THE AMAZING KINDLE/POD PROCESS

(YOU MIGHT LIKE TO BOOKMARK THIS PAGE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE)

PROMOTE YOUR E-BOOKS –FREE! -The very latest techniques!

AUTHORS – PROMOTE YOUR BOOKS ON OUR FACEBOOK SITE - https://www.facebook.com/pages/Readers-Authors-Interact/617024891705063

PROMOTE YOUR E-BOOKS – FREE

MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR OF THIS PAGE – I spent 32 years running a publishing company in Australia and have been an author for 29 years. My first book was offered

to 9 publishers before being accepted. It hit the bookstores and was an instant hit. (The Millionaires Manual). I know how hard it is for Newbies to get started so I developed this

webpage to help. I am retired now and living in Vanuatu (near Australia) and have 33 titles published on Amazon.

Good luck........and please feel free to pass this URL on to struggling fellow authors...... James F. Coyle

THIS SECTION IS A NEW ADDITION TO THIS PROMO PAGE -

KDP have supplied us with the ability to publish and distribute at zero cost but promotion has always been in the author’s hands.

And this has presented a ton of problems for most authors.

Until recently with the advent of SELECT FREE and SELECT BORROWING.

Now let us suppose that you’re an average author with 3 books on Amazon and you just can’t seem to get those sales fired up.

Your rankings for all three hover around #100,000 which is not exactly profitable.

Then out of the blue a buyer contacts you and suggests that as you have great potential he will personally organize a promotion for you that will cost you absolutely nothing. Of course you leap at this chance as this “secret friend” is prepared to do something you can’t afford to do. He takes expensive ads in the local media and tells readers that 1000 copies of your latest book will be available totally free next week at the largest bookshop in town. He also pays for the printing of all these books and expects nothing in return. At the end of the week all your books have been distributed and you notice that your other books are starting to sell also. In fact the rankings have improved to the #20,000 level.

Then he suggests that the same bookshop arrange for your book to be “borrowed”. He arranges for the bookshop to pay you $1.70 for each borrow and you end up with over 100 books distributed in this manner. You eventually receive a check for nearly $200.

A month later you notice that the rankings on all your paid sales have improved and one is touching the #10,000 mark.

Of course you are totally delighted..... all thanks to your “secret friend”.

And who is this “secret friend?” ........... Amazon KDP !!!

And that my fellow authors is how it works.

You have gone to a ton of trouble to write your books but promotion has always been the sticky point.

I personally have gone to a ton of trouble to prepare this website to help you because I can vividly remember all the hassles I had finding a

publisher for my first book some 29 years ago. Eventually a small publisher agreed to produce it and it was an instant top seller on the

Australian market. And it has been selling steadily ever since!

What have you got to lose by trying it?

NOTHING!!

BRAND NEW –

OK….so your book is just about to go live on Select-Free….. now….. how do you advertise it to the world?

Simple……you join the AUTHOR MARKETING CLUB (for free) and their webpage displays all the main free listing sites.

Better still, by clicking on these sites you are taken directly to their individual free-listing pages so you don’t have to do any searching.

Here is their URL -- http://www.authormarketingclub.com/

This is the best free marketing tool I have yet come across.

Another site I have found extremely effective is the Awesome Gang - http://awesomegang.com/submit-your-book/

Click on this for their free submission page.

Also I have just added the new ones below to my freebie submission sites-

ASK DAVID - http://askdavid.com/free-book-promotion#submit_book

FRUGAL READER - http://thefrugalereader.wufoo.com/forms/frugal-freebie-submissions/

FREE EBOOKS DAILY - http://www.freeebooksdaily.com/p/submit-book_15.html

GALLEYCAT - https://www.facebook.com/galleycat/app_362465080506455

THE AMAZING KINDLE/POD PROCESS!

The first great invention in publishing was the Gutenberg Press around 1440. The second greatest publishing invention was the Kindle process, coupled with the POD (print-on-demand).

There are multiple free ways you can improve your sales rankings and at the same time help popularise the Kindle concept so that the number of world-wide Kindle participants double thereby doubling your potential buyers. I took my own book rankings from an average of #500,000 to a much higher average of #50,000 (sometimes much better) by using these methods.

You can use the material on this page to dramatically improve your own sales by cutting and pasting parts (or all) of it to your potential customer emails or website or by simply directing them to this URL via your social networking page. Please feel free to refer this page to fellow authors.

Not too long ago small time authors needed to outlay $5000-$10,000 to a local publisher to get a limited print run of their hard-copy books.....without any guarantee of distribution or promotion. Along came Kindle and the POD instant print process. Result....the authors could present their books for free on Kindle and for a very small fee on POD. Better still distribution was guaranteed.

All that was left for the author to organise was promotion. What you are about to read will solve that problem.

