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freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Anybody who runs a small business and copes with Tripadvisor etc will be able to tell you that people are far, far more likely to complain or disagree than praise - in fact I am guilty of this myself as a customer - so what you see coming back in is disproportionate.

I mostly get positive reviews but I'll freely admit that the bad ones bother me more than the good ones make me feel good. I think that's true for lots of people. We're still basically chimpanzees and aren't wired to take criticism well! Unfortunately I can't offer any more advice than what you're already giving her: those 797 people, even if they're silent, like what you're doing, so try to focus on that rather than the complainers.

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freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Have you pre-written it and are now releasing it, or are you just writing it as you go? Because I would find the latter very stressful!

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Camo Guitar posted:

How recently did this kick in? I'm also here in Aus and had author copies come in last month.
(Also FedEx is beyond loving useless for delivery, I had to go hunting for my first batch of author copies. I had put on the wrong address (previous address) and after a bit of tracking I found them at a newsagency where they dropped the package off after bouncing a couple of times and left it there, washing their hands of it.)

Edit: just ordered another 3 to my address in nsw without a problem so you may be in luck!

Yeah it used to be the case they wouldn't send author copies to Australia (because their operations here have always been limited - nobody I know actually uses them) but that ended when they opened a distribution centre here in 2018 or 19 or something.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Whoops, sorry, my bad - I've only ever ordered author copies, not proofs!

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Ebooks are 99% of my sales so the print side of things isn't something I ever really bother much about. I know that's not helpful to you if you're writing a kid's book, sorry! You'll probably be able to find some better help and advice on Kboards.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Congrats, glad this went well! FWIW I have definitely seen KU tails from free giveaways - although for a new release the giveaways are worth it in and of themselves just to rack some reviews up. They may not translate into immediate financial gain but it's all building towards that in the long term.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Captain Log posted:

If I can make money - That would be grand. But I've also done enough of the arts throughout my life that I'm aware not everyone, "Makes It." I do have one valuable thing on my hands, which is time.

Just a note on "making it" - everybody focuses on the Hugh-Howey-esque life-changing success stories, but don't underestimate the benefit of even a low-key side gig. I've been doing this just over four years now and my writing income has wildly fluctuated in that time, generally smoothing out at maybe $500-$1000 a month, post-overheads but pre-tax.

That's way less than some of the people who (used to?) post in this thread, and 10k a year obviously does not mean I'm about to quit my day job. But it's a pretty significant amount of mostly-passive income that changes my spending habits, my savings, and my ability to plan long-term about buying an apartment or whatever. And if I check the Amazon ranking of my bestselling book at the moment, it's something like 70,000, so I'm a nobody. But you don't need to "make it" for self-pubbing to be a really good decision. The only thing I regret about it is not starting sooner.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Captain Log posted:

I became disabled in my mid-thirties, getting diagnosed with motor neuron disease and loosing significant function in my lower legs. Getting the government to recognize this took twenty-eight months and a law firm. The reason for all this effort is to cover my very, very expensive healthcare.

tldr - American healthcare is bad.

Making small amounts of money will gently caress this all up, which is why I can afford taking a circuitous route to being published if it could potentially mean earning more. If I started making a legit salary, I can afford some Obamacare coverage. But if I start making 10k a year, I'll lose my government coverage and not be able to afford Obamacare.

OK, yeah - in your situation where a certain threshhold of income could gently caress up your disability benefit, then having the extra pocket money would indeed not be worth it. I love having my extra 10ish grand a year, but if I were suddenly told I had to rely on it that would make me panic.

On the other hand, as Leng points out, trad publishing can be equally unreliable and unpredictable.

I guess one thing I would say is that self publishing gives you a hell of a lot more control over your sales and marketing. If I were in a situation where I didn't want to hit 10K (not sure if you used this figure because it was my example or because that also happens to be your disability threshold), and I realised there were two months left in the financial year and I'd made 8k or 9k, I could make all my books free overnight. Income vanishes, but at least people are still reading and reviewing and recommending, which will be good when you turn the tap back on next financial year. Scheduled promotions and stuff are the only thing that might give you a major sudden spike in sales, but again, you have control over those and they aren't going to be major spikes when you're just starting out.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

It's been a long time since I published short fiction, but if you want to go down the road of the short fiction version of trad pub (magazines and journals), then Duotrope is (or at least was, circa 2015) an absolutely invaluable resource:

https://duotrope.com/

Helps you keep track of what you've submitted and where, how long you've been waiting to hear back, whether journals permit simultaneous submissions etc. Also IIRC it had a really good filterable search engine so you could be like, OK, show me a fit for my [HORROR] story of [LESS THAN 5,000 WORDS] which [PAYS] and [ACCEPTS SIM-SUBS] from [OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES] etc.

