A few words on pricing ebooks

If you are planning to self-publish, unless you plan to concentrate on print publishing, you will need to look into your options on pricing ebooks.

In my opinion, ebooks are the reason self-publishing took off as it did. First off, ebooks are relatively easy to create, and second the per copy cost to replicate them, once you have the files in place, is zero. This means that if you are not a well known author, you can price your book very competitively (as low as 99₵) and thus compete with better known but more expensive writers. The big publishers seem to want ebooks not to sell especially well, at least when they are new, because they price them so high.  Quite often the ebook version is more expensive than the paperback version, defying industry past practice that a higher price meant a more expensive to produce product.

The image above is a the Amazon page for the best seller, Golden Girl, by Erin Hilderbrand,  As you can see the hardcover price is very slightly more expensive than the trade paperback at $17.40 and the Kindle version is priced at  $14.99, less than $2.40 in difference. Well of course, this is a brand new book, But what happens when it has been out for a decade or more? 

Here's the Amazon page for Twilight, a best seller first published in 2006. The hardcover is way more expensive at $22.49 but the Kindle book is more expensive, at $10.99 than the paperback is at $9.43! And by the way, the ebook price is the same on Barnes & Noble and Google Books. 

Publishers fought with Amazon to be able to control the price of their ebooks. Publishers wanted to be able to protect hardcover sales, which are very profitable. Amazon lost that battle, but you will notice Kindle books usually say "price set by publisher." 

The good news is, if you're self-publishing, you (mostly) control the price! On Amazon, you get the best deal on royalties by pricing your book between $0.99 and $9.99, which is frankly, the range it's best to be in unless you're already a best-selling  author. 

You also control when the price changes, which means you can experiment with different prices.  Be aware that Amazon price matches, so if your book is cheaper in other ebook stores than it is on Kindle, Amazon will drop the price of your Kindle version to match the others' lower price. That is, by the way, the method used to make a Kindle book free on a long-term basis. A book that is in Kindle Unlimited can be free for up to five days every three months, but except by using price matching, you cannot make a Kindle book always free,  It is only because other bookstores allow free ebooks that price-matching can work to make a Kindle book free.

Self-publishing 101

 Decades ago, if you wanted to get a book published, you had to be able to produce a clean, readable  manuscript. Then you sent it off, either to agents or directly to one or more publishers who accepted unsolicited manuscripts. And finally, you waited for the rejection letters to pour in. 

If you got nowhere with traditional publishing and decided to self-publish your book, you needed a good chunk of money. Once you had a clean manuscript (which if you were wise, you paid someone to edit), you had to get someone to layout your book in the proper format and then pay someone else to print and bind a large number of copies-- hundreds, at least. And then you needed storage space--a garage, a dry basement, a rented storage locker--so that you had somewhere to store all those cartons of books. And finally, you needed to be able to visit bookstores and persuade the store owners to sell your book

Technology has changed all that. Word processing makes it easier to produce a clean, tidy m.s. and even to format the book (although it's fairly tedious to do it with a regular word processor like MS Word).  The invention of the Espresso Book Machine (like a photocopier and book binder rolled into one) made it possible to print a book only when someone ordered a copy of it. Online services like IngramSpark and Amazon's KDP meant that you no longer needed a garage or even a bookstore to sell a self-published printed book.

An Espresso Book Machine

And then there were ebooks, Ebooks are basically a file coded with HTML tagging using a predefined set of rules for what tags to use. If you've never seen HTML (it's what makes the web possible), it's full of tagging like this:  <p>This is a paragraph of text</p>. Most tags with begin and end tags <tagname></tagname> are actually containers that contain text and/or other tags, Tags can have attributes that define how the content appears, like this: <p style="text-align:right">Text inside this tag will be aligned right.</p>

If it all sounds terribly technical, be aware that there are software programs such as Calibre (free download, but please make a donation if you find it useful) that can create epub (the most used ebook format) and other formats from MS Word files. It can even edit them, but you have to know how to edit HTML. 

Calibre ebook management software

I first self-published a book (The Sixth Discipline) in 2011. My 18th title (Worlds Apart) releases in May of this year.. All but two titles are available in paperback as well as ebook form. Nine of them are in Kindle Unlimited, which means the ebook version is only available from Amazon. This Amazon subscription-based service allows users to borrow your book and then pays royalties to the author based on pages read. If an ebook is reasonably priced, to compete with tradstionally-pubslished ebooks, and long enough, the author can make more from KU readers than from sales. However, some genres do not do well in KU, so I always launch there but move the book to wider distribution in 90 days (when the first term expires), if I don't get enough KU pages read to make it worthwhile to keep the books exclusive to Amazon. Be aware that this Amazon KU limitation does not affect printed versions of books, only ebooks. 

