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self-publishing

Covering Your Assets

by | February 21, 2022 | | 5 Comments

All things considered, I much prefer self-publishing to working with a publisher. I like being able to put out books that don’t fit neatly into someone else’s genre pigeon holes. I appreciate not having to fight with an editor, especially about whether the sex I write is too raw or explicit, or whether I can include LGBTQ interactions in what is primarily a heterosexual romance. Given my busy real world schedule, I’m glad I don’t have to write to someone else’s deadlines. That might make me more productive, but at this point, I really don’t need or want the stress. And of course, I’m happy to get a bigger slice of the pie for each book I sell.

For the most part, in my view, self-publishing is a big win. There’s one area, however, where there are pros and cons: the question of covers.

Every book, self-published or not, needs a cover. And both marketing research and personal intuition suggest that the quality of the cover does affect sales. With all the books available, you need a cover that will grab a potential reader’s attention and communicate the essential qualities of your book – all in a fraction of a second before her eyes flit to the next book on the page.

Having a publisher responsible for your covers is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it relieves you of a lot of work and/or expense. On the other, sometimes you have to accept a cover you really don’t like. Most publishers do solicit author input on cover art, but they may have considerations other than the story, related to branding, imprints, series, etc. And I’ve observed (unsurprisingly) that the covers coming out of a particular publisher have some tendency to look alike.

When you self-publish, you have much more control, but you must either purchase a cover (pre-made or custom) or create one yourself. I’ve done both, but I have a pretty limited budget for third-party art. I don’t expect to make a lot of money on my writing (which is more of a beloved avocation than a career), but I don’t want to go into the red. A couple of covers can easily eat up my royalties for a month.

So I’ve been making many of my covers. And I admit, it can be a painful process. I think I have the necessary imagination and artistic perspective, but my practical skills are extremely basic. I also seem to have the devil’s time finding stock photos that satisfy my needs.

Still, I’ve learned a lot in the past few years. Here are a few rules of thumb, based on my observations and experience.

Readability is critical

E-publishing platforms require you to submit a high resolution cover (for instance, 2000×3000 at 300 dpi), but in fact most readers will see your cover as a thumbnail 200 to 300 pixels wide or even smaller. It is essential that they can read the title and the author name, even at this very coarse resolution. It should also be possible to identify the primary images in the cover.

Just for the heck of it, I grabbed the “Trending” covers from the Smashwords home page today.

These thumbnails are only 125 pixels wide (click on the plus at the upper right to see actual size) – and some of the titles are close to illegible. (What’s the title of the middle book? The only really clear words are “in the”! And forget about figuring out who wrote it.)

Readability is influenced by font style, font size, font and background color and contrast. The “busyness” of the cover also has an impact; if there’s too much graphical detail the text can get lost.

You want a cover that’s dramatic, arresting, attention-getting – but readability is more important than any of these. The best way to insure readability is to examine your covers at very low resolution. If you can make out the title and author in an image 200 pixels wide, you’re probably doing okay.

Visually signal genre and story content

Most of us at ERWA write what would be considered “genre fiction”: erotica, erotic romance, romcom, horror, science fiction. Every genre has cover conventions, typical styles and image content used by many books. Chick lit, for instance, tends to use cartoonish drawings in bright colors rather than photo-realistic imagery. This is often true of cozy mysteries as well (though the image content will be different), but not more serious mysteries. Romance covers usually feature photos of the protagonists, often though not always in an embrace. Naked, muscled, headless male torsos are also ubiquitous.

Here’s a quick screen capture from my romance publisher, Totally Bound.

The color schemes often signal the sub-genre, with darker shades for suspense or paranormal. For some reason romance covers also often have a lot of background detail as well. It’s very common to have an image of the setting, whether it’s a city skyline or a windswept prairie, behind the central figures.

Erotica covers, of course, tend to push the envelope, focusing in on seductive body parts as much as on faces. The covers are intended to arouse the reader, hopefully without attracting the scrutiny of the censors.

If you are creating your own covers, you need to decide how closely you will follow the current trends. You want readers to be able to identify what sort of story you’ve written, but you don’t want your cover to blend into the crowd.

This is a tough guideline for me to follow. First, many of my books don’t fit neatly into a single genre. A lot of my work straddles the fuzzy line between erotic romance and erotica. I also work in many secondary genres: sci fi, steam punk, paranormal, and so on. I struggle to create covers that capture the essence of my titles.

Sometimes it may be more important to you to convey the tone of the book than the genre. I recently published a new edition of my M/M paranormal erotic romance Necessary Madness. Although this novel is definitely romance, in the sense that it focuses on a single developing relationship (and even ends with a wedding), its a rather dark book that includes some very intense episodes: horrific visions of disasters, scenes set in a psychiatric hospital, and satanic rituals.

Here is the original cover, from Totally Bound, a very traditional romance cover, without much indication of the paranormal sub-genre. (I should say that I was able to choose the images of the heroes as part of this design.)

Here’s the new cover I created. I’ve focused much more on the paranormal aspect here. There’s even an echo of horror, which in fact is fitting to the story. I don’t even include an image of the second hero.

I don’t know which cover is better, but they definitely send out different signals.

Be distinctive and original – but not too subtle

Those of you who’ve known me for a while are quite familiar with my contrarian tendencies. Hence I’m more likely than not to stray away from the genre norms in choosing or creating my covers. Sometimes, though, it’s possible to be too subtle.

Here’s a cover I adore, for the first edition (2016) of The Gazillionaire and the Virgin, created for me by Willsin Rowe.

This is pure BDSM romance, sweet as well as hot, which turns the Fifty Shades of Grey stereotype on its head. Willsin deliberately designed this to visually echo the original Fifty Shades cover, with the gray necktie.

I thought this idea was brilliant. However, in retrospect, I doubt anyone else noticed.

In contrast, here’s the cover I did for the second edition, which was released on Valentine’s Day.

This cover screams erotic romance (at least to me). Furthermore, even though there’s not a handcuff or riding crop to be seen, I think (or at least hope) that the positions of the man and woman, and their expressions, suggest a power exchange relationship.

Series covers need a visual theme

For most of my writing career, I wrote standalone titles. I honestly couldn’t imagine writing a series; when I finished a story, it felt complete and I didn’t have any ideas for follow-on books.

A few years ago, that somehow changed. I found myself typing “The End”, then almost immediately starting to dream up new situations and characters in the same fictional world. My longest series so far, Vegas Babes, includes five books (and I have some rough ideas for a sixth, if I can ever find the time to write it).

If possible, the covers in a series should have some similar elements, to communicate the fact that this is somehow a connected set of titles. However, when I wrote the first Vegas Babes book, Hot Brides in Vegas, I didn’t realize this would be a series. Hence I had to adapt the later covers to the mood and visual theme of the first book cover: mostly blank background, beautiful women, and a specific set of fonts.

Of course, one advantage of self-publishing is that you’re never stuck with a particular cover. It’s fast and easy to change the cover on Amazon or Smashwords. (Good thing, too, because sometimes the censors will force you to make a switch!) Still, retrofitting a cover to match a series theme isn’t a trivial effort.

When I started The Toymakers Guild, I had a three-book series in mind. Here are the first two covers. Much more similar than the Vegas Babes, but I’ve actually had considerable difficulty finding appropriate foreground figures. I still haven’t located a woman for the third cover (though that won’t be an issue for a while!)

For erotica, expression is more important than bodies

Since most of you write erotica, I’ll end with this guideline. This is purely a personal belief. I do not have any evidence to support it. However, for me, sexy bodies or poses do nothing to excite my interest unless they’re accompanied by a genuinely provocative or aroused expression on the part of the models.