Going down this road is purely for credentials/CV/experience though, you'll barely ever make a dime off it. I think the only piece of fiction I ever published that was financially worth the time was a story I had in Daily Science Fiction, because they were paying like 5c a word and I thought up a gimmick for a piece of flash fiction, wrote it and submitted it in the space of a couple hours. That's generally why I started putting all my energy into publishing longer fiction on Amazon, though I certainly don't regret it and I imagine having a small portfolio of published work would serve me in good stead if I ever try to trad pub long fiction.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

divabot posted:

yep - and accumulating a fan base who will then buy your longer works. Thinking of the authors who've started in fanfic and grown a base there who already like their stuff.

In fanfic, certainly, but nobody builds an audience in trad short fiction markets. There's a Tobias Wolff story about a writer who's published "a few stories in literary journals that nobody read, including me." Looks good to other publishers, is all.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

oliveoil posted:

Can people make decent money self-pubbing now? I got the impression it became so competitive that one had to be willing to spend 60hrs a week writing smut for minimum wage.

It depends on your definition of "decent" money. Lots of people (long before self-publishing was even a thing) make the assumption that novelists earn six figures a year and anything less than that is failure.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009


FWIW I think your cover and blurb are really good and if you've been published in short fiction magazines then you know how to write. You've said this is mostly a personal project and I'm sure you're aware that short story collections don't sell well, but you should definitely try putting out longer fiction in the future if you're so inclined - I think you'd do well.

Captain Log posted:

I'm curious as to why people would hate self published stuff?

I know it can often mean complete word salad trash, especially pre-internet decades ago. But in today's age, where you can read a page and gauge the competence, why would it receive a negative reaction?

Here is a bad example I've personally encountered - I remember working with a guy in a warehouse who started cranking out self published zombie novels. This was a decade ago, so he did much better than the work warranted. It was really, really bad writing and the dude walked around all :smug: saying, "You know, I AM a published author, so..." and then prattle on with the stupidest poo poo you'd ever heard.

But on the other hand, there is a whole lot of great self published stuff. Especially today, where excellent authors can cut through the Literature Scene and start making copies?

Does everyone just assume self published equals being That Guy who I worked with ages ago, while magically not naming and of the good ones?

A much higher proportion of it than trad published books is still trash. And the rags-to-riches stories like Hugh Howey and the 50 Shades of Grey writer revolve around writers "making it" by getting a trad publishing contract, so lots of non-writers still assume that if anyone is any good then they'll inevitably end up in trad publishing, so if you're still self-pubbing you must not be any good. Anecdotally, I've heard the opposite - plenty of trad published authors who were only ever making maybe 10k in royalties a year and still had full-time day jobs (which is probably like 90% of authors with books on shelves in stores) have started self-pubbing instead because it gives them far more control and a bigger share of their profits.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

I've also always been on KU purely because I can't be hosed dealing with multiple markets, especially when Amazon is 90% of the market anyway, and if you're going to be Amazon exclusive you may as well be on KU too. There is an argument that it eats into your royalties but also an argument that lots of people who might not be inclined to purchase your book outright are more likely to borrow it through KU, and frankly I think that's impossible to meaningfully test or measure, because there are also all kinds of other factors that might influence your sales at any given time even if you put them in and later take them out.

For me, my first big 6-book series I later released as a box set (which is now how 90% of people read it) and clocked in at just over the 3,000 word cap for KU payout - which generally hovers around $0.004 a page, so $12 for each person who reads it through. That's actually more than the 70% royalty cut I'd get on the box set's price of $9.99, i.e. $7.00. So I'm better off if people read it in KU rather than buying it.

But then I started a new series - two books out, writing the third at the moment - and because those are rather short, I'm actually a lot better off if people buy them rather than borrow them from KU. So when I release the third I'm seriously considering pulling those two out of KU and going wide. Which will be a lot of work but probably financially worthwhile in the long run.

