Many indies use Amazon KDP. It is a great way to publish a book of any size. We often associate more pages with more value and bigger royalties but that is not always the case. There are circumstances when publishing paperbacks on Amazon KDP where you can increase royalties by decreasing page count. A case when less is more!
Author: Chalkie
A Story-line for Writers
Before I come to this “Story-line” for writers, I want to purposefully digress slightly and talk about an excellent TV series on Netflix called “Black Mirror”. It is relevant (honest!).
Black Mirror is a series without a unifying story. It is in effect a set of stand alone stories. Each story is different and could be put out as-is without any of the others. Each story stands alone on its own merits.
Libraries and Public Lending Rights
If you place your book (or your book is placed) into one or more public libraries in the UK then you can register for an annual payment under the Public Lending Rights scheme (known as the PLR – see here).
Public Lending Rights is a long standing UK government scheme. It recompenses authors for loans of their work from public libraries. While the income from Public Lending Rights will not set the world on fire, it is a rather satisfying confirmation that your work is getting noticed and read. I believe most other countries run very similar schemes.
Book Promotion: Don’t Forget Local Libraries.
When you are promoting you book do not forget to give free copies of your work to the local public libraries. This is especially true if you are writing something that is locality relevant.
The Unthinking Folly of Copyright Law
In my humble opinion the current state of copyright law is a serious inhibitor to the production of lesser known or nearly forgotten works. Maybe I have this wrong. If so please enlighten me.
Continue readingNiche Non-Fiction Paperback Sales
So what can you expect from selling a niche non-fiction paperback on Amazon or one of the other on-line platforms?
The first thing you need to take on-board is a heavy dose of realism. What is the size of the market for your book? How big should your book be? What will the punters be prepared to pay?
Continue readingAmazon KDP Irritants
I don’t want to knock Amazon KDP publishing platform (well, not by much anyway).
Over the last eight years KDP has provided a way in for countless new authors and publishers. It has almost singlehandedly, wrested control of publishing away from the stale suites governing the big five publishers.
Continue readingThe Tyranny of Amazon Ratings
Authors all crave Amazon ratings. A string of good ratings really can establish a book. This is especially true for ebooks. An ebook with an initial bad rating will die a sudden death. If the first rating is bad then it can kill free downloads. Let alone sales.
Most readers do not give a rating. Even those who really enjoy or significantly dislike the work usually just let it pass. Most of those who do give a rating do so because the book has had an impact upon them. They try to fairly judge the work on what they got for their money. Which is fair enough and what we all want.
Legal Deposit: What to do
So you have published a paperback on Amazon or elsewhere. Well done! There is a legal requirement that you deposit at least one copy with the British Library. This is the famed Legal Deposit you have probably heard of. Here is what to do and what to expect.
Continue readingBuying an ISBN in the UK
There are many head winds facing a self publisher. One of these is the cost of buying an ISBN in the UK. The price structure for buying ISBN’s strongly favours big companies while severely penalizing small publishers.
If you are publishing a single book and so just want one ISBN, you will get hit the hardest of all.
This is the price structure for buying ISBN’s in the UK as of today.
Niche Non-Fiction: Ebook or Paperback?
Nobody is going to get rich writing niche non-fiction books on local history or other similar narrow niche topics. But if you can get a some sales it will give you a great feeling. You will have provided a useful resource to the community.
If you are lucky, writing a niche non-fiction book might allow you to buy a few beers. But you most certainly should not give up the day job! So if you want to maximise the number of beers what should you publish? An ebook? A paperback? Or both?
Zombie Novellas
NOTE: This is about novellas, short stories and other ebooks that do not sell. It is not about the Zombie novellas as a genre!
OK, lets say your novella or short story sold a few copies then went into rapid decline like This One did. Now, two years on, instead of giving you that small but consistent income you were hoping for, it has dropped to a sales rank so high it resembles the number of dollars you were dreaming of making when you started writing.
What should you do?
Sales Analysis: A Poor Selling Short Story
In the last post I displayed the statistics for the first of three short stories I wrote a few years ago. The sales performance of this first ebook was hardly spectacular. But it took less than a day to write, format and then submit. It was also just an experiment. So taking all into account, it wasn’t bad. I made a couple of hundred quid. In this post I want take a real no-hoper and do some sales analysis.
Lifespan of a Short Story eBook.
In my last post (Here) I looked at how the ebook Novella and short story market appears to be overcrowded. I went on to surmise though that maybe it is not as bad as it first looks. Could it be that as most novellas and short stories seem to have a very brief shelf life? Which would mean the author of a new novella would be competing mostly with corpses.
If that is the case then there is some good news.
The good news is that the market is not swamped. Or at least, less swamped than we thought. Sadly though there is some bad news too.
Novella Sales are NOT Dead!
(It is just old novellas smell funny)
So how do novella sales compare with other ebook formats? Look at this graph I picked up from Data Guy on AuthorsEarnings.com. Like all of the Data Guys information, it is immaculate. Everything on his site is worth a read. (Frankly I’m in awe). There is no reason to doubt the graph below at all. But, I do not think it tells the whole story.
eBook Sales USA versus UK
Just to wrap up the last set of a short series of blog posts on how many ebook sales you can expect from a specified sales rank, I thought I would just compare the pluses and minuses of sales rank performance in the USA and UK. The series started On This Link
We know that by far the biggest market for ebooks is the USA. Below is the relative quantity of ebook sales by Amazon in 2017 by English speaking region. Bear in mind Germany is a bigger market than the UK. Japan is nearly as big. There will be more on these two markets in a later post.