Here are a couple of my favorite covers by other members of ERWA.

I love both of these because of the emotions I read in the women’s faces. In the Hired Help cover, the woman is believably transported by lust. At the same time, there’s an aloofness that matches the character in the story.

The main character in the Nina cover has a more ambiguous look. She’s not sure what she’s getting into – but she thinks she likes it!

In my view, if your cover characters look aroused, your readers will be, too.

 

An Insane Plan

by | January 21, 2022 | | 1 Comment

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

My husband always tells me that I need to learn not to over-commit. After forty years together with me, he knows very well how hard it is for me to dial back my goals to realistic levels. For example, I can’t seem to resist volunteering for a task when it’s needed, especially when I know I can do a better job than most people. I try to keep my promises realistic, but I’m fundamentally an optimist. Even when I have a long to-do list, I figure I can slip in another task or two without any negative effects.

So, during January, I’ve promised my readers to release four books, all paranormal, all at the intro price of 99 cents. This is a total of about 150K words.

Just to be clear, I don’t have to write these books. They’re all titles that have become unavailable, either because of a publisher’s closing or my deliberately reclaiming the rights. Still, self-publishing isn’t an instant process. I have to reformat each manuscript to the style template I use, and of course I do editing on the way. For books that were previously with my British publisher, I often need to change the dialect from UK to US English. In many cases, I need to replace the blurb and excerpt at the end (“If you liked X, you might also enjoy Y”) to use a more recent book, or one that is in fact still available.

Next, I have to consider the question of covers. In two of the four cases, I like the old covers too much to change them, even though that might help sales. For one book, I’ve bought a pre-made cover. The longest and most challenging volume, though, a 50K paranormal erotic romance novel, has a new title, and I wanted a new look. So I’ve spent hours futzing around with Gimp and CorelDraw, trying to create something that looks half-decent. It was really depressing when one of my cover artist friends told me my cover was a mess and that the font which I loved so much “sort of says 50’s tiki bar flier” to him. I didn’t agree, and kept the font, but I spent more hours trying to clean up the worst flaws in the images. (In all fairness, it’s the most complex cover I’ve ever attempted, a combination of three different images.)

Then there’s writing the blurb, picking out the keywords, creating a media kit with excerpts and so on, tracking down the buy links as they appear and saving them in the media kit, sending the kit out to bloggers, announcing the release on my own blog and to my email list… assuming Amazon doesn’t kick my book to the curb for keyword violations or some other such silliness!

Meanwhile, I’m working full time. I am still adapting to the new job I started last October, which may well be the most demanding position I’ve ever had – especially since I’m at least twenty years older than most of my colleagues. Some days I don’t even have time to check my Lisabet email.

Am I insane? Probably – but in fact, I’ve managed to put three of the four books out there (the latest hitting the virtual shelves next Wednesday) and probably will do the final one, a 15K short with the pre-made cover, this weekend. So maybe I’ll succeed after all.

Hubby will say this is just going to encourage more insanity. I’m sure he’s right.

I’m a strong believer in keeping all of my work “in print” if I can. Given how long it takes me to write something, there’s no way I want to let it languish unread (and unpurchased). Alas, I still have a significant backlog of books that are temporarily not for sale, including a couple of my best sellers.

Looks like next month is going to be packed with releases, too.

Yeah, crazy, I know. But I do so love to see my books, my babies, out where people can get at them.

Narrow or wide? How to decide?

by | July 21, 2020 | | 10 Comments

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Self-publishing offers an author a lot of freedom. You’re no longer bound to the schedule of a publisher; you can release your books whenever they’re ready, or according to a strategy related to your personal future plans. A self-published book does not need to fit neatly into genre-based pigeonholes. You can write and publish work that reflects your creativity and vision, rather than the often rigid categories that supposedly define “the market”. Furthermore, self-publishing can spare you sometimes painful fights with house editors about words, phrases or content that violate the house style rules. You, the author, are in the driver’s seat, and your book is 100% your own.

On the other hand, you become responsible for many critical decisions. What should the cover look like? What categories and keywords should you use? How should you position the book, with respect to your other work as well as the competition? What price should you set? How should you promote the book? All of a sudden you’re not just the author, but also the publishing executive and the marketing manager.

One thorny issue facing any self-publishing author at the moment is whether to go narrow or wide. Everyone knows that Amazon commands the largest share of the ebook market. “Going wide” involves publishing and selling on other platforms as well as Amazon, for instance Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Google Books. If you want to go wide, there are a variety of sites that will publish and distribute your books to a range of online vendors, including Smashwords and Draft2Digital. In return, they take a cut of the royalties (but a smaller percentage than a regular publisher). As an alternative, you can upload your book independently to different sales sites, which takes more effort but can result in somewhat higher returns as well as better control over format.

“Going narrow” means publishing exclusively on Amazon, enrolling your book in KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited (KU). You may publish and sell a print version of your book, but the ebook version must not be sold anywhere else.

KU is a subscription-based model for reading ebooks. Rather than paying for books individually, KU members pay a monthly fee (currently about $10) in order to download and read an “unlimited” number of books. (In fact, I believe there are some restrictions on how many books you can be reading concurrently, but I have not been able to find the details on the Amazon help pages.)

Since readers don’t purchase books under the KU scheme, Amazon pays authors according to the number of pages of their books that KU members read. The actual unit is called KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages), a quantity which is calculated based on a (secret) algorithm. Authors receive a certain amount of money per KENP; the amount is also a secret and varies over time, but is some fraction of a cent. Note, by the way, that Amazon systems must periodically access individual readers’ Kindle devices or apps in order to compute KENP.

Many authors swear by KU as a way of making more money. It does seem that KU reads do not reduce the number of outright purchases by much. KU subscribers are a different population from purchasers. On the other hand, by going narrow, an author risks losing sales from readers who prefer to buy from other sources. This includes a segment of the reading public who actively avoid Amazon for various reasons including the company’s monopolistic tendencies, their intrusiveness and their indie-author-unfriendly policies. In the interests of full disclosure, I will personally confess that I fall into that segment.

My personal experience with going narrow is very limited. I have one book, a boxed set, available in KU. Since I released that book, in February 2020, it has logged 22,217 KENP. The payment for this has been $54.22. So I’m getting about 0.0025 cents per KENP. The book is about 600 pages, so the page reads translate to roughly 37 sales. The purchase price is $4.99 and the royalty percentage is 70%, so if I’d actually sold these copies, I would have received $3.49 per copy, or $129.13.

Of course, it’s not likely I would have sold all those additional copies. As noted above, KU subscribers wouldn’t necessarily purchase the books they download as part of the program. Like all “unlimited” subscriptions, Kindle Unlimited encourages readers to take a chance on merchandise they’re not sure they want, because there’s no penalty to downloading a book but not finishing it. In addition, KU subscribers have an incentive to consume as many books as possible in order to “get their money’s worth”.

It is clear though, that Amazon itself saves money when authors go narrow. Given the current KENP formula, for a complete KU read of Vegas Babes, they only have to pay me about $1.50, which amounts to a royalty rate of 30% – rather than the 70% I get for an outright purchase.

Still, there’s a segment of the reading community that loves to see the words “Free on Kindle Unlimited” splashed across a book banner. It’s not really free, of course, but once a reader has paid the monthly fee, they will tend to forget that.

