Kindle Unlimited for Authors - So What?

The publishing world has been abuzz over the past few days as Amazon took the plunge and officially announced their latest wheeze - Kindle Unlimited.  As an indie self-publisher myself (check out my book on the other tabs of this blog!), the first question I asked myself was, "How will this affect me?"

I did a search online to see what initial thoughts were out there, but many of them focused on the issue of what royalty would be received as part of this program.  The general thinking seems to be that royalties will be cut and therefore this will be a bad deal for authors.  I'll comment on that in a minute as well as some highlights some other key points which don't seem to have emerged yet.  But first of all, just to recap what Kindle has announced, just in case you have been hiding under the proverbial rock for the last few days (Hey, it's summer and I know some people have better things to do than stay in front of a laptop 24/7!

To quote Amazon directly:

Kindle Unlimited is a new service that allows you to read as much as you want, choosing from over 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks. Freely explore new authors, books, and genres from mysteries and romance to sci-fi and more. You can read on any device. It's available for $9.99 a month and you can cancel anytime


So what does this mean to me?  Here are some initial thoughts:


1) Quantity of books published becomes important (OK, even more important!)

I've lost count of the number of times I have read old publishing sages saying the same thing.  Focus less on marketing and more on writing.  The simple truth is that the more books you write, the more "shelf space" you will occupy and the more likelihood that people will come across some of your work and find the rest.  Of course, writers are born to write and readers were born to pay to read what writers have written, so it all makes a lot of sense.  It strikes me though, that there is another reason - now there is a way for avid readers to download books en masse that are not being given away for free.  Previously, under KDP Select, a buyer could only borrow one book a month, now they can acquire as many as their device will hold.  They have more shelf space that you can fill.  If you only write one book, you can only get one royalty from that one reader.  If you write ten, they may acquire ten - and hopefully read all ten!  The numbers game becomes more important as royalties go down - to compensate your volumes have to go up!

2) Shorter may be better

We don't have all the details as to how the royalty system will work in practice yet.  But, simply based on what Amazon has come out and said, it seems that a flat royalty will be paid out on all qualifying books (I'll come on to the qualifying in point 3).  That would mean that the same royalty would be paid out on a 120,000-word epic as on a 10,000-word short story.  If it works like that it does sound a little unfair.  A writer would be wise to split his/her tome into 3 x 40,000 slices and therefore get three times the royalties (assuming of course the reader stuck with you all the way to book three!)

3) Don't hold back in the first 10%

To qualify for a royalty under Kindle Unlimited, you simply have to coax the reader through the first 10% of your book.  Perhaps that is another reason to keep your book on the shorter side, for a 10,000-word book only requires the reader to battle through 1,000!  However, the key message here is to make sure you give the reader every chance to make it to that 10% level.  Now, obviously, any writer worth his/her salt will invest vast amounts of time in getting the beginning absolutely right - you want to hook the reader right in and propel them through what is coming.  But now there is real, financial, skin in the game.  It may be worth looking at the first 10% of your book to see if there is anything that can be improved, perhaps some back story that can be deferred until later in the book or perhaps there are some cliff-hangers that you can introduce.

4) Everything comes to he who waits

What I find fascinating is that royalties will still be earned, years after the download happens, as long as that 10% threshold is hit.  In the past, as KDP Select only allowed one book per month, the expectation was that the reader would be very selective in purchasing and would be likely to read that book in the same month.  Indie authors have had to deal with the grim prospect that their freebie books would be downloaded and left to rot on Kindles without ever being read.  That still might happen, but at least the prospect now exists that there could be some financial reward down the line if the book ever gets rediscovered.

5) Whither KDP Select?

