KDP SELECT - How to work it.

So for those of you who follow my journey, you'll be aware that almost a year ago (May 2012)  I wrote a post on 'Why Amazon KDP and I are on a break' 

In that post I explored the reasons why KDP wasn't working for me. Well a year later, I've approached the whole KDP thing in a different way and hopefully the results will be quite interesting.

The biggest issue with KDP is the exclusivity clause; which is in my opinion is unnecessary and aggressively oppressive. It is certainly not something that the Big 6 are playing ball with, which led me to the question, 'How are the traditional publishers using KDP select to their advantage?'

There are 2 main ways.

1) They are releasing sample chapters in the guise of 'books' - offering the reader a few free samples with a link to purchase the full novel.

2) They are having their author's release a short story or a novella with plenty of links to the other works (which are not on KDP select)

What they are NOT doing is signing up their main or whole novel up to KDP select and the exclusivity clause.


In order to do option 1, releasing sample chapters, they are having to 'publish' and register it as a separate work on Amazon. This does NOT involve having to register it with another ISBN or a catalogue at Neilsen, it simply means uploading it via Amazon KDP platform and having an AISN assigned to it.

Somehow this option doesn't quite sit right with me; yes, it's a clever way of directly targeting new readers by hitting the rankings in the FREE listings, but all they are really offering the reader is the same as the downloadable sample chapters which Kindle already provide. What it does achieve is the cluttering of the free rankings with samples of traditionally published novels that are already high up on the paid listings.

However, I have learned a lot from option 2 and have come up with the following plan.

NEW COVER

FRONT COVER: Firstly, it is more important than ever to have a front cover that grabs the readers' attention when jumping into the free for all race, so I have had my front cover professionally designed with an image that is fresh, eye-catching and immediately communicates genre.


SHOWCASEEven though they are shorts, I have invested in having them Beta Read and edited professionally - they are going to be the potential portal to my other works for new readers, so the first impression needs to be good.

OLD COVER

VIEW IT AS A PROMOTIONAL PACK: Secondly, I have thought about this 'giveaway' novella as a promotional pack. A teaser / gift pack for the reader. I ensured that there was plenty for the reader to enjoy so that they did not feel short changed. I included a personal note, a biography and YES, I INCLUDED CHAPTERS 1-4 OF MY NOVEL as a sample read at the end of the 'gift'.

CONNECTIONS WITH THE READER: The personal note explained how the short story, 'The Venus Club' led to the writing of 'Beautiful Freaks'. This then led onto sample chapters of 1-4 of the novel with a comment at the end saying TO READ THE REST OF BEAUTIFUL FREAKS FOR $0.99 CLICK HERE.

FOLLOW UP: I have ensured that the price of 'Beautiful Freaks' is reduced to $0.99 for a significant period after the promotion because I want to capture the reader once their curiosity has been hooked.

PREPARATION: 
TIMING: The promotion is on at the same time as a major blog tour for 'Beautiful Freaks' a connected piece of work, which means that there is quite a lot of internet media coverage going on already, allowing me to piggy back off of it.

MEDIA PACKS & BLOGGERS / FRIEND'S SITES: I also created a media pack and let other writers and bloggers know that it was available, making it really easy for them to create a spotlight on their blog. This has allowed me to direct my twitter followers and facebook followers to the spotlights and links to the promotional giveaway without directly hitting them with 'spammy' links to the promo. (Although it is acceptable in my opinion to use some of these direct links and posts because after all, your followers need to be kept informed)

CALLING IN FAVOURS: If you have worked hard at becoming an integrated member of the indie writers' community, shouting out and supporting your fellow writers then every now and then it is okay to ask them for a favour. Our community is awesome and I've been really touched by the efforts and support some of my fellow authors have offered.

INVEST: Set a budget for the promotion function on Facebook and some coverage on Twitter. It doesn't have to be a fortune but it offers a little boost to getting your information posts out there.

WORK IT BABY: During the promotional period you have to be on it, checking your stats, tweeting your peeps and announcing the achievements you are making. It's about letting the world know you're showering them with gifts without harassing them.