Mostly, I’ve gone wide, because I want anyone who is interested to be able to buy my book. As noted above, I personally don’t have a Kindle or buy ebooks from Amazon. I read 5-10 books per month. Knowing how important this is to authors, I try to review almost everything I read. Since I’m active on Goodreads and host a lot of authors on my blog, I frequently encounter books that sound interesting. If the book is available on Smashwords or Kobo, I’ll consider buying it. However, if it’s exclusive to Amazon, that immediately kills the notion. Hence, my fellow authors are losing out on reviews from me because they’ve chosen to go narrow.

I don’t want my own potential readers to have the frustrating experience of wanting to acquire my books but finding that Amazon is the only source.

I know I’m not neutral on this topic. I recognize that many of you have made a good deal of money by going narrow. It’s your decision – and it’s not irrevocable, since you have the option to remove your book from KU after ninety days.

I’d like to finish by presenting some interesting data. I just ran a contest for members of my email list. To enter, they were required to send me a message answering three questions:

1) Approximately how many books do you read per month?

2) Where do you get your books? (Amazon? Other online sites? Bookstores? Garage sales? The library?)

3) Do you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription now or are you considering one?

I received 26 entries. (I have about 300 people on my list.) They read an average of 11 books a month, with a lot of difference between readers (minimum 1, maximum 30).

The majority of respondents (16 or 62%) get books from many sources including Amazon. Other sources mentioned included BN, Kobo, Google, ARCs from authors or publishers, BookFunnel, PaperbackSwap.com, yard sales, brick and mortar book stores, and libraries. Seven respondents (26%) mentioned only Amazon. Three people (12%) did not mention Amazon at all.

Only six people (23%) said they had or were considering a KU subscription. One or two said they really loved it, since they read so many books. One person said she was considering dropping it, because she didn’t read enough to make it worthwhile.

Finally, I got a couple of comments that, I have to admit, mirror my own feelings about Amazon. One person, in response to the third question, said: “No, I like to keep my books and hate to think they’re tracking me.”

Another reader said: “No, I do not have Kindle Unlimited nor do I plan to get it because a couple of years ago Amazon banned me from leaving any type of reviews, so why should I pay to read on there?”

So: narrow or wide? It’s not a straightforward decision. By choosing to go narrow, you’re probably gaining some new readers, but you may be losing others.

I will leave you with this thought: Amazon wants you to go narrow, not only to freeze out the competition, but because they can pay you less per book than they’d have to if you went wide.

That’s enough to clinch the decision for me. Your mileage may vary.

 

Self-Publishing or Are You Sure This Won’t Hurt?

by | February 24, 2018 | | 6 Comments

Greetings fellow writers of smut, Larry Archer here. For this post, I’d like to talk a little more about the self-publishing game.

A lot of authors have mentioned the concern they have of the self-publishing mechanics which may be holding them back from taking the plunge.

I realize that it’s easier to just type up your manuscript and send it off to the publishing house and let them deal with all the dirty work, but you may be leaving a lot of money on the table when you do this.

From what I can see, sending in your manuscript for possible inclusion in an anthology results in about a $50 payment plus a copy of the book. Certainly, you may be offered more or less, but typically you will be given a fixed amount of money for your labor.

Think about a possible alternative, divide the money you could potentially receive by two and that’s roughly the number of stories you would have to sell to break even. Then once you break even, it’s all gravy after that.

Assuming that your sales ranking for the story is between 500,000 and a million which is a decent figure for an erotic story that captures the reader’s eye. This ranking should result in sales of 5-10 copies per month at Amazon or $10 to $20 per month income and the same from SmashWords. Personally, I normally make two or three times as much from SmashWords, but let’s assume the same sales.

Before you start rolling your eyes, consider this. A sales ranking of 100,000 should result in the sale of 30 to 40 copies per month or $60 to $80 per month profit per published story.

When your ranking drops into the top one-hundred, you could easily be selling thousands of copies per month and be waited on hand and foot by nubile scantily clad servants who are busily stuffing grapes into every one of your orifices.

Rank To Sales Estimator from David Gaughran estimates your sales as follows:
#1 to #5 = 5,000+ books a day (sometimes a lot more)
#5 to #10 = 4,000–5,000
#10 to #20 = 3,000–4,000
#20 to #50 = 2,000–3,000
#100 = 1,000+
#200 = 500
#300 = 250
#500 = 200
#1,000 = 120
#2,000 = 100
#3,000 = 80
#5,000 = 40
#10,000 = 20
#25,000 = 10
#50,000 = 5
#100,000+ = fewer than 1 a day

From what I’ve seen, this estimate is relatively close. A 100,000 sales rank should return sales in the 30 – 40 per month bracket, but your mileage may vary.

But let’s not get carried away here, the cold, cruel truth is that assuming you are a decent writer of material other people want to read, you’ll likely have a sales ranking around a million. At least that’s what you need to shoot for initially.

My point is simply that if you take the plunge and try self-publishing, then it is possible that with a number of stories published you could be pulling in a few hundred dollars per month. This would easily vault you past the single payment you receive when publishing in an anthology.

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk more about tools that can help you determine where you stand in the various rankings but I just want you to consider self-publishing.

Another benefit of self-publishing is that you have complete control over your story. When you deal with a publisher, then you have to first convince them to accept your work, and often beyond that point, there is a limited amount of control that you can exert.

A good example is search keywords to allow your readers to find you. Often these are determined by someone who may or may not have read your story and realized what a wonderful writer you are.

We all have a fear of the unknown, especially when it involves whips and chains, but that’s a whole different post. It’s sort of like a guy sitting at the bar, two stools over from a woman who is drop-dead gorgeous.

While he’s trying to build up his courage to talk to her, another guy slips in between them and sits down. The new guy leans over to the beautiful woman and asks, “Would you like to fuck?”

To which, the woman slaps the guy as hard as she can, calls him an asshole, and walks away.

While the cad is rubbing his cheek, the first guy says, “I bet you get slapped a lot with that line?” To which, the other guy replies, “Yeah, but you’d be surprised at how often I get laid!”

The moral of the story is you don’t get if you don’t ask. Your customers are not going to bang on your door and beg to buy a copy of your latest story.

For those who are hesitant about self-publishing, ask yourself this question, “What’s the absolute worst that can happen to me?”

Aside from the ones who write you and say, “You Suck!” or the old blue-haired lady who cancels your library card, that’s about the worst of it. It’s not like some guy with a broken nose is going to show up at your front door.

If you need further reassurance and cover, tell them, Larry, made me publish my drivel and then they can tell me that I suck! So now that you don’t have anything to worry about, dust off that manuscript and let’s see if we can make you rich.

After all, 50 Shades made millions and most of us would be ashamed to admit that we wrote crap as bad as that. Certainly, you can do better, can’t you?

Going forward, I’d like to help you with the process. Now, I can’t guarantee that I can help with your English, but I can help you package your story and get it out to your adoring fans.

See you next time and remember to stop stroking when you start needing glasses. Otherwise, you might find out that your Mother was right!

Now on a personal note, I’d just like to give a shout out to Lisabet Sarai, who I consider a good friend and inspiration. She and I published two stories concurrently at the end of last year, Hot Brides in Vegas and Nina, The Fallen Ballerina.

The two stories were well received and both were themed in Foxy and Larry’s world of swingers and strip clubs. It was fun and certainly interesting on how Lisabet portrayed the regular characters in my Foxy and Larry series.

I’ve published some 15 or so stories using these two characters whose roots grew out of our experiences swinging. Working with Lisabet taught me to make sure and flesh out your characters in every story to ensure your reader understands and can picture them instead of assuming they have read about the character in a previous story.

F&L series stories tend to flow from one to the other and characters are often introduced and built up from story to story. The whole chain of stories is sort of like a Roots or Godfather series except not on television. What I didn’t take into consideration was that readers may not have read all my books. Shame on you!

