Having failed to get a publisher or even an agent for my little non-fiction book, I’m considering self-publishing on Kindle Direct Publishing. I’ve read all the conditions and everything and am not unhappy with the terms. I have plenty of resources in terms of book format and layout, so I won’t be needing help in that area.
Anyone had any issues with the formatting, uploading, publishing, marketing, sales or delivery? Any gotchas I mightn’t have thought of? Has anyone used their ancillary services like On-Demand Publishing, Author Central, Amazon Advantage, Amazon Associates and so on?
Basically after general experiences and tips.
Oh, and one specific question - how did you decide on a price?
A friend of my husband’s self-published his sci fi fantasy book on Amazon. He, I believe, used its on-demand ancillary so as not to be left “holding the bag” (or books), as it were. He also had a tie-in with Create Space. I’m not sure how that worked, though.
I know he’s considering putting out a Kindle version with the hope that its lower price will entice more people to buy it.
I bellieve his initial listing price was in the mid teens – say, $16.95 for a 200-odd page book. I suspect he arrived at the price after checking the going price for similar books in the genre.
I could ask my husband for more details if you’d like.
I did, but I don’t have much to say about it. It worked. Note, however, that if people don’t need your product all the time, they can just buy it and return it. That proved to be a problem for me, since shorter products can basically be treated as a try-out.
Obviously I didn’t make it clear - I’m exclusively talking about Kindle publishing, not a real printed book. I’d be interested if he’s gone further with that than I have (basically I’ve read all the online info but not actually done anything yet). thank you!
You’re talking about physical printed books, not digital, I think?
I hear the current prevailing wisdom is that if you are a new, untried author your first ebook should be $0.99, and if it does well you can raise the price a little on subsequent books. I know of one guy who’s done this at Amazon and it’s worked out quite well for him so far.
I’ve self published on Amazon, and they have an EXCELLENT forum for Kindle publishers, where you can find threads where people discuss most of the problems you might have and how to solve them, and you can ask questions too of course. I highly recommend joining the Kindle Publishing forums and reading them before proceeding with publishing there. If you like what you see, go for it.
I’ve never self-published but I know someone with four Kindle books, horror/crime genre. The first she priced at .99, the most recent $3.99.
She’s sold quite a few, but she has five or six active blogs, maintains a very heavy online presence on writers’ boards and generally spends a lot of time promoting herself. Without doing that I doubt she’d have sold many because the writing is really bad.
I have two science fiction novels I self-published on Kindle, but just as digital copies, I don’t offer physical copies. I set the price at 99 cents since I am not a well-known author. Tjhat’s only 35 cents a download profit, but I have been reasonably successful selling them and I’m working on sequels. Hopefully I can charge a bit more for the sequels.
It’s light-hearted non-fiction; I’ve gathered a bunch of “geographical misfits”; things that didn’t actually originate where you might think (eg panama hat, alsatian dog, guinea pig) and written hopefully amusing and informative short explanations of how they got those names.
Thank you. I’ve been unsuccessful getting any lasting industry interest; one agent was quite keen to represent me for a while and then suddenly (literally one day to the next) went cold after he gave it to someone else to read. So maybe it’s just not very good or interesting :shrug:
That’s a subject that’s right up my alley, I love discovering word origins!
The same thing happened with my husband’s friend – sent it out, it garnered interest with a particular agent, then for no reason the agent dropped him :shrug:
OK, the Kindle stuff: Friend had both digital and hard copies made of his sci fi book. The Kindle version, overall, has been more of a success because of its price point ($0,99 – friend isn’t a big-name author either) He’s since published a Kindle version of a personal essay collection as well as a book about antique guns. The antique gun version is selling for a couple of bucks, given that the friend is now somewhat of a “name” because of the sci fi book.
I think he told my husband he’s had about 40K downloads of the sci fi book. It’s a good story, the price is right, and it initially got his name out there.
I honestly don’t know what he did about promoting it, though. That’s the thing – self-promotion can be very, very difficult, especially for a first-time author.