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Bardeh posted:I just switched from Mail chimp to Mailerlite because Mailerlite allows automated emails without a premium subscription, but I never seemed to have any issues using Gmail on MC. Honestly, I think Mailerlite is better than Mailchimp now. The only reason I'm still on Mailchimp is that I don't want to rebuild all my templates (can't directly import them) and deal with importing all the names again.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:51
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I would, based on the pricing benefits as you scale up. That's just my opinion though. I have about 4,700 people on my lists right now and I cringe every time I see the monthly Mailchimp bill.
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Dec 1, 2016 21:13
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LionArcher posted:Good to know. There's also nothing stopping me from having multiple mailing lists (like four or five) for different pen names that would all be free from them right? As long as I have under 1,000 subs. The joys of different romance kinks I don't know about Mailerlite, but MailChimp adds them all together to charge you the sum. You can't split them to get around it.
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Dec 3, 2016 07:59
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Fuckin Trump Riot posted:Here's a quick question: so, let's say you get your ARCs into a bunch of people's hands and, miracle of miracles, 40 people leave reviews on your first day and you jump up massively in visibility. What are the chances Amazon looks at all those reviews, sees they're not verified purchases, and goes "lol no"? I've heard some horror stories about Amazon reviews disappearing even with the standard "reviewed in exchange for free copy" disclaimer, plus there's a chance people won't or don't know to do that. I think (based on nothing but hunch, anecdote, and N=1) that Amazon is specifically searching for either reviewers linked with pay-for-review services or major review mailing lists, not people with their own fan bases. For disclosure, I shut down a side business I was running where authors would provide romance ARCs to me and I'd distribute them to readers who were interested in the books, along with managing all the review reminders / release date reminders, etc etc. Too may of the reviews were getting deleted by Amazon, so I couldn't justify charging authors (and thus couldn't justify running the program). The big distinction here is that I had a few hundred super-active subscribers who would review tons of things across varieties of romance sub-genres, always getting the books for free, and not really showing much of a purchase pattern beyond "it's romance," versus a set of readers who say they're your fans and regularly review your books (and review less often at that). I also don't know how often the deletion really occurs, either. Every author is a hysterical lunatic on the internet, so who the heck knows how bad it really is. If you believe some of the posts on the various off-site forums, the sky is falling all the time and Amazon is actively eating our firstborn daughters every time we hit 'publish.' But either way, I don't think it's worth worrying about. Like AO said, it can happen, but the alternative is not having any reviews from the start. Your gamble is on whether you'll have your reviews deleted or not. If you win the bet, you have reviews. If you lose, you have some quantity of your reviews deleted. I've never heard of it ever going further than that (e.g., nobody has ever had account issues, books suspended, etc etc for ARCs). If you lose the bet, you're (at worst) back to the exact same state as if you'd never distributed an ARC at all. Seems like a good gamble to me. 
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Dec 5, 2016 08:02
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jazzyjay posted:Is the book's title End Times or Rise of the Undead as it looks like you've got two titles at the moment. I'm going to guess there's a colon in there somewhere. End Times: Rise of the Undead
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Dec 12, 2016 06:36
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Space Taxi posted:What's the best mailing list site? It depends on what your list size is, your budget, and what features you want. The three biggies most people use are Mailchimp, Mailerlite and ConstantContact. You could also manage your own, if you're a masochistic freak who also hates himself. Mailchimp is the basic one most people start with. Free below 2000 names, but gets pricey once you grow bigger. Lots of decent template features, etc etc. Pros: Great for small lists, easy to use. Cons: Expensive for big lists, templates don't transfer to other sites well once you decide to switch platforms. Mailerlite is free below 1,000 names before it starts to charge you. However, it costs less for larger lists than Mailchimp. Otherwise, pretty much the same feature lists. ConstantContact is the most expensive and has no free options except for a 60-day trial. You almost certainly don't need it. For larger lists, the price is comparable to Mailchimp. It does, however, have a lot of easy feature integrations from their marketplace and other oddball things that the other list providers either don't have or don't easily implement. As an example, they have SMS mailing / SMS list signups to enable you to text people when your book comes out or for people to text you to sign up. You probably don't need this feature either, but a few authors claim it worked wonders for them. (Also, ConstantContact's support is supposedly great, but seriously now... how much support do you need to run a goddamned mailing list?) My opinion: Start with MailChimp. If you get up around 3,000 names on your list, switch to MailerLite and bite the bullet on remaking your mailer templates.