Another lesson in the road to becoming hopefully a better writer.

She’s helping me with one of my latest books based on an actual event where one of our neighbors crashed our annual New Year’s Eve party. While the actual event didn’t turn out quite as perverted as the resultant story, it could have. Lisabet has been instrumental in helping build a number of the chapters and helping to brainstorm the storyline. Thanks, Lisabet!

Wifey and I still laugh about that episode. We try not to make friends with our neighbors as bad things can happen innocently. But we had become friends with this straight couple, who live a couple of houses down from us. Our lots are pretty big and they were a little over a block in distance from us, so not like they are right next door.

After every New Year’s, they would always comment on the number of cars parked around our house and we would excuse not inviting them because they had said they were going to another party.

Then one year, sometime after midnight the doorbell rings and I stupidly answer the door. I find the couple from down the street, all decked out in a suit and fancy dress. Keep in mind that these people are really straight!

Not knowing what to do, I invite them in. At this point, there are over 100 people in various stages of undress or modeling Victoria Secret underwear with an impromptu orgy going on in the living room.

I’m wearing a bathrobe and Foxy is in long johns, unbuttoned down the front and with the back flap open. There is a picture of her with some of the girls here. Voyeurism at these parties is worth paying for. LOL

They were standing in the entry foyer with their mouths hanging open looking at the pile in the living room. After leading them to a quiet corner, we told them that they were welcome to stay but not to talk about what they saw or experienced. Anyway, our shocked neighbors soon departed except I got the impression the wife wanted to hang around.

That’s a thumbnail sketch of how the idea for the story got started and you’ll have to buy a copy to find out who did what and to whom. The title is still up for grabs, “The Neighbors,” “Our Nasty Neighbors,” or “Crashing a Swinger’s Party.”

See ya next month,

Larry Archer – LarryArcher.com for my blog or for the catalog of my stories – LarryArcher.blog/stories.

P.S. If you have any topics you’d like me to opine on or any suggestions, email me: Larry <at> LarryArcher <dot> com. For a laugh, check out my Twitter ads: http://bit.ly/2FtFzpG

The Future of Indie Publishing – Selena Kitt’s Predictions for 2017

by | January 13, 2017 | | 2 Comments

I remember in the old days, back in 2010 (*rocking like the old-timer I am, in a chair on the porch*) when the ebook market was the wild west of publishing…There was gold in them thar hills, I tell you! So. Much. Gold! Those of us who got in early? We made out like bandits. Now, I know this isn’t 2010 anymore, but the metaphor of the gold rush still applies. The avenues to “easy money” have mostly been closed off in indie publishing. As Amazon continues their attempt to dominate the ebook market, other income streams narrow down to a trickle. And Amazon themselves continue to squeeze indie authors, offering them less in profits, while their algorithms force them to spend more money in ads to make a larger sum.

Depressed? Dejected? Don’t worry. This isn’t the end of indie publishing. It’s just a shift in the market, and the best thing about indie authors is their ability to adapt. Yes, the market will continue to be flooded with new authors and more books. As the pond gets bigger, there will be a larger gap between the “big fish” and the “little fish,” and it will become even more difficult to gain visibility. But if you stick with it, and do all the right things, you can still make a career as an indie author.

2017 holds a lot of promise. It may not be the gold rush anymore, but there’s still a lot of gold in them thar hills—you just have to work a little harder to find it.

I think upping your marketing game this year will be key. Learn how to create effective ads with the biggest bang for your buck—or hire someone reputable who can do it for you. Amazon Ads will start giving Facebook ads a run for their money. Bookbub will continue to be effective (but less so than in previous years – we may have reached a saturation point there…) To be fair, most mailing list sites are less effective now than they’ve been in years previous. That said, many are still worth investing in to get the most eyes you can on your books.

Unfortunately, I do believe that Amazon’s market share will continue to grow. However, I think we are starting to see the giant just beginning to stumble, now that they have to turn a profit and actually pay shareholders (and this isn’t limited to selling books). Amazon has made several missteps this year, and they’re battling widespread fraud (again, not just in ebooks) and I see this trend causing mistrust, both in their customers and their vendors.

Amazon algorithms will continue to give boosts to KDP Select books, but given the issues that have recently come to light about “Kindle Unlimited” (not the least of which is Amazon’s inability to actually count the “pages read” they’re using to pay out to KDP Select author participants) authors may become more selective about their use of KDP Select as a marketing tool. Authors may put only certain books into the program, or put books in for just the first 90 days and then use sale prices coupled with a Bookbub ad (or a cluster of other smaller ads) to push the book wide. I believe authors will continue to use KDP Select, but many will begin to back off from the “all in” philosophy. Personally, I’ve never been a proponent of putting all your eggs in one basket.

Still, Amazon will remain the elephant in the room, and I believe their own imprints will continue to dominate the top book spots on the site. Because of this, we may see authors seeking to go hybrid this year, whether it’s looking to become an “Amazon author,” or submitting to traditional publishing houses.

I think growth in 2017 will be in foreign markets (where Kobo already has a foothold), as well as audio (where the market is still growing by leaps and bounds) and direct sales (which means sites like Gumroad and Patreon will gain even more popularity with authors). And while we’ve seen some small pubs down-size (like Samhain) and other smaller sites collapse (like All Romance Ebooks / Omnilit) others like Excitica and A1 Adult Ebooks (and their sister sites) will be around to pick up the slack. And as Amazon and other vendors crack down on more “adult” material, these sites will offer niche markets for subsequently disenfranchised readers and authors.

My best advice for 2017 is to work smarter, not harder. It may feel as if you’re on a writing treadmill, forced to release something new every thirty days or so, and the truth is there are plenty of authors doing just that. And some prolific authors have found success doing so. There is certainly something to the formula of “writing to market, writing fast and publishing often.” But don’t worry if you’re not the 5-10K-a-day sort of author. You can still be successful writing just a book or two a year. How?

Work smarter. Make sure you’re growing your own mailing list—and engaging with your readers on a regular basis. Don’t let them forget you exist (but don’t spam them—or annoy them—either). Readers like engaging with authors. And what they seem to enjoy most is authors with big personalities. So find your author persona and work it! I’ve seen authors do this in many different ways, from the inimitable Chuck Tingle to the sassy Jordan Silver. Take the best parts of you—the parts that others tend to be drawn to—and amplify them by ten. Turn up the volume. Be bold. Do and say the things that will make them remember you, in your newsletter and on social media. Just make sure you’re doing it from a genuine place. You’re just turning up the volume, not changing the channel!

Also, remember that no author is an island. Find other authors who write things similar to you and work out a way to cross-promote and cross-pollinate on a regular basis. Trust me, even if you’re the most prolific author in the world, you can’t turn out books fast enough to keep up with readers. Cross-promoting keeps readers on your side. They’ll start looking to you for recommendations and it will help keep their interest while you’re writing your next novel. And if you find you really click with another author, you can always consider an author partnership. After all, two authors can writer faster than one!

I don’t think 2016 was a great year for indies—but I do believe 2017 has the potential to be. No, 2017 won’t be anything like the gold rush year of 2010, but it’s still full of possibilities. I think the indie author community has grown together and become stronger over the years, and their future is still quite bright. Indies know how to adapt. They’re natural entrepreneurs, and even when the learning curve is steep, they’re willing to jump into the deep end to learn how to swim.

Looking forward to 2017, I think indie authors will continue to innovate, push the envelope, and transform the face of publishing itself.
Selena Kitt
www.selenakitt.com

ScAmazon 2 – Mammoth Consequences: The Digital Sweatshop

by | April 20, 2016 | | 0 Comments

About a month ago, I did a post about the scams that are rocking the self-publishing world on Amazon. I pointed to the scam Kindle internet marketing course that Dave Koziel was doing, and the 15-year-old German kid who made 130K using his methods.

