Tag Archives: Publishing

by Ben Trube | October 13, 2015 · 12:35 PM

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?

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?

1 Comment

Filed under Books + Publishing, Internal Debate 42, Writing

Tagged as Amazon, Books, Fiction, Kindle Scout, Publishing

by Ben Trube | October 29, 2014 · 6:43 AM

Amazon Scouts for new talent

Or actually they get you to do it.

Amazon seems to be rolling out new programs for its readers and writers every couple of months. This latest, Kindle Scout, offers readers the chance to vote for the next big thing in books, or more specifically, who gets a 5 year contract and $1500 advance from Amazon.

For readers it doesn’t seem like a particularly bad deal. You get to sample the first few pages of a lot of authors, pick your favorites, and if a lot of people agree with you, you get a free copy of the full book. Even if you don’t get free books, odds are you’ll have found something new you might not otherwise have discovered.

And for writers it’s not so bad either, particularly if you’re just starting out. The full terms are a 5-year renewable contract for exclusive worldwide eBook and audio-book rights in return for the $1500 advance and a 50% royalty. True, you have less control over how your book is published than you do with Amazon’s 70% self-publishing option, but you also have Amazon’s Featured Marketing which seems to include participation in Kindle Unlimited and the Lending Library (both things you get with the exclusive 70% option) but also e-mail and targeted promotions (whatever that means).

If you read the Publisher’s Lunch newsletter, then you know that $1500 advance is not a big deal, but it is a nice one. Here’s how the calculation works for someone who was going to sell their book exclusively on Amazon for the 70% option at $2.99.

To earn $1500 in royalties you would need to sell 717 copies of your book (assuming no appreciable transmission fees that cut into your royalty) at $2.99 (70% royalty). If you think you’re going to sell less copies of your book, then a $1500 advance is pretty good. Just to compare apples to apples you’d need to sell about $2143 in merchandise to earn $1500 if you go it alone.

To earn your advance if published by Kindle Press you’d need $3000 in sales before you’d start earning additional royalties (regardless of the individual price of each book which is a little difficult to parse and probably will vary on Kindle Scout). That might sound like a lot more, but hopefully Amazon’s marketing would help with that as they obviously have some interest in you earning the money they paid for you.

Problems I see are these: If a book is really popular in its Scout campaign, it stands a risk of most of its copies going to the people who voted for it, and not for people who spent money. And exactly how much social media or random reader clout is necessary to break the threshold is a little nebulous as well, and probably varies from cycle to cycle. Amazon might take a risk on you initially, but if you don’t earn your advance or maybe even the $25,000 they hope you’ll earn in your 5-year contract, they may not give you another one. That’s true for just about anywhere in the publishing industry though so maybe its worth the risk.

And some people in the literature community might be uncomfortable with the idea of books being selected by popular vote, and not by the standards of literary agents and publishers. Scout’s genres at the moment are sci-fi, mystery and romance, which have always been more populist genres, but this is a real experiment in whether the crowd can actually pick quality.

But that’s really what our publishing landscape looks like these days. Readers and writers alike need to be willing to experiment to find what works for them. I’m not sure if I’d submit a book to this program or not, but I am considering it. If I do, I hope I can count on all of you to vote for me and in return I’ll vote for you to 🙂

Have you guys checked out Kindle Scout? Thoughts?

4 Comments

Filed under Books + Publishing, Internal Debate 42, Writing

Tagged as Amazon, Kindle Scout, Publishing, Technology, Writing

by Ben Trube | August 27, 2014 · 6:35 AM

Is there room for me?

By one estimate, a new book is published on Amazon every 5 minutes (though this might include apps as well). Almost every one of these books is a self-published indie book. At current count Amazon has over 3.4 million books and counting. This doesn’t seem like a very encouraging statistic for those of us who want to make a life at writing, but here are some words of encouragement that might help you be found amongst the throng.

Remember the web is much bigger – On WordPress alone, where I host this blog, 41.7 million new posts are created each month. About 15-16 of those are mine. And yet I’ve got over 3000 subscribers, and a comfortable number of daily visitors to the site. Chances are if you’re an indie writer, you’re blogging too. It can take a while to form a base, but it is definitely possible, particularly if you have a clear vision for your writing.

Find your niche – I’m not too good at the marketing thing yet (hopefully when Surreality is released I can get a little better), but failings in marketing can be balanced with good SEO (search engine optimization). In other words, write about a specific topic and appeal to a specific segment of the market. You don’t have to be the only one standing in that market, but sometimes it’s better to shoot for the small market that might see you than trying to appeal to the broadest common denominator.

Remember what books are being published – Even with a flooded market, a bad book is a bad book. A lot of how people evaluate books on Amazon are by using reviews, and reading the product description. Chances are if someone can’t write a very good book, they can’t write a good product description either. And even if they can, the first person who buys that book and doesn’t like it will probably go online and say so. I might not be right about this, but I think people have more of a tendency to post a review if they didn’t like something than if they did, so a few positive reviews on your book go a long way.

Some books are written by robots – About 10o,000 of the books on Amazon have been written by an AI, specifically an expert system designed to write extremely technical narrow market reports designed to sell at a premium to 10 people. That’s impressive from a technological perspective, but not something you’re really competing with. Though it might not be the best time to enter the market as a romance author (as that’s the next genre this AI wants to take on).

Define success – Your first book, or even your fifth, probably isn’t going to be the one that lets you quit your day job and live in the writer’s paradise of writing full time. But it might do better than your last book. I wanted to sell between 200-300 fractal books in my first year. Frankly, this seemed like a bit of a stretch goal, but I met it, and sales for next year are looking healthy so far. I make enough money each month for a mid-priced dinner, but hey it’s better than nothing. I have roughly equivalent modest goals for Surreality, and will be excited if I meet or exceed them. The goal is to do a little better with each book, and to just keep writing.

You’re probably doing better than Joe Biden – Remember our Vice President? He had a book out last year and earned about $201 dollars in royalties (according to a May report in Gawker). I earned more than twice that last year for a book about fractals, and I don’t quite have the same name recognition (or number of appearances on Parks and Recreation).

Amazon is not the only game in town – There are magazines, this little thing called Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Indie Bundle sites, the list goes on. You can have a book be exclusive on Amazon for a while, then try other markets. Or you can eschew Amazon altogether and strike out to sell your book directly off your blog. The writing community and the blog community is a pretty friendly one. If they like you’re writing, they’ll probably buy your book, especially if you show the love as well.

Just keep writing, and keep smiling. Remember, I’m pullin’ for ya. We’re all in this together.