If learning and managing all the intricacies of Amazon’s advertising engine in order to promote your book/s seems just too hard, perhaps you might consider hiring a consultant through the outsourcing websites Fiverr and Upwork. You can check reviews of each consultant’s work in order to see if any of them might be a good fit. Packages start at quite low rates, so you could experiment without committing huge amounts of money.
Choosing Amazon Book Categories
Uploading your book to Kindle Direct Publishing / Amazon is the beginning of a process rather than the end. The next task is to optimise your metadata for visibility / search. Reedsy is offering a free course on the basics of Amazon advertising.
“In this article, we’ll reveal the importance of choosing the right categories and provide you some practical steps to perfectly place your book on Amazon’s bulging shelves. ”
An Amazon Tale: He Fought for His Royalties, and (Eventually) Won ....
A very dogged author relates his trying experiences with Amazon KDP and organising the payment of royalties. He does arrive at a solution, but only through sheer persistence:
“Amazon is probably the best outlet for Indie authors, but manage your expectations when dealing with their customer service.
Their help/assistance/advice to me was either inconsistent, vague, given in Amazon’s internal technical speak, incomplete, or simply wrong.
I put my latest novel up on Amazon as I did with my previous two, only this time, I put both eBook and paperback on all markets, not just Australia.
When sales started occurring, I followed those on my KDP account site. I found their reports informative and helpful. They gave me statistics for each marketplace and the estimated royalties.
When my Australian royalties started arriving in my Australian bank account by EFT, I thought I would find out why my sales in the other markets were not reaching me.
I then discovered those royalties could not be paid by EFT into my Australian bank account, only by cheque or wire. Then I found that not only could an EFT transfer not happen, but that Amazon had a withdrawal threshold of 100 units for each market, e.g. US$100, CA$100, €100, or £100.
None of my book royalties in any market outside Australia is ever likely to break these thresholds, e.g. Canada royalties were CA$2.88, Eurozone (Germany) €7.80. So, I put the question to Amazon – how do I ever get paid these royalties?
Amazon suggested I open an account with Payoneer for each marketplace, which I did. So, Amazon from each marketplace could now transfer my royalties to those Payoneer accounts. However, my problem then became twofold:
Payoneer does not have a banking arrangement with UK or Canadian banks. So these royalties could not be transferred to my Payoneer accounts.
Then I discovered that Payoneer also has a withdrawal threshold of US$50 per transfer.
Finally, a solution:
In your KDP account go to the Getting paid tab.
In your non-US/non-Australian accounts, change your payment method to your US$ account and transfer any outstanding royalties in those other non-US accounts to the US$ account.
Under your Amazon US account, click and highlight every tag except Amazon.com.au.
All royalties from sales in all those other marketplaces will now be currency converted into your US$ account.
If or when your US$ account balance reaches above US$100 you can transfer to your Australian bank account.
In my case, I have my Amazon US$ account balance transferred to my Payoneer US$ account (lower withdrawal threshold). Amazon’s US$100 withdrawal threshold does not apply here.”
Amazon KDP and payments: an Odyssey
For Amazon KDP authors struggling to figure out how to aggregate their royalties, see the note below from an independent author:
“At last, I found someone at Amazon KDP who knows their job. I have now tagged all Amazon marketplaces to have royalties paid into my US$ Amazon account, e.g. outstanding UK royalties have now been sent to my US$ KDP account, as well as German and Canadian royalties. It is, therefore, now easy to transfer all that money to my Payoneer US$ account so that I can get paid into my Australian account – PHEW!”
For context, and earlier email from the same author:
I am now experiencing a separate crisis with Amazon, who are not paying me my due royalties. They have told me they have only paid Australian royalties by EFT but cannot pay me for all the other markets, which must be paid by cheque until royalties reach 100 in each currency. I have asked them how I will achieve those thresholds when I have, for instance, only sold one in Germany, and I am unlikely to sell anymore there - do they, therefore, keep my money? It’s very frustrating, and the whole exercise with Amazon is proving a nightmare. I have spent A$2035 on Amazon AD’s with a supposed return of A$474.36, of which I have only received A$153.28. I’m still waiting for an answer from them.
and more…
At this stage, I have read every word on both Amazon’s KDP and Payoneer’s websites. I have determined that Americans set up both sites specifically for Americans – so much for a Global Company.