Today, I saw a video from Dave Koziel on YouTube. He apparently felt it necessary to explain to his viewers that his methods weren’t really “scammy” and why he, himself, is not really a scammer. Watch the video for yourself. (I don’t recommend eating anything beforehand, though, if you have a tendency to get queasy…)

You see, Koziel admits he’s not a writer but more of an internet marketer who hired ghostwriters to write his hundreds (literally, hundreds) of 8,000-10,000 word “books.” He would then publish those books under pen names on Amazon. In KU 1.0, those 8-10K books would yield $1.30-ish a borrow. After KU 2.0, Dave clearly found himself with an abundance of short books that paid about half-a-penny per-page-read. So about $0.40-$0.50. That’s quite a pay cut.

Then Dave realized, if he bundled all his books together (and, you know, published them under different titles, changing up that order with every new title) he’d get paid more and could maximize his “Kindle real estate” so to speak. In fact, he discovered, if he got his reader(s) to click to the end of that mass of titles, even if they didn’t read them, he’d get paid for a full read!

This is particularly interesting to me because, as I revealed in a previous post, a representative at Amazon had directly told me, at the very beginning of KU 2.0, that “skipping to the end of a book” would not result in a full read. Dave Koziel, on the other hand, says that Amazon directly told him that yes, skipping to the end of a book does result in a full read, and that they somehow planned this by design.


So, Amazon – which is it?

Clearly, the evidence shows us that skipping to the end of a book does, indeed, result in a full read. We now have conflicting reports about whether or not that was intentional, or even known, by Amazon.

Dave Koziel took it upon himself to put a call out to his readers at the beginning of his books, asking them to click to the end if they wanted him to get paid for all his hard work (or in his case, his ghostwriters’ hard work and his cash outlay…) He explained to them that Amazon had started paying authors by the page read, and in order to get fully paid, they had to skip to the end.

What reader, who picked up a book because they liked the cover/blurb enough to borrow it, wouldn’t click to the end after that plea?

Koziel claims he was just being honest with his readers. And his scam wasn’t a scam, or even a loophole – that Amazon told him they’d designed the system this way on purpose. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I do know that Koziel and the others he taught his “system” to clearly had some ethically questionable morals, but they weren’t technically doing anything against Amazon’s TOS. As with the short “scamphlets” (making books so short, just opening them would get a reader to 10% and count as a $1.30-ish borrow, no matter what content was inside) this “loophole” was built into Amazon’s system.

The shocking thing, to me, was that Amazon decided to pay authors by “pages read,” when in fact, they couldn’t actually count those pages. They threw out a communal pot of money to the authors and like some literary Hunger Games, we were forced to fight over it. And the thing is – the game was rigged. Not just Amazon’s algorithms that favor their own imprints (they do) or Amazon giving authors sweetheart deals in Kindle Unlimited.

No, this game was rigged by Amazon’s own design. In the first version of Kindle Unlimited, they created a perfect storm where erotica authors (who already wrote short) could get $1.30-ish per borrow for a 5000 word story. This made authors of 100,000 word novels mad–and allowed
scammers internet marketers like Dave Koziel to create scamphlets–so Amazon closed that loophole. But it turns out, Amazon had “fixed” the loophole in Krap Unlimited 1.0 only to create an even bigger one in Krap Unlimited 2.0.

So the game’s still rigged.

David Gaughran and Phoenix Sullivan recently pointed out how many of these scammers have taken courses like Koziel’s and run amok with them, adding even scammier ideas along the way to the mix. These scammers are using giant click-farms to drive their books up in rank on the free charts (and Kindle Unlimited subscribers can still borrow books while they’re free).

They’re stuffing their titles full of keywords (a practice Amazon cracked down on years ago and have since let run rampant again) even going so far as to put keywords at the beginning of each title so they’ll appear high in the search rank. (This has made it nearly impossible to find anything on Amazon – they’ve effectively broken Amazon’s amazing search engine.)

While many authors have learned that adding a “bonus book” at the end of their titles can increase pages read (a bird book in the hand, and all that) and actually add value for readers – scammers have taken it upon themselves to add thousands and thousands of pages of “bonus” content. Sometimes they just put all their ghostwritten books in to increase that page count to 3000. Or they translate those books with Google Translate into twenty different languages and put those at the back. Some are even so bold as to just put gobbeldygook culled from the internet with a link at the front with an incentive (win a Kindle Fire!) to skip to the end.

They’re also putting their books into as many categories as possible (most of them unrelated to the actual content) and sometimes aping the looks of covers, titles and even author names, to appear high in searches for popular books.

So… why isn’t every author out there doing this? Well, the reality is, some of them are. They’ve found out about the loophole and have jumped on the bandwagon because… if you can’t beat them, join them? After all, the loophole is still open. Amazon has done nothing to close it. Skipping to the end of a book still results as a full read, right this very minute. Amazon recently capped the amount of pages read per book at 3000. They have also now disallowed (sort of… in certain cases… about what you’d expect?) putting the table of contents at the back of a book.

Of course, none of that has actually fixed the problem. And that is ALL the action they’ve taken. That’s it. They still have a loophole big enough to drive a $100,000 a month Mack truck through!

As Phoenix Sullivan pointed out: “How many ethical authors are feeling pressured into adopting black hat techniques seeing how many black hatters are making bank on them with seeming impunity? Some days even I’m tempted to grab a few EINs and a handful of throwaway email accounts, put on a black hat and go to town. I understand the system—all I need is one good month to game it…”

Authors learned very quickly that Amazon is where the real money is. Amazon allowed self-publishing stars like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and Hugh Howey to rise to the top after being rejected by the gatekeepers or legacy/traditional publishing, to make thousands, hundreds of thousands, from their work.

When self publishing first became a thing, everyone claimed that with no gatekeepers there was going to be a “ton of crap flooding the market!” Oh noez! Of course, what they meant was a “ton of crap writing” from authors who couldn’t write up to legacy standards.

I don’t think anyone thought, “from hundreds of ghostwriters paid by internet marketers!”

Forget devaluing our work by offering it for $0.99 or free. Forget devaluing “literature” by allowing self-published authors to publish directly to readers. That wasn’t the “race to the bottom” everyone worried about. THIS is the true race to the bottom.

Dave Koziel claimed he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He says he’s not a scammer (even though he admits he’s not really a writer.) He’s a self-proclaimed “internet marketer,” just looking to make a buck on the internet. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

Actually, there is.

Koziel is just one example of his kind. (In fact, he teaches and sells internet courses to others who want to copy what he’s done.) And if Koziel alone has hundreds of ghostwritten books, and they’re not plagiarized or written like a third grader (two things he claims in his video…) then the reality is, he’s accumulated material at a rate that no reasonable writer could accomplish. Only a few outliers (Amanda Lee, I’m looking at you, girl! 😛 ) can reasonably write 10K a day without burning out. But Koziel can hire 10 ghostwriters a day. 100 a week, if he wanted to. He can mass-produce titles at will.

Granted, the system itself is the problem when everyone is vying for a piece of the same pie. The more scammy you get, the more money you make. Yay you! But as the system starts to erode, and more and more mercenary types get on board, the further things collapse. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring a ghostwriter (Patterson does it all the time in the legacy world – and no one cares) there’s a problem when people start taking advantage of ghostwriters and working it all like a “system.”


