Month: January 2014

Exclusivity or Not?

I’ve just come to the end of my second period of Amazon KDP Select, well, I haven’t, my book Windigo has. I now have to go through all the mental hoo haa about whether to give Amazon exclusivity again or shall I not bother and go back to Smashwords? Sometimes I feel I could be missing out on a big chunk of sales by not being on Kobo et al but then again, Amazon has such a huge market share  so really, why bother with the others?  I just don’t know. Think I’ll just toss a coin…unless of course anyone has any sage advice?

Pricing Your Book

Weeeeell, I’ve never heard of this author, but the book’s only 99p, might as well give it a go.

Weeeeell, I’ve never heard of this author, the book’s only 99p, if it’s so cheap, can it be any good?

How to price your eBook is an absolute nightmare. I ask people, I use other similar books as yardsticks and I spend hours cruising Amazon. But still it’s a stab in the dark. I hummed and hawed for ages before deciding on $3.99 which equates to £2.63 on this side of the pond. My reasoning was this: If I don’t value my book, why should anyone else. That’s not to say I don’t give it away too, I firmly believe that limited free promotions are a hugely valuable tool…but must not be overused.

Free – At A Price!

Free promotions on Amazon. Wonderful things, I have got a lot of eBooks in front of a lot of readers with them. Of course, I’ve no idea if they have actually read them and that is something that is out of my control. For the indie author there is perhaps no better way of getting your words in front of people and the price of that is to give your words away. It’s a good deal in my eyes. You can hear a ‘but’ coming here can’t you?

Well, yes, here it is. The lovely reader who gets your free words is very valuable and we love them in all their gorgeousness. But, perhaps (beating around the bush here, worried about offending potential readers, very British) they could, just perhaps, leave a little review in return for the free read? It’s a small thing but it means so much to the paranoid word parent.

Accuracy!

Here he goes again, moan bloomin’ trombone. “The smell of Cordite drifted across the battlefield”. No, it didn’t. The smell of Cordite smoke drifted across the battlefield. If it was before 1889 and after about 1950 it certainly didn’t. Crikey, I’m such a pedant! But such mistakes can spoil a whole chapter, even a whole book for me. The point though, is that it’s only in things I know about, if I don’t know about a particular subject, well, how could I even spot the mistake? But of course, in that instance I am being sold a fib. Being poorly educated.

Therefore my plea to authors is to please research, research, research! Cultivate contacts in many fields, make use of friends, family and social networks to find out more and of course make use of organs such as Wikipedia.