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Dec 19, 2016 07:54
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No point worrying about marketing until you have something to market (and I mean way more than one book there). AO has a relatively enormous catalog now, so it's apples and oranges versus anyone starting up now. The super easy dirt-poor beginners' guide to self-publishing #1 - Figure out what genre you want to write. #2 - Start reading that genre if you don't already do so. #3 - Come up with your idea and apply the general genre identification questions from the OP to it. #4 - Write something for that genre. Finish the first complete draft. #5 - Do not publish it yet. #6 - Come back when you finish it and talk to the thread again about your newly-finished draft. Yes, there are more steps after #6. They don't matter right now. There is absolutely no reason to start getting concerned about marketing, publishing approaches, release schedules, etc, when you haven't written anything. quote:I imagine you'd start small, trying to earn a little, then reinvesting that money to create better covers and market your books better. You'd be trying to create a snowball effect, playing the long game. Book one wouldn't make much, but if you kept writing a series, each new book builds the reputation of the series as a whole. None of the answers to this matter until you've written something. No offense intended to you specifically, but people post a lot of questions in this thread and contact people over PM / e-mail asking for advice about publishing, and a lot of them have nothing written at all and never come back with a finished work even after people give tons of marketing advice. Write something, then come back and talk publishing.
Sundae fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 1, 2017 |
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Jan 1, 2017 21:12
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quote:Checking out booksends.com and manybooks.net, they both list as requirements that your book be on sale. Does Amazon even let you go below 99c? True story: Every bargain-hunting website has plenty of excess staffing and free time to check back on every deal they post to make sure that the initial $0.99 release point was in fact reverted to full price later on, after your promotion was finished. Make certain you don't dare list that it's on new-release sale for $0.99 and put the normal price at something higher (which you may someday revert to once you no longer care, at an undetermined point in the future), because everyone involved catches it instantly and will ban you forever from using their services.  Exception: Do not gently caress with Bookbub.
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Jan 4, 2017 03:37
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For the purpose of this response, I'm going to assume that you are not a famous author, songwriter or poet posting on SomethingAwful under an alias.  Unless you are already famous, poetry collections are literally never, ever viable sales products in self-published form (or honestly, in industry-published form either) through the standard book or e-book means. If you want to publish it as a personal project, go hog wild. If you want to publish it for monetary gain, you will never even recoup the $100 spent purchasing an acceptable cover, let alone compensation for the hours you spent writing it. You may have better (still horrible) odds of doing the 'free reads and become my patron to get stuff sooner / videos' thing Steve R seems to be doing based on a quick google search (I'd never heard of him and he's not selling anything on Amazon or B&N), but that's so far outside of my expertise that I can't really comment.
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Jan 8, 2017 08:46
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ibts posted:It's definitely something that has gains in ways other than purely from book sales. He makes most of his money doing poetry reading tours / selling his books through his own press I think. It's something that, thinking about it, you definitely do for reasons other than making money from the book itself. It's more of an exposure thing I guess. Yeah, if you're going to do this, it's almost certainly going to be through channels other than what this thread thinks of as standard sales channels (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Google) with different tactics as well. I just don't know enough about other approaches to offer any advice with them, I'm afraid. Sorry. 
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Jan 8, 2017 21:17
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:
I'll put together some of the basics (based on what I know) for reasons, etc etc. The stuff in the OP is out of date (except for the examples of bad covers, which remain bad to this day).
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Jan 22, 2017 03:25
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Thank you! I'm so glad I can include real, Fixed that for you.  I think I'm real, at least. Not sure about that part lately.