If you pay a ghostwriter well, and that ghostwriter does a good job, that’s a legitimate business transaction. But most (if not all) of these odesk-type ghostwriters are undercharging (that hurts legitimate ghostwriters) because they’re overseas (there’s outsourcing again) and IMers can (and do) take advantage of that. There’s a difference between an author who has a story to tell who hires a ghostwriter (either because they don’t have time to write it, or because they don’t have the skills) and an IMer who gives an army of ghostwriters the trope-du-jour and says, “write me as many stories as possible.”


These guys may hire click farms, as Gaughran and Sullivan noted – but guys like this are also getting legitimate readers and building a following. (They talk a lot about building mailing lists so they can accumulate a way to sell all their scammy internet marketing things, not just books…) So what’s wrong with what he does? Clearly he doesn’t see anything wrong with it. But there is something wrong with it. I call it the Jurassic Park problem. Remember Jeff Goldblum’s speech to Hammond about cloning dinosaurs? When Hammond asked (like this guy Koziel) what’s wrong with what he’s done?


“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it – it didn’t require any discipline to acquire it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it. Well… you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should…”

Since Koziel likes YouTube videos so much – here’s one he and all of his minions should watch:

The problem is now we really are competing for readers with this guy. It’s like the outsourcing to other countries that corporations do to trim margins in any business – it’s a slippery slope. And now what do we have? A digital sweat shop environment. Writers terrified of falling off a 30-day cliff, utilizing voice software like Dragon to keep up and write as many words as possible as fast as they can, creating shared pen names to try to get a foothold in a flooded market.

It’s hard enough to gain visibility on Amazon these days, when there are plenty of excellent, legitimate writers out there putting out some great books. Because the reality of the gatekeepers was not that there was too much “garbage” out there to publish – the reality was always that there was never enough room at their table. There was plenty of stuff leftover that just went to waste – that’s the stuff that writers can now self-publish, now that the traditional gatekeepers are gone. And much of it is great stuff – books readers prove, with their buying dollars – they actually want to read.

Today, self-publishing authors don’t have to worry about getting past the gatekeepers. But they have to compete with internet marketers who see Kindle as a “business opportunity” and who are using it, solely, to make money. We’re competing with someone who can scam Amazon’s system (which, admittedly, is Amazon’s fault – they’ve made it “scammable”) and they’ve proven with hard numbers that they can take upwards of $100,000 or more a month out of the pot.

There are people in the world whose ethics are very fluid. Who think, “Why shouldn’t I take advantage of this giant money-making loophole?” And when those people don’t stop to think if they should, just because they can, and they decide to take advantage… there are plenty of people who come afterward who feel like they have to, as well – just to level the playing field.

How can a “real author” (as opposed to a scammer internet marketer) compete in a self-publishing world where scammers internet marketers can buy and publish hundreds of titles at a time? Where they can make enough money scamming publishing their deluge of titles to spend those ill-gotten gains on Amazon marketing (Dave Koziel says he was paying Amazon to market his “books”) and Facebook ads, outspending legitimate authors by thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands?

Who can compete with that? Unless an author is going to throw up their hands and decide (a temptation that Phoenix Sullivan so eloquently expressed above) “The hell with it, if I can’t beat them, I might as well join them!” how is that author going to have a chance?

In his video, Koziel says he can see why authors might be angry at him… but I don’t think he really does see. He feels he’s simply taking advantage of a legitimate business opportunity. Like most internet marketers, he’s looking at the short-term gain, and not paying attention to the long-term consequences. Or any consequences at all.

Granted, Amazon created this monster. All of these loopholes, from the scamphlets in KU 1.0 to today’s garbage-stuffed tomes in KU 2.0, could have been prevented with a little forethought on Amazon’s part. I told them this was a risk when they decided to change to paying by pages-read and they either a) lied to me, knowing readers could skip to the end for a full-read or b) they actually didn’t know that skipping to the end would result in a full-read. I’m not sure which is worse.

But if Amazon hadn’t started down this road to begin with, most of these scammers “internet marketers” wouldn’t have gained a foothold in the first place. Now they’re like sharks circling in bloody waters, and they’re not about to leave, unless someone cleans up this mess. And even if Amazon takes action, KDP and self-publishing is now a hunting ground they’re not likely to give up any time soon.

Even if Amazon cleaned up the waters tomorrow, these scammers internet marketers would continue to work the system, looking for ways to game it. Like the raptors in Jurassic Park–they have no ethical dilemmas whatsoever–they’ll continue to test the fences for weaknesses.

As Koziel’s video goes to show. These internet marketers will say and do anything to make money in the system. They haven’t paid their dues. Goldblum’s argument applies categorically – no discipline was required to obtain it, so they take no responsibility for it. Because they’re not writers, because they don’t care about the craft, telling a story, supplying a reader with real value and creating a real relationship between author and reader (rather, they just want to collect mailing list subscribers so they can spam them…) They remove themselves from the “system” they are gaming, and see it as just that – a system to game.

To them, it is a game. And thanks to Amazon’s lackadaisical attitude, they’re winning.

It’s readers and real authors who are losing. Because of the crap (real crap – now we know what it looks like) flooding Amazon’s virtual shelves, because of the keyword-stuffed or deceptive titles muddying up the search waters, real authors and readers are the ones who lose in this game. Readers can’t find what they want to read (I know, as a reader, I can’t find anything on Amazon anymore in the Kindle store, because of the keyword stuffed crap) and authors can’t compete with scammers internet marketers who could care less who they hurt with their scams.

They do hurt people. Real people. Because KDP Select is paid out of a communal pot, there is a finite number that decreases when scammers internet marketers decide to make “books” their “business.” Except they’re not writers, and they don’t really care about books. Or readers. Or the self-publishing community. Their idea of “paying it forward” is to monetize their scams “knowledge of the system” and sell it to others so they, too, can be scammers internet marketers.

Not once do they talk about craft–about plots and voice and point of view. Those are pesky details they outsource to someone else. They’re not even providing outlines – just pointing to the best-selling trope of the hour (what is it this month? is it shifters? billionaires? navy seal shifter billionaires?) and letting the ghostwriters do all the heavy lifting. While they sit back, package and re-package the “work,” publish and republish titles (sometimes dozens of times – and Amazon doesn’t care) with new ASINs when they drop too far in rank (to gain those extra five free days in KDP Select) and find any possible way to scam internet market themselves as high of a paycheck as they can manage for the month.

Never once thinking about or caring about the authors who are writing real stories, for real readers, who can’t humanly produce on the mass level in the digital sweatshop environment these scammers internet marketers have created – where Amazon has allowed them to flourish. This is where we all work now, thanks to the scammers internet marketers.

Thanks to Amazon.

I hope Dave Koziel meant it when he said he could understand why authors were angry with him – perhaps his video is proof that maybe, just maybe, he’s growing the seed of a conscience. Maybe he’s finally thinking, albeit a little too late, whether or not he should do something, instead of focusing on whether or not he can. 

But I don’t live in a fantasy world. I know Dave Koziel and those like him are just doing what they do. They’ve found a lucrative hunting ground, and they’re going to continue doing what they do (while occasionally justifying or spinning it in a YouTube video) until they can’t do it anymore.

In the meantime, authors and readers continue to lose – and their trust in Amazon wanes.

Selena Kitt

SCAMAZON – Amazon "Kindle Unlimited" Scammers Netting Millions

by | March 14, 2016 | | 15 Comments

scamazonHow are scammers making millions off Amazon? (And off any author enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select program?)

