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freebooter posted:OK. I'll have to give it an edit, so I'm not doing it any time majorly soon, but are there any good free resources that sort of hold your hand through the process? This from the OP... I'll check up on that link with the site's owner and see if it's coming back or not. Good catch! Also - seriously, ask questions.  Speaking for myself, I'd much rather answer questions up front than stare at another Ethereal Girls six months later.
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Jul 4, 2015 16:03
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For you super romance guys and gals worried about the per page stuff. Prefacing this idea with "I don't know much about it all. Just an avid reader of the thread for inspiration." Would it be possible to release compendiums of your work perhaps? Place the best selling stuff near the back of the book surrounded by a couple of new 'bonus' stories? If people skip to the new stories, will it count the previous pages as read?
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Jul 5, 2015 04:59
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Bompacho posted:For you super romance guys and gals worried about the per page stuff. I mean there's all sorts of ways to game the system but that doesn't change the fact that this change to the system is really lovely.
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Jul 5, 2015 05:31
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For erotica shorts, I'm doing okay at $2.99 just on Amazon. My "going wide" hasn't published yet because it's taking forever for D2D to publish. I submitted like 36 hours ago, and only Kobo and Tolino have gone through. Kobo is incredibly small and almost insignificant looking, and I couldn't even figure out what the gently caress Tolino is from googling. I'm probably going to get around to uploading to Excitica and other smaller markets just to get those few extra dollars per day. If this were in the old system, I would have made ~$150 today, but I made $55 with just sales at $2.99. Once my whole library is actually wide, that will hopefully be a boost to the total, and I'm still getting a lot of newsletter subs. My hope is that as more authors pull out of KU, sales at $2.99 will pick up even more. If Amazon completely fucks this up 100%, then maybe some other market will emerge for erotica. The readers aren't going to disappear, so I have to assume the money is still there to be found.
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Jul 5, 2015 06:13
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I don't get this new system. If people are paying the purchase price for a book, why isn't a set percentage from that going to the publisher/author? Where's that money going?
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Jul 5, 2015 06:15
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The new system in no way affects people who straight up buy a book, and it doesn't affect authors who only sell stuff for a set price outside of KU. If you price a book at $2.99, and someone buys it for $2.99, you keep 70% of that. If you price at $2.98 or lower, you keep 35% of that and Amazon keeps 65%. The new system only affects Kindle Unlimited. People pay $10/month to read any book they want in KU, for free. The new system is determining how that money is split up between all the books in Kindle Unlimited. Previously it paid based on borrows. Each borrow was worth one flat rate determined by all borrows in the system, now it's pages read.
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Jul 5, 2015 07:08
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Can a book both be for purchase and for KU borrowing, or is it an either/or thing?
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Jul 5, 2015 09:35
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Shima Honnou posted:Can a book both be for purchase and for KU borrowing, or is it an either/or thing? They can be both, but only on Amazon. If you put a book into Select (Kindle Unlimited) then you can't have the book available at any other retailer.
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Jul 5, 2015 10:03
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Sundae posted:I'll check up on that link with the site's owner and see if it's coming back or not. Good catch! OK, cool. So, first book in a series being free, subsequent books being priced - good idea or bad idea?
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Jul 5, 2015 10:58
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angel opportunity posted:For erotica shorts, I'm doing okay at $2.99 just on Amazon. http://jakonrath.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/guest-post-by-selena-kitt.html?m=1 99c is scrub tier, and everyone knows it, so I'm probably going back to $2.99 since everyone else is as well.
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Jul 5, 2015 12:30
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I experimented for a couple weeks last month and the $0.99 price point wasn't doing poo poo. Didn't really see any increased sales, it didn't bump me up the rankings and boost KU borrows, etc. So I swapped back to $2.99 and now that all my stuff is off KU I have seen a sales bump (though noway near enough to offset loss of KU income). As soon as Amazon gets back to me and tells me my US tax number (I haven't been publishing long enough the tax form sent in March - first payment I think came April) I'm going to publish through either D2D or Smashwords. In short, $2.99 is definitely what you should be pricing your short stuff at, $0.99 maybe to suck people in but I haven't really seen any difference between sales numbers on $0.99 or $2.99 for the first of series. I might swap them all to $2.99 and keep it simple, especially since a lot of people don't seem to really care about reading them in order.
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Jul 5, 2015 13:27
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angel opportunity posted:For erotica shorts, I'm doing okay at $2.99 just on Amazon. My "going wide" hasn't published yet because it's taking forever for D2D to publish. I submitted like 36 hours ago, and only Kobo and Tolino have gone through. Kobo is incredibly small and almost insignificant looking, and I couldn't even figure out what the gently caress Tolino is from googling. Tolino relates to a company called Hugendubel like Kindle relates to Amazon. If you haven't heard of Hugendubel, I don't blame you, it looks like they are only active in Germany. So basically completely useless for most authors in this thread.
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Jul 5, 2015 13:55
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D2D is usually pretty quick about publishing things: 24 hours for everything but Barnes and Noble, which always seems to take 2 days. The holiday weekend is probably throwing a monkey wrench into things.