What remains to be seen is what happens to the KDP Select program once Kindle Unlimited gets fully underway.  Will there be a high degree of cannibalization?  The question is why people sign up to Amazon Prime - is it more for the books or for the delivery?  Will Amazon Prime now focus on delivery and other bells and whistles and leave Kindle Unlimited to deal with ebook side?  Obviously Kindle Unlimited gives you much more bang for your book (apologies for the terrible pun!) so I don't see many people wanting both.  However, the way this is being set up, it's an all-or-nothing decision for a publisher - if they like what KDP Select does for them and want to keep it, they have to swallow Kindle Unlimited as well.  Amazon didn't have to like the two so they are clearly doing this deliberately as part of their strategy.  In the end, we might find out that KDP Select is redundant anyway.

So how does this affect me?  Well, on balance, I am quite excited and intrigued by this.  That's probably because I also also happen to curate 30 or 40 religious e-books for another author, that all fall into the 10,000 to 20,000 word count - and I think they could really benefit.  At the moment, I am not finding that KDP Select is doing a heck of a lot for me, in terms of free download exposure or borrows.  I am prepared to give this the benefit of the doubt and see how it goes.

Hope the above gets you thinking.  Feel free to share any of the above, but link back to this page please..!

How to get the most from KDP Select!

I wanted to pass on some great advice that I just read from Ruth Francisco.  Ruth has a number of books published on Kindle - as a way of thanking her for this great advice why not buy one of them?  Here is a random link to one of them that is very well reviewed:

http://www.amazon.com/Sunshine-Highway-ebook/dp/B006O1IIKS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1332903814&sr=8-2

OK onto the great advice.

For those new to epublishing, the Kindle Select program allows indie publishers (e.i. writers who self-publish to Kindle) to offer their books for free for 5 days every three months. In turn Amazon requests an exclusive. The question is how to best make use of a free give away promotion. Here's some tips I've picked up.

1. Wait until you have at least 6 good reviews before going free.

2. There has been much discussion about how many and which days to choose. I am tending to believe 1 or 2 day promotions are best, Wed, Thurs, or Sunday. Try skipping a day between two free days.

3. Several weeks before your free promotion, alert ENT (Ereader News Today) and POI (Pixel of Ink). (Several authors suggest one month for POI.) Google their names and look for sign-up forms. Alert other book blogging sites, particularly those in your genre. This squidoo lens has links to other sites to notify your free dates: http://www.squidoo.com/going-free-kindle-ebook-promotional-campaigns-for-authors

4. On the first day of your promotion, alert all your followers on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter. Ask your Twitter followers to retweet your promotion.

5. Twitter about your book to all Free Kindle twitter addresses (do a search for them on Twitter). Here's some to get you started.

@DigitalBkToday
@kindleebooks
@Kindlestuff
@KindleEbooksUK
@KindleBookKing
@KindleFreeBook
@free_kindle
@FreeReadFeed
@4FreeKindleBook
@FreeKindleStuff
@KindleUpdates

6. Email all good reviewers of all of your books. Many reviewers have email links on their Amazon Profile. Invite them to "gift" free copies to friends.

7. List your link here on Kindleboards, both on this link for free books, and on your individual book thread in the Bazaar.
http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,97167.0.html

8. List or update your book thread on mobileread.com about your free book.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/

9. On the first day of your free promotion, get up very early (like 3 A.M.) and add your book to the Amazon Kindle Forum thread for free books. Also add a comment to your book on the Amazon Kindle Forum Meet Our Authors thread that your book is free.

10. If you have several titles, try staggering free promotions. Free promotions seem to work particularly well for books in series, drawing people to buy other books in the series.

11, Try organizing a free promotion with four or five other writers, preferably around some theme. Each of you can blog and tweet about the other writers' free books, sharing the burden of self-promotion.

12. After your free promotion when your rank is slipping, gift copies of your book to boost your rank.

13. Several weeks after your promotion, run a .99 special on your books that are NOT in Kindle Select. Simply change your prices on Amazon, or lower your prices on Smashwords. Amazon will match the price. It will appear that you are slashing your prices, with the original price and discount. (Everyone likes a deal.)
I will certainly be following this advice next time around!

Amazon KDP - the first 90 days

I have just completed 90 days of being signed up exclusively to the Amazon KDP program - so how was it for me?

