Self-publishing on Kindle

JennyP

Has anyone tried it and made any money?
I suspect it's rather difficult - that for every person who makes any money, there's hundreds of thousands who don't!
A friend of mine reckons he's made quite a lot in just a few weeks. I uploaded mine soon after and have made the grand total of £16 despite tweeting like mad and setting up a website to promote it separately and even a publicity video on youtube!
Perhaps it's like making money from a blog : there'll be a few lucky people who manage to make money from Adsense by having loads of readers and the rest of us will attract only a few readers and make virtually nothing.
Any hints and tips about promotion gratefully received!

Sixer

What is your genre if it's fiction and what is your topic if it's non-fiction.

This is a competitive area and you need to find what they call "key influencers" for promotion. Bloggers have a lot of influence in the book world, so you need to find the most influential in your niche, then offer them a free copy of your book and hope they'll like it enough to review it.

There are many self-publishing and Kindle-based community sites, so join those and chat for England, don't just post links to your book.

Before you do any of this, though, you need to make sure your product is top-notch. Has it been copy-edited? Who by? Are your English skills as good as you think they are (not saying they're not, but I've seen a great many self-published books and the standard isn't generally very high).

macman

Why do you think there are so many free or near-free books available on Kindle? Just like conventional vanity publishing, making the actual product is simple enough. But finding a market for a commercial volume of sales is the job of a professional publisher.

JennyP

I know.....
I have had two books published properly - but there are ups and downs with that too. This time, I wanted to write what I wanted to write. I had a publisher lined up but we disagreed about the tone and I just didn't want to limit myself and compromise. It's been a good experience though....
So....tips on promoting it. There must be ways...
There are people claiming to have sold millions of copies!

macman

You can hire your own publicist, which is what most publisher's do who don't have in-house publicity depts.
Your publisher (if they're any good) will know what sells and what doesn't. That's why they'll have wanted to edit what you write to make it more commercially viable. Remember that the vast majority of successful books are commissioned, they're not picked off the slushpile. The inference being that the publishers' know fairly precisely what they want for their particular market.

JennyP

OK, and for the average person i.e. your average forum reader on here, who would like to make a bit of cash from their writing hobby and does not want to risk any outlay by hiring a publicist....what can they do?

macman

The kind of things you have already done-exploit all the free publicity channel you can get.
If you've already had 2 books published then you should have a pretty good idea of what sells and what doesn't?

JennyP

Anyone with any helpful ideas of what else I could be doing please?

JennyP

Perhaps I'm not doing too badly - just found I am number 10 on Amazon for my keyword which is loneliness and that's overall in books - not just Kindle stuff. Last time I checked I trawled through over ten pages of stuff and couldn't find myself anywhere!

Sixer

Am I invisible? Oh well...

You've said you've tweeted and put up a site and a video. But what ACTUAL networking are you doing? The things you mention are good, but they're all demands for people to do something. You need to give them a reason to do it. This means commenting on book blogs that are important, being an active member of book-related forums, entering Kindle and self-publish competitions, reading and giving feedback on other self-published works on the community sites.

I wouldn't employ a publicist. They basically just send out free copies of your books to reviewers and offer you up for Q&As etc, which you could do anyway if you did a bit of research.

JennyP

Sixer wrote: »

Am I invisible? Oh well...

You've said you've tweeted and put up a site and a video. But what ACTUAL networking are you doing? The things you mention are good, but they're all demands for people to do something. You need to give them a reason to do it. This means commenting on book blogs that are important, being an active member of book-related forums, entering Kindle and self-publish competitions, reading and giving feedback on other self-published works on the community sites.

I wouldn't employ a publicist. They basically just send out free copies of your books to reviewers and offer you up for Q&As etc, which you could do anyway if you did a bit of research.

Yes! You were invisible. For some reason, I clicked the link in my email telling me there was a reply on the forum and I missed yours!!!

Pity as that's great advice. So when you say commenting on book blogs - you mean commenting on the blogs of people who write similar stuff to mine? Book-related blogs? I have been on the Amazon community a couple of times but haven't really got into good discussions like I do on this forum so it seemed a bit pointless! Are there other ones?

Kindle and self-publishing competitions? Where do I find stuff like that?

Any recommendations for specific sites?

All good ideas - thank you so much!