The other benefit to being wide is that it's supposedly more likely to get you picked for a Bookbub.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Quick question for the long-established lurkers, if they're still here: any advice about going wide vs KU? I'm going to release the third book in a series soon and I'm tossing up whether to keep it in KU or go wide for the first time in my short career. Being KU exclusive is something I've done since the start simply because it's easier, but I'm wondering whether the reward of going wide would be worth the effort.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Nope, I write horror and/or "supernatural suspense."

divabot posted:

YMMV. I get 90% of ebook sales through Kindle - but the other 10% includes all the Apple Books users, for instance. How does the percentage of actual frickin dollars of KU vs. sales work out for you?

With my previous series KU works out better because most of my sales/reads now come through the 6-book full series box set, which is a tad beyond the 3,000 word cap. And I get $12 in KU page reads every time someone reads the whole thing, as opposed to the $7ish of royalties from a sale. So that's definitely staying in KU.

But the books in my newer series (two books out, writing the third) have shorter page counts. I'm making about 90 cents and $1.20 per full book page read count respectively, opposed to the roughly $2 of royalties at a $2.99 sale price point. So I'd obviously prefer people buy it rather than KU read it - it's just a question of how many people who would read it in KU will buy it if they can't, rather than just not bother. (In terms of current reader behaviour, it looks like a 60/40 ratio in favour of purchases rather than KU reads for those two books.) Trying to leverage higher sales rather than KU reads is as much a motivation as being able to pick up additional sales from wide retailers.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

newts posted:

Also, there are a lot of names but no sense of who these characters are, no personality to any of them.

Yeah unless all six of these characters are equally weighted in an ensemble cast, that's too many to mention in a blurb. Cull and simplify. (There are other issues with it but that was what stood out to me most.)

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Thalamas posted:

Gandra and Lew (1) of the star ship (2) Blackbird have spent years on the edge of the galaxy avoiding Humankind (3) while trying to keep food on the table. The scavengers see an opportunity when the nearby colony world of Chantico is destroyed (4) by a terraforming accident. When they run into Enrico on the journey, he offers them a job too lucrative to turn down. (5)

Captain Uki of the Humankind patrol cruiser Sedna is dispatched to investigate the accident and recover any survivors. This mission could make her career if she can uncover what happened. On the way to Chantico she stops the Blackbird for a cargo inspection, an act that will change her life. (6)

Without backup (7), the genetically engineered assassin Farouk hunts a threat to the galaxy that has always managed to slip away: Enrico. A chance encounter leads to the confrontation that he seeks. (8)

On Chantico, a boy awakens unsure of who or where he is and surrounded by falling ash on all sides. Unable to make out anything in the gray void, he chooses a direction and starts walking.

I think four different lines introducing characters is still too much - I'd either cut Farouk or merge the first two paragraphs, since it sounds like they merge pretty early in the story anyway.

I actually took a stab at rewriting this but it was too difficult without personally knowing the beats of the story, so instead here's some footnotes based on things I think could be clarified or written better:

1. If they have surnames I'd add them. It always just sounds weird to me in a blurb to have first names only. That goes for the other characters too.
2. Salvage ship? Scavenger ship? Trade ship? I get the impression they're the edge-of-the-law kind of outfit beloved of space operas (I've written exactly that kind of story myself), so say so - it's more evocative than just starship.
3. What is Humankind - a political entity? Say so, otherwise it sounds like Gandra and Lew are aliens which I don't get the impression they are. If you find it too clunky to explain that in a sentence than just say "the long arm of the law" or something, it doesn't actually matter whatever the galactic government is called in your blurb. Also, cliches are fine in a blurb but "food on the table" is evocative of a nuclear family in the Midwest, not a rag-tag spaceship crew, I'd replace it with something like "scrape a living."
4. Swap for "devastated." "Destroyed" makes it sound like it's been Alderaan'ed out of existence. (I also think terraforming "catastrophe" sounds better than terraforming "accident.")
5. If Enrico is buying passage to Chantico, I'd establish that here and now in this sentence. "A stranger's lucrative offer lures them to the devastated planet" etc.
6. I definitely think all of this can be merged into the opening paragraph.
7. "Without backup" is an awkward phrase to start this with. Why is he without backup? Is he disgraced after a failed job? Has he gone rouge? Is he working for the good guys or the bad guys? I think there's a phrase there to establish both a) that he's working alone, but also b) why he's working alone which will also give us an insight into his story/position.
8. Way too vague, either cut it or explain more enticingly what the chance encounter is.