Having now signed up for Payoneer, I find they can deal with EFT payments to Amazon USA, UK and Australia but forget Canada and Germany, where I have sold a few. Those few royalty amounts have gone into the Amazon coffers, given I will never reach the CN$100 and €100 thresholds.
I’ve written to Payoneer customer service to find out how they will arrange payments of my royalties from different Amazon markets, into my Payoneer account, and then into my bank account here in Australia – 5 days minimum response. Both websites state that once I have set up a Payoneer account, Payoneer will email Amazon and arrange payments to route through them - Mmm!
and
Payoneer has now advised that I can transfer currencies from one of my Payoneer Receiving accounts to another currency account. I can directly transfer €8.53 from my Eurozone Receiving account to my US$ Receiving account with a balance of US$44.53, thereby making the US$ account greater than US$50 (US$53.35), meaning I can now withdraw it to my account here in Australia. Phew! Getting that solution from them was like pulling teeth. However, I will leave it all alone until the new year in case any more royalties arrive in those accounts, but since I have canned my Amazon AD campaign there shouldn’t be much of that if anything.
What remains now is £36.40 sitting in my Amazon.co.uk account, which I cannot transfer to my Payoneer account as Payoneer doesn’t have an arrangement with a UK bank. So back to Amazon KDP with that one.
Dealing with Amazon KDP can certainly be a very frustrating experience, with Amazon making it extremely difficult to speak to an actual human.
Here’s a very long list of customer service issues with Amazon KDP.
Anatomy of a Fiverr / Amazon KDP Advertising Campaign
If you are interested in running an Amazon campaign for your title/s on that platform, but would prefer to use a third party to manage the process, here is one author’s results and associated comments:
Fiverr allocated “bestbooks2020” who is managing my Amazon advertisements. They ran the first campaign in the Australian market only. That campaign ended yesterday. At the same time, I went onto Kindle Unlimited for 90 days.
Here are the results as of today:
Since launch;
Sales = 30 – <title 01> = 22 Kindle, 7 paperback. <title 02> = 1 Kindle. Royalties due = $145.75.
KENP READ (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages Read)
<title 01> = 6,988 in Australia, 175 in the USA = 7,163
<title 02> = 138 in Australia, 1 in the UK = 139
Total = 7,302
As I’ve had it explained, KENP READS can be from actual downloads or from reading the first few pages.
I have initiated two more AD Campaigns through bestbooks2020 for the UK and US markets. So it will be interesting to see how that goes. Two, three-day Ads in each market cost me circa $157 each. I was initially going to run AD campaigns for all three books simultaneously in both markets, but that would cost me $900+ (maybe another time).
Update
KindleUnlimited
KEDP READS = 12,874 (11,522 for <title 01>, 1,352 for <title 02>, 0 for <title 03>). Amazon’s technical team are looking at <title 03’s> results to find out what is going wrong. Given the nature of the beast, it’s impossible to have 0 results for <title 03>.
Sales:
A total of 39, being 31 x Kindle and 7 x paperback.
The Amazon AD campaign Fiverr ran in Australia only resulted in 61 clicks for the first three-day blitz and 84 for the second, and a bill today from Amazon for $177.01.
The Amazon AD Campaigns start this Thursday in the UK and USA, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. Given the cost for Australia, I’m now nervous about how much that will cost me, albeit I can pull the plug on it at any time. I will monitor daily.
Amazon KDP now printing in Australia
After years of printing in the US and shipping all the way to Oz, Amazon has finally opened a printery in Australia to service print on demand customers. This is very good news for independent authors, especially that subset who want to concentrate on Amazon. IngramSpark’s service has many pluses, but it interposes a layer between the author and Amazon, and costs a good deal more, particularly when authors wish to upload updated book files. With the new printing facility, Australian authors will finally be able to order author proofs and copies.
With the new printery, postage costs will be reduced and turnaround times improved. Here is the Amazon page addressing the topic.
