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Free is Getting Expensive

11/24/2012

4 Comments

 
At the beginning of the KDP Select Program it was easy to climb up the Amazon charts with a single free promotion and linger on those lofty heights for a while, but that has all changed. Amazon, perhaps concerned over how many low priced books coming out of their free promotions were displacing higher-priced titles, has changed the algorithms to make it harder for free books to climb the charts. Nowadays an often quoted figure in the blogosphere is that 10 free downloads counts for only1 sale. Amazon is also tinkering with their system to decrease the visibility of free books, and it has also biased their ratings away from lower-priced books, effectively signaling the end of the 99 cent book era.

This has created a situation where to have a chance of reaching the top of the best seller’s lists a book has to gather free downloads in excess of tens of thousands, and the only way to achieve this is to make sure that as many people as possible know that a book is being given away for free. Thus the fight for visibility in the Kindle store is now carried out at the level of the blogs that advertise free promotions to readers.

Authors used to be able to list their book for free in several blogs. This is still happening in several automated blogs that list free books as they become  available, but the turnover of books is so high that this advertising option has a limited effect. The next option is blogs that accept submissions of books that will be free and feature them in their pages. However these blogs have had to raise their acceptance standards due to the large number of submissions, and now books are often listed only if they have a rating of 4 stars on ten or more reviews. The competition is so fierce to promote free books that authors are resorting to paid advertising in blogs, and many blogs whose promotional services in the past were free now have paying options or have switched to only paying options altogether.

As the avalanche of free books keeps increasing, the only way to have a decent chance at a successful free promotion will be to pay for it, and this will only add to the costs of a book. Taking into account that in the majority of the cases the bottleneck for any measure of book selling success is not how good a book is (within reason of course) but rather its discoverability, it is very important that authors consider how much of their budget they will spend on editing, formatting, and cover design vs. how much they will devote to promotion.

I miss the old good old days in which making books free used to be free. Now free is getting expensive!
                                  ***
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The Zebra Turns One Year Old!

11/18/2012

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This past Sunday November 18 my book The Sun Zebra turned one year old! I had a lot of fun writing about the magical adventures of Nell and her family, but other aspects of putting this book together, publishing it, and promoting it have been a different ball of wax. I have learned a lot about the process during this time, and I keep learning because the whole self-publishing universe continues to change. Some things that were valid a while ago don’t work anymore, and new and exciting things are appearing all the time. Like most authors I am still trying to find “the formula” if such a thing even exists.

One year ago I self-published my book while trying to curtail any unrealistic expectations by telling myself over and over that my sales would at best be modest. I was not to be disappointed. My book started slow and then went slower and finally dipped into the primordial ooze (the long tail also known as low-sales limbo) with hundreds of thousands of other books. But along came the KDP Select Program that gives authors the ability to give their books away for free. So I enrolled and did my first free promotion with a smile. I gave away a paltry 147 copies of my book in January, which did not gather me a single sale: utter and complete disaster.

I fought my depression over my pathetic numbers (which totaled 25 sales over 5 months) and fixed problems with my book, my author image, and my marketing approach. My second KDP promotion in April was a success as I gave away more than 19,000 free copies of my book. Even though The Sun Zebra reached #9 in the Free Kindle Store and garnered me 240 sales and 54 borrows, but it still did not gain a lot of staying power. A third promotion in July was a bust that awakened me to the realities of the effect of seasonality on free book giveaways plus Amazon also changed the algorithms they use in weighing the sales equivalent of a free book download. My fourth promotion just finished last Sunday November 18 and soon I will know whether that went well or not. Either way I will likely learn some more!

All in all for the past year I have ended up with 303 sales and 58 borrows. If you take into account the dollar amount of each borrow compared to the percentage of royalties I earn from the sale of each copy of my book, the number of sales plus “sale equivalents” comes to about about 514. Clearly the Amazon Prime program has been a great asset for me. As I expected my numbers have been modest, but the important thing is that The Sun Zebra didn't cost me anything to publish and the money that I have left over from paying for promotions will be enough to pay for my next book, which will hopefully be out in the first few months of next year.

I want to thank all the extraordinary people who helped me in this self-publishing project with their constructive criticism, editing, and opinions, or by writing reviews or helping me with promotion. You are all wonderful, take care, and keep on reading and writing!

Rolando
                                   ***
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The Issue of Exclusivity in KDP Select

10/26/2012

14 Comments

 
The CEO of Smashwords, Mark Coker, recently published a guest post in the Self-Publishing Advice Blog of ALLi (Alliance of Independent Authors) entitled:   “Amazon Is Playing Indie Authors Like Pawns,” says Smashwords founder, Mark Coker

In a nutshell he states that Indie authors should have their books distributed to as many retailers as possible and should therefore avoid joining Amazon’s KDP Select program because this program demands exclusivity. If they don’t, he argues that these authors will not gain access to many emerging markets where other retailers are rising in importance. His reference to Indie authors being pawns is because he thinks Amazon is using them to harm other book retailers and presumably harming (sacrificing?) the authors as well in the process.

As one of these “pawns” that Mr. Coker mentions I want to state that I don’t agree with the exclusivity requirement for belonging to KDP Select. However, leveraging an advantage against your competitors is a common sales strategy. Amazon knows that it offers the best deal for authors when royalties, publishing platform, discoverability, size of market, and other aspects are considered as a whole: something that is especially true compared to Smashwords. I considered publishing with Smashwords, but after reading what the author blogoshere had to say about them and their publishing platform called “The Meatgrinder,” I decided otherwise.

From reading author blogs I also gathered that the most common reason why authors leave other retailers and sign up their books with Amazon is because their sales with those other retailers amount to a fraction of their sales with Amazon. To this you have to add two additional features that authors gain in exchange for exclusivity in the KDP Select program.

The first is that books in the Select program get included in the Amazon Prime library where readers can borrow them, and for each borrow Amazon pays authors a certain amount of money from a pool allocated to this program. If a book is priced at $1.99 and someone borrows it, the resulting payment can be equivalent to the royalties from 3 sales. If the book is priced at $0.99 the resulting payment can be equivalent to the royalties from 6 sales. The second feature is the capacity to make a book free for a total of 5 days, which can help with promotion and boost the amount of sales once the book comes off the free period.

So is Amazon using me as a pawn? Maybe, but I don’t really care. I am not “married” to Amazon. I am on Amazon and on the Select program because in my opinion they offer me the best deal at many levels. When and if this changes I will make my move to other publishing platforms. Perhaps, as Mr. Coker says, I miss the chance to get on the bandwagon of emerging markets where other retailers are rising in importance. However, to gain entrance into a market through another retailer it is not enough to simply publish. You have to work at it and master the nuances of promotion on each retailer’s platform. The way it is now, I barely have time to keep up with everything I have to do on Amazon, and I am still making mistakes and trying to get things right.

Finally, I want to remind Mr. Coker that if a pawn reaches the eighth row it can get promoted to a knight. Right now I think my odds of achieving this with Amazon are higher than with Smashwords or other retailers.

What do you think?

                                   ***
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