Another pitfall. And while the book was on sale you had sales. That means it is important to get it right on the very first try.
We have known authors who spent weeks trying to replace faulty files in the Amazon upload system. When you work with an independent conversion house such as Authorlink Publishing Services, rather than relying on Amazon tools, errors can be minimized, and the process can prove less stressful.
Knowing this will determine which sales channels and devices you target. Amazon devices have limited support for such rich media. Ebook Architects has a good chart for helping you decide whether to distribute through Apple or Barnes and Noble, Kobo or Google, all of which have better support for enhanced media.
Mobi is still OK for fixed formats. If unexpected anomalies occur and they sometimes do a professional can solve the issues quickly. Yes, you possibly can see your book on Amazon within 48 hours, provided you have already correctly formatted the book and uploaded it to the publishing platform without a hitch.
When the book goes through quality control, Amazon can flag it for formatting errors and send your file back to square one. The issues may not be clear as to how to make the correction. Even when you have corrected the errors you must start the whole upload process over again. You must delete the bad file before you upload the corrected version, a time-consuming task.
This is not necessarily true, and the risks may outweigh the advantages. In some cases that might not matter, but in others it will. It is important to know where your target market lies and how many potential readers you are giving up. If your book appeals to the Canadian market, for example, you may be giving up about 10 million ebook buyers via Apple iBooks and Kobo. The Author Earnings site once had an interesting chart and statistics to help in your decision-making.
So look at the territories where your book may be sold to assess the impact of this policy. Technically, this claim is true. The work is still yours. But in practice, the claim is a bit misleading. And if you have a payment dispute, you can only sue for the amount of monies payable for the accounting period in question.
Amazon dictates the minimum and maximum list price, based both on the size of your book and the royalty plan you select. See Amazon List Price Requirements. The retailer, too, can choose to sell your book at a price below your list price, minus delivery costs and any applicable Value Added Tax. Add-on costs can eat away at your earnings.
And royalties will be based on the discounted price. He was—and at the time of this writing, still is—ranked above J. Rowling No. His most recent book is ranked tenth on Amazon Charts, which Amazon launched after The New York Times stopped issuing e-book rankings, and which measures sales of individual books on Amazon.
The company does not disclose the metrics behind Author Rank, which is still in beta. While he may not be as familiar a name as the big authors marketed by traditional publishing houses, and may not have as many total book sales, Omer is making an enviable living from his writing. Now, he makes more money than he did as a computer engineer. But now its self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing KDP , has made it easy for people to upload their books, send them out into the universe, and make money doing so.
Its store has created a place for readers to go and easily find inexpensive self-published books. The site that got its start by radically changing where books are sold is now reshaping how books are published and read. This is, of course, threatening to the traditional publishing industry, which seems to be in a state of everlasting free-fall. Industrywide, self-publishing is gaining readers as traditional publishers are losing them, according to Author Earnings , a site produced by an anonymous marketing analytics expert who calls himself Data Guy.
The self-published share of paid US e-book units increased to His data takes into account self-published and Amazon imprint-published books, which many traditional data sources do not.
Launched in , the feature was a response to other companies that were trying to create a Netflix for books, such as Oyster, which shut down in , and Scribd, which is slowly gaining acceptance from the Big Five publishing houses.
Remember, almost anyone can publish on the Kindle platform, so any edge up on the competition is money well spent. Personally, I hired Happy Self Publishing to create my cover. Their name kept coming up in writing communities, so I gave them a try. I was not disappointed. They struck a good balance of professionalism, quality, and price. When I hired Happy Self Publishing , they sent me a questionnaire to gather my book information title, subtitle, description, etc.
I filled out the questionnaire, gave the designer my directions, and submitted samples of covers I liked. In addition to your cover, you also need to format your book so it looks good. To prevent this, you need to format and save your book as a Kindle-friendly book file like.
This way it will look good on every Kindle device. You just copy and paste your chapters into it, change the formatting as desired, and export.
Happy Self Publishing , the company I used for my cover, also provides an affordable formatting service, or you can find hundreds of freelancers on Upwork who can do it for you.
Be sure to check your formatting on an iPad, Android tablet, and any smartphone to ensure the Kindle app formats your book properly on different platforms and devices. See how I use the bullet points to foster curiosity rather than give away the main points of the book? Giving the reason away would defeat the need for the reader to purchase the book. Instead, I trigger curiosity by leaving it open. If you want to learn more about writing persuasive descriptions, the following resources helped me a lot while writing mine:.
Instead, you want to have a plan in place and have your marketing materials prepared weeks before you hit publish. Ensure they understand what it means to be a member of your street team:. For the number of reviews you want, double that number of people on your street team, because chances are only half of them will actually review your book. Up to this point, I had been keeping my list engaged by sending Monday Motivation emails every week, as well as an update every time I published a new blog post.
Stay tuned. You need to create a schedule so you know exactly which promotion happens when, and what actions you should take each day. For the promotional articles, I also prepared a few new incentives geared toward promoting the book:.
But the launch process is a bit more involved than just clicking a publish button, and it starts much earlier than your official launch. Feel free to copy it, tweak it, and use it as your own. Four weeks ahead of your official launch, you want to send your subscribers free samples. Send them one free sample each week. You can choose to share any chapter you wish. The launch date for my new book, You 2. Because my primary goal is to get you to read the book and use it to change your life.
That matters to me more than money. You should never wait until your official launch date to publish your book on Amazon. You should publish it one week in advance. There are a number of tools available. Two that seem most often cited by experienced indie publishers are Vellum , Mac software that helps you format and produce both ebooks and print books, and Draft2Digital , an ebook distributor that offers free formatting. And as with editing, you can also hire someone to do the formatting for you.
That can get you into a lot of trouble. Aukes tried creating her own covers when she first started, and soon gave up. So how do you find editors and cover artists? A good place to start is to ask around among your contacts in online self-publishing groups, conventions, and meetups. There is the Editorial Freelancers Association , which offers both lists of freelancers and advice on rates and other hiring considerations. There are also sites that offer access to vetted lists of professionals, such as Reedsy.
Cover artists, says Rogers, are available online via a simple search. However, as with any venture, you need to be cautious. Gaughran warns against trying to cut corners by using a company that claims to do everything for you for a few thousand dollars. How do you sell it? Well, one place to start is Amazon, the ten-pound gorilla in the publishing universe. Authors whose books are part of Kindle Unlimited earn royalties based on the number of pages read and the amount of money in a global fund.
And because Kindle Unlimited is very popular, it can be an important source of income for self-publishers.
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