Amazon advertising and BookBub
Practical suggestions from a very active and savvy independent author:
Four years ago, I fluked winning a FREE Featured Deal. I had five other books at the time, and the sell-through, and KUs were great (250,000/month). On top of this I received an additional 70 reviews for the Featured book, most of them 5-star. At the time I knew next to nothing about BookBub and expected to keep on winning Featured Deals. Was I in for a sad awakening!
Fast forward to July 2019 when I sold a mere 100 books and had a miserable 14,809 KUs. To make matters worse, I had more than doubled my number of books. There are many reasons why the preceding occurred, but the main one was that I did no promoting either via social media or paid advertising. I should say that writing is not my prime source of income, which is just as well, because if it were, I’d be starving. That said, I have a certain amount of pride and set out to remedy the foregoing.
I decided I’d actively advertise my books in promoters’ newsletters but would not spend more than $150 per month. The results to date, while not great, are promising. I’ll sell more than 200 books in October, and my KUs will nudge 30,000. The increase in revenue more than covered my advertising costs, and my numbers are up 100%. The idea now is to compound them at the same rate for the next four months.
I have not applied for a BookBub Deal this calendar year but soon will. If I’m successful, BB will be the exception to my $150 rule. I will not accept an international Deal and am of the belief that without the U.S., BB’s Deals, even with sell-through and KUs are still likely to be losers. The U.S. is critical.
The struggle that I have had is finding six suitable promoters for the seven-day Amazon countdown period. Outside of BookBub, ENT is the absolute standout. I don’t advertise the day after ENT ($45), as I’m still getting good sales and KUs from the day prior. The next-best promoter is BookRaid because it’s cheap (about 18 cents a click and usually less than $3) and is good for approximately 10 sales. Let’s say I’m promoting a book with a rank of #300,000 … it won’t be attractive to ENT’s subscribers, but by using BookRaid on the first day and another small promoter (say Authors XP at $20) on the second day, I can lower the ranking to sub #40,000 by the time ENT’s promo kicks in on the third and fourth days. Now it gets hard as I have three days to go and a remaining budget of about $82. The promoters available are eReaderIQ, FKBT, ManyBooks, The Fussy Librarian, Robin Reads, Just Kindle Books, Book Rebel, Book Gorilla, and Book Cave. I have had reasonable success with eReaderIQ ($20), FKBT ($30), and ManyBooks ($29). I might be tempted to replace FKBT with Book Gorilla ($50), but it would blow my budget by $17, and I’d need another 25 sales to justify it, and that’s unlikely.
Finally, I tried Amazon ads when they were first introduced in the U.S. with moderate success, but the competition was too hot (Mark Dawson spent $50,000 on Amazon Ads last month). However, Amazon has just introduced ads in the U.K., and I have 10 running, and they’re doing okay. I’m running them for two reasons … first-mover advantage and currently I hardly make any sales in the U.K.
How to Work With Your Amazon Book Listing
Selling books on Amazon and other online platforms is disorienting to writers who grew up with actual bookstores and readers browsing shelves of books. Online booksales revolve around search, algorithms and keywording, an alien world for many. Yet it is a world of great potential for independent writers who take the time to understand it, and with a vastly greater potential reach, not to mention margins unimaginable to traditionally published authors, who have to wait while bookstores, distributors, publishers and agents subtract their considerable take. Jericho writers has some suggestions regarding both blurbs and keywording that are well worth watching.
“Picking the right metadata basically defines how your book will be shelved in Amazon’s system – and therefore which readers are most likely to encounter it.”
None of this guarantees online success of course — persistence, quality, a backlist and luck all play a significant part. But getting the basics right with your online publishing presence at least gives an author the opportunity to succeed, and often at minimal cost.
“That means you have to snag that reader fast. So what do you write? How do you structure your blurb? How do you format it? What 2 models have been endlessly tested and proven to work?”
Amazon/KDP Not Posting Discounted Print Copies to Australia....
An interesting thread about Amazon’s refusal to send discounted author copies to Australia. Naturally this policy is driving local authors into the arms of IngramSpark, Blurb or Lulu. As we have posted before, there is still a strong argument to be made for uploading to both services.
