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Someone brought up a point on another forum on this topic today, and I hadn't thought about it this way, but it rings true. If it's your first book, you'll probably want to learn how to format it yourself. The reason being is that you are going to want to make changes, whether it's adding more books to your catalog list in the future, or updating web links as they can change over time, or whatever. If you don't know how to do it yourself, your time is at the mercy of a freelancer. And your money too, as you'll have to pay them to make the changes for you.

One way you can get a clean epub version of your book that will pass validation at all the major retailers is to sign up at Draft2Digital.com. They're particularly an aggregator site that uploads your book to the non-Amazon bookstores and gives you a way to track your sales on one site rather than each individual one in exchange for 10% of the retail price you set. But they also have an easy-to-use converter where you can upload your Word file and it will automatically convert it to a clean epub file and even creates a table of contents for you. Even if you don't want to publish through them, you can still upload your book and download the epub before you get to the publishing stage of the process. I believe NookPress does this as well, though since I do use D2D I don't go through them anymore.

It's not difficult at all. There are a few more steps to take in Word to get rid of all the junk it puts in the files, but I can take a simple Word document and turn it into an ebook in about twenty minutes. A non-fiction book with a lot of tables and charts may take some more time, but a fiction book that just has text, chapter headings and maybe a couple of pictures is quite simple once you've practiced a couple of times.

This change was in response to all the scammer "authors" who would publish very short works that were in the 4-10 page range that were often nothing more than short how-tos with basic information that doesn't really tell you anything or "scamlets" that just had info on a subject copied from Wikipedia. If you tricked a reader into downloading and opening such a short book, it immediately registered as 10% read and the author would get the full royalty. Which was not fair to legitimate authors in KU. It was incentivizing not only scammers, but real authors to flood the program with shorter works, since it required less for the reader to reach that 10% mark, rather than full novels, which is what KU was marketed toward. It was undermining the purpose and credibility of their entire program.

Amazon has always been upfront about how their payouts are determined, and a little research on the part of an author considering putting their books in the program will show that the payout every month has consistently been in the $.0045-0.0055 per page range since the revamped KU began. KU is not required to publish on Amazon, you can withdraw after 90 days, and it's up to the individual author if they think they can profit more from the program than from going wide across other vendors. It's hardly any kind of scam.

I never found KU to be all that beneficial to me when I was in it. They certainly weren't doing anything to market my books. The author doing what they need to do to make their books visible without the backing of a publisher or retailer is what self-publishing is all about. Like with the tactic of offering the first book in a series free, many put their first book in KU as a loss leader to draw in readers and funnel them into purchasing the following books in the series. It's all in how you use the tools at your disposal.

That font size is going to be HUGE on the finished product. You could easily go down to around 10 without losing any readability. I've always used Palatino 9.5 for my books, which is about the equivalent of Garamond 11 in size. As an experiment, I copied and pasted some of the text to turn my 114,000 word book into 151,000. With my custom margin settings, it came out to 470 pages. And my trim size is 5.25x8, so there was less paper space to work with. So you should be able to significantly cut your page count if you decrease the font size.

The good news about ebooks, and why they're much friendlier to a self-publisher, is there is no production cost so you can sell it at whatever price point you want (or whatever is prudent). There are also no page numbers, font sizes or margins to worry about since everything is standardized. E-readers allow the reader to pick a font size and type of their choice, a godsend to older folks with bad eyes. If the file size is too large, there may be a negligible delivery fee attached to it per copy sold, but that's it.

Yes. BookBub is well-known for being the best return on investment for a self-publisher for the past few years. No one else really comes close. There's tons of anecdotal testimony from authors who made back their money on the day the ad ran and profited in the following days and weeks from sales of their other books.

BookBub participated in a Q&A on KBoards a while back, clarifying their criteria. I can't remember the details off the top of my head, but number of reviews was only one factor, as is a professional-looking cover. Acceptance also has to do with the amount of space available in their newsletter, since they don't want to dilute their effectiveness by promoting too many books per day. So you might have a better chance if your book is in a niche genre (not as many authors submitting those kinds of books) vs. something like Romance.

If you really want a spot, I'd keep submitting as often as they allow. There have been books with few or no reviews that have gotten through.

Here's this for anyone who is having trouble. Advice on blurbs and queries from Libbie Hawker, an indie author who has been quite successful over the years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4fKJAlGFU

This used to be true, but not so much any more. There are plenty of instances of publishers buying works that were previously self-published. Many now take submissions even if it has been published by the author elsewhere.

There is no contract when you publish on Amazon. There is a TOS you need to abide by while you publish there, but you can stop publishing any time you want. Amazon doesn't claim any rights over your work. The only self-renewing I can think of is if you sign up for KDP Select, where it automatically renews your participation every 90 days if you don't manually withdraw.

Createspace is your best bet for price and usability for paperbacks. Lulu is obscenely expensive, and I don't know why anyone still uses them. There are other places like Lightning Source, but they're such a headache to set up that unless you want to try and get your books in physical stores (pretty much a fruitless endeavor for a self-pub author) that it's not worth the effort.

I would assume they're keeping track via the progress bar that tells you what percentage of any given ebook you've read.

For those interested in Keith's artwork, he's currently running a summer special, which is the same deal as his holiday special this past year. E-Book/Print covers are $250, and E-Book only is $150.

https://keithdraws.wordpress.com/pricin … al-offers/