CRITICAL IMPORTANCE …….. The title of your book! Are other authors using exactly the same title?

As an example I titled my first mind-power book “BEYOND BELIEF”. After the publishing company loaded it up on Amazon in print and e-book versions I found to my annoyance that a number of other books on Amazon had exactly the same title.

This presents real confusion when buyers are searching for your title. I should have checked Amazon first to see if anyone was using that same title. If I had done this I would have modified my title slightly by calling it something like “WAY BEYOND BELIEF” which was not being used by anyone else. So before you name your book check the competition!!

The next most important thing to start with is this........ is your book acceptable to the average reader?

Send email copies to a group of friends. Ask for their criticism and observe their feedback carefully. They might suggest improvements. I have 19 books up on Amazon. Most of them were sent to a group of friends to proof-read first. Their suggestions turned the books into reasonably good sellers. If you have already published on Kindle you can still do the same...... and re-publish the altered book. All you do is upload your new book content over the old one. Your old one stays on sale until the new one suddenly replaces it so you don’t lose any continuity.

The problem with authoring a book is that the author becomes too close to the content and can’t see the forest for the trees! You need a fresh set of eyes to look at it objectively.

If you are a newbie author it would definitely pay to search the web for writers critique groups. These are groups who will read your early manuscript (and you read theirs) and offer suggestions to improve your work. This can be quite vital as they look at your work with fresh eyes. Pay serious attention to this concept, particularly if you are writing your first novel. In fact I would consider this an absolute necessity for beginners. They will help you clean up your book and make it more acceptable to the buyer.

VITALLY IMPORTANT - make sure you run your book (including the product description) through a word spell. Nothing is worse than a batch of spelling errors or grammatical errors. This sort of thing makes your work look amateurish.

You can also run the manuscript through a text-to-speech program and sit back and listen to it. Glaring errors will stand out when the voice starts stuttering!!!!

Below are the simple processes I followed to jumpstart my rankings:

Advise all your friends on Facebook, Twitter, etc that your book is available. Feature it on your website and add it to Google free submissions.

Google free submissions -

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?continue=/addurl

Put excerpts from your book on your website and offer other interesting free material. Contact book reviewers and see if they are interested in reviewing your book. Keep plugging away like this to develop a profile.

Arrange with a Kindle author friend to buy your book and you buy theirs. Then you can both do a review and give each other stars. Check with KDP to see how this is done. These star reviews will make your book more acceptable to outside buyers. Once my own books were reviewed (by independent professional reviewers) and given stars my sales increased dramatically. However if you organise too many of these “friendly” reviews but your book is still at a #300,000 ranking (basically not selling) then buyers will become suspicious and not purchase your book.

Check the web out for free book review sites. Submit a doc version (or PDF) to the site for free review. Don’t pay for these....only apply to free sites. If a number of these sites review your books you might kick sales off.

If you have two or more kindle books reference them to each other. That is, somewhere in either your first book or on its promo pages

mention your second book. I have my three main books referenced to each other wherever I can. This sparks a buyer’s interest and they

may end up buying one of my other books which is of more immediate interest to them. Also if you have several books mentioned it tends to give the buyer more confidence as they assume you are a successful author.

Get hold of the Kindle book - How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! by John Locke. That has some useful ideas in it.

Contact Internet radio stations and persuade them to do an interview with you about your books. They are always searching for filler material.

There are tons of FREE news media advertising websites out there. Google up “Free Ads” and place your web ads complete with a pic of your book at no cost whatsoever. I found about 30 of these sites covering all western countries. Some ads run for a week while others run for months. My sales picked up while these ads were running however it is a fairly time-consuming exercise.

As a former professional recording guitarist I put a “Finger Popping” demo up on UTube which led to my Facebook page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t9CnmI1kAc

This attracted sales also. You can use UTube for book promos of your own.

If you have a lot of Facebook friends or other social network friends tell them they can download the free Kindle Viewer and read a preview of your book. If they like it they might buy it.

Kindle Viewer -

PC - http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

Mac - http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=hp_macfaq_kfm?docId=1000464931

I guarantee your sales will jump!

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

After uploading my first Kindle book I advised Facebook friends and my email list. I got a lot of resistance to the Kindle idea. I told them how to download Kindle viewer for PC. Then resistance from those who wanted a printed version. I spent days finding the right free Kindle-print converter. I advised them of all this. Result - my sales leapt and Kindle got a batch of new clients. Hold newbies by the hand. Make life easy for them. A lot of these potential buyers are oldies or low-techs. They need to develop confidence.

For Kindle print-out details go to my webpage at - http://www.mindtech.com.vu/millionairesmanual.htm

This page explains in detail how to print out Kindle books easily. Let them know. Explain it so the process is less scary for oldies and low-techs!