Amazon and the Big Publishers
An interesting piece explaining how some of the world’s biggest publishers have learned to live with and profit from their Amazon presence. The ongoing decline in real world bookstores (especially in the US) has made that more of an existential necessity than an optional extra. Remember when the Internet was going to bring diversity and choice? It certainly hasn’t worked out that way in browsers, search, social, ecommerce or just about any other field. Without some kind of regulatory restriction, it seems the natural evolution of any online business sector is towards aggregation and domination by one player.
The Rise of the Independent Author
The book of the future was supposed to be an amazing digital, virtual thing, anticipated eagerly by every second futurist, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. An interesting article in Wired about how we got to the current ebook landscape (hint: involves an all conquering behemoth named after a big river). And print books are still a thing, thank goodness. And here’s an interesting quote for all the independent authors out there:
“Almost half of author earnings now come from independently published books. Independent books don’t outsell big-five books, but they offer higher royalty rates—roughly 70 percent versus 25 percent.”
The Rise and Rise of Indie Authors
The Author Earnings website has worked hard at 'scraping' data from Amazon's various sites to provide unprecedented detail on sales data. As Amazon now represents close to a majority of print titles sold, knowing what is being sold and by whom is very interesting indeed. The data shows that independent authors represent a large and rapidly growing fraction of book sales on Amazon. There is also ample evidence that having a book listed on the Amazon bestseller lists provides a substantial boost to non-listed titles from the same author. Overall, Author Earnings claim that they identified over 9,000 authors earning more than USD $10,000 per year, and half of that number were earning over USD $20,000 per year. Read the whole report, which goes into much greater detail.
Create your own Audiobooks with Amazon
Not content with dominating the online sale of printed books and ebooks, Amazon is also moving to extend its dominance in audio books. The e-commerce giant already owns Audible. ACX is aimed at small publishers and authors wanting to create an audiobook version of existing print editions. Given the increasing popularity of podcasting and streaming music services, it makes sense to offer independent authors a way to grab a slice of that audio content pie. Authors can create their own audio, but they would need decent equipment and some technical savvy to meet ACX's audio quality requirements. ACX steers authors towards their roster of professional narrators and producers, and offers long term distribution through Audible.
Finding your BIC code when setting up an Amazon account
When authors set up accounts at Createspace/Amazon for print on demand or via Kindle for ebooks, they are confronted with a request for their BIC code. This is a unique identifier code used for international money transfers, and is also known as a swiftcode. To look up the BIC for your bank, go here.
Amazon Set to Open Non-Virtual Bookstores
After spending the last decade laying waste to the bookstores of the world, it now seems vaguely possible that Amazon is about to build a few of its own. That's right: physical bookstores, with actual books on actual shelves. And actual customers, one assumes. Amazon doesn't do anything without a plan, and without a preternatural understanding of their customers, so their business model must be pretty robust. As this blog post points out, the massive number of print on demand titles that Amazon hosts gives it the ability to tailor store offerings in a granular way without having to maintain huge warehouses of stock. And no-one does logistics and fulfillment as well as Amazon. Lovers of books may find it reassuring that Amazon evidently subscribes to the view that print books will be around for the foreseeable future.
Getting a Title Removed from Amazon / Reassertion of Copyright
Recently, a local publisher (Jo Jo Publishing) went into bankruptcy owing authors, printers and suppliers a great deal of money. The liquidators indicated the authors were free of any contractual obligations to the now-defunct company. Many of the authors published by Jo Jo wished to remove their books from Jo Jo-badged online listings (with Amazon in particular) so they could re-upload their titles with new ISBNs. As Jo Jo was now unstaffed, they had to take matters into their own hands. Amazon has a facility for authors in this kind of situation:
“If you believe that your digital content is being sold by a publisher no longer authorized to sell your copyrighted content, please provide Amazon.com’s copyright agent the written information specified below. This procedure is exclusively for notifying Amazon.com and its affiliates that your copyrighted material has been infringed.”
Amazon's requirements / contact details continue as follows:
- An electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest;
- A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed upon;
- A description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the site;
- Your address, telephone number, and e-mail address;
- A statement by you that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
- A statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf.
Amazon.com 's Copyright Agent for notice of claims of copyright infringement on its site can be reached as follows:
Copyright Agent
Legal Department
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226
Fax: (206) 266-7010
E-mail: copyright@amazon.com