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Jul 5, 2015 15:10
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ArchangeI posted:Tolino relates to a company called Hugendubel like Kindle relates to Amazon. If you haven't heard of Hugendubel, I don't blame you, it looks like they are only active in Germany. So basically completely useless for most authors in this thread. Hey now, I've made 10 bucks this year from Tolino.
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Jul 5, 2015 15:29
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It's been over a year since I've uploaded anything to B&N. Now that I'm "going wide" again post-apoKUlypse, I see that they haven't fixed any of their bugs from NookPress launch.  To think that this pathetic loving company is Amazon's biggest USA book rival. 
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Jul 5, 2015 17:32
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Bobby Deluxe posted:http://jakonrath.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/guest-post-by-selena-kitt.html?m=1 Selena Kitt currently has many titles performing very well at 99c. As do several of the heavy hitters in this thread.
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Jul 5, 2015 18:38
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By The Horns posted:Selena Kitt currently has many titles performing very well at 99c. As do several of the heavy hitters in this thread. Isn't that in the olden days of KU?
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Jul 5, 2015 19:01
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Deborah Bladon's priced all her stuff at 0.99 without ever being in KU (that I know of) and has made a killing, but I'm willing to bet she's more the exception than the rule. She's got great branding and a pretty frequent release schedule even though her works are decently long. Whether the "book" is 30 or 100 pages, 0.99 seems to be the price that readers have come to expect from serial romance
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Jul 5, 2015 19:50
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ravenkult posted:Isn't that in the olden days of KU? Selena has three books published this month all at 99c This is promotional pricing and the massive decrease in potential borrow revenue means that it's not going to subsidise the loss decrease in %age revenue any more, but I think it will remain a big part of many people's marketing toolkits. I never put much stock in the idea that books priced at 99c sold less because the discount price put people off (personally I think the opposite is true) and while a lot of people used to treat that as gospel I think it's a myth that had fallen out of fashion recently due to how many people were using it as a price point to launch books into the top 100.
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Jul 5, 2015 19:51
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Blue Scream posted:Deborah Bladon's priced all her stuff at 0.99 without ever being in KU (that I know of) and has made a killing I think she has made a lot of sales but the way she does things actually minimizes her revenue, in my opinion. Like she obviously how to write a good book and cultivate a following but this "sell 30k words for 99 cents, then sell 3-packs for more than the individuals are altogether while also splitting visibility for two sets of books by releasing the bundle right away" has gotta be the worst strategy possible.
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Jul 5, 2015 19:58
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I think the point of the article I linked was that at $2.99, you make $2.09 per book. At 99c, you make 34c per book because of the royalty shift, so you'd have to be selling 6 times as many books to be making the same money. 99c has it purposes to lure people into the first part of a trilogy and for other promotional purposes, but I don't think it's going to net the same kind of cash as the $2.99 point does.
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Jul 5, 2015 20:23
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Popular Human posted:I know that since it's a zero sum thing with the way Amazon hands out the fund that SOMEONE has to be making more money under this system, but who? Is there some cadre of authors writing 750-page fantasy novels with a rabid fanbase that I don't know about? Sulla got it. Nearly everyone who writes longer, more "in-depth" works benefits from this. As I said in a previous post, most people in sfwa.org were positive on this change. Traditional novel writers felt KU was a bad deal because it was filled with dreck and those gaming the system. Borrow bots and poo poo. Now, product is amorphous. If you put out 50 novelettes or 5 novels or 100 short stories or whatever combination, the only thing that matters is how much time you can entertain a customer. Time spent entertained is a pretty good metric considering we don't have a way to measure how much your Life Was Changed. Basically, you're competing on quality at the lowest level (page) instead of coaxing that click at a higher level. If someone stops reading at page five then you get five page's worth of revenue. I wish I could do that with stuff like computer games and porn. quote:Does anyone else feel like this new system disincentivizes longer works, too? No. And while the .0057 is a good ballpark, more people are dropping out (yay!) and pretty much every book ballooned in size from their traditional paper/word processing page count. My latest novel is about 40% larger in KENP than the paperback. What really matters is the KENP read every day. It doesn't matter how you get there.
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Jul 5, 2015 20:31
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freebooter posted:..no longer seems to exist, and while I'm sure this thread will be helpful down the line it mostly seems to be full of seasoned pros that I don't want to bug with idiot questions. This resource is still available. You have to sign up for the guy's mailing list to get the series of daily tips -- it's not on the site.
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Jul 5, 2015 20:36
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If someone borrows a book and reads it multiple times, does the KENP score reflect that?
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Jul 5, 2015 20:38
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Bobby Deluxe posted:If someone borrows a book and reads it multiple times, does the KENP score reflect that? We know that they won't pay you for the multiple reads, so hopefully the dashboard doesn't say it.
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Jul 5, 2015 20:49
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By The Horns posted:Selena Kitt currently has many titles performing very well at 99c. As do several of the heavy hitters in this thread. Once you have sales momentum and a legion of fans eagerly awaiting your next release, many of the rules no longer apply to you.