If you want to convert your kindle book to print version use Amazon CREATE SPACE who for a very cheap fee set your paperback up for the Print-on-Demand technology. This machine will print off copies of your book in 2-3 minutes ready for despatch. If you want to see a video of this POD process go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q946sfGLxm4

PRINT SALES (printed book format) Most of the ideas above are designed to help ebook sales. Printed books are another story.

If you order a batch of print books off Amazon (as the author you get a steep discount) you can then use them for promotional and distribution purposes around your immediate locality. You can run book-signing events and personally hand a copy to the local media book reviewer. You can run small ads in the local papers explaining that your book can be obtained from the local bookshops, etc. As the book starts to sell locally you can expand to areas outside your immediate vicinity. There are plenty of successful books which evolved this way into national distribution. Once your book picks up sales locally you can then approach national book distributers who may be interested in listing and stocking the book for their chains of bookshops. There are unlimited ideas you can use for promoting a print book!

One thing you can do is Google up - press release for a book. This will give you an idea of not only how to prepare press releases but also actually place them free of charge. You might also find sites that accept press releases for Kindle books.

GENERATING FEEDBACK - In all my books (paperback and Kindle) I put my 2 email address on the final page with the following message - If you want free updates email me at one of the addresses below with "FREE UPDATES" in the message line.
I've generated around 300 responses worldwide this way and use these to advise readers when I upload a new book. Quite a few of them respond this way and my new books get a kick-start with a fairly reasonable start-up ranking. These readers who are interested enough to respond to your offer are usually impressed with your book and will become ongoing customers.

I uploaded my first Kindle book about 5 months ago. Now have 8 books on Kindle. Not making a living out of them yet but starting to get there. Sales have been helped by Amazon’s referral process -

If you have two or more titles on Kindle, Amazon have this neat trick of recommending other books bought by the same customer.....often your second book.

This creates multiple book sales due to Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought etc”. As I have a number of Kindle books cross-recommended in this manner my monthly dollar sales values have almost doubled for the same number of initial customers.

Amazons secret philosophy seems to be – “we'll do whatever it takes to help our authors sell their books!”

Explain to your potential buyers that when they go into a bookshop to buy a hardcopy they can really only go by what is on the covers. It is impractical to stand there and read the first few chapters. Result – you often buy a book that is no use to you. With the Kindle books you can preview them first then get instant access which saves handling charges and often weeks for delivery. Sell them on the idea!!

Also explain when they buy a hardcopy from Amazon the book is almost always in stock due to their POD process.

Most people have at least heard of Amazon but there are still those who are reluctant to join. Point out how easy this is and with 1-click ordering they can re-order very simply. Help them to overcome their resistance and join the wave of the future!

A lot of your potential buyers will be dead nervous of either computers or the ebook concept but in time they will come round.

Help the process because it will help you!!

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VITAL INFORMATION RE AMAZON FOR “NEWBIES”

The following was kindly supplied by a well known KDP author.

Her blog is at - http://onlytruemagic.blogspot.com

Before posting your question, let's check it's not one of these first, hmmm?

Do I have to pay to publish on Kindle?
No. Amazon will take a percentage of each sale as a royalty. There are no upfront costs.

What royalty rate is best?
If you charge between $0.99-$2.98 per book, you can only opt for 35% royalty. Charge between $2.99-$9.99 pick 70% (after all, why would you take less???). Over $10.00 you have to select 35%.

I picked 70% but some sales are showing up as 35% - why?
Because sales outside the Amazon domains .com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .es and .it are sold through Amazon.com at a reduced royalty rate.

Can I make my book free?
Only if you sign up for Select, in which case you will get 5 free days every three months.

What is Select?
If you join Select your book must be exclusive to Amazon for three months at a time. The Select option automatically renews if you don't opt out. You will get to make your book free for limited periods (see above) and your book will also be available for Prime members to borrow. Borrow rates are announced the following month and are usually around $2.50 per borrow. No borrows are guaranteed. Your book can still be bought conventionally from the Amazon store.

Can I list my Select book on my blog / B&N / iTunes etc?
No. For the period your book is in Select, you cannot withdraw it and you cannot put it up anywhere else in any form.

What about paperbacks?
Select only applies to ebooks.

Do I have to join?
No. You can sell books on Amazon without being in Select, but you can't make them free or let them be borrowed.

How do I get reviews?
Get readers. Read-review rate is something like 750-1 for paid books; 1500-1 for free books, so don't panic and don't hold your breath. They will come...eventually.

Will you do a review swap with me?
No. There is nothing more suspicious than a new book with half a dozen glowing reviews. Don't waste your time getting friends/family/sycophants to leave you reviews, they will do more harm than good.

