indieKindle: October 2010

Friday, October 29, 2010

PayPal is down and out in Paris, London, and everywhere else

Brad McCarty seems to have the scoop at The Next Web. Unfortunately this outage may temporarily impede sponsorship transactions.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

New sponsorship opportunities allow us to open up the calendar a bit with some lower price points

As you may have noticed, our Kindle Nation Daily sponsorships have been so effective and popular that we are currently scheduled well into January for daily options and well into May for weekly options. I'm very attentive to the need to keep a delicate balance between the desire to provide helpful connections between readers and writers and the need to provide readers with the full range of useful content that drives them to take time to read and/or subscribe to Kindle Nation in the first place.

That being said, we've created some new options that open up new sponsorship opportunities for authors and publishers, and the calendar is currently wide open! They are listed on the sponsorship info page here and included on the PayPal pulldown menu, but here's a quick summary:

* 1. Our relatively new sister site, Planet iPad, is growing by leaps and bounds. Its readership and impact, for now, is just a fraction of Kindle Nation's, but it has doubled in the past ten days and under the editorship of Tom Dulaney is already pushing 20 percent of the levels that it has taken Kindle Nation nearly two years to reach. We've just set up a one-day Planet iPad Free Book Alert Sponsorship that is priced very low and the calendar is wide open.

* 2. At Kindle Nation, we've added Option 6 - eBook of the Day Sponsorship - 1 Day, a package that includes several elements:

a one-day Planet iPad Free Book Alert Sponsorship;
a small linked mention of title and author near the top of the Kindle Nation Daily website for at least 18 hours;
a single "Kindle for the Web" sample post on the Kindle Nation Daily website at some time between noon and 8 pm Eastern, with brief linked mention of title and author;
one Facebook status post and one Twitter tweet linking back to the "Kindle for the Web" sample post; and
one left sidebar "eBook of the Day" ad on the Kindle Nation Daily website for at least 18 hours, with linked title, author, and cover art.

Note: To reap the full benefits of Option 6, you'll want to make sure that your ebook is compatible with the "Kindle for the Web" sample feature, which you can see in this recent Kindle Nation post on Paul Levine's novel Reversal. If you want to check with me on compatibility, send me a simple query with your ten-digit ASIN in the subject line of your email.

*3. Since the weekly email blasts on which Gold Sponsorships are partially based are sold out until mid-May, we've added a new "Option 5 - Silver Sponsorship" package which allows you to save $10 on a package consisting of Options 1 and 2. Options 1 and 2 are both daily events and there is availability beginning in mid-January for each.

Please keep in mind that everything I've said about availability here should be taken as a snapshot based on the status of things before I send out this newsletter.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats in Joe Konrath's Marina

It takes more than just a pretty face to launch a thousand ships these days, and the same goes for a dozen bestsellers. As I write these words on the morning of October 28, Joe Konrath has 5 of the top 17 titles on the Kindle Store Movers + Shakers List, which by definition also means that he has at least 5 titles in the Top 400 overall in the Kindle Store.

How does he do it? He's not just the hardest working man in the book business, he's also, by my lights, the smartest.

Every author and every publisher would do well to go to school on the very specific steps that Joe takes to cross-pollinate his various titles and brands with his other work and even with novels by other authors. And Joe makes it easy to learn with excellent posts like this one on his blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. If you have a Kindle, subscribing to the Kindle edition to have his frequent posts pushed directly to your Kindle will probably be the wisest use you could ever make of 99 cents a month.

By the way, the same principles of cross-pollination also work well in association with Kindle Nation Daily sponsorships. Authors like Paul Levine and L.J. Sellers have seen a powerful "halo effect" benefit where a sponsorship for one title also paid off dramatically for other books or series. In cases like these, the author has a distinctive brand, a number of highly regarded books, and a willingness to price creatively for maximum marketing impact.

Pricing Your eBook For Best Results

It's not my job to tell you how to price your book for the Kindle Store, but I don't mind working overtime to share a little experience. Long story short: $2.99 is the sweet spot, 99 cents can be a very powerful lure in a "loss leader" kind of way, and anything over $4 or $5 is likely to have a chilling effect on your sales and royalties if you are an indie author. Am I say your book is worth any less than Fall of Giants? Hell, no. I'm just reminding you that your royalty payments aren't just based on A, they are based on AxB, where A is the royalty per book and B is the number of books sold.

My primary concern here, of course, is that I want to see our authors succeed with their sponsorships. And if you've been seeing dozens of other authors' books climb from #100,000 to the top 1,000 in the sales rankings, and your $7.99 novel only makes it into the top 15,000, I'm just saying: it wasn't because I said nicer things about someone else's book.

(And yes, if you are wondering, you can click on the cover image to download a copy of my book on ebook pricing to your Kindle or just about any other device for $2.99.)

Every now and then we have an unexpected opening.... Let me know if you are interested!

Occasionally there are events that unanticipated sponsorship openings in our calendar, often with pretty short notice. When that happens, I send out a brief email describing the sponsorship availability and the price, with a request that interested parties get right back to me right away. I try to handle such events as efficiently as possible on a first-come, first-served basis. If you would like to receive an email from me when these openings occur, please send an email to hppress@gmail.com with the following in the subject line:

unexpected sponsorship opening

Thanks.

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Free Books and Other Content for Your Kindle

The Kindle store is the best place to buy many books, articles and periodicals, but it is also worth checking out the free content you can acquire through the links below. Then scroll down for Kindle information, guides, accessories, links, and a look at the latest in fresh fiction from some of the Kindle Store's hot indie authors!