There were two main benefits that I was looking for - for people to borrow my book out of the lending library (so I would be paid a fee) and also to take advantage of the 5 free days of free promotion in that period (i.e. I was allowed to give the book away free for 5 x 24 hour periods.

The lending was not at all a success!  Only one book was borrowed in the whole three months, earning me a whopping $1.60!  To be honest, I cannot say I am surprised for a number of reasons.  Firstly, I am a very small fish in a big pond and there are hundreds and thousands of other options.  Secondly, my book has been priced at either 99 cents or 2.99 and one would think that borrowers would prefer to borrow a bestseller and save themselves ten bucks (the borrower can only borrow one book free per month). Thirdly, because I am enrolled in this program, savvy borrowers will know that I am likely to offer my book for free at some point in the 90 days, so why waste a borrow?

Frankly, I think it highly unlikely anyone is sitting around daily just praying that I will give my book away - chance would be a fine thing!

Anyway, I was always more interested in the freebie side of the equation.  This was rather more successful although of course not in the least lucrative.  I reckon that I gave away well over 600 books during the 5 free days, with a peak of 200 books in one of those days.  Not bad, although I could probably have done better.

How did I use the free days?  I spread them out.  One right at the start and one very near the end and the other three pretty evenly spaced.  I didn't opt to roll 2 or 3 days together as I wasn't sure that was the best way to approach it.  I am not really any the wiser having done it all day by day.  I think it is more fun to spread it out, personally.

However you space it, the key is to be as well prepared as you can be and make sure your advertising on various sites and boards, or Twitter is all in place for your free day.  The days where I did not advertise as much showed much lower downloads.  One snag is that by the fifth day, if you are using the same marketing channels, you may not be reaching as many new people as you would like.

Did my free sales generate any further sales when I reverted back to a selling price - the answer is yes but not a huge amount and the trickle soon dried up completely.  You do get the benefit of appearing in Amazon's "people who bought your book, also bought this" section, which must have some real benefit.  But there was no real explosion of sales, even though I got pretty high up in the free charts.

Did I get a lot of reviews from the freebies?  Hardly any, which is disappointing but hardly surprising - for a start I don't know just how many people actually ended up reading the book in the end, and secondly, why should I expect people to leave a review just for me, out of the kindness of their hearts - how many reviews have I left for other Indie writers - perhaps two or three at most.

Having said all of that - have I re-enrolled in the program for another 90 days?  Yes I have - probably through a sense of inertia as much as anything (you are automatically re-enrolled if you do  not opt out).  We will see how it goes this time, but like anything else - you only get out what you put in...

I am also conscious of the fact that to upload my manuscript to other sites such as Smashwords or Barnes and Noble would require some re-formatting and jumping through hoops - and I am not sure I am going to see the sales from it. My understanding is that Amazon is currently where it is at from a e-book perspective.

Decisions, Decisions - Kindle

Hi again.

In my last post I promised I would talk a little bit about a few of the decisions I had to make when I listed my book on Kindle.  These are decisions that you will have to make yourself if you ever decide to self-publish:

1) DRM vs Non-DRM

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and it is basically a way to stop your book from getting downloaded and shared on the internet without you getting paid any royalties (aka pirating). Unfortunately, the selection on Kindle is a one shot deal, you cannot change your mind later - so you have to think carefully.

The drawback to using DRM is that it may prevent people from transferring their purchase across their own Kindles (e.g. a PC version and Ipad version, or the real Kindle) - that might put off potential purchases.  The plus side of course is that you limit the risk of thousands of people ripping you off (although I bet there is software that can remove the DRM anyway).

In the end I decided not to use the DRM facility.  Doing some research on the internet showed that this appears to be the way the industry is going and, quite frankly, the risk of my book "going viral" are pretty small - and in a way it would be quite gratifying if it did!