I can't see my book ranking?
Book ranking in the Kindle store will appear on your book page once you have made at least one sale.

I can't see my genre ranking?
Genre ranking will appear on your book page once you reach the top 100 in genre. For some genres that's easier than others.

How many books do I need to sell to make the top 100 in store?
Thousands.

What are tags?
Relevant keywords/phrases that people search by - 'thriller', 'romantic comedy' etc etc. To add tags, go to your book page on Amazon, press 'T' twice in quick succession and a box will pop up where you can add them in.

Will you tag my book?
No. You only need two or three people to 'agree' with tags to make them relevant. You don't need 200 'agrees' to every tag.

I got a negative review. Should I reply?
No, never. Suck it up and move on.

Can you vote down my negative review?
Not unless it's rambling, aggressive nonsense. Some people will just hate your book, and they're entitled to do that. Look at it again, they might even have a valid point.

Reviews keep saying my grammar is terrible - are they idiots?
No - you're the idiot. Don't trust great aunt Sally to properly proofread your book and tell you it's fabulous. As a minimum you need good betas and a firm grasp of English. Some people need more help than others. If you're serious about writing, you'll learn your craft and get help where you need it.

I took a great picture of my dog, that will do as a cover, right?
Your cover is your first impression. Fail and people won't look further. make sure it's good, make sure it conveys the tone of your book and most importantly make sure it looks like a book cover should. So a name, a title and the right shape for starters.

I asked why my book wasn't selling and you were all mean to me and said I needed to do loads of work on it.
That's called tough love - get used to it.

Will you follow me on Twitter / Facebook?
Only if you write stuff I'm interested in, otherwise why would you ask me to? There's no point having 10,000 followers if none of them read ebooks.

So I started a blog yesterday, I wrote all about my writing method, but I only got two hits and no new sales. What gives?
Blogging is a long-term plan, but it's a good one. It takes time to build a following. And don't write about writing, it's boring.

I just published. How do I market my book?
You think about who your readers are, where they hang out and what interests them. Then you get their attention and you give them what they want.

What is Goodreads?
It's a site where booklovers meet to review books and share recommendations. It's a great tool, but you have to get involved properly. If you spam a few forums and never speak to anyone, you won't get anywhere. You'll probably actually put people off buying your book.

Should I promote on the Amazon forums?
Not unless you like being tortured. Don't go there, and if you do, don't mention that you're an author, and if you do, don't cry to me when they savage you and leave you negative reviews just because they can.

I spotted a typo in my published book, can I fix it?
Yes. If you need to make changes to the book's file (typos, rewrites, changes to font / formatting etc) or if you want to change the price or distribution, go to your bookshelf, click the select box next to the title and then in the options drop-down you will be able to edit the book's file. It will take up to 3 days to republish the book with the new changes, but the book will be able to be bought throughout.

Can I change my blurb without republishing?
Yes. Make an author central profile (http://authorcentral.amazon.com) and you can change the blurb from there, and also add reviews, a "from the author" section etc. Changes go live within about 15 mins.

Is author central useful for anything else?
Yes. Use author central to create an author profile, add pictures, link to blog / twitter feeds and track sales of your books. You will need to create a new profile for every domain (.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr). You can only edit book details from .com

I need help formatting, where do I start?
If you're working in MS Word then get the FREE Smashwords Style Guide http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52 this is a great starter guide for formatting.

Are there any marketing guides I can buy?
Hundreds. But start with some freebies - the SW Marketing Guide http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305 and SW Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431

Can I publish places other than Amazon?
Not if you're in Select, because you've signed to say you will offer Amazon exclusivity. Otherwise there are lots of places to try - wwww.smashwords.com offers distribution to B&N, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, iTunes and Baker-Taylor. If you're in the US you can publish directly thought Publit onto B&N without going through SW. There are lots of distribution sites out there so get googling.

I want to publish in paper, can I do that?
Yes. The three biggest sites are Createspace, Lulu and Lightning Source. These are all POD (print on demand) services. In the US, CS is considered the better source, Lulu works best in the UK, but there are pros and cons to all of them and you need to check them all out properly to make sure you've picked the best option for you.

What sales should I expect?
None. Anything over that is a bonus. Some people sell a book a month, some sell a book a second, and there's people on every step in between. Don't expect to throw a book out there and get a flurry of downloads without putting in any effort. "Success" can only be defined by the sales figure that makes you happy - comparisons with other people are arbitrary and meaningless. Unless you're the #1 book on Amazon there will always be people outselling you, and even if you are #1, how long will you stay there? Concentrate on your own efforts, not on what others are doing.

Message was edited by: diamondlifestyle

Good Luck!

James F. Coyle

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Homepage for a list of my books and a new author book editing service -

http://www.mindtech.com.vu/