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Jan 23, 2017 18:51
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The Fuzzy Hulk posted:Did anyone else just get one 1099 from amazon this year? I normally get a pile of them. I haven't received any from them yet. B&N got me my amazing Nook earnings AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA in record time, though.
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Feb 1, 2017 19:17
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So what are people reading right now? Anything interesting to share? Welcome to Nightvale tried too hard and fell horribly flat as a result. It had its moments of hilarity, but the amount of effort required to sustain the style of humor really just didn't work outside of a podcast/radio format. I'd recommend reading the first 1/4 of the book or so just to get an example of the style, but don't try quite so hard if comedic (insert genre here) is your cup of tea. The Girl With All The Gifts was a different take on zombie post-apoc stuff. It has five different viewpoints, each narrated competently with enough distinction to feel like they're different voices. The ending was a bit of a letdown in terms of "wait... seriously? That's it?" but the rest of the book up until that point was pretty great. 1Q84 was very enjoyable for the portion of it I got through (50% or so) before I ran out of time and had to return the 900-page monstrosity to the library. My biggest problem with Murakami is that he takes anything that could be said in three paragraphs and instead makes it three chapters. It's like that section in the middle of the Hunchback of Notre Dame where Hugo decides that yes, he will spend over one hundred pages describing the history and construction of the cathedral, except instead it's his breakfast and what he thought of the morning newspaper. There's a really neat story in the back behind it, but oof, it's a slog to get through it. I actually haven't ready any romance lately. I'm getting lazy or something.
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Feb 25, 2017 00:48
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I'm just going to recommend Bookside Manner over and over again.
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Mar 3, 2017 02:35
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It's a little more than half what you'd pay on the low end of the price spectrum for "professional" basic copy-editing according to EFA, and that lines up with quotes I've had from other editors. Also, she does great, fast work and has always given me back more than I've paid for (as if she can't help but comment on things beyond the pricing scope ). I think the reliability and general trust that she'll do a good job is worth more than hunting for someone who will cut $0.002 off the price per word.
Sundae fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Mar 4, 2017 |
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Mar 4, 2017 08:19
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This thread is almost three years old now. Anyone want to pick it up and go with it under a new OP? I don't think I'm a good thread owner for this now since I'm not active enough in publishing these days. (Now that I've made enough to kill all my family's student loans / other debts and moved to the west coast, I just don't feel the same sense of urgency anymore. I'm too happy to write, as weird as that might sound. )quote:Most likely someone attempting to guess AO's pen name. This forum (SA in general) and this thread in its various incarnations has managed to chase off every single successful author who ever posts in them and dares to reveal that they're making (good) money off their work. It's loving ridiculous. Yep, this stuff pisses me off to no end. I ended up burning a pen name back during the BFC thread era because it got the attention of the one-star brigade. I hate that poo poo.
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Mar 26, 2017 07:24
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freebooter posted:I get not wanting to outlay cash on something that may not prove successful, but putting out a book with a self-made cover that looks like a high school textbook guarantees it won't be successful, and you've already invested a lot of your own time in writing this. 100% agreed on this. From the OP, IMO the most important part of the whole thing (and possibly the only part not hilariously out of date):  You can make money in self-pub, but the era of "poo poo some stuff out and it'll sell no matter what" ended years ago. Put the effort into your presentation and release marketing / day-one reviews or you have no chance.
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Jun 9, 2019 03:48
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LionArcher posted:That’s true of most popular stock photo models. Same five dudes are on so many covers. I find it funny when I see cheap thrillers at Barnes and Nobel that use the same stock photos that I have too. It blew my mind when I was in an airport newspaper/book shop and realized I recognized the cover photos for some of the books. 
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Jun 14, 2019 22:45
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Does anyone have a list of the currently-worthwhile (e.g., not literally 100% useless all the time forever) book promo sites? My wife wrote a YA Fantasy and I've been out of the self-pub loop for so long that I don't know how to promote things anymore.
