Tanya Lisle

Creative on a health break

Tag: indie pub

  • Distribution: Amazon

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    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. ((Met the guy in charge of KDP once. Just the slimiest person I have ever met.))

    Amazon KDP

    Amazon’s program is called KDP, or Kindle Direct Publishing, ((I think. I have never actually looked it up)) 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. ((And just an awful file format))

    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. ((Heads up, someone can return your book after they’ve had plenty of time to read it)) 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. ((Other countries do not, though)) 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 page ((The amount that I did,  anyway)) 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, ((Subtract an amount that they use to pay select books bonuses)) 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 week ((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)) 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. ((Which is how people list their books for free)) 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.

  • Some things to prepare

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    We’re getting really close to actual distribution and getting your book out there! Or mine, however we’re looking at this. Now, this is going to be a do as I say not as I do sort of thing, because you should have this stuff done, but I never do. This will be quick and you’ll be so happy if you keep it all in a document somewhere. Anyway, onward!

    Synopsis

    The write up for your book that will go on the sale page. What is your book about? What would you put on the back cover of your book to get people who picked it up to decide to open it and flip through it? Remember that this synopsis will be truncated as preview text on some outlets, and others will ask for a short version and a long version of this. Either way, I would suggest keeping it to two paragraphs at most, since people will probably not want to spend a lot of time on the page reading it to decide if they want it.

    Categories

    When I say categories, I mean BISAC codes. Read through them and make a list of seven of them, and put them in order of how important they are to you. Different outlets will ask for different numbers of categories, and some of them will use older or newer lists. Or so I’ve found. It’s good to have backup categories.

    Keywords

    Keywords are things people can search for to find your books. This is text that is not in the categories or the description or the title. There are a lot of articles about how to adjust these to hack the system and get all the sales, but I tend to just use them as intended. If there’s zombies, I add “zombies” as a keyword. These are less important, but they are useful to help people find your book.

    And now we get to distribution!

  • Publishing as a Canadian

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    Now seems like an excellent time to mention that I am, in fact, Canadian. All those weird random Us in words? Totally intentional. ((Except in some books, where I remember to get rid of those. It varies.)) 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 distributor ((Smashwords, Createspace, etc.)) 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%. ((For now, at least. Let’s hope that trade agreement with the US holds for just a little longer…)) 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 TIN ((Tax Identification Number, I think? The one for my business)) 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, ((You don’t have to do this, but I did)) 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.

  • File preparation

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    So in order to get this stuff all online, you’re going to need to get your files ready. I am at this point assuming that you have finished writing and done all of the editing passes until you are happy with the final result. Once you are, then it’s time to format the files.

    Documents

    First of all, you’re going to want to read this the Smashwords guide on this. It is invaluable, even if it is long. It’s also the most restrictive and, honestly, only Smashwords is quite this strict on their formatting guidelines, so keep that in mind. 

    I tend to work out of .doc files. ((Multiple, but we’ll get into that with distribution)) They are the easiest to manage and edit later, plus most places will take them and do your conversions for you. ((Looking at you PublishDrive. We’ll get to you.)) Since I don’t do a lot of custom formatting, it’s the easiest for me to work with.

    And now for actually doing it. Since I write in Google Docs, I copy and paste all of my text into Word. From there, I open up the styles panel and then start murdering any style that isn’t Normal, Italic, Link, Center, Heading 1, or Heading 2. You can do this by selecting one of those custom styles ((Mine are always called Body Text something something something)), and clicking on the little arrow to the right of it. There’s a Select All option to click. Once it’s all highlighted, you can then click on any of the other styles ((Usually Normal)) and it will change all of the styles at once.

    A word of warning about this method, since I write a lot of books with telepathy. This doesn’t always preserve the italics and other formatting. So be careful.

    Once you’ve limited the styles used in the text down to just those few styles, then you’re usually good to go. Although, there’s one more thing for me.

    Front and Back Matter

    I have two specific things I always add.

    The first is a title page. It just has the name of the book, sometimes the name of the series, my name, the name of my imprint ((Scrap Paper Entertainment)) and the year of publication.

    The second is a page with a small bio on me, and a list of links on how to get in touch, including Twitter, Facebook, and the Mailing List. No one, to my knowledge, has ever clicked on them, but I’m in the habit of this now.

    Another common thing to add is a table of contents. I don’t personally recommend this in most cases, because the file will have an internal table of contents that will be more useful to your reader than the one at the front of the book.

    Calibre and ePub

    Now, every once in a while, you will need an ePub version. Of all the types, ePub will be the most versatile. Everything takes it, ((Some will only take it)) and this is the format it will be converted to ((Except Amazon)) so it’s handy to have.

    If you don’t already have it, get Calibre. If you have formatted your book as per the above, it will convert those docs really nicely into any ebook format you want. It will also allow you to edit the files directly, but you’ll need to know some basic HTML ((And have a working knowledge of email HTML because it’s pretty similar with how much of a pain it is)) in order to make it work.

    Personally, I only use this for very specific instances, but we will get into those more a bit later.

    Covers

    I’m hoping you already have your cover done. You’ll want it in .jpg, since that’s what’s actually going to upload to all outlets.

    For most, you will want a .jpg file of about 1563 x 2500 pixels for the cover. It changes by outlet, but 100% of places will at least accept a file of this size without any issue, though one I’ll be talking about will ask for larger.