2) Setting the price

I had to decide what price I would ask for my book.  I really gave myself two options - 99 cents (US) or 99 pence (UK) which would accrue royalty at 35%, or the minimum price to obtain a 70% royalty which was $2.99 of 147p (can't find the pounds sterling sign on this keyboard!).  The good thing is that you can change the price whenever you like.

I went for the minimum price to get the 70% option figuring this would be much more lucrative and not really wanting to "give away" my many, many hours of work for such a paltry sum.  However, after just a few days of selling, I changed my mind.  I realised that you need to price based on customer perception of value and not my own perception.  Why should a potential reader take a chance on my book out of millions out there?  I realised I need to take away the potential barrier of price, realising that selling more books at a cheaper price would in itself be a handy marketing tool
as Amazon will link the book to other books that my buyers have also bought.

So, we will see how that pricing strategy goes.  Infact, I will give an update in a few days time, on my first couple of weeks live.

c) Choosing a category

I also had to decide which categories to place my book in so that people can find it.  Amazon now only allows two categories to be selected, whereas it used to be five.  Limiting it to two was extremely difficult, but the good news is that it can be changed later (although it may affect your rankings in the Top lists).

It wasn't too hard to place the book in the Juvenile Fiction - Action and Adventre section.  The hard part was deciding whether I wanted to use the other category to classify as a "Christian book".   It's no secret that there is Christian content right through the book - Mason and his family are Christians, we read about them at church and talking to the pastor.  Mason's principles and beliefs help him make some tough decisions.  But, at the same time, I never intended that this would be a Christian book per se.  The plot would work pretty well without any of the aforementioned elements and my intention was to be a bit different and include that dimension which is often lacking in childrens fiction and tends more towards an atheistic worldview.

In choosing the second category, I was wary of choosing something which would potentially limit the number of people who would read the book or even seriously look at the synopsis.  On the other hand, I thought it might not be a bad idea to mark the book for something of a niche market who would see the Christian elements as positive or not merely neutral or even negative.  So...in the end..I decided to mark as Christian...and hoping for the best!

On a related point, I did read advice which encouraged the selection of relatively obscure categories where there might not be much competition to get into the Top bestseller list - which would further aid marketing.  This seems to be good in theory, but I have found that Amazon seems to place you in certain lists based, perhaps, on the content of your synopsis and the general categories selected.  It's something I need to do some research on...

4) Lending Library

Finally, I needed to choose whether to enrol the book in the Kindle Lending Library.  This needs to be for a three month period and requires exclusive listing with Amazon on Kindle.  Any listings on Smashwords etc needs to be removed.  There are two benefits to being in the program (US only) - if people borrow your book you share in a fixed pot for all shared authors in a given month.  Dec 2011 and Jan 2012 were both $500,000 each.  It sounds a lot but I imagine it will spread very thin.

What appealed more to me was the ability to offer my book for free for any 5 days out of the 90, as a marketing device.  Normally, Amazon does not permit free listings unless you can prove the item is being given away on other devices (plus I am not sure how easy it is to change that.)

I decided to take the plunge and enrol and see how it goes for the 90 days.  I figured I can always change and enrol on Smashwords to give me access to Sony, Ipods/Ipads and Nooks.  Speaking to other self-publishing authors indicates that the majority of their sales come through Kindle anyway - but it is always handy to be accessible in as many places as possible.

That's all for now!

How to Get Your Book on Kindle...

Rather than put my feet up now that my book is live on Amazon, I thought I would share with you my experience of getting the book onto Kindle.  I am sure there are many who, like me, were a bit fearful of trying to have a go and are strongly considering paying someone else to Kindle-ise your book for you.

Having been through it myself, I can tell you that there really is nothing to worry about AND, if you do a couple of simple things BEFORE you get to far into drafting your manuscript it can be even easier!

I don't intend this to be a detailed exposition of how it is done.  It has already been done many times before and I'd rather share the website that I used rather than repeat it all here:

http://declanconner.com/kindle-formatting/


Declan Conner is an experienced self-pubber and although the layout of his site is not very orderly, there is a wealth of excellent material there - and not just on formatting.

