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AFM posted:Very sorry if this has been posted before, but I've been away from the forums and just couldn't bring myself to catch up on over 200 posts. He lost 6000 sales, but he wasn't selling at that rate before the price drop. I understand where he's upset he lost sales, but I think he's naive for assuming he'd have made all those sales at his normal price, anyway. An interesting side effect of their price matching algorithm is that you can list your book at 2.99 on Amazon and get the 70% royalty rates, then list it somewhere else for 99 cents. Amazon will reduce your price, but not reduce the royalty rate, so you keep getting the 70%. (Apparently there's a lower royalty rate for 99 cent books? I haven't tried this personally.)
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Nov 9, 2011 17:35
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Are you all typing your manuscripts in Word and then converting to other formats? What do you use to convert from Word? I tried to follow a guide I saw on using styles rather than local italics, but when I converted my manuscript it stripped all my styles. This was with Mobi Pocket Creator.
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Nov 14, 2011 20:31
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It's a big deal that Penguin is the one doing it or that someone is doing it? It seems like bad business for the author unless you're just lazy. You're giving up a percentage of sales on top of a flat fee. Why not pay the flat fee somewhere else and keep your full 70%? Are formatting and a cover really worth losing royalties forever?
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Nov 16, 2011 20:56
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That title screams screams screams that an amateur created the cover. Go look at a bunch of covers on Amazon and steal some ideas for the font and shadowing. Other than the title it looks good.
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Dec 10, 2011 04:04
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http://www.amazon.com/Antigen-ebook/dp/B006O1XY3E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324395646&sr=8-1 http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/antigen-db-baldwin/1108033238?ean=2940013888579 quote:Alex’s life as a graduate student is transformed when a laboratory fire destroys three years of research in a single morning. As he works to pick up the pieces he must overcome hostility from his department head and come to terms with his feelings for his lab partner. Then love and science combine to put him in a position to perform research in a way he never imagined possible. What he discovers will change his life, and the lives of those around him, forever. I decided in the summer that if I was ever going to write a novel that I should actually start one. Once I got some momentum it wasn't too bad. I'm not sure what to think of it. Some days I feel like it's pretty good. Some days I feel like it's terrible. I've had some beta readers offer feedback, but none of them are in publishing, so I really have no idea. They did seem to like it, though. Buy it and tell me! I sure learned a lot in the process and I'm already plotting a new (totally different) book.  edit: Added B&N link. Humbaba fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Dec 21, 2011 |
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Dec 20, 2011 17:25
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Copy and pasting all that is lovely. Taking the best stories and ideas and writing them into something new? That's called fiction.
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Dec 26, 2011 04:37
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I saw a Joe Konrath post about having 1 title selling 100 copies an hour. He sold 7000 copies across his catalog in 36 hours. I'd be happy right now if I sold 100 copies in a month.
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Dec 27, 2011 22:06
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Rootbeer Baron posted:I just finished writing a novel that I'm ready to share with a few close family and friends, and I'd like to be able to put it in a kindle fire/ipad kindle app friendly format, since that's what the majority of them use to read. Since this is the self publishing thread and I'm sure you all have lots of experience, what's the best program to use to convert files to kindle/kindle app format, and once I have the files converted, how do I go about transferring them to the respective devices? I have calibre but it's overwhelming and I don't have a good grasp on what I'm doing when I use it, and even when I do use it to get an epub file, it won't show up on the kindle app on my iPad when I drag the epub file through itunes. If you guys could give me any help on this I'd be eternally grateful since I'm itching to get my book read. http://guidohenkel.com/2011/01/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting That's a good guide to converting from a word processing format to a proper epub format. I didn't follow it for Antigen, though I'm thinking about giving it a try this weekend and seeing what the effort really is. He includes regular expressions for search and replace, so it's not like you'll have to add paragraph tags around each paragraph.
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Dec 29, 2011 19:27
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I released Antigen the week before Christmas and I've had 25 sales. I think that about exhausts my friends and family, though.
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Jan 2, 2012 19:08
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Roar posted:If it makes you guys feel any better, I'm talking about erotica. My sci-fi short story still has sold just about jack poo poo. How many erotica stories do you have listed?
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Jan 2, 2012 22:56
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bollig posted:Sup. Fingerbangmisfire, your buddy hooked me up with a sweet cover and I'm going to pimp it on this forum once it clears and stuff (tomorrowish). You don't need to buy a bunch to sell with CreateSpace. It just gets listed on Amazon as a paperback version and when someone buys it they print a copy and mail it straight to them.
