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Jalumibnkrayal
Apr 16, 2008

Ramrod XTreme

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

How many search terms does D2D allow? Or rather what is the maximum number allowed by the distribution platform with the smallest allotment? I read on some guide that D2D allows 15 terms max but that didn't seem to be the case and I can't find any other mention of the limited number of search terms.

My limited understanding is that none of the worthwhile vendors use the D2D search terms. Maybe Tolino and Pagefoundry do? I believe you need to publish directly with B&N to use keywords. Same with Apple, but publishing direct with Apple makes them use your real name as the publisher (lol!). Oh and with Google Play you need to put your keywords in your blurb, but I can't even register a Google Play account so I can't really speak for that marketplace.

angel opportunity posted:

I don't know about anyone else, but going wide isn't worth it to me.

I've made $6 on D2D and $18 on ARe. It seems these other sites have no algorithms or ways to gain visibility.

Yeah, it seems like they're very stagnant ponds. I guess that can be a good thing if you can somehow arrange effective marketing for them. One thing I've read is that it can take months for sales to organically take off at these other sites.

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psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
FWIW D2D has surpassed BN as my second-highest earning platform. My applebux are creeping up on Amazon's... maybe at 50-60% these days.

Then again, this month my BN sales have slumped down to kobo levels. I assume from everyone fleeing KU and uploading their catalogs at BN?

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
I'm getting about $50 a day from B&N now as I start uploading my catalog over there. Still seriously pathetic, though, compared to prime Amazon KU days. :\

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

Seems to be mixed results really. Some people have managed to blunt their losses by going wide, others saw early gains that have now fallen off, others have gone from predicted 30k months to less than 5k.

The most common observation seems to be that novel length is probably still better off in KU, speed-romance shorts have no surefire longterm plan.

I know AO was planning some experiments with leaving some in, taking some out, starting some in KU then withdrawing after the initial 90 days. I'd be interested if there's any results yet but I wouldn't have thought there would be.

Babby Sathanas
May 16, 2006

bearbating is now adorable

Pham Nuwen posted:

The storage system kind of sucks, though... the Neo stores your text internally, right? And then when you plug it into a computer, it acts like a keyboard and dumps everything into a text editor?

I'm thinking a simple microcontroller (AVR, perhaps) that runs a basic editor, something that immediately writes every keystroke to an SD card, reading in a KB or two into RAM so it can display whatever's near the cursor position. Simple text displays are cheap, couple that with a decent keyboard and you're good to go.

Sorry for the derail but my engineer sperg wanted to say stuff.

That's funny I've been thinking of the same thing recently. I found small eink screens for the raspberry pi that would be perfect, combined with a non-full sized mechanical keyboard and you've got yourself a super sweet little portable digital typewriter.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
My experiment so far did not work. I'm not patient enough to keep trying it either. D2D has given me two sales in about a month. I've made $20 from ARe, and I'm getting $20-$30/day on Amazon still.

People say you have to wait really long for the algorithms to do some poo poo on B&N, so I'm leaving some books in there to see if they ever start selling.

Any new short erotica I release is going to just go into KU. I see KU as undercutting your own loving sales and giving you a few pennies in return, but the payoff is that your books are actually visible. I have one single short at 4k rank right now, and it alone is acting like some shining beacon that drives sales of everything else. I have like 5 out of 18 books in KU, and today so far I've made $10 already just from KU pennies, and I still get sales at $2.99 on stuff that is in KU. My 4k rank book sold four copies at $2.99 yesterday even though it's in KU.

I launched a brand-new series that has never touched KU in early July, and it's loving DEAD. Almost no sales ever, rank plummeted immediately. I guarantee you I would have made more money off those in KU.

I've started a paranormal romance novel though...my takeaway from all this is that short erotica isn't worth it as a main revenue stream. It's still going to just about pay my rent this month, but it seems like it will never let me quit my day job, which has always been my goal. If you are thinking of starting out, I do not recommend starting out in erotica right now.

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
I'm going to put erotica aside until it stabilises and people figure out what's going on. I'm going to push the few titles I have wide but I'm going to get a proper job as soon as I move to Berlin and my spare time will be focused on writing full-length normal fiction (sci fi etc). So that even if I don't make any money at least I'm doing something I care about.