Anyway, here are a few things that I think might be worthwhile knowing:

1) The biggest time saver for me would have been knowing that it is good practice when writing for Kindle to only have one space after a full stop (a period if you are reading this from the US!), whereas normally you would have two,  Yes, of course I did not know that and had to go through the entire manuscript to delete them all.  Infact I had to review a couple of times to weed out the ones I missed and I probably did not get them all of them in the end!

2) The same applies to a slightly lesser extent on the indenting.  I had used a different convention than suggested by Declan so I had to re-edit the document to get it right.

3) The one thing you might not have encountered before is bookmarking and hyperlinking.  This allows the reader to easily navigate from the table of contents to individual chapters.  Declan also recommends putting bookmarks at the end of each chapter so you can be taken back to the contents page.  I found Declans guide here a little confusing but I still managed to figure it out.

4) Once you have the manuscript properly formatted, you need to create the file in the right format.  To do that you can download Mobipocket Creator from the Amazon site.  The good news is that it really couldn't be easier to use and you can have the finished file in less than a minute.

5) The file needs to be checked to make sure it looks OK in the Kindle format.  I downloaded the Kindle Preview tool but ended up managing to see it in my Kindle PC version automatically - so that was good.

6) At this point you are ready to upload to Kindle.  This was a little trickier than I had anticipated, simply because there are a couple of very important decisions that need to be made.  By this point it was in the early hours of the morning and I was struggling to maintain focus.  Some of the key decisions include:

a) Should I protect my file (DRM) or leave it open?
b) At what price should I sell my book?
c) In which category should I sell my book?
d) Should I participate in the Lending Library program, which meant I was signing exclusively with Amazon for a minimum of 3 months?

I will write more about each of these in future posts.  But the good news is that once I had these worked out, the upload process was really very smooth. Within 3 or 4 hours, my book was for sale on Amazon.  The wonders of modern technology eh?

The only snag was that my cover was missing.  The upload process should have used the image within the Kindle file but it didn't seem to be working.  So I went back and uploaded that separately - within a few hours it was up.  Phew!

Introducing George Chedzoy!

One of the most important skills that any budding writer has to master has nothing to do with writing at all!  That is the skill of networking.  And so it is time to practice this art by introducing you to George Chedzoy.

I have known George for five or six years.  I have never actually met him, except in cyberspace.  I first came across him on ebay when I was wasting time just searching for various things.  I think I was looking for holiday accommodation in Abersoch, Wales.  Anyway, George happened to be selling his children's book on ebay, by hard copy installments (sounds old school now eh?  But this was before ebooks had really got off the ground).  As the story unfolded around Abersoch, a place I love, I was an easy sell and purchased the first few installments.  I still have them on my shelf actually!  But it seemed like George had given up on his mission as I never saw the final installments for sale.

A couple of months ago, I was again searching for something about Abersoch.  George's book came to my mind and I wondered, perchance, if his book had ever been completed and  was now available.  I searched and by a huge stroke of luck, he had just started a blog publicizing his newly completed novel and had just started selling his Kindle book on Amazon.co.uk.!

I was delighted and I was even more delighted to be his first ever online customer of the book!  We've since struck up a good working relationship including  learning from each other's marketing initatives as well as providing detailed reviews of our books on a chapter by chapter basis.

We  now both have links to each others blogs on our sites, but I will take the opportunity of highlighting it again in this post:

http://georgechedzoy.blogspot.com/

And here is the link directly to his book on http://www.amazon.co.uk/:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005E0AK2O/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=georched-21&camp=1406&creative=6394&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B005E0AK2O&adid=04C82CES6ANB56V1J1CY&

You can find much more about his book on either site - but suffice it to say you will particularly enjoy this if you like good old mysteries in the Enid Blyton style, as I certainly do.  The book is very reasonably priced as well so I highly recommend. By the way, you may not know that you can download a Kindle app to your PC to view these books - you don't need to buy a real Kindle...

Anyway that's all for now..