Tag Archives: Kindle Scout

by Ben Trube | October 15, 2015 · 12:35 PM

Kindle Scout – How It Works

Well … it turns out what I thought would take two weeks, took two days. The Kindle Scout campaign for Surreality is live.

So what does that mean?

Q. What is Surreality again?

My latest mystery, set in the city of Columbus, OH and the virtual world of Surreality.

Business partners turned bitter rivals, a missing hooker, and a death that’s just a preview of things to come… When a man is strangled in the virtual world of Surreality and $80 million is stolen, Detective Dan Keenan must find the missing money and stop a killer from making good on murder.

Q. What is Kindle Scout?

Kindle Scout was introduced by Amazon about a year ago. Prospective authors put their book up for public voting for 30 days during which time Amazon decides whether to publish the book through Kindle Press. If the book is selected the author gets a 5 year publishing contract and a nice advance.

Q. So, what’s in it for me?

If you nominate my book and Kindle Press decides to publish it, you’ll get a free eBook copy. And either way, you’ll have my gratitude. All of the support I get from my fellow bloggers and friends really means a lot to me. This book wouldn’t be ready for publication without your support.

Q. Can I buy it yet?

Not quite yet, but the first two chapters (and a little of chapter three) are available as a sample through the campaign. You can read it online, or have it sent to your Kindle to read for later.

Q. Do I need to sign up for Kindle Scout to vote?

A. Nope. If you have an Amazon.com account, you’ll just sign in with that.

Q. How long do I have to decide?

About a month. The campaign ends November 14th at 12:00AM EDT.

Q. Where do I go?

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/2VSHAGFXNJ50T

Q. Is it a long book?

Only about 75K words (maybe 240 pages). Good for a beach read or for those slightly less cold because of El Nino winter nights.

Q. How can I help?

If you like the book, share the campaign on Twitter or Facebook. Tell your friends, your relatives, your dog. Hey, you never know. Maybe he’ll vote by randomly mashing keys. Dogs are very smart.

Q. What if I have more questions?

Kindle Scout has a great FAQ or you could just contact me at bentrubewriter@gmail.com.

Thank you so much and hope to earn your vote!

Kindle Scout – My Submission

As of about 10pm last night, I have submitted my next book Surreality for consideration under the Kindle Scout program.

Right now I’m in the waiting period for my materials to be reviewed. In a few days I should be receiving details as to the launch date of the 30 day campaign, as well as previews of how the site will look. It’s a bit of a nervous feeling, more so even than when I published my fractal books. The one payoff of those projects is that they were available for purchase pretty much immediately after I uploaded them. Here I have 45 days to wait and see if Amazon Press will be publishing my book, or if I’ll work with Kindle Direct Publishing as I did before.

A lot of things went into preparing the campaign. They say you can do it in 15 minutes, but they’re only talking about the literal form filling out process (and that’s if you don’t read the EULA as I did). Since this is a blog chronicling technology and aspects of the writing process I thought this would be a good time to give you my impressions of submitting to Kindle Scout, and help fill in a few gaps in the FAQ’s they provide.

Treat this like a real publishing contract, because it is:

The short version of this statement is don’t assume anything. The Kindle Press contract has some specific terms about what rights go to Amazon and when and how they revert to you. Even if you aren’t selected for publication the materials on the Kindle Scout website are not automatically removed.

Amazon will remove your materials from the Kindle Scout site after you request it in writing (but not automatically).
If you publish with Kindle Press certain rights automatically renew if sales goals are met, while others can be reverted to you if Kindle Press hasn’t exercised them or sales targets are not met. Again, this doesn’t happen automatically. You have to request reversion of your rights.
Amazon sets the price of the book. No big surprise but it might be a factor for some people. They control the marketing.

My advice is to print a hard copy of the EULA as well as saving a digital copy to your computer. And I know it’s long, but do read it. It’s not a bad deal, but you should understand it.

Author Questions / Bio

You can select author questions from a list of about 15 questions Amazon has come up with. Responses are 300 characters long for each question. Use this space to talk about books you like and what inspires you. Your Bio is only 500 characters and probably should be more about who you are and where you live.