How are people going wide, though? I signed up to D2D and the only title I've tried with it got blocked (for reluctance) on ibooks, kobo, oyster, scribd, tolino. Published on pagefoundry and awaiting response from nook. Even though it got through Amazon's filters fine. Is this standard? Where else do people publish, or is it better to publish to these services directly (excluding Apple which uses your real name)?

I'm still trying to do research but it's all a bit confused.

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
And what is ARe?

e: vv thanks!

Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Jul 24, 2015

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
allromanceebooks.com/

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

How are people going wide, though? I signed up to D2D and the only title I've tried with it got blocked (for reluctance) on ibooks, kobo, oyster, scribd, tolino. Published on pagefoundry and awaiting response from nook. Even though it got through Amazon's filters fine. Is this standard? Where else do people publish, or is it better to publish to these services directly (excluding Apple which uses your real name)?

I'm still trying to do research but it's all a bit confused.

If you want to go wide with shorts, your best bet is B&N. Nobody else is worth going to. You should go directly if you're in an eligible country for NookPress, or through D2D if you're not.

If you want to go wide with longer works, you'd use D2D for Apple, Kobo for Kobo, and the NookPress stuff as detailed above. Oyster and Scribd are useless from what I've heard, and I have no idea about Tolino or PageFoundry. You can set Apple to not use your real name if you publish directly, apparently, but they're such a pain in the rear end that you might as well use D2D anyway.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
aapple is definitely worth listing any works at, they just don't take very many sexually charged works. submit everything, expect nothing to get through

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Have you ever had something Edit: SHORT get through over there? The only things I had were novels (never a short), and they sold about 0.01% of what they did on Amazon.

Sundae fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jul 24, 2015

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
all of my non-PI shorts got onto apple through D2D, not one single item has sold though

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Sundae posted:

Have you ever had something Edit: SHORT get through over there? The only things I had were novels (never a short), and they sold about 0.01% of what they did on Amazon.

Yeah I made about 10k with them but it was in the eighteen months prior to KU, no novels.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
I stupidly got into a reddit argument with a bunch of libertarian cliche reddit users about how pirating ebooks is totally fine.

The smugness they have about how "it's so sad to want money for art" is making me irrationally angry

edit: lol

angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Jul 31, 2015

brotherly
Aug 20, 2014

DEHUMANIZE YOURSELF AND FACE TO BLOODSHED

I'm constantly trying to subvert governments with smut. Viva la smutolution!

Mr. Belding
May 19, 2006
^
|
<- IS LAME-O PHOBE ->
|
V

angel opportunity posted:

I stupidly got into a reddit argument with a bunch of libertarian cliche reddit users about how pirating ebooks is totally fine.

The smugness they have about how "it's so sad to want money for art" is making me irrationally angry

edit: lol



I'd imagine you're pretty at home with anything preceded by "irrationally".

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Mr. Belding posted:

I'd imagine you're pretty at home with anything preceded by "irrationally".

what's meaning?

ArchangeI
Jul 15, 2010

the brotherly phl posted:

I'm constantly trying to subvert governments with smut. Viva la smutolution!

And to think that the big act of defiance in 1984 is to have sex.

Agent355
Jul 26, 2011


So I write for fun and because I work as a night time security guard where I spend 8 hours in the dark with nothing but a laptop and a flashlight and can get a ton of writing done when i feel inspired. For months (years) I've had a story floating around in my head percolating but it was always missing something that prevented me from doing more than writing a story arc here or there for fun. Last night I was struck by inspiration which I'm pretty sure is the glue I've been waiting for which allowed me to go and pound out 5000 words worth of brainstorming/summary. So tonight I'm going to actually start writing chapter 1 and follow the outline I have and see how well I can actually do this.

I don't really expect much out of it but if I assume that I'll actually finish my novel I'd like to publish it. I'm not doing it for the money but at the same time I think getting paid to do it would be wicked sweet.

