#ICYMI #SelfPub -- Ebook Formatting

**This post originally appeared on dvmulligan.com on 4/11/15**

Yesterday, I made The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing available for download. Unlike my novels, this book was not the result of years of sweat and tears, or at least writing it wasn't. The reflections in it are based on years of sweat and tears, but it only took about a month to write, edit, and format it. (It's 30,000 words, and several of the chapters are adapted from prior blog posts.)

What's more, I set aside my usual perfectionism because I had a strong sense of urgency I felt to say everything I needed to say about self-publishing right now, before the whole self-pub world changes again and leaves my advice and experiences obsolete. To the end, apologies for any typos. I hope they aren't too terrible. The book is basically like a long blog post, and though I did my best to proofread, I know there are going to be errors.

But it's not the typos that are driving me nuts now.

#ICYMI #SelfPub #Amazon -- Change the "You Know this Author" Policy

**This post originally appeared on dvmulligan.com on 7/13/15**

Regular readers of my blog will recall a couple of posts from back in the spring about Amazon's review policy, which I believe is unfair to indie authors. Well, I'm not alone. Recently a change.org petition was started by Jas Ward to ask Amazon to change it's policy.

If you've ever had a review removed because Amazon decided you knew the author personally or if you are an indie author struggling to get and keep reviews, consider signing the petition.

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#ICYMI #SelfPub #Amazon -- The Flaw in Amazon's "You Know This Author" Policy

**This post originally appeared on dvmulligan.com on 4/28/15**

In this post, a follow up on my last post regarding Amazon's review policy and how that policy is enforced. Whether you are an author puzzled by disappearing reviews or just a casual Amazon shopper, you should be troubled by Amazon's practices.

Longtime readers of this blog know that sometimes I get a little hung up on a topic, and when I do I have to write successive blog posts in order to sort the whole thing out and move on with my life. Thus, another post on my recent experience of learning that Amazon rejected a reader review of one of my books because its computers concluded the reviewer knew me personally.

Let's start with Amazon's goal in policing reader reviews. According to the Email my colleague received from Amazon about why his review had been rejected, "Customer Reviews are meant to give customers unbiased product feedback from fellow shoppers. Because our goal is to provide Customer Reviews that help customers make informed purchase decisions, any reviews that could be viewed as advertising, promotional, or misleading will not be posted."

This is a slightly different way of stating the sentiment on Amazon's review FAQ page: "Customer Reviews are meant to give customers genuine product feedback from fellow shoppers. Our goal is to capture all the energy and enthusiasm (both favorable and critical) that customers have about a product while avoiding use of reviews to outright advertise, promote and especially mislead."

As someone who hopes that prospective readers will be enticed by my product page to buy my books and to then enjoy and favorably review them,I definitely want my product page to be populated with genuine, energetic, and enthusiastic feedback. I absolutely do not want the reviews there to mislead prospective readers,  because, if they buy my book with wrong ideas it, they will be disappointed and will review it negatively.  So it seems that I, as an author, believe that Amazon's policy suits my interests.

Unfortunately, when enforcing the policy, the objective apparently shifts from ensuring genuine feedback to giving unbiased feedback. Let's parse some definitions, shall we?

#ICYMI #SelfPub #Amazon -- Getting Reviews

**This post originally appeared on dvmulligan.com on 4/25/15**

In The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing, I offered a few bits of advice about getting reviews, which can be summarized including the following: 1. It's okay to pay for reviews as long as the reviewer is honest, 2. Encourage friends to post reviews. When I offered that advice, I knew that Amazon had cracked down on bogus reviews, particularly paid reviews from people who had never even read the books they were reviewing, but I was not familiar with all the precise "rules" Amazon has established for reviews. In this post, further advice for interpreting and navigating those rules.

Earlier this week, a colleague who is considering self-publishing told me he had reviewed The Sane Person's Guide and that he found it very helpful. I was happy that I had been able to help him and thrilled that he was posting a review, as reviews are key to discoverability.

It's been days and the review has not yet appeared on Amazon. When you post a review, Amazon states that it can take up to 48-hours to appear, but it's been longer than that. What gives?