Look at other submissions

It was very helpful to me to see what others were doing for things like their descriptions and taglines. 45 characters is not much space to describe your book, but you’d be amazed what some people come up with. The tagline should evoke the feeling of the book, the description should tell you what the book is about.

Make your thank you a thank you

This is a personal opinion, but I don’t think a thank you should be sales pitch as Amazon suggests. You’ve already mentioned where people can find you in social media links, maybe answers to questions and your bio. Let the thank you statement just be a thank you for people who took the time to vote for you.

Submit a book that’s ready to publish

I don’t know how this is going to go, but Surreality is coming out one way or another. I’ve voted on a number of other books on the site, some that have been selected for publication, and others that haven’t. If you vote for a book, you’ll get a notice if the author self-publishes it on Amazon and it’s probably a good idea to do this when people still remember who you are. As for the books that won, Amazon expects a final draft with 30 days of you being picked and will go ahead with what you’ve submitted if you don’t update them. Again, this is the real deal, treat it as such.

Tomorrow I’ll talk a bit about the cover shoot. Anyone else got a campaign running?

Summarizing Your Work

Marketing your work and writing are two very different things.

In preparation for the Kindle Scout campaign for Surreality, I am preparing a 45 character “tag-line” and a 500 character description of my book. I have been working on this book off and on for about seven years, and very intently the last half year as I’ve concluded the final revisions and copy edits.

But I am having a devil of a time distilling it down to the essence, just a couple little words that describe countless hundreds of hours of work.

The truth is my attempts so far have ranged from the technical, the corny, the too long and the wildly inaccurate.

And what grabs me in descriptions may not grab a general audience. I tend to like non-sequiturs, weird mashups of characters, something that shows me the author’s personality and the personality of the book. A tagline like “A taut political thriller” does not grab me, but one like “Rabid raccoon rights wrong” might get me to at least read the description to see where that story is going. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who would dismiss such a tagline as just silly and never read any further.

And I might not be the best judge. I’m a sucker for puns and requested a review copy of an Angry Birds \ Transformers mash-up because it was called Age of Eggstinction.

The trouble is getting stuck in patterns of thought. I feel like I need a random word generator, something that takes a random section of my book, throws it on the screen and makes me write about that. Actually as a programmer I could probably write that. I once wrote a sorting dictionary out of the full text of War and Peace for “fun”.

Not much insight to share at this point other than I’m going to keep banging on this until I get something good. Any of you have any thoughts?

Giving Scouting Another Look

A little less than a year ago, I wrote about a new Amazon program called Kindle Scout.

The bottom-line is this:

Readers read excerpts of books and vote for their favorites (up to 3 per month). This voting data is used by Amazon to consider the next crop of books it will publish out of Kindle Scout. If a book you voted for is picked, you get a free copy.
Authors whose books are selected get a $1500 advance, 50% eBook royalty and a 5 year exclusive Amazon publishing contract (plus marketing promotions, audiobook and international sales,etc.)

According to the Scout FAQ you retain print rights, which you can use to publish the book through a traditional publisher or through CreateSpace. It’s a little unclear if the book would be eligible for Kindle Matchbook (free or discounted eBook copies for purchasers of the physical book) under these circumstances.

Keeping print rights is actually important to me for a couple of reasons:

The fractal books were too expensive to produce print copies, so I never got something I could hold in my hand after a year and a half of work. This was understandably a little disappointing.
Print copies allow me to gift my book to friends easily, with signed copies.
I can take advantage of unconventional local scale marketing by donating books to little library boxes.
There’s at least the possibility that I could sell the book to local independent book stores.

The pros and cons of going with Scout seem to be these:

Pros:

Money up front.
Amazon featured marketing, beyond the programs you can get through KDP.

Cons:

Lower eBook royalty.
Less control over how the book is priced, marketed.
Long Amazon exclusivity. Less flexibility to try other channels.

Truthfully, I’m on the fence about this. I like the control that comes from going “full indie”, but I recognize that can make it a lot harder for a book to be discovered. And there’s a certain amount of upfront interest that has to be generated for the book for it even to make Amazon’s cut.

Have any of you tried Scout? What has been your experience?