Alice only has one year left to win her bet with the Bandersnatch, or be trapped as a prisoner in his garden forever. And Alice isn’t the only one losing heart. The Queen continues to steal peoples hearts, and the refugees from Neverland are the latest victims. For some reason, Alice can’t put them back and Adam refuses to leave Wonderland until they stop her.
The pressure is on for Alice to keep the magic books from falling into the wrong hands. The clock is ticking and failure means none of the stolen hearts will be returned, Adam will remain trapped behind the mirror, and Alice will be forgotten in the Bandersnatch’s garden. Forever.
Let’s get one thing straight. Amazon is just… awful as a company. The’ve put a bit of a stranglehold on a lot of the online publishing industry and keep trying to make things worse so that they can make a profit. Because they are a company and their publishing arm is just… ugh.1
Amazon KDP
Amazon’s program is called KDP, or Kindle Direct Publishing,2 and it is one of those friends that I have to see more than I want to see. It will take .doc files and the conversion is fairly painless, though their viewer to check them online is… eeeeh. Look, you’re pretty much always going to want to download an actual copy rather than use an online viewer. Important to note: Amazon works in .mobi files, which are pretty much only used by Kindle. But, because Amazon is everywhere, .mobi is still important.3
Amazon’s sales statistics dashboard is the second best of them all, which is very pathetic. It will give you live sales updates, but it will not tell you which book got sold on their visualizations without selecting the book individually. It also will not display if a book has been returned.4 Also missing: A running total of what they owe you. You find that out right before they’re about to pay you, two months after the sale.
It’s also the channel that I have sold the most books through by far. The sales are fairly decent and regular, mostly because Americans buy most of their ebooks through Amazon.5 And Amazon knows it.
The Problem with KDP Select
So Amazon has this one program in order to access their extras. KDP Select. If you enroll in it, you can get free days during each three month period you are enrolled in, or the ability to offer it for a discount to promote your new release to the wide audience that Amazon has. They even have a page to help promote your discounted book! And it gets your book in Kindle Unlimited, where you can get paid per read page!
Unfortunately, enrolling in this means you can’t put out your book anywhere else. No Barnes & Noble, no Google Play, no Kobo, nothing. You technically can’t even put it out on a personal store that you run on your own site. You cannot do a wide distribution.
But Kindle Unlimited! Except that the amount that you get paid per page6 dropped drastically from the time I started to the time I eventually pulled my books from the program. From what I understand, Amazon has a certain fund every month to pay authors for their pages read. They take that amount,7 divide by the total numbers of pages read per month across Kindle, and you end up with fractions of a cent per page. This has no bearing on the price of your book.
This and the ability to discount your book for a week8 or set it to free for a few days are all great for promotion and getting your books into the hands of people, but my experience has been that people who get a free book off Amazon don’t come back for more. So I don’t advocate for this long term.
Pricing
We talked about payment already, but let’s talk a little about pricing, because Amazon has made this standard across the industry. Basically what you need to know is this:
Below $2.99 – You get 30%
$2.99 and above – You get 70%
Something else to be generally aware of is that Amazon will price match any price you have listed elsewhere.9 On top of that, I’ve also seen them change my pricing on different stores, or all stores even, without my setting anything.
And then there’s the prints
So Createspace looks like it’s getting absorbed by KDP Print. Currently, you are much better off with Createspace because they will do both proof copies and discount any author copies you order for your own purposes. Personally, I won’t be making the switch. I’m currently looking at Ingram Spark when the time comes and Amazon eventually kills Createspace.
Met the guy in charge of KDP once. Just the slimiest person I have ever met. [↩]
Subtract an amount that they use to pay select books bonuses [↩]
The Countdown deals are pretty sweet and a nice way to get some quick sales! They even actually advertise these for you a little, unlike the free books [↩]
Okay, so when I said that next was the fun stuff I… lied. Kind of. See, I’ve changed my process lately, and I’ve decided to put all of my new books out in print. This means that getting print done has to happen sooner, which means it’s the first outlet I’m going for.
So, quick word to start. I chose Createspace because it does print on demand with minimal cost to set up, the books they turn out are of good quality, they have a good number of options, and they let you order your own books at a discounted rate. KDP, Amazon’s ebook arm, does have print options now, but I don’t know if the first two are still true about it, and the third is not. And now, onward!
File preparation
So there’s a lot of things to deal with here. What size do you want your book? How do you prepare the PDFs so that they’ll work? Bleed? No bleed? Widows? Orphans? Why does all this sound like a horror novel?
I won’t be getting into the specifics of it here.
I prepare all of my files, except sometimes the cover. And even when I don’t do the cover, I usually have to convert the file into a PDF. Explaining how to use various programs, laying out a book, and the practices around widows and orphans, I would strongly suggest just looking up how to do it yourself or hiring someone who will do it for you.1
Once your files are done and you’ve submitted all the information to Createspace, they will have a person review your files. Once they have reviewed them, I order a physical proof copy. And then the fun begins.
