Following a Successful Author's Experience with New Publishing Technologies

Sunday afternoon

He calls it "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing", but don't think for a moment that Joe Konrath hasn't been to Night School. As I have already discussed in the Kindle Nation newsletter, Joe is my eye idea of an author who is working hard at connecting with his base of readers. As a direct consequence, that base is expanding by leaps and bounds.

Most recently, due in part to some nice symbiosis between Joe and Kindle Nation, "his" novel Serial has soared to the #1 bestseller position, among 290,000 Kindle books, in the Kindle Store. (Why the quotation marks around the word "his"? Because Joe's the human behind the Jack Kilborn pen name.)

Joe is also the successful author of the Jack Daniels suspense-with-an-edge series, hold the garnish and the little umbrella, that began with the 2004 publication of Whiskey Sour.

If you are an author or independent publisher who wants to learn how to work the new technologies to find your readers, here are two suggestions:

• Set yourself a Google Alert for "Konrath;" and
• Become a subscriber to Joe's newbie publishing blog.

Kindle Blog headcount approaches 5,000, but ... Readers? That's another story

The explosive growth of the Kindle Store's Blog selection, following the launch of Amazon's Kindle Publishing For Blogs Beta Program about ten days ago, continues apace. We're approaching 5,000 as I post this morning, up from about 1,500 prior to the beta:


Of course, nobody knows if any of the new blogs are gaining any traction, since -- because of Amazon's convenient 14-day free trial for all Kindle Store blogs and other periodicals -- they won't show up in publishers' sales reports until at least 14 days after they go live. I can tell from my Amazon Associates report that a couple of hundred people followed the link in my New Kindle Blogs for Your Consideration post to check out the page for this blog, but that doesn't tell me if any of them were moved to click for the trial once they got there. We'll see. What we can tell -- based on the fact that no Kindle blog ranks in the top 18,000 titles overall in the Kindle Store -- is that nobody, not even Ariana, is living in the lovely world envisioned by the GeekMBA360 post to which I linked a few days back:

Let’s say that you can attract 5% of the overall Kindle user base, which is 50,000. The total monthly revenue from your blog would be $100,000. Amazon will get $70,000 while you get $30,000. You get paid at a rate of $0.6/user.

To put it another way, my considerable experience with the relationship between Kindle Store sales rankings and actual units sold says that there are fewer than a handful of all Kindle blogs that are currently averaging more than 1 or 2 sales per day. I wish I could put this more sweetly.

There are various reasons for this:

• On the way to becoming the upload society we may have forgotten, or left ourselves without sufficient time, to continue fulfilling our responsibilities as the download society. It's just another wrinkle in that old curveball epitomized in the widely observed notion that we have more poets than poetry-readers.
• Blogs, they're just not that into you. Blog reading isn't nearly as big a deal as book reading for most people, or, more precisely, for Kindle owners.
• Then there's the one that makes you say "Duh," or, perhaps, if you are a Kindle blogger, "D'oh." Blogs are free everywhere else but in the Kindle Store, and you can get them pushed to your Kindle via the services that work with RSS feeds and other aggregation processes. While I have tried to make the case that it can be convenient in various ways to have them pushed to your Kindle in something close to real time, it would be insane to think that people will beat down the doors of the Kindle Store to pay for something that is free everywhere else.

Maybe there's one more thing that we as Kindle owners and readers can influence in a positive way. While it is true that the 14-day trial takes the financial risk out of checking out a blog in the Kindle Store before we invest 99 cents a month, that does not address the perhaps more significant risk that we might waste our valuable time reading stuff that we don't care or need to read.

Unfortunately, there is little for us to go on in terms of the kind of reader feedback that often helps us connect with interesting or distinctive or simply very good work among books in their Amazon store incarnation. As of this morning when I took the above screen shot, as you can see, there were only 221 customer reviews for all of the 4,915 blogs in the Kindle Store. There's a customer feedback system that is not working.

So, I suggest that we as Kindle Nation citizens might want to exercise a bit of civic responsibility rating and writing brief reviews of blogs on their Kindle Store pages when we have something to say about them. A couple of lines, or a couple of minutes, is really all it should take. You'll find a link to read or write reviews near the top of any blog's detail page, just below some pithy line such as: "The Kindling point for thousands of Amazon Kindle owners."

Scribd Beta DIY Launch for eBook Authors and Publishers Looks Viable

San Francisco-based startup Scribd has just launched the beta version of a potentially exciting new opportunity for authors, publishers, and readers. I hesitated before including the DIY label in the subject line because it may be misleading, given that Scribd has done some business with major publishers such as Random House, according to today's New York Times piece, "Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Their Work and Name Their Price." But Scribd's roots are all about document-sharing and a Youtube-like DIY approach for those who understand that uploading is the new downloading.

Scribd stands out among innovators in the arena of connecting digital text authors and publishers with digital readers, because (1) it offers some compelling reasons for faith that it could actually work; and (2) it is not Amazon.

By "actually work," I mean that it could actually lead to significant sales and exposure for ebook authors and other content providers. By "not Amazon," I am getting at the notion that, if it proves viable, Scribd could actually provide authors and publishers with an effective counterbalance in a marketplace where Amazon currently threatens to establish such hegemony that the rest of us could end up feeling as if any effort to influence pricing, royalties, sales, and important issues such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) and copyright is utterly ineffectual.

Scribd will allow authors and publishers to upload their content, establish their own approach to DRM, and keep 80 per cent of the proceeds from content sales. That's not a bad start, and these claims from the Scribd site go even further:

• "Tens of millions of people visit Scribd every month; your work could be discovered by the world.
• Every document on Scribd gets frequently indexed by Google, which means better audience targeting for your work.
• Your documents will be viewed the way it was meant to be - with its unique fonts, graphics, and other details.
• Check out detailed stats on viewers, ratings, downloads, and more.
• Take your document anywhere; just copy the embed code and insert it into a blog or website."

The site also provides user-friendly uploading tools for Mac as well as PC users.

Naturally, I'll want to have my cake and eat it too: to upload content to Scribd and to be able to read it on my Kindle. No doubt there will be a number of ways to do this, and we'll be posting more about them in the future.

New link to make it easy to search for free books in the Kindle Store!

Click on Search Free Promotional Content in the Kindle Store

or paste http://tinyurl.com/SearchFreeKindleContent into your browser

Thanks to Karen at Kindle Korner!