So I read over the OP and I'm aware that I'm likely months from actually having a finished/edited piece of work I'd want to publish anyway, but I'm curious. Is there any argument at all to publishing with an actual publisher if self publishing is such a big thing now? Is self publishing more likely to provide more average income than an actual publisher but isn't as likely to catch on in the main stream or anything? It just seems from reading the OP that anybody who was just getting into writing and might put out a book or four would be crazy to do anything except self publish.

Oh and I don't know if this is poor form or anything but I'm curious what an average success looks like for self publishing in dollars.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
The answers to all of those questions really depend on your genre and what your own expectations are. Historical Sci-Fi (is that a thing outside of Serious Sam?) probably has a very different definition of success from Cozy Mysteries or Contemporary Romance. Also, the easy example of where trad-pub still dominates is the children's books genre. Foreign sales, translations, etc, all are easier through trad-pub methods as well. As for other issues of visibility and reader acceptance, they're all genre-specific.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't mind sharing numbers. I'm sitting at around $55K through the end of July. Not quite on the pace I'd hoped for, but I can't complain. :)

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
Self-publishing is honestly a lot of work so if you don't want to do all the work of a publisher in addition to all the work of a writer, then maybe go the traditional route. As long as you're cool with giving up a lot of creative control to someone for whom your book is just another assignment, and giving up the lion's share of your profits to someone else.

I don't like sharing numbers, but this month I made enough to pay my bills and the rent again, so yay. My Amazon numbers are higher than normal, but my BN numbers have bottomed out. Kobo is Kobo, and iBooks is the lower end of average.

I'm going to assume that all the authors fleeing KU and flooding the other platforms with all the books that were previously exclusive is having some effect?

moana
Jun 18, 2005

one of the more intellectual satire communities on the web

Agent355 posted:

So I read over the OP and I'm aware that I'm likely months from actually having a finished/edited piece of work I'd want to publish anyway, but I'm curious. Is there any argument at all to publishing with an actual publisher if self publishing is such a big thing now? Is self publishing more likely to provide more average income than an actual publisher but isn't as likely to catch on in the main stream or anything? It just seems from reading the OP that anybody who was just getting into writing and might put out a book or four would be crazy to do anything except self publish.

Oh and I don't know if this is poor form or anything but I'm curious what an average success looks like for self publishing in dollars.
Obviously we're biased towards self-publishing, this is the self-publishing thread. If I was going to write a literary novel, I'd look to trad pub, but that's pretty much it. Or if you suck at technology, someone who can't sign up for KDP without help isn't going to succeed in self-publishing, for example. I would say that if you are just starting out, self-publishing is more likely to make you ANY money at all. Author earnings has a survey for self-pubbers where you can find actual income: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LzGMXBoJcPPS6Ghdx-X_2lc3fRQFa-zlLogKggGgcjA/edit

Mr. Pumroy
May 20, 2001

I have a question about the report on my kdp page. When I first started getting some numbers on the book that I put online last month, I assumed that Units Purchased graph tracked paid books AND Kindle Unlimited borrows, and that the kenp graph below tracked both paid and KU pages read, but that doesn't sound right. Are KU borrows tracked on the paid units graph at all, or are they quantified solely in the kenp graph as pages read?

If that's correct, then am I right in saying that the paid units graph only tracks books that are, well, paid for, and that the kenp graph keeps track of the number of pages read through KU, and it is the only thing that tracks KU?

Sorry if that's like super basic no-poo poo kind of question, but the Amazon FAQ leaves something to be desired imo

Yooper
Apr 30, 2012


Paid is just that, someone bought your book for full price.

KENP relates to borrows and eventually how much of it they read.

Did one person read all 300 pages, or did 300 people read 1 page?

:iiam:

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

That's now the situation, yes. Top graph is buys and free downloads from promos. Lower graph is KENP read.

Currently the system does not tell you how many borrows you've had, which makes the KENP stat a bit useless at showing if one person read the whole way through (in which case your book is great but your promo sucked), or if 100 people gave up after 1% (in which case your promo worked but the book sucks) .

E: motherf

Mr. Pumroy
May 20, 2001

Thanks. Yeah I kind of assumed that I'd get the number of borrows and not just pages read, which is why I was misreading what the graphs represented.

edit: and I won't find out how much money I made until 60 days later right?