Also I know you were told to cut this:

quote:

Obscured behind a curtain of ash, Chantico will intertwine their fates.

...but personally I always like to end on a note something like this, because otherwise it sounds like you're just rote listing your story beats and then stopping when you run out of characters.

Overall though I would just add, don't sweat it - well, I mean, do sweat it because your blurb is really important - but it's totally normal to get really frustrated writing a blurb. I haaaaaaaaate it every time. I can't remember which author said "if I could sum my book up in a paragraph I wouldn't have written a whole book about it," but basically that - and there's a reason that trad publishing houses get someone other than the author to write the blurb.

This is also why I've developed the habit of starting to draft the blurb well in advance of even finishing the novel's first draft - it's something which really benefits from being put in a drawer and then later re-examined, having its darlings killed, being broken down and rebuilt sentence by sentence etc over a period of months.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

What kinds of promotional discount letters are still getting good traction these days? Bookbub is still king but I'm noticing less of a profit and less of a tail than I used to get from places like Robin Reads and ENT, almost to the point where I'm really just breaking even. (Though I'm also running the same old backlist books, so that may just be diminishing returns for me personally.)

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Not eligible as I'm not in the UK, but I've seen it before and if you're already in Select it strikes me as a nothing-to-lose type thing.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

They're one of the few non-Bookbub mailers I regularly still use (alongside Robin Reads and Free/BargainBooksy) but I've noticed all three giving increasingly lower returns, to the point where they're only barely giving ROI. Having said that I'm promoting the same old backlist, so YMMV.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Bookbub isn't what it used to be but it's definitely still the king, hence why it's so expensive (and competitive).

I get the impression that all the free/discount mailing lists in general have started to lose a bit of their power compared to four or five years ago, though I'm not entirely sure what they've lost it to. The only answer I can think of is Amazon/FB ads, but when I've dabbled with them I've personally never found them to be very cost effective.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

I didn't follow it particularly closely but there was a scandal around an award-winning sci-fi cover this year that was accused of being AI, and then the artist came forward and provided all their draft work that proved it wasn't AI, but then it turned out he had used AI for the final product, I think...?

The point being that from this point forward anything that looks even vaguely AI is going to be scrutinised as potentially AI, whether it is or not.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Anybody had a book in Amazon Prime Reading before? Amazon offered me a spot for the first in a series for a 3-month period, September through December.

As far as I can tell it's sort of like another Kindle Unlimited subscription with the difference that the author only gets paid in exposure...?

It's a moot point since I've accepted it anyway, on the reasoning that any publicity for book 1 of a series is good publicity, just curious if anyone else has experience with it.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Also, congrats Selkie on making a rather mind-boggling amount of money! Have you/will you quit your day job?

I'm a write-what-I-want-to-write author who makes maybe 1k a month, but I treat it as a monetised hobby and don't write when I don't feel like writing. (For example, I've put out one book since the start of the pandemic.) I've been toying with the idea of researching and reading a different genre and trying to crank some output under a second pen name, while keeping my original pen name for my passion projects. The genre I had in mind was romance, but now I'm wondering if that's a general fighting the last war, and the lucrative genre of the 2020s is going to be LitRPG.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Hmmm, OK. Well, the book in question is currently sitting at #67,700 in the Kindle store and #73 in vampire horror, so I'll circle back in a couple of weeks and see if it made any bump in ranking.

Selkie Myth posted:

Romance is still the big seller.

Don't try to write 'for the money' IMO. Write what you love. If you're EH on litRPG and don't bother reading and understanding it, I doubt you'll enjoy writing it, or writing something people would like

That's the thing - I know I'd find writing romance to be well outside my wheelhouse, but LitRPG actually seems like the kind of thing I might enjoy. I wrote a fair bit of fantasy in the first place as a teenager, just ended up drifting to sci-fi/horror at university and stayed in that niche when I started publishing. It's all a bit of a pipe dream anyway though, I have two day jobs as it is!

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

KrunkMcGrunk posted:

Blurbs are, by far, the hardest part of any book. It's crazy how much time I've spent revising like, a hundred words, and still, I've never felt totally confident in any blurb I've ever written.