Ebook Sales Rank (UK) The Long Tail
In the last post I looked at the relationship between ebook sales rank and actual sales for popular ebooks in the UK. This post is about those ebooks that sell less well and how the sales rank relates to actual sales for them.
Over 400 million ebooks were shifted by Amazon USA in in 2016/17 whereas the UK managed just short of 85 million. So the ratio of ebook sales between the two behemoths is of the order of 5:1. Unsurprisingly the sales rank for the same ebook differs greatly between the two.
So, are the USA sales ranks totally independent of the UK store? I think so. Inevitably there will be books that sell well in the USA and badly in the UK and vice sa versa. So to have the same ranking for both would be self defeating.
Ebook Sales Rank for UK
The last couple of posts, starting with (This one) I have explored how ebook sales rank relates to number of ebooks sold. But that was for the USA. From the data that is out there I extrapolated to end up with a set of graphs showing how Amazon sales rank related to actual sales. Obviously this comes down to my interpretation but I think it stands up. Here I will try an explore the same issue with UK sales rank.
EBooks: The Long Tail Sales Rank in USA
In the last post (Here) I tried to graphically present how many ebook sales per month you could roughly expect for a particular sales ranking. This was fine for those shifting 1000’s a month. For those with a sales rank under 10,000 it was useless. The resolution on the graph was simply not up to displaying the highs as well as the lows. The long tail ebook sales rank in the USA just blurred into the x-axis.
eBook Sales Rank in the USA
This is the first is a series of posts on how ebook sales rank in the USA and the UK relates to the number and rate of ebook sales. While there are a number of tools available that will give an approximate sales outcome for a particular rank, they are a little like fruit machines. You put in your sales rank. Pull the handle. Out pops an estimate of the number of books you need to sell to achieve that sales ranking.
I thought it would be nice to present this data graphically so we can all see what is going on right across the full sales rank spectrum. I intend going down to where a ebook is selling only a handful of copies a year. This is below the resolution of the fruit machines.
Where To Put Yoast Breadcrumbs Code
I had a little trouble getting Yoast breadcrumbs to work properly. Most of the Yoast plugin needs no other modification to your theme. It works right out of the tin and is an excellent product. But to get Yoast breadcrumbs to work you need to do a code mod. The question is where should this code modification be done.
Continue readingProblems with Soft 404 Errors?
A soft 404 error is one where the website shows a 404 Not Found error page BUT then completes with a HTTP status code 200 (OK). Here’s how to fix the issue.
Continue readingLinux: Mounting a USB Drive Manually
Here’s my notes on mounting a USB drive that for some reason fails to mount automatically on Ubuntu.
This would be the case if you plugged in the usb stick and it has not appeared in the “places” tag in the menu bar.
Open a terminal. If you are running in the Gnome GUI you can do this with crtl-alt-t but use whatever method you like.
Continue readingUbuntu: start or stop MySql and Apache2 on boot
These are my personal notes on enabling/disabling auto start of Mysql and Apache2 on boot (or other services for that matter). Also on how to start/stop these services after boot. The notes are as they are. I hope you find them useful.
All this is done through a terminal. Open one from the Gnome GUI with:
Ctrl-Alt-t
Continue readingUbuntu: What memory is fitted to my PC?
Want to see what memory is fitted to your laptop or PC? Or if your machine has any vacant memory slots? Or maybe just to see what the speed and type of memory you already have and where it is?
Open a console with ctrl-alt-t
Continue readingUbuntu: Fixing a Readonly Filesystem.
Just in case anyone else does this or has a similar problem here’s how I managed to end up with a readonly filesystem and how I (eventually) fixed it.
Continue readingMySql or MariaDB: Lost Root Password Resetting
Here’s my personal notes on resetting the root password for a MySql or MariaDB database running on Ubuntu Linux. Maybe it’s useful to you too.
I assume the machine is running a gnome desktop manager.
Open a terminal with ctrl-alt-t or do whatever you need to open a terminal.
Continue readingWordPress: Adding Google Analytics Without a Plugin
There are many Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. Most also give you some form of display of this data in the wp-admin area. But you also get the endless plugin promotions trying to get you buy the enhanced version. While I don’t mind (that much) people trying to sell their wares (especially when I’m using a free version) sometimes it just grates.
So if rather than using a plugin you would like to just code and forget it, you can simply add a function into a file in the site child theme. Then you can check it works and forget about it. That’s what I do.
Continue readingBacking up a One.com WordPress site
It is a good idea to always keep a recent local WordPress back up copy of your one.com hosted website. One.com is one of the more reliable hosting companies and they offer a backup facility for customers. But even so, if you have a recent local copy of your website safely stored on your hard drive there is no question about your ability to restore your site should the worst happen.
Continue readingReducing Video File Size
Here’s my personal notes (wordpressed up) on reducing video file size using tools on an Ubuntu Linux Distro.
Last post (here) I showed how to change the format of video files from (say) mp4 to (say) mpg. That’s all fine for converting files. But what if you want to crush down your mp4 or mpg file and make it smaller?
Continue reading