My mom is having some major health issues...so much so that I'm not going to be able to post here for another couple of days while we get it straightened out.
Note to all my readers: If you have high blood pressure, make damn sure you take your medication or 20 years later you'll have congestive heart failure and wham, bam goes your quality of life.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
One Sells, the Other Doesn't
Still waiting to reap the benefits from Vol 2 of my Scrabble book. The first volume continues to sell well on the Nook - haven't sold a single vol 2 and I don't really understand it!
Meantime, no sales at all on the Kindle for either one.
Meantime, no sales at all on the Kindle for either one.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Find a niche for the Kindle
My Scrabble book continues to sell well on Nook - not at all on Kindle. That's because on the Nook, there is no competition - anyone doing a search on Scrabble finds 10 results. (And it's screwy. My book sells very well, but I'm still listed at #8 on search results. You'd think I'd be at #2.)
The Kindle has been around a lot longer than the Nook, and I don't think that there is any niche left for the Kindle that won't return four pages of results after a search. And of course any new book will be at the bottom of those search results.
But if you want to get into publishing books for the Kindle - that will be bought - that's what you have to do. Find a niche that, if someone searches for it, only has about 10 books on offer. This would be non-fiction books, not fiction books. Fiction writers are screwed on both Nook and Kindle, I'm afraid. In order to advertise those, you've got to have a website that draws lots of people.
Back to Non-fiction
*I just did a search on Wind Farms on the Kindle. That returned only 19 results. So if someone wanted to write a book on wind farms, it would be easily be found by searchers. Make it a good book with an eye catching title and cover, and bob's your uncle, as they say in England.
*There are 452 results for sharks, but only 42 for sea turtles.
* There are only 4 results for the Keystone Pipeline - and that's big in the news.
* No articles used about that Contra Cruise Ship that is off the coast of Giglio right now - write a quick book about that and it would probably sell well
* Indeed, any book/pamphlet on a current event would probably sell well
The Kindle has been around a lot longer than the Nook, and I don't think that there is any niche left for the Kindle that won't return four pages of results after a search. And of course any new book will be at the bottom of those search results.
But if you want to get into publishing books for the Kindle - that will be bought - that's what you have to do. Find a niche that, if someone searches for it, only has about 10 books on offer. This would be non-fiction books, not fiction books. Fiction writers are screwed on both Nook and Kindle, I'm afraid. In order to advertise those, you've got to have a website that draws lots of people.
Back to Non-fiction
*I just did a search on Wind Farms on the Kindle. That returned only 19 results. So if someone wanted to write a book on wind farms, it would be easily be found by searchers. Make it a good book with an eye catching title and cover, and bob's your uncle, as they say in England.
*There are 452 results for sharks, but only 42 for sea turtles.
* There are only 4 results for the Keystone Pipeline - and that's big in the news.
* No articles used about that Contra Cruise Ship that is off the coast of Giglio right now - write a quick book about that and it would probably sell well
* Indeed, any book/pamphlet on a current event would probably sell well
Monday, January 23, 2012
The Nook Saga, part 2
Had a very good day yesterday, Nook-wise. 8 sales of my Scrabble book. Only problem is, I have no way of knowing if people are buying the old, improperly formatted book, or the new, correctly formatted book.
Both Amazon and Nook allow you the capability of replacing the content of your book - once published.
With Amazon, if you do it, the book is frozen for a while. It still shows up in searches, but no one can buy it until the new text replaces the old. This takes a couple of days.
With the Nook, that "freeze" didn't happen. I replaced the book around midnight, by noon the next day someone had bought it. Yet the message I'd received when I'd replaced the book said it would be 48-72 hours before it was available.
On sober second thought, I should have just unpublished the book completely, then republished it with the correct text. Then I'd know for sure that the book with the correct format was the one people were buying.
Since I own a Kindle, I'm able to check these things myself on Amazon. I don't own a Nook...
I guess the acid test will be when Volume 2 of the Scrabble book becomes available in a couple of days. If people buy both volumes in one day, then it'll be a safe bet that the formatting of volume 1 is correct.
Of course all this angst could have been avoided if I'd just read the Nook instructions to begin with...but who would have thought they'd have arranged things so that a Page Break command wasn't good enough? Who uses Section - Add New Page? Certainly not I!
Both Amazon and Nook allow you the capability of replacing the content of your book - once published.
With Amazon, if you do it, the book is frozen for a while. It still shows up in searches, but no one can buy it until the new text replaces the old. This takes a couple of days.