To me, the toughest aspect of self-publishing is what happens shortly before and then after the book is published: Marketing!  I'm not going to give any advice on that because frankly, I'm not especially good at it. If anyone has any advice to chip in, feel free to leave a comment. Ditto if you have a question.

Guest blogging today on NO WASTED INK

I've got a guest blog post today on the No Wasted Ink site. It's about how easy—or how hard—it is to make money self-publishing. Note that it's written for folks who know little or nothing about publishing.

KDP Print versus Nook Press

One of my most popular blog posts is from 2016, when I compared using Amazon's CreateSpace to using Barnes & Noble's Nook Press Print. CreateSpace is gone now, replaced by KDP Print, but I recently published Tribes as a paperback on both KDP Print and on Nook Press, so below is a comparison of print publishing via Amazon and Barnes and Noble using the versions of those platforms in use today.

Both platforms have fully integrated print and ebook publication. Each title appears once in the author's list of Projects (B&N) or on the Bookshelf  (KDP), with the ability to add it in a second format and neither one makes you create the ebook first.. Basically, most of the features/options below apply to both ebook and print formats.

Pre-order

Nook Press offered the choice of putting the book on sale now or using pre-order but it didn't give me a chance to say when it would be available. After processing finished, I saw this message on my projects page.

• Your pre-order print book Tribes has a publication date of March 26, 2019. You must upload your final files by March 11, 2019. If you’re unable to do so, you must push your publication date or your book will go off sale.

And that was that! So pre-ordering was available on B&N but without a lot of options.

With KDP, pre-ordering is an option only for Kindle books. It does let you set the date, though. In fact, the pre-order option is the only way you can launch the book with the X-Ray feature enabled from the start. 

Categories:

KDP only allows two categories but it was very easy to add both.

Nook says it allows 5 categories but after I added the first, I could not figure out how to add more.  Also, selecting a category required me to specify three levels: category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory.


ISBN:

Both KDP Print and Nook Press provide free ISBNs for print books, but if you use their ISBN, it cannot be used anywhere else. I always buy my own ISBNs and register them to my imprint, Cracked Mirror Press. I want the paperback to have one single ISBN.

In the past, B&N has rejected the ISBN I used on Amazon KDP, but this time  I had not yet clicked publish on Amazon when I set up the Nook version. Also, I didn't select "expanded distribution" on KDP, which causes Amazon to make the book available on other online bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, Consequently, I was able to use my own ISBN for the Nook Press version.

Formats:

Both platforms offer paperback, but Nook Press can also do hardback. I have no idea of the requirements because I have never used that option, but it is there.

One advantage B&N has is the "Buy online, pick up in store" option that shows up on the product page. It's only really an advantage if a reader lives near a store with an Espresso Book Machine to print the book, but it's there.

Pricing:

Amazon stated my cost to print (which is the cost of author copies) as $4.44 and B&N estimated it as $5.00. This does not cover shipping, of course.

Proof copies:

Both platforms allow you to order a proof copy; the one from KDP had a "Not for resale" stripe on the front cover, but the Nook one did not.

Linking the print and ebook versions:

Both platforms allow you to create a new version of an existing title in a new format just by clicking a button on the entry for the existing format. I had, in fact, pulled the Nook Press version of Tribes from sale before I published the Nook press paperback, but it was still in the system (it was, in fact, still for sale, because before I published it to B&N directly, I made it available to B&N via Smashwords; this was years ago, well before I published it directly on Nook Press, I had quite a time getting that version pulled from sale). .Anyway, B&N automatically added the Nook book description and other details about the ebook when I clicked the link to create the print book .On the B&N product page, it showed one entry for Tribes but with two formats. So, linking product pages was no problem on the Nook end.