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Jan 5, 2012 01:19
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Smashwords is more commonly used as a single point of entry to get your book onto multiple sites. I'm not aware of a print on demand option (which not to say it doesn't exist). The most common approach I've seen is to publish digitally on Amazon, B&N and Smashwords. The Smashwords portion handles Smashwords itself, Apple, Kobo and Sony. Folks do Amazon and B&N separately so they get the higher royalty rate straight from Amazon and B&N and don't have to give Smashwords their cut. Then once the digital bit is covered, setup CreateSpace to do a print on demand paperback version. That version can be sold directly through Amazon. When you set that up, you pay for a sample to make sure everything looks good and you have the option to order more physical copies if you want to sell them yourself. You buy your copies at a fairly reasonable price and can sell them at a markup yourself if you want. My personal plan has been to not bother with it and just sell them through Amazon. Packaging and shipping books myself feels like  given that there's not much more profit in it.
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Jan 5, 2012 02:53
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Romper Billson posted:Speaking of which, his upcoming book is put out by Thomas & Mercer, which is an imprint of Amazon's new publishing division, and his previous one in the same series was released by Amazon Encore, another arm. I'm not sure if this says that Amazon's publishing is more like self than traditional publishing or whether J.A. Konrath gave up on the self-pubbing route and wanted a more traditional relationship. Konrath has been very up front about taking whichever route makes the most sense for him at any given time. The Amazon print deals apparently had very good terms and he felt like he'd make more money through them than he would by straight self-pubbing. There was an interview he did with Barry Eisler a couple weeks ago and they mentioned Eisler turning down the 500k deal last year. Then Eisler signed with Amazon (could have been T&M) a few months later. It came out in this interview that he's already earned out the advance with Amazon. Of course, the advance could have been 0 and he just had amazing royalty terms.
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Jan 9, 2012 15:27
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Pope Eggs Benedict posted:I like goons and want to support them! All I have is a nook, though. Which of you fine authors are published in B&N? Give me links and I will spend some money on words and write some reviews. Pick me! Pick me! http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/antigen-db-baldwin/1108033238?ean=2940013888579&itm=1&usri=antigen quote:Alex’s life as a graduate student is transformed when a laboratory fire destroys three years of research in a single morning. As he works to pick up the pieces he must overcome hostility from his department head and come to terms with his feelings for his lab partner. Then love and science combine to put him in a position to perform research in a way he never imagined possible. What he discovers will change his life, and the lives of those around him, forever.
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Jan 10, 2012 01:08
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So your .99 stories on Amazon got paid the 1.70 if they were borrowed? That's a nice surprise. I haven't done anything with KDP Select because I only have a few titles and I'm gambling that wider distribution will make me more overall. Once I have some more titles available I'll enroll one in Select as a loss leader.
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Jan 12, 2012 19:35
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Please tell me how amazing (terrible, I know they're terrible) my blurbs are. The first two are short stories and the third is a novel. The novel has sold around 30 copies in the last month, though most of those were surely to friends and family. The short stories have sold 0 copies. They haven't been up for that long, about two weeks, but I have this feeling that my blurbs are bad and I don't really know what to do to fix them.quote:The Kite and the Cage quote:Snow Dog quote:Antigen
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Jan 19, 2012 15:42
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Thank you goons. I feel appropriately humbled and motivated.
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Jan 20, 2012 03:21
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I looked at the KDP and Smashwords terms and I see language prohibiting affiliate links, but nothing that prohibits normal links to other titles on competing sites. Is anyone aware of anything else I'm missing that would prevent me from putting in a list of other titles and include links to Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords as options to buy that title and then distribute the same blurbs and links to all three sites? It's not a problem for longer works, but for shorter works the maintenance of links is becoming tedious.
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Jan 31, 2012 16:44
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Capntastic posted:How would I go about formatting a children's book that has a single picture and then about a paragraph of text on each page? I keep getting stuff where it'll flow and end up having the text run onto the next page, which'll have the image and then only some of the text. Can that even be done? There's no guarantee about the size of the e-reader. I read on my phone and on my Kindle and something with illustrations that looks great on a kindle will look lousy on my phone. I guess you could setup the HTML by hand, use Calibre to build the mobi/epub and then use a physical device to tweak things til it looked right for a given resolution. Maybe just include in the description that it looks best on that resolution or higher.
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Feb 2, 2012 23:03
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What do you all do for critique groups? I'm working on my second novel and I still have no idea how the first one is. I'm assuming "not very good" because a couple of my friends and family have mentioned liking it. I don't have any non-goon / non-family reviews, either. I'd like to get some critiques of the new book once I have it written and cleaned up a little, but before I release it into the wild.
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Mar 6, 2012 21:57
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Doghouse posted:This is a super interesting thread. I have read a lot of it but it is pretty long - does anyone know if/where in the thread I can find goon success stories? You can't just browse for self-published. That's the beauty of it. Amazon doesn't put self-publishers in any kind of ghetto. The "best" way would be to look for ebooks 4.99 or below, but even then you'll find some big publishers with lower price ebooks (it's fairly rare) and some self-publishers with higher price ebooks (less rare).
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Apr 24, 2012 21:27
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