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Oct 2, 2019 20:21
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Got my first self-pubbed novel going up for sale later this week and I'm just a nervous wreck. Your first few books will suck to release, especially if they're special to you. Becoming a nervous wreck is unavoidable. Make yourself a checklist of all the things you need to do to support your release. Any promo, mailing lists, review sites you're hitting up, adding the book to Goodreads, updating AuthorCentral, etc etc. Go down that list and do everything on it. You can check your book page on launch day to ensure that everything looks right and nothing bugged out, you didn't make any formatting errors in your blurb, etc etc. Once that's done, though, don't go looking at it. Get the poo poo done you have to get done. Don't F5 the rank. Don't read the reviews (IMHO never read reviews, period, unless they're something loving weird going on and they're all one-star or you have 10,000 of them out of nowhere or something), and definitely don't go F5ing your Goodreads reviews or ratings. I know that's going to be nearly possible to resist, but nothing good has ever come out of paying attention to what the anonymous online customers think of your work. It's a great way to spend a week in vodka therapy. Focus on the work you need to do for launch week and then either go take some time off or start on your next book, depending on your goals. Let your sales be the judge of success, not the reviews. Edit: Unrelated... does anyone want to take a stab at a new OP for this, or are you guys still okay with it? It's more than five years old now. Sundae fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 00:34
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freebooter posted:The least they could do is copy the exact same system Goodreads has and let you flag reviews that have spoilers to place them behind a warning and a cut, but no. Amazon won't even remove actively harmful, false reviews most of the time. They give no shits unless the author gets doxx'd or there's a physical threat in it. (Or if there is any way that they can play 7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon back to you from a positive review, at which point they'll just delete the review. I had an entire business venture of mine shut down by that policy. )
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Jul 18, 2020 03:57
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freebooter posted:50k words is fine - and it'd be a short novel, not a novella. Much more workable than trying to sell something that's 25k words. I'd price it at $2.99, though, not $3.99. 50K words is perfectly good, agreed on $2.99 pricing. Nobody has ever said, "I loved every minute of that, I just wish the experience was shorter." Never. About anything. quote:the first book was ridiculously successful (11,000+ sales self-published - I have published friends who went "holy poo poo" at that) 'cos I accidentally timed a niche perfectly - it was about why bitcoin is stupid, and came out as the 2017 bitcoin bubble was accelerating It was a fabulous book that also hit the shelves at the perfect time. You deserved every bit of that success.
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Sep 18, 2020 18:44
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divabot posted:yeah, read enough books that taught me: Oh yeah, I'm not saying add filler. I'm saying the opposite; don't worry about it being too short if it's good. Don't add filler just to make it longer out of fear that it's too short.
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Sep 25, 2020 19:59
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NuclearEagleFox!!! posted:I asked this in the business thread, but I think I might get more interest here. Word of mouth, mostly. Talk to other authors in your genre. I'd recommend Kelly at https://booksidemanner.com/ as an editor. She did a ton of work for me in the past, and she was worth every penny. I can't answer the multiple-genre part; I only worked in one genre (two if you count erotica shorts, but I think of that genre as cheating, really).
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Sep 29, 2020 08:31
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angel opportunity posted:I actually stopped posting on SA because I got so tied up in self-publishing that I didn't have time to post here anymore... Congratulations, dude. You deserve every bit of the success! 
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Nov 27, 2020 01:52
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angel opportunity posted:Are you still publishing? Nah. We paid off all the debts in our family and then retired to other hobbies. We’re still working on various weird side-hustles, sure, but we’ve put down the pen.
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Dec 17, 2020 09:03
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Boba Pearl posted:I want to write a book, but I also want to use my own illustrations in it, either full color or black and white. Is there a way to self-publish a book that has illustrations in it? What are the limits? How do images work on e-readers? Illustrations on e-readers? Welcome to Hell, buddy. Every single reader will handle them differently. You will get 1-star reviews from people with the Kindle app on their phones that they can't make out your pictures. E-Ink devices will randomly decide all your colors are actually the same shade of gray, just because they can. It's doable. You can make it work. It's going to hurt getting there, though.