On Amazon, for some reason even though I created the paperback by clicking the "Create paperback" button on the Kindle version's entry, it did not link the product pages. If you searched Amazon for the title and author without specifying Kindle, it showed both formats but with two entries, like this:

If you limited the search to the Kindle store, you would see only the Kindle version, with no indication a paperback exists. Likewise, clicking one entry brings up that product page with no link to the other version. Amazon claims linking will happen automatically within 72 hours, but I have always had to ask them to link the books, which is what I had to do for Tribes. It didn't take them long and now it looks like this:

Conclusion

In terms of ease of use, the two platforms are actually pretty similar. Also of note is that the PDFs for the interior and the cover worked fine on both platforms. Of course, in both cases, I had selected white paper instead of cream, which I suspect is why the covers worked for both.

Conquering InDesign

Considering that my husband calls me a “Kindle evangelist,” I have spent a lot of time lately working on printing books. I just finished a semester-long class at my local community college. The course title was Desktop Publishing but really it was How to Use InDesign.

InDesign is an Adobe product that will handle page layout, and also allow you to export an ePub (ebook) file,. As I found out from the course, it will also export simple Adobe Flash files, for say, a series of click-through screens. And, it can export interactive PDF, if I ever need to do that. It's a very powerful but complex product, and I had had no luck in learning it on my own, which is my usual method with new software. InDesign has an incredible number of functions and as a result, the menus often have long list of unrelated options. Also, it use “tools.” That is, you change the function of what the mouse cursor does by picking a tool from a list.

The basic function is selecting things, but the software doesn't stop you from using menus if you have a tool other than the Select tool in use. This can get you in trouble! For example, I discovered that if you're using the Type tool when you place (paste in) a graphic file, InDesign creates that image as an anchored graphic that won't budge, no matter how much text you add in front of it,  Who knew? I'm sure it's that way to provide a shortcut for people who know what they are doing with InDesign. Until recently, that was not me.

As you can see by the above image of a full print cover, I started small, with my only novella, Where Magic Rules. Because it's so short, I didn't even try to put text on the spine, but I'll do that with the next book.  Once I have WMR ready to go, it will join Saronna's Gift as a paperback for sale on Amazon.

And of course, InDesign does the page layout beautifully. You can quickly and easily impose proper book format, with the first page of a chapter having its own unique layout. I love it!

Is Google serious about its ebook platform?

Almost a year ago, I blogged about starting to load my books onto Google Play/Google Books.  I just got Saronna's Gift loaded yesterday. I've had very few sales on Google Books, but I figured it couldn't hurt to expand. For a while there was a major hold-up in loading new books because Google Books had no filter to stop people from pirating other people's work. I'm not sure when that was resolved, because they're not good at communicating. When the new book would not load all the way, I didn't get any message as to why; it turned out there was an epub problem, but I had never gotten a notice about it.

I have to say, Google has not made a lot of (or maybe even any!) improvements in the "Books Partner Center" in the last year. The interface is still clunky, and seems to be designed by geeks, for geeks. I guess you could call it the UNIX of book platforms; but unlike UNIX, there's no graphical interface available to make it easier.  One of the things that takes up a lot of room on the report screen is the pie chart it draws to show you the percentage of books that are live and for sale.

That's a lot of screen real estate for something that will usually be 100%. 

Features that are still clunky or problematic:

• You have to download a new CSV file every time you want to see your sales figures. There is no way to generate a report on screen.  This is my single biggest complaint. What a pain! Even Barnes & Noble is better than this.
• Reporting is erratic. I checked every day after I ran my last promotion, and it took a full week for the books I had given away to show up in the sales transaction report. On the other hand, I often see sales and giveaways the next day.
• If you want to run a Google Books promotion, you have create a CSV file and upload it. For every book, you need to provide the following info:  Identifier, Title, Currency, Amount, and Countries. Except that their program doesn't actually use the title column, so you can leave it blank. And you can say WORLD for country if you want it everywhere. 

The message you see on loading a book is the reason it's still worth it.

This book is live in the Google Play store in the following regions: AR, AS, AT, AU, BE, BG, BO, BR, BY, CA, CH, CL, CO, CR, CZ, DE, DK, DO, EC, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, GT, GU, HK, HN, HR, HU, ID, IE, IL, IN, IT, JP, KG, KR, KZ, LT, LU, LV, MH, MP, MX, MY, NI, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PE, PH, PL, PR, PT, PW, PY, RO, RU, SE, SG, SI, SK, SV, TH, TR, TT, TW, UA, US, UY, UZ, VE, VI, VN, ZA. It is also listed on Google Books.

Of course, if you need all those country codes explained, you'll need to look it up elsewhere. Google is a huge company. I expected better from them, so this makes me wonder if they really care about Google Books or not. 