100% agreed. I can't remember who it was and Google is broken these days but there was an author who said something like "if I could sum up my book in a hundred words, I wouldn't have written a whole book about it."

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

freebooter posted:

Hmmm, OK. Well, the book in question is currently sitting at #67,700 in the Kindle store and #73 in vampire horror, so I'll circle back in a couple of weeks and see if it made any bump in ranking.

Circling back around on this, two weeks later it's sitting at around 37,000 in the Kindle store overall, and #48 in vampire horror, which is more or less where it's been for most of the past week when I've remembered to check on it. No uptick in earnings (as expected) but also no apparent flow-through to later books in the series.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Leng posted:

Huh. I can't remember how Prime Lending works and have only tried it out once on a free Prime trial, but I seem to recall there's no "end date" on when you can have the book borrowed. So I wonder if you're not seeing read-through because people have grabbed it but haven't cracked it open yet?

This would track - I pay the bare minimum amount of attention to promos just to figure out if I get an ROI or not, but have generally noticed that I get way less read-through on free promos than discount promos. Lots of people seem to just like snapping up whatever's free and sending it to the bottom of their 100+ book TBR pile.

Leng posted:

I do legal deposit for my state and country of residence (NSW Australia) which ends up being 3 copies, though I only need to provide print versions for 2 of them.

They don't really chase it that hard; I've technically still yet to drop copies to 1 of the locations. The national e-deposit I do at the same time as upload but the physical copies I do whenever convenient.

The Australian government can barely even do anything about the billions of dollars of tax fraud that waltzes out the door every year, I'm never going to bother with this outdated practice

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Bright Bart posted:

I've learned that just because the government won't go after the rich for breaking laws doesn't mean it won't go after regular people for breaking rules or just existing.

One place where I've lived, in a first world country mind you, the service line for people on unemployment to e.g. schedule appointments or ask about re-application status was a premium number that charged by the minute.

I'll send a copy to at least the national Library where it's being published.

Governments go hard on people claiming unemployment benefits because (in treasury's eyes) it's a form of revenue loss. I can assure you nobody in the public service is getting worked up over people who self-publish books on Amazon failing to comply with an outdated regulation which is of questionable benefit in the first place.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Captain Log posted:

- I know paying for an editor is looked at as wasted money in this thread. That said, I'm a disabled person, which means profit is something that literally has to be discussed with a lawyer so I don't lose my health benefits.

I don't know how either your health benefits or US taxation works, but definitely do be careful about this - I don't declare any of my writing income to the ATO until the end of the financial year, which is also when I claim my business write-offs for cover design and advertising etc, and the trade-off for that is that I do actually have a lot of net profit flowing into my bank account for 12+ months before I've declared to any authorities that it is indeed net rather than gross profit. So e.g. if you pour thousands of dollars into editing and then your royalties recoup that profit and make it a wash, it may not necessarily look like a wash for a while to come. (Like I said though, I'm in Australia and I have no idea how income tax works for authors based in the same country that Amazon is.)

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

It could be a tad more concise but generally I think that's pretty good. I definitely feel like I know what I'm getting if I buy the book.

With the caveat I'm just another dude who also posts my blurbs in here asking for feedback, the bolded parts are what I'd cut or modify:

-------

After the severed heads of six goats are staked against an old tree, an ancient force is awoken.

Deep in the rolling hills of Tennessee, two Union veterans of the American Civil War build a quiet life in the town of Lawrenceboro. Childhood friends Francis Meet and Freddy Monk grew up playing amongst the thick woods outside the small town (something less wordy), and now own the very land holding the Meet family homestead. Without wives or children, the pair tend to a small number of (their) livestock while bandaging both the physical and mental wounds left by war.

But most local families sent soldiers to fight for the Confederacy, which (who) returned bitter and beaten men. The rumblings of simmering hatred from the defeated coalesce[s] into the burgeoning Ku Klux Klan, an organization intent on maintaining the established southern (Southern) order of white supremacy through hooded nighttime raids punctuated by (and) brutal lynchings.

The very existence of two Union veterans prospering outside of town is an affront to the worst elements of Lawrenceboro. As rumors spread about the lifestyle of the men, the Klan takes action against their homestead. The first casualties are goats, torn apart by dull Bowie knives before being (and) staked to an old oak tree.