Watch this space for my evaluation of this promotion. So far it is going really well. 'The Venus Club + Song of The Moth' (2 Fairy Tales of Horror) has made the top 100 in the Horror charts in both the U.K and the U.S and has been in the top 20 for Historical Fantasy in both the U.K and the U.S.A. It would be really nice to see if it can hit the hallowed #1 spot but we'll just have to wait and see.

AND ON THAT NOTE, YOU CAN PICK UP YOUR FREEBIE ON THE FOLLOWING LINKS UNTIL MONDAY MIDNIGHT GMT.

U.K Link >>>  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Venus-Club-Horror-short-ebook/dp/B004V0VXFQ

U.S Link>>>   http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V0VXFQ

The Indie Author: The tethered Cash Cow?

It's now officially official, there has been a reading revolution and it has happened super quickly. In 2011 14.9 million e-readers were shipped world wide, add that to the 14.9 million of 2012 and the predicted 10.9 million expected to be shipped in 2010, we get a shed load of people who own an e-reader. (That's not counting the tens of millions who own a tablet with e-reading application)

Undoubtedly Amazon led the way in the e-Reader revolution with its Kindle e-Reader. The mega powerhouse that is the Amazon book store was suddenly portable and instantly on hand to anybody with one of their magical little devices.

When coupled with its incredibly easy to use self publishing platform the indie book revolution exploded into the world. I was fortunate to be at the right place in the right time at the end of 2010 with the release of my first indie published book.

At the time, Amazon offered writers like me the opportunity to indie publish their work and have a 'level' playing field amongst the traditionally published houses - in fact a possible advantage. Offering 70% royalties on books over £1.49 was an incredibly enticing opportunity. Some writers who were canny enough to be prophetic already with a back catalogue of 10+ books even found themselves making hundreds of thousands of pounds (and we've heard about the millionaire indies, John Locke and Amanda Hocking)

But with the e-Reader thing going bonkers and the self-publishing world changing every turn of the Atlantic clock, the bubbles of optimism were sure to burst. And so they have...

The impact of the $0.99c Price wars: And the real winner is...

Firstly nobody really understood or thought that the price wars would impact on indie works so much. Humbled by their legacy-reputation of vanity publishing, indies soon realised that in order to gain a readership they would have to lower the price (and value? of their book) to $0.99 / £0.79p. I resisted for a long time, not because I believe readers should be milked for every cent, but because I knew that the $0.99c route was a very perilous one indeed. In the end market forces forced the decision on me and I lowered the price of my first book to $0.99c. It was a gamble that paid off in lots of ways but Amazon was quickly becoming Saturnine; yes, you can lower your book to $0.99c but you will only get 30% royalty.

There are now hundreds of thousands of $0.99c books on Amazon, and that is a lot of $0.70c profits filling up their coffers.

I am yet to understand why there is this difference in % royalties other than Amazon knowing that they are on to a very, very good thing and the indie writer is now nothing more than a domesticated cash-cow: Tethered fast by the KDP select program which insists on exclusivity to take part.  Goodness knows why (other than it being an overt attempt to monopolise the book selling world)

KDP Select & The dangers of all your eggs in one basket: 

In principle this is an excellent facility. When it first came out I jumped at it and had several very successful promotions. However it was early days for The Knight Trilogy, and at that time I was happy to be 'exclusively' on Amazon. But as time has gone on and I've had my docs specially formatted for Smashwords premium catalogue (allowing me access to iTunes / iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Nook and Kobo platforms, establishing profiles on each of them) I am reluctant now to pull The Knight Trilogy out of those for the sake of being able to freely give away a couple of thousand copies on Amazon.

 I'm increasingly wary about putting all my eggs in one proverbial basket - especially with a predicted fall in e-Reader sales (predicted to be as low as 8 million in 2014) as Apple, Samsung and Android tablets come storming up the market. (For more information on these market trends head over to http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Tablets-Surge-Ereaders-Struggle/1009555 )

I opted out of the KDP select program for this very reason about 12 months ago in order that I could investigate other platforms - unfortunately, such is Amazon's hold on the worldwide market that sales on sites such as Smashwords and e-zreader are very minimal.

How to make a living on Amazon: Series and coming to an agreement with your readers

I'm lucky that the genre and audience I write for lends itself towards series, which means I can afford to have my first book on at 0.99c and then have the rest of the series on at a more realistic living price. (Point of note: I have a 88% follow through on readership, with readers happy to pay £1.49 - £2.49 for books in the rest of the series.)