My sometimes immature mind at first went to the sort of conspiracy theories that all teenagers thrive on: Maybe Amazon was delaying reviews to my book to punish it for saying things critical of Amazon and for not being part of Kindle Select. Of course I have the sense to overcome this paranoia if for no other reason than my book is such small potatoes that I can't imagine they've even noticed it exists.

In search of a more reasonable explanation, I turned to the Kindle Direct Publishing Community forums and searched for any recent posts on reviews. Someone else posted a similar situation in early April. I checked out the replies to his post and saw several people insisting that if Amazon can trace you personally to the reviewer, they'll take the review down or reject it. This struck me as even more paranoid that my own conspiracy theory.

I found another similar query about reviews, and more similar responses, and I started to get annoyed at the way internet forums are full of nonsense, so I went seeking Amazon's actual rules for reviews. Here they are.

A few highlights:

• Be specific, be sincere, disclose if you got the product for free
• No reviews from those with a financial stake in the product
• No "Reviews written for any form of compensation other than a free copy of the product. This includes reviews that are a part of a paid publicity package" and no "[s]olicitations for helpful votes"

I agree that those who got the product for free should say so, and it makes sense that anyone with a financial stake doesn't get a say, but paid reviews or solicitations for helpful reviews--we need those. Without those, we indies would be floating down the river without a paddle.

Amazon offers a link to a FAQs page for more information on what's not allowed. You can find it here. On this page they offer specific examples of things that are not allowed, including:

• "A customer posts a review in exchange for $5"
• "A family member of the product creator posts a five-star customer review to help boost sales"
• "An artist posts a positive review on a peer's album in exchange for receiving a positive review from them"

Well, friends, this means that all the advice I gave you about getting early reviews is technically against the rules of the jungle, and since late 2012, as The New York Times reported, Amazon has been enforce its rules with a heavy and uneven hand. 

To say that I was troubled to read these rules (Amazon calls them "guidelines") is an understatement. I am a rule follower. I have been one all my life. I follow the speed limit, I don't cut in line, and report every last penny on my taxes. But these rules, which are written with the important goal of ensuring that customer feedback is genuine and informative to prospective buyers, are so flawed, and stack the deck so thoroughly against indie authors that I simply cannot accept them. Here's why:

#ICYMI #SelfPub #AmWriting -- Author Discoverability Tools

**This post originally appeared on dvmulligan.com on 7/10/15**

In this post, news about 2 tools I've just learned about to help you maximize discoverability of your book within the Amazon ecosystem.

If you've read The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing, you know that my advice to sell more books is to maximize discoverability of your book work in the Kindle store, a task that sounds specific until you try to do it.

In trying to learn how to boost my book's visibility, I have read a lot of advice about researching book categories and keywords, using Google Adwords, and search engine optimization (SEO), and I have honestly not found any of that research useful. I consider myself pretty smart, but trying to figure out the exact categories and keywords for my books made me feel like I was back in calculus all over again, and let's just say calculus wasn't my best subject.

Enter two interesting and helpful tools:

1. Kindle Samuri

2. Kindle Spy

Both of these tools are designed to cull data about bestselling books and provide you with all sorts of data you can use to improve your own book category, keywords, and visibility. Not only does each give you lists of categories and keywords, but they use handy, color-coded systems to show you what topics and keywords can most benefit you. They consider the popularity, potential, and competition in categories, all of which is fascinating and useful.

The downsides: These are not free products. They cost $27 and $47, respectively. Also, Kindle Spy seems to me to be more helpful for those in the book planning phase than for those who already have books available for sale.

The upsides: Way cheaper than paying an SEO expert. Once you buy the tools you can use them over and over. You'll get all kinds of hard data to be better informed about the book selling marketplace.

When I used Kindle Spy to look into my competition for The Latecomers Fan Club, what I learned is that to be a bestseller in women's fiction, you need to compete with 50 Shades of Grey, and the books doing so with the most success have the following words either in their titles or keywords:

#ICYMI #SelfPub #AmWriting -- Why Indie Authors should opt out of Kindle Select

The following post was originally published on 7/24/15 on dvmulligan.com.

In this post, further thoughts on the recent changes to the Kindle Unlimited pay structure and how indie authors can be part of the solution instead of adding to the problem. 

