Amazon makes it easy to publish your own ebook - but the challenge is getting punters to find and download it. Ebook author Nik Rawlinson shows how it's done
It’s never been cheaper or easier to publish a book. Agents and traditional publishers are being squeezed out, and writers are selling directly to Kindle, Kobo and iPad owners. The trouble is, it’s become too easy: the market has exploded, and you’re now competing with a greater number of potential JK Rowlings than ever before.
On these pages, we’ll explore how to give your work the best chance of success. If you haven’t already written your masterpiece, it begins with choosing a subject that people want to read about - but one that isn’t already saturated. We’ll also show you how to work around Amazon’s block on free books if using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), boost series sales by letting readers borrow selected titles, and navigate the pros and cons of enrolling your books in KDP Select.
Choosing a subject
The adage that you should write what you know is only partly true; given time, you can research any subject. If you want to make money on Amazon then the trick is to write what you know will sell.
Here’s an example: let’s say you want to earn £150 per day to kick off a career as a professional author. Pricing your book at £2.99 will deliver royalties of £2.10 per sale, so you’ll need to shift around 71 copies every 24 hours to hit your target. While this number may not sound like much, few titles achieve it: doing so would give you a Best Sellers Rank of somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. (Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank measures exactly what its name suggests, with lower numbers denoting higher sales, just as in the music charts.)
Your best chance of hitting these numbers is to find a subject that’s currently under-represented on the Kindle - so you have minimal competition - and for which existing titles are already achieving a decent Best Sellers Rank, revealing that customers are hungry to read about the topic.
Finding your niche
To work out where your potential profits lie, start by going to the Amazon website and hovering over Shop By Department. Pick Kindle Books from the Books & Audible fly-out menu, then click the Best Sellers link below the page title. Click through the sidebar categories to gradually narrow down the books on display. Stop when you find a topic you think you could write about, but which currently contains too titles or fewer.
Next, open the full product description for each of the top five or ten performers in the category, and check their Best Seller Ranks. You’re looking for titles whose ranks would deliver the kind of revenue you could live on - we suggest you look for a rank of at least 20,000. If nothing in the category is selling that well, backtrack through the subject tree and keep exploring until you find an area with high sales and a small number of titles on a subject you can research with authority.
This can be a time-consuming process. If you want to take a shortcut, an app such as the KindleSpy plugin for Chrome can automatically generate a list of ranked books, projected sales and, based on price, likely revenue for all titles in a specific Kindle Store category or page of search results. Hey presto: you get an immediate idea of what you’re likely to earn if you hit the top spot. The app isn’t cheap - it costs $37 (around £24) from kdspy.com - but the potential rewards are considerable.
KindleSpy also offers a word-cloud view, which picks out the most commonly used words in the top selling books’ titles. You can use this information to choose a title that will help buyers find your book - and to guide your writing, so that when they download your book the content will match what they’re looking for.
The value of free
It’s tempting to publish your work at 99p. At that price, you’ll undercut traditional publishers and compete head-on with your homespun rivals. Unfortunately, you won’t be earning much. Amazon pays only 35% royalties on anything priced below £1.99, so a 99P sale will earn you 34p. To hit that £150 target, you’d need to shift 441 books every day. Few ebooks achieve such numbers, and none can keep it up for long.
If you can push up the price to £5-99 - similar to what paperbacks sell for on the high street - you’ll qualify for 70% royalties (£4.19). A price point of £5.99 is certainly less of an impulse buy, so you’ll have to work harder to make those sales. But a tactic you can employ is the old supermarket favourite: the loss leader.
In this context, it typically means writing a series, or a serial. The distinction is a fine one: a series comprises multiple self-contained but linked stories in separate publications (think James Bond), while a series is a single tale split across multiple books (Harry Potter). Many self-publishers have adopted one or other of these formats, because they provide an opportunity to hook in the reader with a free or cheap first edition, then continue selling through the run with links in the back of each book to promote the next volume.
Amazon US even has a dedicated Serials store that highlights individual episodes and collected Kindle “box sets”. Although this store’s not yet in the UK, there’s nothing to stop you publishing a serial or series within the regular listings, and pricing the episodes so that the first one draws in the reader. We suggest you make your first volume free, and price the box set so it’s around two-thirds as much as the sum of its parts - so that buying individual titles looks like slightly poorer value than the full set.
As an illustration, let’s imagine that your serial comprises six episodes and you want to charge £5.99 for the box. If you price parts two to six at £1.49 each, your customers should realise that buying them all will cost them £7.45, so they have an incentive to buy the box set instead. This is the outcome you want: since the box set qualifies for 70% royalties, you make £4.19 on each sale - whereas if a reader were to spend £7.45 on buying the parts individually, you’d get only 35% of each sale for a total of £2.61.
