51WUm3MYn2L._AA324_PIkin4,BottomRight,-60,22_AA346_SH20_OU15_It has been an exciting first month for me on the Kindle store. I sold 5 books, and released my latest title just before the weekend. I am learning a lot about the eBook business as I go! Here are a few insights from my second month on the Kindle store:

1) Kindle Unlimited has its uses. After selling 3 copies in one day, then nothing for a week, I put my book into Kindle Unlimited. Under the new algorithm, I am not seeing borrows anymore. It is just showing page reads. I think I had my first borrow because a few days ago, it suddenly was listing 198 pages reads. Either one person borrowed and read the whole thing, or 198 people borrowed and each read one page. I think KU serves a useful purpose—not for every book, but for cases like this one where it is the first book of the series. I hope it will serve as a sort of sort of loss leader for the other books in the series.

2) Amazon is not a fan of republished works. My first book was an edited and carefully prepared public domain text. Amazon subjected it to extra verification steps and won’t allow it into KDP Select. My next two books have been based on my Teleread work. Amazon deleted this latest one so it could verify I own the publication rights given that  ‘some of the material may have been available elsewhere.’ Lesson learned! I am planning to put out one more Teleread-inspired title to complete the set, then I am on to more marketable titles.

3) Branding, branding, branding. After my Twitter count shot up to almost 80 people in just two weeks while my Facebook page stagnated, I got some feedback from my dad to market everything under my personal name and not a corporate name. After some fiddling, I got my Facebook page and my website renamed to match my author name. Traffic is improving. Now, I need to get a photo for them and start blogging at my .com site too, to build an audience.

4) Genre matters too. I have had to radically change my business plan; I had originally thought I would specialize in carefully packaged public domain fix-ups. Given Amazon’s restrictions for those, and given the anemic sales I’ve seen, I think that is a dead end. I will be doing a ton more original stuff than I thought. I am excited about that! I have a lot of passions I can write about (and maybe some fiction too!) But it is a departure from what I thought I’d be doing.

Up next for me? I want to flesh out my Writer Tools series a little. I plan to do a guide book on the process I used to turn my blog into a book, and another for Canadians who aspire to publish on the Kindle store. I also am working on some art-themed stuff!

1 COMMENT

  1. I’m not surprised by your hassles with republishing classic, public domain texts. Carefully chosen and with enough additional material, they’ll do well enough. My Eugenics and Other Evils (G. K. Chesterton, 1922), has a paid-for Italian translation. Just this morning, I got an email for them wanting to discussing adding ebook rights. Pick the right title and you’ll do OK.

    But I also tell people that it’s hard to compete with free. Your enhanced version may be worth the added cost, but not all potential buyers may feel that way. That may be why Amazon is being such a pain. It doesn’t want to bother to distinguish between the two.

    And whatever that book is about, it needs to break out of the ugly ranks of bookish junk food and look good. Those who’re interesting in good typography in books, including ebooks, might want to listen to this speech by Charlie NIx at the Ebookcraft conference held in March of 2014 by BookNet Canada:

    https://booknetcanada.wistia.com/medias/8da22src07

    Good luck with your publishing! Keep experimenting and you’ll find what works for you. I’m not getting rich with it, but I am enjoying doing books on when I worked, years ago, caring for kids at a top children’s hospital. I enjoy bringing those long-ago memories back to life.

    –Michael W. Perry, My Nights with Leukemia

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