Proof edits
If you follow me, you will have seen some of my proofing. When I get a physical copy of my book, I go through and read it with a stack of post it notes. As I’m reading, I make notes of any formatting errors that occur. I also make note of any editing things that I missed while I was doing those previous edits. And I always find something I need to fix editing-wise.
Once I have all of those marked out, I go through the print file and fix all of those errors. I also have the Word doc open and fix the errors in that file as well. Both at the same time, until all of the notes are gone.
I usually go through at least two rounds of this process, sometimes more, until I’m comfortable with everything.
Everything good?
Awesome! Files are all good, the print copy looks good, and we’re all ready to go. I don’t hit publish yet, but make sure everything is ready for publication. Now that I’m doing things a little differently, this is when I pick a publication date. Createspace does not allow you to set that date, or put things up for pre-order, so whatever date I pick to put my ebook out, I make a note to hit publish on Createspace 3 days before. It can take up to 3 days for the book to actually show up on Amazon.
Distribution
Okay, so here’s the tricky thing with ISBNs. Createspace will give you an ISBN, which will list Createspace as the publisher. Not ideal. But there’s a whole section of distribution that opens up to you if you do it this way.
On the other hand, you use your own ISBN and you get to be listed as your own publisher. But you will not have your print book listed in the catalog for academic institutions. So… be aware of that.
Other than that, your book will appear in just about every other online store within about two weeks of publication. If getting in libraries through hoping that they look through the catalog and find your book is a priority, use a Createspace ISBN. If not, you can use your own.
Pricing and Payment
Print book pricing works differently than ebook pricing, which we will get into. For print books, there is a base cost for Createspace to make and distribute your book, and then you set an amount on top of that which will reflect your profits. You want to make $5 per book? You set your price to $5 higher than that base price. Once your book is out and for sale, all you have to do is wait for people to buy it and watch the profits roll in.
Now, quick reminder. I am Canadian. This means I get to let you know about the fun thing about not having an American bank account.2
If you have a Canadian bank account, they will only pay you when you hit a certain threshold of earnings. That threshold is $100. Per currency as near as I can tell. I’m getting close to finding out, because I have only recently made a lot of books available through print. But when I do, I will be getting a real, physical, paper cheque!3
On the up side, I do sell print books! I just haven’t seen a payment from it yet because I’m waiting on the payment threshold.
I know I didn’t go much into the specifics of Createspace, but it seems to be changing of late and some things I may bring up4 probably aren’t going to be accurate in a month or two. And so, let’s move on to the parent company. Let’s talk Amazon.
Or hire me? I am considering doing some of this stuff freelance. [↩]
Or an English one, because they don’t do this to folks with a UK bank account either [↩]
Now seems like an excellent time to mention that I am, in fact, Canadian. All those weird random Us in words? Totally intentional.1 And because I’m Canadian, there’s a few things that function more than a little differently for me on the legal side of things.
ISBNs
First and foremost: For most outlets, you do not actually need an ISBN.
There are benefits to having your own ISBN in some cases, though. It does allow you to list your own imprint instead of the distributor2 which is nice, though many of these places will sometimes designate you their own ISBN as well. I have chosen to get my own, personally.
Because I’m Canadian, ISBNs work a little differently here than they do in the US. In the US, you just buy them, but in Canada, you can get them free! All you have to do is go and request a login from Collections Canada. Once you have it, they will give you a prefix and you get 10 ISBNs at a time. Use them up, and then you can send in another request. It’s taken at most 24 hours for them to approve me for another 10.
They do, however, ask that you make a Legal Deposit of your book to the Archive. When you do this, you will have two options: Open access or Restricted access. Open access means that the copy of your book will be publicly available to anyone looking through the digital archive. You don’t really want this if you’re looking to make money off of it, so be sure to select Restricted access. You cannot change this from what I’ve found after depositing it.
You don’t have to do this, technically. As in, they don’t check as far as I’m aware. It’s mostly an honour system thing. Because Canada.
Tax Forms
The other thing you really need to know is about taxes. Most of the companies are American or deal directly with Americans to the point that they might as well be American. And that causes some issues for us dear people from other countries. Such as all of the outlets taking 30% of all profits and having it all go directly to the IRS.
Luckily, as a Canadian, I can use my SSN for… all of them now. You used to have to go through the process of calling a US tax office repeatedly until you got someone who would just do what you were asking instead of sending you to a complicated form that they might reject if you happened to fill it out with the wrong ink colour. Now, you can fill it out with your personal tax information and be on your way and that 30% will go down to 0%.3 This changes by country, so if you’re outside of the US and Canada, then you may have a different method.
I probably won’t be using it for much longer, honestly, and will be trying to switch it over to my TIN4 because I may not want all of this tied directly to my own personal tax information. I have gone through the trouble of registering Scrap Paper Entertainment as a separate business,5 but I have been slow to move the tax forms over. Mostly because I don’t currently know if they will take my TIN in the same way as they take my SSN.
And now that that’s out of the way, we get to move on to… more prep work.
Except in some books, where I remember to get rid of those. It varies. [↩]