Mr. Pumroy fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Aug 3, 2015

Yooper
Apr 30, 2012


Not exactly, but once August's word tally comes in we'll all have a pretty good idea. For a rough estimate you can multiply your KENP by .005 cents. Yes, half a penny. Where it'll be exactly, who knows.

Popular Human
Jul 17, 2005

and if it's a lie, terrorists made me say it
Could someone direct me to a good tutorial online on how to make those bundle covers I keep seeing everywhere? They have that sort of 3D effect, with the cover on one side and a list of titles on the other.

This is a good example of what I'm talking about.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

Popular Human posted:

Could someone direct me to a good tutorial online on how to make those bundle covers I keep seeing everywhere? They have that sort of 3D effect, with the cover on one side and a list of titles on the other.

This is a good example of what I'm talking about.

Here you go:

http://www.actionuser.com/id/BUN5

Popular Human
Jul 17, 2005

and if it's a lie, terrorists made me say it

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER
Is there any way to get digital payments from Amazon if you're trying to self-pub from, say, Malaysia like I am? Or will I have to hope against hope that our postal service won't screw things up if Amazon decides to send a check? I admit, I wrote some naughty stuff for a quick buck (quickie buck?), and when going through the rigmarole for payment plans, tax numbers and such, it seems Amazon can't pay me electronically for some reason. Did I miss something?

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
Why not just sign up to Payoneer or something if you need a US bank account to receive payments?

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

Why not just sign up to Payoneer or something if you need a US bank account to receive payments?

Because I'd forgot about that option :downs: Hopefully there's a way to change it later.

Hijinks Ensue
Jul 24, 2007
The bad news (for me) is that I've had to cancel some August vacation plans.

The good news (for you) is that this opens up more availability this month for my editing services. Whether you need line editing, copyediting, or proofreading, just visit my site to learn more (http://booksidemanner.com) or email me at booksidemanner at gmail.com. I'm open to all genres and all story lengths.

Blue Scream
Oct 24, 2006

oh my word, the internet!

Hijinks Ensue posted:

The bad news (for me) is that I've had to cancel some August vacation plans.

The good news (for you) is that this opens up more availability this month for my editing services. Whether you need line editing, copyediting, or proofreading, just visit my site to learn more (http://booksidemanner.com) or email me at booksidemanner at gmail.com. I'm open to all genres and all story lengths.

Throwing in yet another recommendation for Hijinks Ensue. I've used her copyediting service. She's quick, thorough, and professional.

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

angel opportunity posted:

Any new short erotica I release is going to just go into KU. I see KU as undercutting your own loving sales and giving you a few pennies in return, but the payoff is that your books are actually visible.
How's this been working out for you by the way? Thinking of doing the same, my off-zon sales have been terrible and I really have no idea how to promote wide. The extra time i'm spending on the other sites is really impacting on my writing time.

CommissarMega
Nov 18, 2008

THUNDERDOME LOSER
Bit of a dumb question here, but does anyone know how to format a document so that each chapter begins on its own page on a Kindle? Also, how does one use Payoneer to receive online payments as a non-US citizen? I can't seem to find any line on the Amazon tax information form that would allow me to do so; just the usual stuff about receiving stuff by check. Never mind, found the option- it was in the 'Bank Account' section :downs:

CommissarMega fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Aug 9, 2015

Szmitten
Apr 26, 2008

CommissarMega posted:

Bit of a dumb question here, but does anyone know how to format a document so that each chapter begins on its own page on a Kindle? Also, how does one use Payoneer to receive online payments as a non-US citizen? I can't seem to find any line on the Amazon tax information form that would allow me to do so; just the usual stuff about receiving stuff by check. Never mind, found the option- it was in the 'Bank Account' section :downs:

In .docs at least you insert a page break.

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Mr. Pumroy
May 20, 2001

CommissarMega posted:

Bit of a dumb question here, but does anyone know how to format a document so that each chapter begins on its own page on a Kindle?

A page break. idk how it is in other programs but for example in Open Office you press ctrl+enter.

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