Blogs, Books or Both?

For the last couple of years, I have had both books and blogs available for the Kindle.

My original fiction hasn't sold - at all. It's not that nobody knows about it - a percentage of folks do. I have a book called The Lady and the Tiger...Moth about a girl pilot. I announced that at various aviation forums. No one cared.

I've got two original science fiction books - one a full-length book, the other an introductory novella that I had hoped to offer for free on the Kindle as a way to get people to want to buy the other book. No dice. If you're an established publisher you have the option to offer a book for free - if you are an indy publisher, you do not have that option. So damn infuriating.

In any event, I'd announced the book on various science fiction message boards - no interest.

The only book of mine that is selling is my annotation of Dorothy Sayers Whose Body. But that's because people do a search on Dorothy Sayers, and find my book. The Dorothy Sayers name is what does it.

What's the solution? Well...have your website, and I'll go into that more in future entries. Try to get book reviews. (My sci fi novels are in the queue to be read by the popular Red Adept blog... unfortunately she's swamped for several more months!!)

Try Create Space - Amazon's printing arm that allows you to have your books printed on demand. There's no cost to you up front - Amazon takes their cut from the cost of the book. But at least you can get some books printed, and introduce them into your local bookstores - offering to do readings - and point your audience toward the Kindle as well as Create Space editions.

For me...blogs are where I make my money. I've got a blog about the controversial talk show host Rush Limbaugh - and people love to read about him. My other successful blog is a BLog Review Blog. The rest of my blogs - and I have several - have a handful of subscribers, so it all ads up over time.

How To Advertise Your Books - Website

Getting your book noticed is the hardest thing in the world for the independent publisher. Amazon has recently made it harder still - now if you dare to try to advertise your Kindle book on one of their message boards - set up for discussing books on Kindle! - you can be banned because you dared to indulge in "shameless self-promotion." You can't even put a link to your book in your signature.

So what can you do?

Well, I'll make a series of posts on that.

First one - you need a website.

It costs about $100 a year to have a domain and website. I use GoDaddy for my domains, and Yahoo's small business hosting.

These days, there's software that enables practically anybody to create their own professional looking website - and your website must look professional.

What should be on it.

The cover of the book.

A sample chapter.

A description.

Links to where to purchase it. Don't just have your book on the Kindle. Put it into Nook and Smashwords as well.

I Can't Believe They Listened!

Went to Amazon.com today, to check my Kindle blogs, and I see that BLOGS has been put on the Kindle stripe.

They had taken it off for a few months.

Well, it's back...here's hoping it helps our blog revenues.

Amazon Customer Service Sucks...

My July report (due the last day of August), finally arrived, 7 days late. Now I just have to wonder when I'm going to get paid. When the report normally comes, about 3 days before the end of the month, the payment is only a day or 2 away.

I don't know when it will come this month.

I had sent in a question yesterday, the day after Labor Day, wanting to know the status - and recieved the answer today - they were still working on the problem. They didn't tell me what it was.

So now I'm wondering if they're going to email me and explain what the problem was, and assure me that it will never happen again, or if I'm going to have to email them again.

I'm hoping that things just went wonky because of the Labor Day holiday, although goodness knows why that should effect anything.

But customer service is definitely not based out of the US. Both times I emailed them, the response came from someone with an Indian name - I'd say their customer service is based out of India. Which would be fine if they spoke excellent English and knew what they were doing... but I wonder....



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Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report

There's always something...

It's 3 days in to September and I have yet to receive my August 31 payment (which covers monies earned in July.) Not only haven't I received the payment but I haven't received the report.

I emailed customer service and someone from India - where Customer service is located, of course, who confirmed I had $240 coming, and would try to find out why it had yet to arrive.

While $240 is a nice sum, it is a disappointing one. My blog subs have fallen off in the last two months. At one point I had climbed up to earning $300 a month, and thought I'd be going even higher...but instead I've been dropping.

Disappointing.

I also had a little contretemps with my Whose Body book... I blogged about this. I had tried to update the descriptive text to add in my two science fiction books (which aren't selling at all) and nothing ever happened, so I hit "republish" expecting that that would do the trick. But instead it flagged something and Amazon removed the book for a whole week while trying to determine if it was Public Domain or not.

Well, it was Public Domain - there are 6 other Whose Body books on offer on the Kindle - mine the only one that is annotated. But finally they put it back up, and then no one was buying it - although I didn't lose my place in the rankings of those books so I'm assuming it was because it was the week before school was supposed to start and everyone was busy with final vacations.

I now seem to be back up to snuff, getting at least one purchase a day - of Whose Body.

But as I have blogged before, Amazon has made it very difficult to sell blog subscriptions - there used to be a Blog Subscription label on the Kindle stripe - that is now gone. So no people new to Kindle will even know that blogs exist and can be subscribed to!

And as far as books - we can no longer post adverts about them on the message boards. Worse than that, we can't even put a URL in our signature pointing people toward our books. According to Amazon, this is "shameless self promotion." a phrase that irritates me no end.



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Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report