It’s easy. So say digital entrepreneursscammers like Dave Koziel – who admits to outsourcing his material, he’s not an actual writer or anything. You see, all you have to do it just upload “books” stuffed to the gills with anything, even unrelated material (romance books, cookbooks, South Beach diet books, foreign language texts, any and everything you’ve got at your disposal) then use a click-bait link at the front of the book (something like “Click here to win a Kindle Fire!”) to take the reader directly to the very back. A German blog has detailed these tactics as well, although it seems the German Amazon store (much smaller than the U.S. one) is cracking down on this now.

Why does this method result in big bucks? Because of how Amazon has changed the way it pays authors enrolled in KDP Select. Authors know that when Kindle Unlimited was first launched (rather quickly and in direct response to other book subscription services that were just popping up like Scribd and Oyster) we were paid “by the borrow.” It was similar to a sale (on sales, we were paid 70% of list cost) except now we were paid out of a general fund instead of a set percentage. (Like a “pot” or “kitty” – a communal pool of money – except in this case, Amazon was the only contributor and authors the recepients.)

But Amazon changed that payment method from “per borrow” to “pages read.” Not pages written, mind you – but how many pages a reader actually reads.

Except, the problem with this method that’s recently come, shockingly, to light, is that there’s a loophole in the system. Apparently, if you put a link at the beginning of your book to the very back and a reader clicks it – the author is paid for all those pages. A full read. Even though a reader just skipped over them.

Remember when Amazon capped the KENPC count at 3000? This was why.

Except Amazon didn’t want us to know one important thing – they lied to us.

They have no idea how many pages a reader actually reads.

Let me say that again, just so you don’t miss it:

AMAZON HAS NO IDEA HOW MANY PAGES A READER ACTUALLY READS.

Wow. A little bit of karma coming back at you with these scammers, Jeff Bezos?

Because Amazon has been scamming authors in the KDP Select program all along.

They decided to pay us by “pages” read, when in fact, they can’t count actual pages read, and they can’t time how long a reader actually takes to read those pages (last time I checked, no one could read 3000 pages in less than two minutes…)

Oh, they can email me and my publishing company that I’m missing a “page break” at the end of my novel, or threaten to take my book off sale or label it problematic for typos (that may or may not actually be typos), or actually take my book off sale (which they recently did – Bear Necessities – just after a great freebie run, too, while it was on sale for $0.99 – thanks, Amazon!) because I provided bonus content in the front of a book instead of at the back – but they can’t actually count how many pages a reader reads in a book.

Yet… this is how they have decided to pay authors. Per page read.

See anything wrong with this picture?

I sure do – and it smells like fraud and class-action lawsuits to me.

How do I know Amazon can’t count how many pages a reader reads?

Because, if Amazon had a way to count how many pages a reader actually reads, a link at the front of the book that took the reader to the very back would result in two pages read.

Just two, not every single page in the book.

But as Dave Koziel and company have proven, that’s not what’s happening. There’s a little loophole in Amazon’s system. When a reader clicks a link at the front of a book that takes them to the end of a 3000 page “book” – it gives that author 3000 “pages read.” Not just two.

If Amazon had a way to count how many pages a reader actually reads, placement of the TOC (table of contents) at the front or back of the document would be irrelevant.

But as this post proves (and man, do I feel awful for author Walter Jon Williams– he’s out a hella lot of money because of Amazon’s knee-jerk reactions and lack of planning and forethought) Amazon has suddenly begun removing books with a TOC at the back of the book from sale. As usual, they decided to shoot first and ask questions later, and damaged legitimate authors in the process, as David Gaughran first pointed out.

If Amazon had a way to count how many pages a reader actually reads, placement of “bonus material” (an extra story or book along with the original source material, which many authors have started to do, including myself in the Kindle Unlimited program) would be irrelevant. You could put it at the front or back of the book, and it wouldn’t matter, because the table of contents tells the reader what’s where, right?

Except the truth is, Amazon is showing us through their actions – their cap on KENPC, their insistence that the TOC needs to be at the front of a book, and their recent email to me about “bonus” content not being allowed at the front of a book – that they have no idea how many pages are being read in any given book.

All they know is where a reader STOPS reading.

That’s all they can actually calculate.

That’s why a TOC needs to be at the front (because TOC defaults as the “start” point of a book, and if it’s at the back and a reader goes to the TOC, an author has just been given credit for a full read even if the reader didn’t read the book) and why they are no longer allowing “bonus” content at the front of a book.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there are legitimate, non-scammy reasons to put a TOC at the back or bonus material at the front. The TOC (especially if a book is long or a boxed set) takes up valuable real estate in the “Look Inside” feature or “Sample” on Amazon. Placing it at the back avoids that issue.

And the logic behind putting “bonus” material at the front?

Well, this is how I explained it to Amazon in my letter to them:

I had a very legitimate reason for putting the bonus book/content at the front of this title.

The last time I put a bonus book at the end of the book, I had reviews complaining that the original title ended at “50%” – and they thought it was much longer, because the bonus book was taking up real estate at the back of the original text.

In this case, I put the bonus book up front (and labeled it clearly on the title page and in the table of contents) so that when the reader finished the main book, it would be near 100% and they would understand they’d reached the end, and wouldn’t feel “cheated” or “ripped off.”

It’s easy to look at a Table of Contents (TOC) and navigate to the book they purchased.

You see, I was under the assumption that, since Amazon is paying us by PAGES READ, that you, at Amazon, actually had a way of knowing HOW MANY PAGES A READER ACTUALLY READ.

I assumed, since it would be fraudulent otherwise, per our contract in publishing with you, that since you were paying us by pages read, if a reader skipped over a book in the table of contents, we wouldn’t actually be paid for those pages. So that putting bonus content at the beginning of a book would be no big deal, no harm, no foul.

Apparently, that isn’t the case. And you never told us that. As a matter of fact, you, personally, (rep’s name redacted), lied to me and said that skipping to the end of a book would NOT result in a full-read. We emailed about this and talked about it on the phone when KU 1.0 was originally rolled out, and you assured me that yes, Amazon had a way of tracking the pages a reader actually read, with time spent on each page.

Turns out, Amazon hasn’t been able to correctly count pages read since the very beginning, even though that’s exactly how you’re paying us. 

If you think this isn’t fraud, and that there aren’t authors out there already talking about a class action lawsuit, you’d be very, very wrong. There are a lot of wealthy authors out there who are beyond furious about this new information. 

I suggest you plug this leak as fast as you can and make some apologies and remuneration for it. 

And restore my book to published status immediately – and its rank as well, since you took it off-sale for a reason that shouldn’t have been a problem or caused an issue if you hadn’t lied to authors about your ability to actually count the pages you were oh-so-generously paying us less than half-a-penny for. 

On my part, it was completely unintentional. I was directly told that skipping over content in a book would not result in pages read. But that was clearly a lie. I thought I was creating a better customer experience (kind of like Walter Jon Williams and his TOC placement) when in fact I was unknowingly using a tactic commonly utilized by scammers.

Unfortunately, it’s not the only scammer tactic I unwittingly adopted.

You see, I have a link at the front of my books in my table of contents (I happen to place my TOC up front, so I dodged that particular bullet) that leads to the back and a link to sign up to my mailing list. I incentivize signing up to the list by offering readers five free reads. I’ve been doing this for years.

The thing is, I had no idea that doing this resulted in a full read in Kindle Unlimited. Because Amazon specifically told me directly that “skipping pages” wouldn’t work – that they could count pages read – and linking to the back page would not result in a full read!