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Jan 21, 2021 09:39
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Just the annual reminder: This thread's OP is 7 years old and probably could not be any more out of date if it tried. I retired from writing a few years ago now, but if any regulars want to PM me a new OP, I'll edit it in.
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Jul 1, 2021 19:25
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Leng posted:That was me as well. It gets better the moment you stop caring about your books and stop thinking at each release that "this is the one." Narrator: It never got better.
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Jul 6, 2021 03:38
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I recommend you also download a copy of Sigil E-Pub Editor. Use the converters on D2D or whatever else you use, and then when you fail EPUBCheck, start loving with it in Sigil and fix your stuff there. I found it much easier to work in markup mode and generate all the TOC stuff and internals that way, and fixing broken poo poo at least felt like it was easier when I could look under the hood and modify stuff directly. YMMV, of course, that I found it helpful.
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Jan 17, 2023 04:23
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Updated OP to cross out Damonza recommendation on the basis of their generative AI policies. Thanks for the heads up. Everything else is just as out of date as it was before, and I'm not in the writing game anymore, so if anyone else wants a new OP, please feel free to (generatively, of course ) add any poo poo you want from my post that isn't multiple generations out of date.Also, looks like the SA self-pub logo from the old thread has a photobucket watermark over it now.  No idea when that happened.quote:I'm not sure if 2.99$ is too high for 8800 words, but I can always lower it later. I considered 0.99, but then I read this reddit post warning against pricing things that low and claiming that you can totally make money selling shorts for 2.99+. 1.99 would put me only one dollar short of the 70% Amazon royalty rate, which would triple the royalties (70% of 2.99 vs. 35% of 1.99). 2.99 it is, for now. Anyway, it is also on KU where the price makes no difference. Don't go lower than $2.99 unless it's promo-pricing. KU is probably still your money-maker unfortunately, but even going down to $0.99, you can't compete with the scammier poo poo on volume / visibility / AI-based writing for shorts. There's no point undercutting what little remains (visibly, I mean) of the legit shorts market to try to compete on an unfair playing field where you can't really win. Sundae fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Sep 7, 2023 |
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Sep 7, 2023 04:48
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:Amazon is now asking if books contain AI-generated content during the creation process on KDP. No idea if it'll actually do anything since, ya know, lying exists, but it's nice to think maybe Amazon is concerned about the market being flooded with a mass of AI-produced books. Given they didn't care about the mass flood of paraphrased books back in 2014 or so, I'm guessing they don't give a poo poo apart from it being a "lol you answered yes" sort of question. Maybe some sort of Section 230 thing, where they claim you lied to them so it's not their problem?
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Sep 8, 2023 04:46
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KrunkMcGrunk posted:I am not optimistic about Amazon's willingness to actually address a problem, but a zillion AI gobbledy-gook books will probably erode consumer trust and turn their Kindle division into a ghost town, because who in their right mind would want to wade through a sea of nonsense books to actually find something to read? On the other hand, look at how bad their website is for everything else with counterfeit/knockoff versions of regular goods obliterating visibility on the stuff people are actually looking for? I don't know how much they actually care about the physical-sales storefronts or books anymore. (I really have no idea. I'm purely guessing.)
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Sep 8, 2023 21:28
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Captain Log posted:Reading this makes me want to bump up my silly plans to cold-read some bad romance novels on Youtube. Just to give you a heads-up on this: I did this with erotica as a goofball YT podcast with friends, where we'd read bad erotica and joke about it while getting increasingly drunk. The result was 4-5 episodes that almost nobody watched but which somehow still got the channel suspended by Google. Don't use ones that are too explicit, if you do that.
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Nov 23, 2023 06:59
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Captain Log posted:This is what's going to get read - We were reading erotica shorts, straight-up smut. Like, one of the stories we covered was named "Five D's in Zero G's" and the content involved astronauts breaking all kinds of orbital protocols, let's say. The channel got suspended for content, but I think you can probably get away with the traditional harlequin stuff.
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Dec 8, 2023 03:48
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