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Jul 6, 2015 14:40
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Just worked out that my last lovely promo weekend (literally just the KU freebie, no linking anywhere) got me about $53 overall. 32 Downloads, 10 sales @ $2.99, 25ish borrows. This weekend just gone, I got a BKNights deal, promoted on tumblr, reddit, bunch of free sites. Got 416 downloads, 15 sales @ 99c and about 116 KENP. Made just under $6 dollars. Look at all the cake and presents! 
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Jul 6, 2015 15:24
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Jul 6, 2015 16:46
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I've spent so much time these past few days just uploading to various storefronts. If anyone hasn't gone wide yet and is considering it: -Make a "Going Wide" folder, and make a folder for every series and book. -Convert every book into .epub, .mobi, and .pdf. Strip your Amazon "also from" links from the back. D2D will generate also from pages for you. Or you can be lazy and just omit them entirely. -Save the cover image into the folder at big nice resolution, then at 200 x 300. -If you're using D2D, it will store your blurbs for you, but you probably also want to put a .txt file into each folder with your blurb in HTML (with the <b> tags) and then have another .txt file for your "excerpt" I thought D2D would cover the entire "going wide" thing for me, but it turns out there are other markets like ARe and Excitica that are probably wroth doing. ARe and Excitica both make you do EVERYTHING on your own, that's why you're manually converting poo poo. ARe actually lets you input your own reviews, so I guess it's sort of kind of honor system (though I'm sure if they figure out you're loving with them they'll ban you), and it feels like a hassle, but I'm putting my books with the best Amazon reviews onto ARe first since it lets me carry those reviews over. If you're going wide, you may as well go as wide as you can. Get as much bang for each story that you write as possible, and be organized with how you do all the extra publishing bullshit for each story so that it makes it relatively quick to go wide. This whole thing has basically doubled how long it takes me to publish a completed story (from like ~15 minutes to 30 minutes) but it's HOPEFULLY going to be worth it. Please, someone tell me it will be worth it. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 04:11
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ARe doesn't check for anything automatically and you can get away with a lot of things for a lot of time. However, they don't allow most of the bestselling types of erotica, so if you're looking to publish romance in the future, don't burn your bridges there.
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Jul 7, 2015 04:38
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What does this mean exactly? I just woke up so maybe im missing something simplequote:D2D will generate also from pages for you.
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Jul 7, 2015 08:23
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D2D will generate the 'also from' pages at the back of the book, I think.
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Jul 7, 2015 08:28
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Sundae posted:This resource is still available. You have to sign up for the guy's mailing list to get the series of daily tips -- it's not on the site. Ah cool, thanks
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Jul 7, 2015 08:59
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Bobby Deluxe posted:D2D will generate the 'also from' pages at the back of the book, I think. Ah interesting. That's a handy feature - how do they wind up looking? I'm still waiting on that email from Amazon with my tax number (I think the period within which they said they'd get it for me is about to expire today) so I can't sign up to D2D yet.
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Jul 7, 2015 09:15
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EngineerSean posted:ARe doesn't check for anything automatically and you can get away with a lot of things for a lot of time. However, they don't allow most of the bestselling types of erotica, so if you're looking to publish romance in the future, don't burn your bridges there. EngineerSean posted:ARe doesn't check for anything automatically and you can get away with a lot of things for a lot of time. However, they don't allow most of the bestselling types of erotica, so if you're looking to publish romance in the future, don't burn your bridges there. Yeah I have some stuff that I've done which I can't and won't publish there
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Jul 7, 2015 12:21
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Ah interesting. That's a handy feature - how do they wind up looking? I'm still waiting on that email from Amazon with my tax number (I think the period within which they said they'd get it for me is about to expire today) so I can't sign up to D2D yet. Oh good, they replied within the 7 day period they'd advised me of before: quote:Hello, Don't know if they're just swamped with the new changes or if they're trying to punish me for pulling out of KU and going wide What I'm asking them for is the american tax number they received after I filled in that IRS form through their system. They have a copy on file, otherwise they wouldn't be able to pay me. I wonder why they can't just, you know.. look it up.
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Jul 7, 2015 12:23
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It's most likely a case of getting an intern to go look it up, and they're all busy pulling porn out of KU.
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Jul 7, 2015 12:34
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Out of curiosity, what do you all publish? Like, your specific titles? I've read through a lot of the thread and people only seem to reference their stuff obliquely. And if that's on purpose because you prefer to keep it on the down-low that's cool, I get that, but if not I'd be fascinated to see links to your books and what they're about and the sales figures and stuff.
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Jul 7, 2015 13:51
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We're specifically not allowed to talk about book content, at all, in this thread. Some people also intentionally don't want to reveal their pen names. You could ask people to PM you that stuff probably though.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:49
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Yeah, talking about specifics is what got the old goonerotica thread shut down. Plus, you can't talk about poo poo like that without some posters taking it to an absurd degree. If you want to send me a PM w/any questions about genre specifics or w/e, I'd be happy to help.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:36
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