What I Learned from Self Publishing: My Love/Hate Relationship with Amazon

Amazon is certainly not the only player in the self-publishing game, but it is dominant, and it does offer a print option, which is rare. Smashwords is a great way to get into ebook publishing on every platform except Kindle, but they don't deal with print. Barnes and Noble recently announced they would also offer print on demand via Nook Press. It will be interesting to see if that goes anywhere. Unlike CreateSpace, B&N offers a hardcover option as well as paperback.

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is pretty easy to use, and I have put out eight books with it. CreateSpace is the name of their print self-publishing platform, and I have used it only once for my latest book Saronna's Gift. CreateSpace is possible because of print on demand (POD) technology; the book is uploaded to a database, and when someone shopping on Amazon orders a copy, that copy is printed individually and mailed to the customer. Authors can also order multiple copies directly from CreateSpace to sell themselves, or to give to reviewers.

The two platforms have separate set-up requirements, although you can publish a CreateSpace book to Kindle, with no additional set-up, if you're willing to convert the PDF. I don't recommend that, by the way. PDFs are difficult to convert reliably. For one thing, you can end up with excess hyphenation. Also, using the print PDF doesn't allow for a a difference in the elements in the ebook. Because ebooks can't be flipped through in the same way print books are, it's important to offer a clickable table of contents as a navigation aid, whereas in print, it's not that big a deal for novels—especially if the chapters only have numbers and not titles. Also, because of the free sample feature, you might want acknowledgements, blurbs, and lists of your other books in the back of the ebook, instead of in the front.

My Amazon wish list:

• Add a way to connect KDP and CreateSpace so that the author can specify that the two books are the same thing. This would not have to be automated. It could just notify Amazon to do whatever linking up they do, but at least it would save having to send an email, and hopefully it could happen faster than it does now. Alternatively, the CreateSpace set-up could let you load the digital file that KDP currently uses, instead of using the PDF.
• Stop requiring ebook exclusivity for almost every marketing benefit (making a Kindle book free or on sale, participating in Kindle Unlimited, etc.)
• Add a button to the CreateSpace set-up pages to include the “Look Inside the Book” feature; Amazon already gets the PDF, so this should be easy to do
• Change the set-up protocol for CreateSpace so that you can switch between glossy and matte covers without having to upload the PDF again. 
• Add X-Ray to KDP. I know from having had it happen to The Sixth Discipline that Amazon can create the file needed for the X-Ray feature to work by using the Book Extras information (lists of characters names and descriptions, places, etc). Currently, this info is entered via Shelfari (accessible from each author's Author Central pages). It would be nice if the author could create the X-Ray file info this way and click a button to submit it. The X-Ray feature is something only Kindle has, so it would make sense to do this.

What I liked about Amazon:

Conversion: In the past, when I had a day job, and time was more of an issue than money, I relied on paying a conversion house to create the ebook digital file, and didn't bother with print at all. Now that the time/money equation is reversed, I decided to try print, and to experiment with creating my own ebook file. I tried using Scrivener and Calibre to convert the MS Word file, and was not happy with either result. Scrivner offers the advantage of being able to keep the book elements (title page, contents, dedication, chapters, etc) as separate things and assemble them different ways, but I didn't like the look of the resulting ebook file. Calibre creates valid files, but it doesn't translate any of the print style features. Imagine my suprise when I tried loading the MS Word file directly to KDP, and found that their conversion had radically improved! 

Kindle Bookmatch: Finally, a feature that doesn't require Kindle exclusivity! If you publish your print book via CreateSpace and have the same book in the Kindle store, you can opt to have the Kindle version be free or very, very cheap to anyone who buys a print copy.  As soon as they order the print, they get a button to download the ebook.

No DRM: Some people seem to think that all Kindle books have DRM because Amazon requires it, but in fact, they don't all have DRM. It's a publisher's option, not a requirement. All KDP authors have the option to leave the DRM off. 

So you see, I love that Amazon makes it possible to publish my books, and to reach readers, I just don't like everything about Amazon. 

Happy New Year! Looking forward to 2015

End of year sale on MS Word templates

If you are interested in self publishing in print, you really should check out the sale at BookDesignTemplates.com. When you buy a Word template from them, you not only get the templates, with all the necessary styles and fonts needed, you get really good written instructions on how to use the template to create a PDF that can be used for a print book. The only thing I don't think was included in the directions was a reminder to change the hyphenation settings, if needed. The first time I generated a PDF, the hypenation was funky (e.g., fa-ther). MS Word lets you set a length for minimal hyphenation, and also control how many consectuive lives can end in hyphenation. Changing that setting really made my book look better. 

