Information and tips, focusing on publishing, publicity, promotional ideas, author profiles, design resources and more.
An excellent overview of Maria’s writing philosophy and background can be found here. Her book “The Invisible Thread” is available on Amazon.
““her writing story was carved by her immigration story. Her Cypriot heritage has been an integral part of her writing journey. Maria writes with the ink that drops from her heart.””
An interesting plain-English explanation of the multiple algorithms behind Amazon’s seemingly capricious and constant price changes. Authors are often surprised to learn that while Amazon may pay royalties according to the prices they enter when uploading their new title, the price seen by potential purchasers will vary from day to day.
“Though daunting to many, these algorithms don’t have to be intimidating once you know what they want and how they work. ”
The most important part of uploading to Amazon KDP with ebook files is getting the metadata right. This turns out to be a little more complicated than one might expect. Fortunately, others have done the legwork and put the information out there for KDP users.
The following two free titles are well worth consulting on this front:
Let's Get Digital by David Gaughran
Ricardo Fayet's How to Market an ebook
and David Gaughran posted some verypractical tips recently:
https://davidgaughran.com/amazon-book-category-kindle-categories/
and he put up a video too on a related topic before that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fXU8R0cHOM
Joanna Penn goes into this topic too in some detail:
https://www.thecreativepenn.com/book-categories-keywords/
https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/the-basics-of-book-metadata-and-keywords
In a world of hucksters and over-promising, David Gaughran stands out for producing material with some integrity and a lot of detail. He produces a great deal of free material (alongside paid information) relating to the effective digital marketing of books — an essential part of book promotion these days, accelerated still further by the covid debacle. His free Starting from Zero course should be an essential starting point for any digital marketing neophyte. He approaches the Amazon borg with curiosity and humour, and demystifies the algorithms that increasingly rule our online lives.
Reviews are important in the Amazon ecosystem — a clear signal to their search algorithms. Unfortunately, this also means that they are constantly being gamed, and without strict controls on the part of Amazon, quickly become meaningless. Equally unfortunately, Amazon has decreed that one of those controls is a $50 purchasing threshold — ie. if you have not purchased at least $50 worth of products or books from Amazon in the last 12 months from the e-commerce giant, you are not allowed to post. Here is the Amazon page describing the policy.
And the text:
Eligibility
To contribute to Customer features (for example, Customer Reviews, Customer Answers, Idea Lists) or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card in the past 12 months. Promotional discounts don't qualify towards the $50 minimum. You do not need to meet this requirement to read content posted by other contributors or post Customer Questions, or create or modify Profile pages, Shopping Lists, Wish Lists or Registries.
Some interesting posts on Amazon reviews, with different takes.
Author advice guru David Gaughran has posted a very interesting column on the most powerful selling tool for books — personal recommendations and reviews, or “social proof”. If a potential reader receives a strong social signal via reviews or a personal recommendation from a friend, they are much more likely to purchase. It therefore follows that independent authors need to do all they can to foster and amplify such signalling for their own work.
“The phenomenon is only different today in the surface details: that trusted source can be an algorithm at Amazon or Goodreads, a book blogger who taste maps your own, bestseller charts at various online retailers, daily emails from BookBub, or a million other things in today’s fragmented recommendation ecosystem.”
Reviews are a key signal used in the ranking of online books. The more reviews, the higher the book ranks and the more books are sold. Of course, given this logic, reviews have been widely gamed by authors and publishers, to the point when they are sometimes not reliable guides as to a book’s quality and popularity. Authors round up their friends to review their books, or pay other services to generate reviews, or review other authors’ books in the hope of reciprocal reviews. Amazon has been fighting back against this degradation of the reviewing signal — the outlines of said epic struggle are described here, along with the latest strategies for independent authors.
Many authors have never heard of Bookbub. The service is essentially a regular email offering selected discounted ebooks to a massive subscriber list. Most of the titles promoted therein are from major publishers, but a significant fraction are from independent authors and small publishers. Publishers and authors pay over $600 per title just to be considered for inclusion in their featured deals. They are extremely powerful in the world of ebook sales and massively profitable.
Peter Ralph has done a stellar job analysing the performance of bookbub and advising authors how to get one of the sought after featured deals. Other bloggers have useful posts about setting up effective ads for Bookbub, Others point out that while the sales spike created by bookbub is real and substantial, it can be rather short lived. This author suggests that the real benefit of being featured on bookbub is exposing the rest of your published work to a new audience.
In a world where bookstores, though gamely hanging on, represent a decreasing fraction of overall print sales (not to mention ebooks and audibooks), authors have to come to terms with the necessary techniques for online sales success, and letting the market know they even exist.
A note regarding the preparation of your book manuscript for ebook conversion, from our preferred ebook converter, Warren Broom:
What can be done in the ePub format:
Firstly, to convert to the epub format, we require a print ready PDF. This must be single page single column. If not, all of the sentences that form each column end up shuffled like a deck of cards. We will also need an ISBN and a description and subject to place into the meta-data that shows up on the retail site. Descriptions should be kept to 2 to 3 paragraphs.
Images:
We prefer to take the images from the pdf as many have captions that we include in the image so that they do not get separated from the image. We do all images in colour for those reading devices that support colour but, of course, they will render in greyscale in those that don’t.
Tables:
We can only do tables that are two cells wide as any more and the words start to get squashed up at higher zoom levels. Tables with more than 2 columns are done as images. Sometimes when table cross “pages, some of the text can separate but this is not usually a problem.
Hyphens:
If the text is justified, some words break in two, utilising a hyphen. Once again, this is not really a problem but, if the author wants to avoid them, we can align the text to the left.
Table of contents:
eBook reading devices produce a digital TOC but we usually add hyperlinks to the TOC in the ePub for earlier reading devices that don’t. We can also link sub heading to the TOC but they are not really necessary.
Indexes:
Redundant in ePubs as all reading devises have a search function. However, if the author really wants to include an index, it should only include single word references as multiple words will link to all references in each of each word included within the entry.
Footnotes:
We place all of the footnotes at the end of the chapter and can link the reference within the text to its’ corresponding footnote. I can also add a return link back to the text the reference is in. It should be noted that footnotes are very time-consuming and can dramatically increase the price of the ePub.
Fonts:
Fonts can be embedded but, many reading devices have a default font that overrides the embedded fonts. A maximum of 2 fonts can be embedded. It is also possible to add audio and video to an ePub but, this is very complex and dramatically increases the file size and also, the cost. Our recommendation is that that a hyperlink to an external website be employed to view or listen to these forms of content.
A succinct explanation of ebook selling at Jane Curry Publishing (now relaunched as Ventura), including the setting of prices and distribution of royalties.