Interestingly though the readership thing is complex and despite having an 88% 'loyalty' for The Knight Trilogy, my stand alone novel 'Beautiful Freaks' has really struggled and I am probably going to have to lower that to $0.99 for a time (Gut galling as it is by far a more technically accomplished book and a gorgeous story - it's the favourite of all I have written)

I love writing, I love story telling even more. I want to spend my life writing books but I need to be able to pay my mortgage and put shoes on my children's feet. So I'm going to marry my love of writing with my business head; I am writing a 7 book series - and no I'm not compromising on quality. It took me four years to write the Knight Trilogy. I am planning on writing and publishing book 1-2 of The Meadowsweet Chronicles this year. I couldn't have done this four years ago (or before completing NaNoWriMo or investing in Scrivener) but I am more skilled, a stronger writer, wiser about what my readers want from a book. My readers want beautifully, passionately, honestly told stories that let them escape. They do not want the wordsmithery of Umberto Eco or the almost too clever genius of Will Self that leaves them feeling intellectually unworthy. My readers are clever, astute, savvy and will not take any messing - they know what they like and they have high expectations: I strive to meet them. My love of writing and their love of reading will make us a happy bunch.

From the business point of view, the books will be lower priced at the beginning of the series (after all my readers are taking a gamble with their hard earned cash) and then we will come to a compromise whereby the reader acknowledges my need to eat and their need to read on. However, I will never screw my readers over by whacking them with a $24.00 price tag for one of my new releases! (They'll stay below the $3.99 tag)

N.B Bundles: You can see from the image that another way around the 30% royalty issue is to bundle all your books into one and then charge $3.00  for the complete bundle. This way your reader is still paying the golden 0.99c a book but the writer is getting 70% royalty. It's swings and roundabouts - you lose the potential of a higher gain by readers going onto buy 2-3 at a higher price but you capture a 70% royalty outlay from the start. A few of these a month really boosts your royalty account.

How to bite back the hand that feeds: Refuse to play Amazon ball.

There is no denying that as an indie, I NEED Amazon and apart from their blatant exploitation of my vulnerable position as an indie, they serve me very well. Over 90% of my sales come from Amazon and it is because of them that I have bread on my table (I could afford wine to go with it if they cut me a 70% royalty on 0.99c!)

But there are ways that we could change things and one of these is promoting more of our work with the Smashwords links. Smashwords is a 'hidden' shop. Authors and those in the writing community are mostly aware of it and it has become very much the place where authors buy their own reading material. Smashwords offers a set royalty of 70% regardless of list price. It also allows the author to run coupons, giveaways etc without the demands of exclusivity.

Smashwords gives readers the choice of their download format - catering for almost every form of e-Reader and tablet device. Just because a reader has a Kindle it doesn't mean they are trapped into buying their works from Amazon - we can chip away at their sales monopoly. Readers can hop over to Smashwords, fill their Kindle with $0.99c books and know that the writer is getting a fair deal - a living wage.

Call to arms: 

• When tweeting links to your books alternate them between the Amazon page and the Smashwords page. 
• Write a blog post explaining to readers the buying options they have and how you are striving for a better deal for writers. 
• Refuse to put all your books on Amazon at $0.99 and help to push the 'norm' back to $1.49 and a 70% royalty agreement
• Love Amazon for all they do for us but don't let it be unconditional. Run your giveaways through Smashwords and spread your book across various platforms (Beware the falling e-Reader sales) 

USEFUL LINKS:

SMASHWORDS PAGE: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/katiemjohn 

e-READER ARTICLE at emarketer.com http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Tablets-Surge-Ereaders-Struggle/1009555

Added at 3.39 Saturday 23rd Feb: 

As I said in the post, things change so rapidly and here is living proof over at Publishers' Weekly

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/56042-indie-booksellers-sue-amazon-big-six-over-e-book-drm.html 

It seems that it isn't only authors that are feeling the tethered effect of the Amazon powerhouse. Several independent booksellers are suing publishers over DRM and the monopolisation of the e-book market by Amazon.

 “Consequently,” the complaint states, “the vast majority of readers who wish to read an e-book published by the Big Six will purchase the e-book from Amazon.”