The templates are incredibly useful for printed book, because the styles handle things like making the page layout different on the first page of a new chapter. Unless you're a real expert in Word, it's a total lifesaver.

The sales ends 12/31/2014, so check it out NOW!

Saronna's Gift has been proofed!

I have the report back from the proofer and will be ordering a new proof copy soon. I think I will try the glossy cover this time, to see which one I like better. 

I have discovered I am terrible at proofing, so it was a good thing I had help. Also, if you're interested in procnostication, this site has some predictions for self publishing in 2015. We'll see in a year how they did. 

Happy New Year, everyone! 

How do you “ship” a digital file?

Smashwords is both a retailer and a distributor. They will sell your book when you upload it, but they will also allow you to distribute it to many other retailers who will then sell it on their sites, too. Smashwords' authors can opt out of this distribution on an individual retailer basis, so if an author already has his book published via Amazon's KDP platform, he can opt out of shipping it to Amazon.

From everything I have heard, the Smashwords feed to Amazon isn't actually implemented yet. I recommend loading a book directly to KDP. For other retailers, though, Smashwords is a good bet, so long as you can live with really slow feedback on sales. KDP shows new stats within hours of a sale (usually); Smashwords is the same for sales from their own store, but they can take more than a month to update sales data for a specific retailer.

When you opt in to distribution, Smashwords will deliver an epub file (except for Amazon!) to that retailer, but they will refer to it as shipping the book. I find that weird!It's not like you pack a digital file into a padded envelope or a cardboard box! So far, Where Magic Rules has shipped to Barnes & Noble and to iBooks, but it's not showing up in either store yet.

Selling ebooks outside the Kindle store

This is the dawn of a new era in book-selling not because people are self-publishing—authors have done that for a long time—but because it's finally cheap and easy to self-publish. What that means is, all those people who always wanted to write a book are coming out of the woodwork, writing their books and then putting them up for sale, either as ebooks or POD (print on demand) books or both. The Kindle store is glutted with ebooks, hundreds of thousands of them.

Of course, quality varies considerably. Some self-published authors don't understand the importance of editing or even, sad to say, of proofing. Fortunately, technology provides a taste-before-you-buy option, either through the"Look inside" function or the downloadable free sample. There are plenty of good self-published books, but you do have to find them.

To quote the Bard, there's the rub! It's difficult for a new author who doesn't have the benefit of an established fan base to get noticed in the rapidly swelling crowd. One thing I have noticed in the months my books have been for sale is that is that there is not, in spite of what you might hear, only one marketplace. Yes, the Kindle store is the single most popular ebookstore. It is very well designed and Amazon's software is great at recommending new things to buyers (although they need a button that says "I only bought that CD or movie or video game as a gift for my nephew. Please stop suggesting these things to me!"). But it's also harder to stand out in the Kindle store. I think that's one reason why I have seen more sales lately in the Sony and Apple iBooks stores than on Kindle: less competition. After all, the books have the same covers and blurbs in all three stores; they are the same product but in different-sized marketplaces.

A second reason is the fact that both Sony and iBooks offer a way to make a self-published book free. All you have to do is 1) publish your book on Smashwords, 2) opt in to sending the book to other retailers, 3) make the book free on Smashwords, and 4) wait. In less than a week, your book will be free in the Apple iBooks and Sony ebookstores. Of course, being able to give away a book works better as a sales strategy if you have more than one book. But even when you only have one book out there, giving it away can get you a lot more reviews and get your book noticed on book bloggers' sites. And you don't have to make it free forever.

Also, as I mentioned in an earlier post, Apple is selling internationally, so my books are available in iBooks for readers in the UK, Canada, and Australia as well as the US. Amazon sells to other countries, too, but I haven't seen more than a few random sales, and again, I attribute this to more competition.

Of course, there is also the question of whether vendor sites treat self-published books differently, which is why I moved my three books from the PubIt platform to using Smashwords to publish in the Barnes & Noble Nook store. It's too early to say how that's working, but the outcome will determine what I do with the next two books, which should be coming out in about two or three months.

If you're reading this because you've self-published, I would be interested in hearing what markets are working best for you. If you're still in the planning stages, please feel free to post a question in a comment.