With the Nook, that "freeze" didn't happen. I replaced the book around midnight, by noon the next day someone had bought it. Yet the message I'd received when I'd replaced the book said it would be 48-72 hours before it was available.
On sober second thought, I should have just unpublished the book completely, then republished it with the correct text. Then I'd know for sure that the book with the correct format was the one people were buying.
Since I own a Kindle, I'm able to check these things myself on Amazon. I don't own a Nook...
I guess the acid test will be when Volume 2 of the Scrabble book becomes available in a couple of days. If people buy both volumes in one day, then it'll be a safe bet that the formatting of volume 1 is correct.
Of course all this angst could have been avoided if I'd just read the Nook instructions to begin with...but who would have thought they'd have arranged things so that a Page Break command wasn't good enough? Who uses Section - Add New Page? Certainly not I!
Saturday, January 21, 2012
The Difference Between Formatting for Nook and Kindle
Oh - my - god.
No one to blame but myself, of course.
For the Kindle, if you are uploading a word document, you use page breaks to, you know, have page breaks.
Fot the Nook, doing the page break is not good enough. The Nook parser does not recognize page breaks.
You have to go into BREAKS (on our work document) and choose NEW PAGE section.
I have to admit I had seen that my page breaks didn't work properly when I uploaded my Scrabble book to the Nook, but I thought it was just the previewer acting funny.
Then, today, I took a look at my Scrabble page on the Nook - my book had been selling so well - and there was a 1-star review. Of course the idiot who did the review did not write any text - just labeled it one star. Note to reviewers - if you dont like a book, say why, don't just give it one star with no explanation.
I took a look at that one star and had a sinking feeling... the contents of the book was good...obviously the formatting was off. And for a book that is a series of flash cards - a question on one page and the answer on another, the page breaks had to work.
So I took a look at formatting tips, and there saw what I should have seen several days ago - don't use page breaks, use Section New page.
How stupid is that?
Well, I've just got done replacing 2000 page breaks with 2000 Section New pages.
Reuploaded the book to the Nook, and now have to wait 3 days before it's on sale again. And at the same time pray that none of the other 15 people who bought this book in the last three days writes a bad review - otherwise I'm well and truly screwed with no one to blame but myself.
No one to blame but myself, of course.
For the Kindle, if you are uploading a word document, you use page breaks to, you know, have page breaks.
Fot the Nook, doing the page break is not good enough. The Nook parser does not recognize page breaks.
You have to go into BREAKS (on our work document) and choose NEW PAGE section.
I have to admit I had seen that my page breaks didn't work properly when I uploaded my Scrabble book to the Nook, but I thought it was just the previewer acting funny.
Then, today, I took a look at my Scrabble page on the Nook - my book had been selling so well - and there was a 1-star review. Of course the idiot who did the review did not write any text - just labeled it one star. Note to reviewers - if you dont like a book, say why, don't just give it one star with no explanation.
I took a look at that one star and had a sinking feeling... the contents of the book was good...obviously the formatting was off. And for a book that is a series of flash cards - a question on one page and the answer on another, the page breaks had to work.
So I took a look at formatting tips, and there saw what I should have seen several days ago - don't use page breaks, use Section New page.
How stupid is that?
Well, I've just got done replacing 2000 page breaks with 2000 Section New pages.
Reuploaded the book to the Nook, and now have to wait 3 days before it's on sale again. And at the same time pray that none of the other 15 people who bought this book in the last three days writes a bad review - otherwise I'm well and truly screwed with no one to blame but myself.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Nook Seems to Have Some Uses
There are a few places to offer one's ebooks for sale. I use only Kindle and Nook. Smashwords is another one.
My Whose Body Annotated is available at both places. I get a handful of purchases from the Nook a month. But I get at least one purchase a day from Amazon. That's because Dorothy Sayers is a famous name, Whose Body is the first book she wrote, and so it comes up in the top 10 of any search results.
Not so all my other books. I've published a few other books on the Nook - my science fiction ones and my aviation ones, and they've not been bought. And on Amazon Kindle only a handful of these are bought a month...if that.
But now my Scrabble book...I dare to hope it's taken off.
And it's taken off on the Nook. Haven't sold a one on the Kindle (because in a search for Scrabble, it comes up on the third page of results), but I've sold 5 in 3 days on the Nook.
I'm thinking this is because there are not a lot of Scrabble books on the Nook, so when they do a search on Scrabble game...my book must be at the top of the queue.
So that's one way - the only way - to get your book noticed. Choose a topic where there's one very successful title, but no others, so that you can ride it's coat-tails.