While the pair at the homestead prepare to match lead with lead, the evisceration of animals awakens an ancient entity from deep within the soil. An infestation begins to take hold, plunging the countryside into an otherworldly violence older than the words printed upon the pages of the thick family Bibles sat within each home (I like the description here but not sure it's the best way to end the blurb).

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Dumb royalties question: I know Amazon only pays out when a market accumulates more than $100 in royalties, which is why every now and then I get an extra 100 at the end of a month because a year's worth of sales in India or whatever has hit that threshhold. But I got a payment along with my usual three US/Europe/Australia payments yesterday which was only $15... what's with that? It's called "AMAZON EUROPE COR." (My typical Europe payment is called "AMAZON MEDIA EU S", and is also there as per usual.)

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

You're welcome. I also struggle to end my blurbs, which is why I think most of mine give a hint of what's about to happen and literally end with an ellipsis. My very rough rule of thumb (especially in the horror genre) is that a blurb should loosely outline the first act and suggest what's going to happen in the second.

I think your length is OK but I try to make individual sentences in my blurb really tight, more so than in my actual book, because you're facing a much harder battle for people's attention span when they're scrolling through Amazon than when they're reading a book. This also means you end up going over and over the same bits and pieces of text, though, which does your head in. One thing I find helpful is to start drafting your blurb well in advance of finishing your book, then go back to working on the book for a few weeks, then come back to it with fresh eyes. (Or even write a new one from scratch or from memory, and compare them, because the stronger aspects will have stuck in your head while the weaker ones won't have.)

All of which seems like a lot of effort for 300ish words, but as this thread was very useful in drilling into me, your blurb and your cover are as important as your book.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Icon-Cat posted:

Here's my take on the Captain Log blurb. I get the sense that you thinking of the international audience and maybe that's why you're explaining what the Civil War / KKK is when an American reader of historical fiction wouldn't need it; would a European reader of historical fiction set in America? I mean, if I'm interested in books taking place in Victorian times, I don't need Queen Victoria or Parliament (for example) explained in the blurb.

My perception as a non-American (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that it's not so much about whether people are aware of the history, but that for a sizeable number of Americans in the South and Appalachia, things like the KKK/Confederacy being unequivocally the bad guys is a controversial topic in the American culture wars. (Which is not the case in the rest of the Western world.) As such I think it's prudent for Captain Log to make their views* extremely clear in the blurb.

*or to put it another way, their factual assertion of history

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

leper khan posted:

The people going on in tyotl 2023 about the war for southern rights know full drat well that they're the bad guy.

The KKK is a hate group, and not inactive. I'd tread very carefully with the topic. Honestly your framing in this comment I find offensive.

Perhaps I have an overly left-wing Twitter feed, but the impression I have always received is that e.g. the notion of tearing down statues to Confederate generals is controversial, Southern school history textbooks emphasise the Lost Cause narrative and downplay the horrors of slavery, Confederate flag bumper stickers are perfectly common etc. As such, from the perspective of a potential foreign reader* of a self-published novel, I don't think the sentence in that blurb "explaining" the Confederacy/KKK is excessive. Like, it's probably not necessary, but neither did it strike me as redundant.

*(not that this really matters since 90% of your English-speaking readership are always going to be in the US)

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Vanity publishers have been rendered completely obsolete by internet self-publishing on large platforms like Amazon. Avoid them like the plague.

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Sounds about as appealing as reading an AI-written novel

freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Robert Deadford posted:

I've recently self-published a novel and am trying to find sensible ways to market it.

I'll read back through the thread but does anyone have any hot tips on what actually works?

Submit it as a free promotion to newsletters like Robin Reads or Freebooksy and hope you get accepted. Some new authors balk at the idea of giving their book away for free, but it's way more important for a new book to garner reviews and increase your visibility in the algorithm than it is to make immediate profit.

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freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Has Amazon changed the way they do payments? I normally get my usual lump sum a few days before the end of the month, with every now and then the Canadian or German market or whatever having finally eked out $100 and so I'll get one from them too. But yesterday I received nine payments, ranging between $1 and $68, various tagged "AMAZON MEDIA EU," "AMAZON MEDIA ASIA-PACIF," "AMAZON.COM.CA" etc. Some of those descriptions were tagged to multiple payments. What's up with that?

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