The £0 workaround
So far so good, but there’s a catch. Although we’ve suggested that you make your first volume free, you’ll find that Amazon insists that you charge a minimum of 99p per item - or, if your compiled book consumes more than 3MB or 10MB, £1.49 or £1.99 respectively. The solution is to play Amazon off against its rivals.
When you sell through Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon reserves the right to cut the cost of your book if it finds it cheaper elsewhere. So if you post your book for free on a competing ebook store such as Apple’s iBooks (itunesconnect.apple.com) or Kobo’s Writing Life (kobo.com/writinglife), Amazon’s crawlers will spot the price disparity and make your title free in its own shop. This might take time, so plan ahead - especially if your advertising will be based on the fact that the first part is free.
Not every work is suitable to be broken up into a serial. Non-fiction readers won’t be happy if they find themselves stranded through a practical project. Nonetheless, the power of free can be just as persuasive when it comes to selling complementary products.
The graph above shows sales of my own series of books, sold exclusively through Apple’s iBooks store, on the iWork office suite. It comprises three apps - Pages, Numbers and Keynote - with one book covering each, published at various times throughout last year and priced at £7.99 apiece. First-year sales totalled 144 units combined. On 1 January this year, I republished one of the three with an extra page at the end of each chapter promoting the other two volumes. At the same time, I set the price of the re-published book to £0, leaving the others at £7.99.
This turned the first book into a loss leader, whose purpose was to advertise charged-for products to people I already knew had an interest in them (that is, iWork users). Cutting the price removed any resistance readers may have had to downloading the first book, and over the first three months, overall downloads increased to 315 units, of which 65 were paid-for sales. As a result, revenue for that quarter was 51% higher than in the previous three months.
Capturing free readers
Every time someone downloads a free book, you want it to drive sales elsewhere - on a complementary title, as above, or on a book yet to come. If your free book isn’t doing that, there’s no point in forgoing the proceeds.
If the intention is that your free book will promote sales of a future publication, you’ll want a way to remind readers when the next instalment is ready. Add links to newsletter sign-up forms (hosted on your author site) at the front and back of each book.
If you haven’t already signed up with a mailing-list provider, consider MailChimp (mailchimp.com), whose free plan lets you send up to 12,000 emails per month to 2,000 subscribers. Its Dashboard includes sample sign-up forms to embed on your site or blog.
Each book should also include links to your other titles - including those you haven’t yet written. Use a plugin such as Pretty Link for WordPress to bounce the clicks back out to Amazon, so you can monitor traffic as it passes through your server, and direct any clicks on links for books you haven’t yet written to promo pages on your own site. Again, this can drive newsletter sign-ups by promising readers that they’ll hear about the subsequent titles first.
In addition, consider advertising a 99p launch price, valid for only the first two days that the book goes on sale, as an incentive to drive newsletter subscriptions (on the basis that anyone who isn’t subscribed will miss it). When the next book launches, re-point the link from the promo page to its listing on the Kindle Store so it sends readers directly to Amazon.
KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited - friends or foes?
If you prefer not to sign up with multiple ebook stores, there’s another way to get a free book onto the Kindle Store: signing up to KDP Select through the Kindle Direct Publishing Dashboard lets you run time-limited free promotions, with the downloads counting towards your overall sales rank.
This requires thought, however. Any ebook enrolled in KDP Select must be an Amazon-exclusive title for the period it’s in the programme - you can’t offer it through your own website during that time or you risk being taken off Amazon.
Signing up for KDP Select also means your book will be made available for Amazon Prime members to borrow for free, and will be included as part of Kindle Unlimited, allowing subscribers to download it at no charge. This may cost you sales, but it isn’t all bad. You’re giving readers a reason to sample your work, and you’ll earn a payment as soon as they borrow the book from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library or read past the 10% point after downloading it from Kindle Unlimited. The payment varies from one month to the next depending on the total payment fund (Amazon reveals what this is on a monthly basis) and how many times your work was borrowed, as a proportion of aggregate borrows across all titles on the store.
As far as the borrower is concerned, your book is free - even if it costs a regular Kindle owner £9.99 - so you’re getting the benefits of publishing a book at no charge, with the bonus of payments from Amazon. This means you can afford to write a greater number of more speculative, shorter titles for enrolment in the borrowing programmes, since potential readers will be tempted to borrow such books rather than buy them.
You’re free to choose which of your books you enrol in Select (and, hence, Unlimited), and you’re not committed to publishing your complete library this way. You can use free borrowing as a tool to drive sales of later books in a series, by enrolling just the first episode in the programme.
Play fair
Whichever approach you employ, don’t forget that your name is your brand; if you try to scam your readers by putting out poorly researched books simply to target a high-selling niche, or conveyor-belting a series of low-value, high-priced pamphlets in the hope of striking it rich through Select and Unlimited, your reader ratings will give you away.
The time invested in writing a fact or fiction book, conversely, will repay itself many times over, often for years to come. While smart sales tactics can certainly help, they’re no substitute for doing your research and crafting something worthy of bearing your name.