I'd love for people to do a search on Caroline Miniscule (my fiction and aviation work) as a matter of course, or Eve Le Qinu for my scrabble stuff, but that time is not yet.
My Whose Body Annotated is available at both places. I get a handful of purchases from the Nook a month. But I get at least one purchase a day from Amazon. That's because Dorothy Sayers is a famous name, Whose Body is the first book she wrote, and so it comes up in the top 10 of any search results.
Not so all my other books. I've published a few other books on the Nook - my science fiction ones and my aviation ones, and they've not been bought. And on Amazon Kindle only a handful of these are bought a month...if that.
But now my Scrabble book...I dare to hope it's taken off.
And it's taken off on the Nook. Haven't sold a one on the Kindle (because in a search for Scrabble, it comes up on the third page of results), but I've sold 5 in 3 days on the Nook.
I'm thinking this is because there are not a lot of Scrabble books on the Nook, so when they do a search on Scrabble game...my book must be at the top of the queue.
So that's one way - the only way - to get your book noticed. Choose a topic where there's one very successful title, but no others, so that you can ride it's coat-tails.
I'd love for people to do a search on Caroline Miniscule (my fiction and aviation work) as a matter of course, or Eve Le Qinu for my scrabble stuff, but that time is not yet.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Eve Le QiNu's WordFlash - Unofficial Scrabble Study Guide
That's the title of my new book, published last night.
Eve Le QiNu is an anagram of Evil Queen, and I've chosen Magic Mirror as the name of the publisher... on second thought I probalby should have anagrammed that as well...ah well
This is volume 1 of a 2 volume set designed to help folks memorize the 2 and 3 letter words needed for Scrabble.
I stopped halfway through because the file was getting too unwieldy, and also I was putting in so much work and didn't know if it was worth it. I have to work for months and months on a book, only to find out not a soul is interested in buying it.
So I broke it into two parts. If this volume sells, I'll finish off volume 2.
This is something anyone with knowledge of a certain subject can do - create a flash card type game out of it. For example, do a What happened on this date book. Have the date of an event on the first page, they go to the next page and learned what happened on that day.
And if they go from back to front - they see the event and have to come up with the date.
Books like that are easy to do if you have the necessary knowledge.
Eve Le QiNu is an anagram of Evil Queen, and I've chosen Magic Mirror as the name of the publisher... on second thought I probalby should have anagrammed that as well...ah well
This is volume 1 of a 2 volume set designed to help folks memorize the 2 and 3 letter words needed for Scrabble.
I stopped halfway through because the file was getting too unwieldy, and also I was putting in so much work and didn't know if it was worth it. I have to work for months and months on a book, only to find out not a soul is interested in buying it.
So I broke it into two parts. If this volume sells, I'll finish off volume 2.
This is something anyone with knowledge of a certain subject can do - create a flash card type game out of it. For example, do a What happened on this date book. Have the date of an event on the first page, they go to the next page and learned what happened on that day.
And if they go from back to front - they see the event and have to come up with the date.
Books like that are easy to do if you have the necessary knowledge.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Welcome new subscribers!
I've been fixating on my blogs of late, but as I'm sure you're here to learn how to publish books, I'll veer over to that side starting tomorrow, especially as I'm about to bring out a new book...should have it completed in another couple of days.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Status Report for Jan 9, 2012
I'm about done with a book I've been working on... I hope it will be done tomorrow and when it is - and when it's actually for sale on Kindle and the Nook, I'll talk about it in more detail here.
Blogs? Much the same as usual. All of my blogs seem to have peaked and are now on a downward spiral. My Rush Limbaugh blog had about 480 subscribers 6 months ago...now I'm down to 420 subscribers with 30 of those new ones. Not good.
My weight loss blog is also a few old subscribers below .500... I peaked there at 130 about 6 months ago and haven't been able to get it back up there.
All my other blogs have about 10 subs or below - I finally gave up on a few blogs that had had only 2 subscribers for over a year. While I cherish those subscribers, I just don't have the time to blog for only two people.
Anyway, more later.
Blogs? Much the same as usual. All of my blogs seem to have peaked and are now on a downward spiral. My Rush Limbaugh blog had about 480 subscribers 6 months ago...now I'm down to 420 subscribers with 30 of those new ones. Not good.
My weight loss blog is also a few old subscribers below .500... I peaked there at 130 about 6 months ago and haven't been able to get it back up there.
All my other blogs have about 10 subs or below - I finally gave up on a few blogs that had had only 2 subscribers for over a year. While I cherish those subscribers, I just don't have the time to blog for only two people.
Anyway, more later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
