub.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2015 15:48
|
|