My 90 Day KDP Select Experiment: Day 30

This post follows on from the post My 90 Day Select Experiment. Why I signed up.

Now I'm a month in and I thought I'd let you know how it's going. Two of the primary reasons I joined KDP Select were; firstly, market forces were already making me almost entirely Amazon exclusive anyway (my sales from other platforms were very tiny) and secondly, I had slogged to no avail to crack the American e-book Market.

Despite various attempts, giveaways, U.S blog visits, tweetdeck scheduling, I was reaching a readership of about 10 people a month in the US.

DECEMBER SALES IMPACT: (Joined KDP Select on 20th Dec.)

The intial thing I did when I joined KDP select was to take advantage of their free promotion tool. I set a 2 day free promotion for the 20/21st of December and the U.S downloads went bonkers. Over the course of those two days I gave away over 1500 copies in the U.S alone. This was exciting, but then everybody loves a freebie and I wasn't overly confident on how it would impact on actual paid sales.

Impulsively, I stuck it on for another free day on boxing day, thinking it a good gift for anybody with a new kindle. Again I had almost a 1,000 U.S downloads in 24 hrs. During the rest of that month there were 900 paid sales of #1, 'The Forest of Adventures', in the U.S.

One of the reasons I had been so happy to give away so many copies was because #2 of the series, 'Immortal Beloved', was already published on Amazon and I was banking on the giveaway copies of #1 converting to #2 sales. This happened to a pleasing extent. Around 40% of the giveaway copies translated into #2 sales. In truth I had hoped for more, but since receiving my own kindle and going crazy for all of the freebies, I understand that sometimes the freebies (no matter how promising) tend to languish in my TBR collection. I'm still hoping that my book will be rediscovered when peeps run out of an immediate read.

As a result of the U.S sales I made it into the top #5000 ranked paid books on the Amazon.com and bagged a whole load of lovely new readers and positive reviews. It also made it to #11 of Paranormal Romance #20 of world myths #25 of fairytales.

My stable U.K market followed the same pattern and I made it into the top #600 of the paid Kindle charts, becoming a #1 bestselling fairytale and sitting comfortably in the top #20 of three other categories.

IMPACT ON JANUARY SALES:

U.S - The impact has been significant. Now my U.S market is significantly stronger than the U.K, having sold almost 500 copies. Interestingly the sales conversion rate from #1 to #2 is around 80% - so this either proves that when peeps pay for the book they read it quicker and go on to purchase the sequel, or that peeps are gradually getting around to reading #1. Although I have slipped back down in the U.S rankings to around #10,000-#20,000, it is a considerable jump from languishing around #300,000 mark.

U.K - It's difficult to read the impact this month on U.K sales. The maket for kindle books is still considerably smaller than in the U.S. I do think that maybe as a result of giving so many away there has been a slightly negative impact on the sales of #1 this month, however it isn't anything disasterous and the sales of #2 are more than financially compensating for it.

FUTURE: I still have 2 days of promotion left and I am going to hold onto these until the end of March, closer to the realease date of #3 'Starfire' - I think that this will make an excellent launch promotion and also hopefully boost the sales of all the series into the next quater.

OBSERVATION ABOUT PROMOTION SETTING:
It would seem (from very early analysis) that it is better to block the promo days together. Allowing more time for the book to travel up the freebie charts gets it far more visual coverage on the Amazon sites. It also seems to have a less negative impact on some readers' attitudes. Running the promotion for 2 days and then again for 1 day a fortnight later invited a very irate reviewer who expressed 'hatered' for authors who make some readers pay $0.99 for a book and then go on to give it away free. As a result she gave me a 1* review which was a shame when given because she felt cheated out of 0.70 pence.

KDP Select isn't going to be for everybody. I think that I have found it works for me because in my case 'The Forest of Adventures' is part of the series 'The Knight Trilogy' - I'm not sure that stand alone books would find the same benefit - although on saying that do go and check in with Jeff Bennington (you can find him on twitter @Tweetthebook). His book 'Reunion', a stand alone paranormal, crime, thriller followed almost the same pattern as mine but with even better results, reaching the #20 of paid U.K sales following promos.

Whatever you do, do your research - read around and check in at twitter. Lots of writers are sharing their experience of KDP select and it's an interesting range of experiences.