Search options (Page 2 of 5)

Congrats to Dill, Ceridwen, and Vern!

Hey Sol,
Is there a simple way to republish or do I need to make a new published version of the work?

For print copies, I would agree with everyone else that Createspace is the way to go. However, don't use the images or templates from their cover creator. Find a cover designer that you like and is in your budget. The Createspace covers are easy to spot and scream self-published. They are basically your printer and distributor. Not every outlet will end up selling your work but the major ones (Amazon and B&N) will.
I've never had much luck selling print copies, but I like to give readers the option, and I love having print copies for myself. There are some self-published authors who do really well with selling their paperbacks, especially at conferences.

I'm assuming when you say bestseller you are speaking of traditionally published books because there have been a number of books to hit the bestseller lists (USA Today and NY Times) that are self-published.
Here are a couple of articles about 99cent NYTimes bestsellers.
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/se … ller-list/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240 … 3350815824

USA today is easier to get on because they divide the categories up such as print & ebook, ebook, non-fiction, etc. USA Today has had many self-published 99 cent books on there (such as myself, Susan, Apryl and Sheree).

From the USA Today ebook bestseller list this week here are a couple traditionally published low price books (I didn't go through the entire list just a couple pages):
#82 - The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney ($1.99)
#85 (listed for 83 weeks) The Maze Runner by James Dashner ($1.99) Which I actually purchased on a FREE day

If selling books to as many readers possible while making money is the goal then yes, discounting is a powerful marketing tool. If getting a top agent and contract with a big publisher is your goal then I wish you luck because your chances are pretty slim no matter how great a writer you are. The days of needing a big publisher to get on the bestseller list or to make money are gone. There are a number of stories out there about authors leaving their big publishers to self-pub such as Belle Andre.

Are Books Too Cheap by Melissa Foster (USA Today and NYTimes bestselling author) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/2 … 60383.html
**I agree with her about using 99cents as a promotional tool not as a permanent price.

1. Find a company that will send your advanced copies to interested readers. I typically pay about $30 for this service and it is much easier than tracking down bloggers who might be willing to accept your book and then may post a review.

2. Skip the blog tour. They are time consuming, a giant hassel, and you won't make sales. I've hosted blog tours before, I've paid for a blog tour, and I've organized them for others. Skip it.

3. Price it at 99cents for the first few days, then up the price. If it's the second or third in a series, then lower the price of the others as well. 99cents will get you a number of sales and a boost in rankings. When your price goes up it'll be higher in the rankings and then the increased cost means a bigger boost to ranking when you make a sale.

So you asked for 3 but here is a 4th.
4. Find someone who knows what they are doing who organizes book launches. Don't rely on recommendations from people whose books are in the 100,000's. Find someone who's books are in the below 50,000 range and ask them which companies they would reccomend. 

Okay 5th
5. Go on Facebook and find some indie authors who are having success in your genre. See what they are doing. I have learned so much by see what other authors are doing. Even just those from tNBW like Apryl Baker and DelSheree Gladden (both of whom have become marketing genuises).

This topic has the Kindle Boards on fire and I've stayed away from it because if you like the change you are villified.

A few things to consider with this change:

1. It only applies to books that are in KDP Select - the exclusive with Amazon program that allows readers to borrow your book.

2. When they say $0.006 per page thay do not mean a paperback page. They mean a Kindle normalized page which is much smaller than an average 6x9 page. For example my 205 page Songbird paperback actually comes to 360 Kindle Edition Nomalized Page Count (KENPC). So it's not really that low of a rate.

3. For novel writers this will significantly increase their rate of pay per borrow. In May, I made $1.35 per borrow for Songbird (360KENPC). This worked out to $0.00375 per page (assuming the reader read the entire book). If they didn't read up to 10% I was never paid anything. With a rate of $0.006 per page I'll now make $2.16 per borrow (assuming a complete read) and anyone who borrows but doesn't hit 10%, I'll still get something.

The thing with KU and the lending library was that the old system never took into consideration the difference between shorts and full length novels. People quickly learned how to game the system. They took their novel and published each chapter individually as a serial, there are cases of people even copying wikipedia articles and publishing them. With a novel someone had to read the first 2-3 chapters of my books to hit the 10% payout cut point. With some of the shorts it was one page. Scammers were over running the system and it wasn't good for readers or Amazon sine they were paying many authors more for a borrow than the author would make for a sale.

The value in KU as a reader is that I can borrow up to ten books at a time from the "library" for only $10 a month. If I read novels, that means I only need to borrow 1 or 2 books to make it worth the money. But what happened is with the influx of shorts, readers had to wade through them to find full length novels (it's amazing how many authors will claim their 15k word story is a novel), hitting the 10% on those shorts quickly, and over time this caused the borrow rate to drop and novel writers to pull out, making it even harder for readers.

Amazon doesn't want 10million borrows of shorts. They want 1million borrows of novels, because to a customer that is where the value is. I'm not going to pay $10 a month to read a bunch of shorts, although if I have the subscription for the novels I may borrow shorts for fun.

There is value in short stories and poems, but how many people can honestly say they would be willing to pay the same for a 20 page short as a 300 page novel? That's what the old system did and it wasn't fair nor did it provide readers with the material they really wanted.

Sorry for the rant! But for many authors the KU payout shift from borrow to pages read will either change nothing, or it will increase their pay. We are 10 days into the month and I am already estimating that I will earn an additional $200 this month using the $0.006 per page rate and that is including the fact that my books have been out from between 4years-5months.

Congrats Ronald and Leanne!

Do you see a menu button on the top right? On my ipad, I have a menu button and if I click on that and scroll down  there is a link for contests.

I've never heard of it, but it sounds really interesting. I would definitely consider tyring it if I had a book that fel into one of the genres they accept.

here's the link to her blog. Grammar Girl
You can search for topics with the search feature at the top of the site.
I've always been a bit leery of the MS Word spelling and grammar check, and I was the same with Grammarly. I kept ignoring all of the "punctuation with two clauses" errors Grammarly was throwing at me. I finally went to Grammar Girl to double check and sure enough I was missing a whole bunch of commas. That said, when I went be to Grammarly, it did suggest a few unnecessary commas. Whatever system you have for checking spelling and grammar you have to put it into context and read the sentence again before making the change.