Recently, I shared some information about why Kindle Unlimited is bad for authors. All authors should be upset by the pay structure rule changes. Consider the following math problem:

• Say you write a 200 page novel, which you are selling for $3.99. 
• Every time someone buys it, you get 70%, or $2.66 per copy sold.
• You enroll in Kindle Select, which makes your book available for Amazon Prime  Members to borrow and to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. For each Prime borrow, you get a share of the KDP Global Fund. Your share is based on the number of pages each borrower actually reads and the amount of money in the Global Fund that month. The amount in fund varies. Right now, authors are earning about half a cent per page read. So if your borrower reads all 200 pages of your book, you would earn 100 cents. That's right: You would earn $1.00. 
• If that borrower had bought your book outright, whether or not she read a single word of it, you would have made $2.66, so you're losing $1.66.

My advice: Don't opt in to Kindle Select. 

The best way to send Amazon the message that Indie Authors dislike these terms is to pull our books from the program.

As I noted in my last post, however, one group of authors is particularly upset about the changes, and yet they also seem reluctant to take their books out of the program. Namely I'm talking about authors of erotica. 

Curious to find out why they were so vocally upset and yet so unwilling to just get out of Kindle Select, I did some digging, and my findings are interesting. It seems entrepreneurial authors have found some creative ways to game the system.

First, take a look at this week's Self-Published Best Sellers as compiled by GalleyCat.

#ICYMI #AmWriting #SelfPub #Amazon -- Kindle Select is Bad for Authors

**This post orginially appeared on dvmulligan.com on 7/23/15**

On June 15, Amazon announced changes to the Amazon Kindle Unlimited book borrowing program. If you're read The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing, I am not a fan of Kindle Select, which the program that allows self-published authors to be part of Kindle Unlimited. Changes to the program only further my sense that this program is BAD for indie authors. We can't let Amazon treat us like second-class citizens. Read on for more information.

From the start of the Kindle Unlimited program through the end of June, authors were paid based on the number of "borrows" of their books, and a borrow "counted" when a reader reached 10% of the book.

Effective today, they are now paid based on pages read. Why is this bad?

1. Amazon no longer tells authors how many people are actually reading out books. This information is important. Authors need to know if people are finishing the books! This basic information is no longer provided.

2. Amazon is not telling authors how much they can expect to be paid. For years, authors using Kindle Direct Publishing and other indie publishing outlets offered our books through those storefronts with a promise of a fixed royalty rate based on sales price. But now authors have no idea what they will make if someone reads a book via Kindle Unlimited. 

Many authors are panicking over this massive change. People are expecting to see their income cut by 90% after Amazon cheerfully announced (though they hid it behind some math) that one "page" of a book is worth .57 cents. Not 57 cents. Just more than one half of ONE CENT. 

#SelfPubHelp:The Sane Person's Guide Now in Paperback!

That's right--it's no longer just an ebook!

If you prefer your instruction manuals in print where you can mark them up and dog-ear the pages, The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing is now for sale as a paperback.

Click here to snag yours today!

#SelfPubHelp: Contests -- Are they worth the entry fee?

Recently a newbie to self-publishing emailed me to ask my take on contests. I figured others might have the same questions, so here's my response:

My friend wrote:

Now that my book has been unleashed on the world, I’ve been getting lots of emails about various indie publishing awards. I know you’ve been honored with several awards, and would love to hear your thoughts about them, if you don’t mind sharing your personal observations. Specifically:

·         Did you submit entries yourself?

·         Did you have to pay for those entries? If so, what did you consider a reasonable entry fee?

·         Are there any awards that are more prestigious or better respected than others?

·         How do you know you’re not getting involved in vanity/scam projects from less-than-honorable outfits who are just out to make a quick buck from authors?

#Self-Publishing Workshop at the Shrewsbury MA Public Library!

Thinking of self-publishing but not sure where to start? Check out this workshop.

Where?

Shrewsbury, MA Public Library

When?

Saturday, August 15, 10:00 to 12:00

Cost?

FREE, but registration is required. Click this link to sign up.

What to expect?

I'll be giving an overview of the basics and answering your questions. Topics we'll touch on:

• considerations to make before self-publishing, 
• budget-setting, 
• distribution options for ebooks, print, and audiobooks,
• manuscript preparation and where to find book publishing pros to help you
• and the elusive author platform 

Each participant will get a packet of handouts and worksheets to take home to help with the publication process, as well as access to the Google Slides Presentation from the workshop.

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