Writers & Writing Links & Blogroll

Independent Publishing Resources and Links - in Progress

BowkerLink Publisher Access and ISBN System

American Booksellers Association

Book Industry Study Group (including BISAC Subject Headings List)

International Standard Book Number Agency

Joe Wikert's Publishing2020 Blog

Dan Poynter's ParaPublishing.com

indieKindle

John Kremer's Book Marketing Blog

Reviews of Independently Published Books - Foreword Magazine

Small Press Blog

Small Publishers Association of North America

The Independent Book Publishers Association (PMA)

Amazon's Digital Text Platform for Kindle Publishing (beta)

CreateSpace - high-quality, inexpensive publishing with seamless integration with distribution channels and no setup fees

Believer

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

The Sun Magazine

Grub Street

Poets & Writers

Narrative Magazine

PEN New England

National Writers Union

Sunday, March 23, 2008

A season of renewal

Just a quick drop-by to wish an hour, a day, a season of renewal and new energies to my visitors here. I have been hard at the work of finishing my book about independent publishing -- part how-to, part anthem, about publishing both on the Kindle platform and more generally -- and haven't been here as much as I wished to be, but I'm moved this morning to re-purpose a paragraph from the manuscript and share it with you here:

By heralding and thus extending the life of the good work of others, as readers, writers, and citizens, we are casting bread upon the water. We writers have had to face up to the fact that our initial hopes, that we might happily pursue our writing lives in a Garden of Eden, assured of a loving audience as large as we had any cause to imagine, forgiving of our flaws, where all our needs would be fulfilled, turned out to be delusional. We have been banished to the real world and cursed, like Eve and Adam, to work hard for a living. But it is work that we can do, and be happy to do.
Cheers to each and all,
Windwalker

Friday, March 7, 2008

Indie Author Review Program

att'n Indie Authors: You've published a Kindle edition of your novel, memoir, how-to article or history, so now what?

If you would like to have it reviewed by one of Amazon's Top Reviewers, we can help!

We have been rounding up top 100 reviewers and others who are interested in receiving reading copies of indie work for review purposes, and building a data base by reading interest areas.

If you would like to participate, just send an email to indieKindle@gmail.com with the link to your book's detail page, a brief bio, and a reading copy of your book attached as (preferably) a Word document. Please include "Indie Author Review Program" in the subject line, and include a link to any free excerpts and your website if applicable.

Your content will be only shared with participating reviewers, whose participation will be kept confidential (until and unless they publish an Amazon review). Be aware, of course, that positive reviews are not guaranteed - reviewers will post honest reviews.

Building an audience of readers

On November 19, 2007, Amazon introduced its new ebook reader, the Amazon Kindle. Although it is yet another in a series of ebook devices, it is also much, much more than that. The Kindle sold out in 5 1/2 hours, and Amazon's production process still has yet to catch up with the demand. Whether or not you can ever imagine yourself reading books or journals on a 6-inch e-ink screen, you owe it to yourself, as a writer or publisher, to give serious consideration to what this device can do to help you connect with readers.

More than any other technological development in the past decade, the Kindle will help to provide audience for quality writing of all kinds:

* First, if you follow the steps in the articles that are available to your left, they will enable you to publish books and other content on the Kindle Publishing Platform at zero expense;

* Second, these steps provide a guide to walk you through a seamless, user-friendly process of marketing and promoting your books and other content through a powerful keyword and category search environment that Amazon has created within its "Kindle store," and the cost of this marketing power is, like the cost of publishing on the Kindle Publishing Platform, is zero; and

* Third, and most importantly, by publishing your work for the Kindle now, you will be getting in on the ground floor of the fastest growing segment of avid readers for years to come.

I am, personally, extremely resistant to the notion of telling any writer or publisher that he will ever get rich doing anything related to writing. It is not why we do what we do, and the only paths to prosperity that I know of are paved with passion. So I am not going to talk money here. It makes much more sense for you to do your own thinking on this topic.

But here are some basic building blocks for whatever thinking you may do.

* I published three short-form articles on the Kindle Publishing Platform in December 2007. In the first 15 days they were up, they sold over 15 copies. I did nothing to market them other than fill in keywords and categories for the Amazon search engine. No big thing, in and of itself, until one begins to make logical extrapolations. By the end of the month they sold 50, and another 50 in the first two weeks of January 2008.

* Whatever the small number of Kindles in circulation in December 2007, it is a no-brainer to project that there will be 20 times as many Kindles in circulation one year later, and 50 times as many in circulation a year or so beyond that. Amazon does not roll out its biggest product in years without serious market-testing and a tight plan for ramping up production.

* Can you see where this is heading? Authors who publish directly to the Kindle Platform receive, in effect, a 35% royalty and may set any price they believe the market will bear for their work. They may publish as many books, articles and excerpts as they wish. Ultimately, readers will provide the best filter to determine the success and popularity of the work that is published for the Kindle.

Whether you see the Kindle publishing opportunity as a chance to connect your work directly with readers, as a way to market-test a book project by publishing an excerpt to test response, or as a creative way to build the kind of numbers that might persuade a conventional publisher to give you a book contract, it is time for you to get started. I hope that the articles available at the left will give you a big assist with that process.

You don't need to own a Kindle to publish books or other content for the Kindle. But if you get to work with the publishing process, you may find that your royalties pay for a Kindle sooner than you would expect.