I’ve been “cheating” and didn’t even know it was cheating. I wasn’t complicit in a scam but I’ll sure be blamed for it if they shoot first and ask questions later. (And as we know, they usually do…) Especially since I write erotica and I’m Selena Kitt. I’m guilty already by default. 😛

The problem is, Amazon has been throwing the baby out with the bathwater by taking books off sale for having a TOC at the back of the book, or bonus content in the front. As David Gaughran first pointed out, real authors are being hurt by Amazon’s attempts to plug up a leak that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

And I’m afraid it isn’t going to end there, folks. 

Are links from the front of the book to the very back going to be next in Amazon’s line of fire? Could be.

The irony is, many people do what I do – put a link in the TOC to a mailing list with a free read to sign up. Many of those originally had their TOC at the back of their books – but now Amazon is forcing them to put their TOC at the front. In effect, forcing them to have a link now at the front of their book to their mailing list… which leads the back of their book, and would result in a “full read” if a reader clicks that link.

Doh.

I don’t know how Amazon will plug this particular loophole, but I know what I’m doing this week. *sigh* Time to reformat my Kindle Unlimited books and take out the link to free content at the back and put that content somewhere up front. It’s not “WIN A KINDLE FIRE” click-bait – it’s a legitimate offer – but I’m sure Amazon will see it differently.

It’s better to get out the way of a potential nuclear explosion if you know it’s coming than sit around and wait for it to happen – at least that’s my philosophy. And the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So if Amazon’s reaction to this KU 2.0 problem so far is any indication, I’d suggest you follow my lead and clean up those “links to the back of the book” now before they nuke your stuff.

The thing is, all of this cleanup was preventable. There was no reason to implement such a flawed program like Kindle Unlimited in the first place. Amazon certainly could have predicted the original “loophole” in KU 1.0 that they attempted to close with KU 2.0.

Remember when short books were all the rage in KU 1.0? That was because every borrow that was read to 10% paid out around $1.30 each (well, at last count, the amount kept going down every month…) Erotica writers were hit hard when Amazon switched to the “paid per page read” scenario, because erotica authors have always written in short-form. What we were once being paid $2.09 (70% of $2.99) per sale for before Kindle Unlimited came along, then $1.30 per borrow for in KU 1.0, we were then being paid about $0.15 per read-through for in KU 2.0.

Ouch.

But the real scammers in KU 1.0 weren’t erotica authors, who simply benefited from the per-borrow payout by doing what we’d always done (writing short stories) – the real scammers put gibberish inside a book and made them so short that by simply opening the book on your Kindle, that first page would count as 10% of the book and result in a paid borrow.

Cha-ching!

Are you telling me Amazon couldn’t have foreseen that?

If so, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you.

Then KU 2.0 came along to “fix” the issues/loopholes/leaks of the “scamphlets” in KU 1.0. Amazon went to a “pay per pages read” scenario. It’s ironic that their solution to the money they were bleeding in the first Kindle Unlimited version was increased exponentially in the next one.

In KU 2.0, they weren’t paying out $1.30 a borrow to scammers who created their little “scamplets” and borrowed them in their little circles anymore. (Or to those nasty erotica writers who’ve always written shorts stories for readers who want to buy them… they clearly deserved to be punished for their dirty minds and “selling sex” in the first place, right?)

That’s great, but… before the KENPC cap was very recently instituted, the pages you could get paid for per-read were unlimited. Which meant that anyone could release a “book” of unlimited length in KDP Select (these scammers are putting garbage in their books – foreign translations, articles from Wikipedia, just words for words’ sake) then put a link at the front of that book that jumped to the back –  and voila. A $100 download in one click. I’m not kidding. I know authors who have told me they’ve seen these scammers bragging about getting that much per-read before the KENPC cap.

Even when they put the KENPC cap of 3000 on it, with the payout last month at $0.0041 per page read, that meant the maximum payout was $12.30 per download. Still not too shabby. Especially if you have lots of scammer friends to borrow your book and just click a link to read to the end – and push up your rank in the process.

KU 2.0 is far worse, in terms of scamming and money lost, than KU 1.0 ever was.

Guess you should have just continued paying out for those dirty erotica shorts, Amazon… 😛

Amazon’s continued “fix” to these problems are like putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding artery. Because guys like Dave Koziel aren’t just making money off Amazon. He’s making money off selling this method to other scammers and telling them how to make money scamming, too. And the more they scam, the more money they take out of the “pot.”

Check this link out. Apparently a 15-year-old mentee of Dave Koziel made $64,000 in a month. That’s not a typo.

Do I think this kid wrote all those words? Not if he’s following Dave’s advice, he’s not.

I’m posting a screen shot here, just in case the link gets removed. (You never know…)

Quoted on those images, Dave Koziel says: “A screen shot I got earlier from my mentee and coaching student @justin8600 For those of you who don’t know what this is it’s a report from Amazon that shows you your actual royalty payments from the Kindle store. Take a close look at these numbers and you’ll see how much money he is actually getting paid this month from Amazon. Did I mention he’s only 15? A lot of you may look at this and think it’s fake. How can a 15 year old possibly make $70,000+ in a month online from selling ebooks on Amazon? The world is changing and fast. Opportunities are out there to make money and a lot of it! It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you came from, what your circumstances are etc.”

screenshotb

Authors and readers –  does this make you angry? It should. You’ve been lied to and cheated, not just by the scammers, but by Amazon. Primarily Amazon, really. Scammers suck, but we all know they’re exploiting a loophole that was created by Amazon’s short-sightedness and could have been prevented by Amazon in the first place. The scammers are scammers – and they’re providing a poor customer experience to be sure – but Amazon bears the brunt of the blame here, let’s not lose sight of that.

If Amazon’s focus is “customer-centric” then their Kindle Unlimited program is a giant fail. KU 1.0 was called “Kink Unlimited” because authors (many who hadn’t started out writing erotica) jumped on the erotica shorts bandwagon and the market was flooded with them.

But KU 2.0 is now being called “Krap Unlimited” because of all of these crappy scam-books that claim to have great content, but really only contain a bunch of garbage and a click-bait link up front to take readers to the end, so the “author” of the book can get paid for all of those pages.

And when readers find these word-salad books, do they think, “Oh geez, a scammer, what a jerk?” No. They think, “Welp, everything they say about self-publishing and indies is true – their books suck!”

Thanks, Amazon, for perpetuating that myth.

And while the readers have to wade through crap (and boy, do they – I thought keyword stuffed titles weren’t allowed, Amazon?) authors are getting hit the hardest under KU 2.0. Not only are we getting paid less than half a cent per-word-read, these junk-books are forcing legitimate authors to split the “global fund”/pot with them. The rate we’re being paid per page just keeps dropping.

Gee, I wonder why?

Let’s take a look, shall we:

  • -6.32% = December rate decrease
  • -10.72% = January rate decrease

 

We can thank the scammers for that.

And here are some more numbers for you.

Amazon claimed recently that pages read were up by 25%. But I know that I didn’t see a pages-read increase of 25%. Did you? I bet you didn’t. Want to know why?

Because those pages read were click-bait scammer reads, that’s why.

I can’t prove it – but other authors have speculated as much, and I believe they’re right.

Take a look at this graph. (Courtesy of my author friend, Michelle Keep – she’s awesome BTW, smart as a whip, and writes great books – and provides amazing services to authors – check her out!)

graph

Before November 2015, the pages-read increased steadily for months by about 100 million-ish a month.

Then, in November 2015, there was a 350 million pages-read increase from the previous month. A pretty sharp increase but we’d seen increases similar to it before from December to January the year before.

Then, between December and January, look at the huge rise. There were 700 million more pages read in that month. How do we explain that? Christmas rush? Hm. Maybe.

Historically speaking, though, the program increases pretty steadily on that graph – but it started spiking in November and continued to climb drastically—far more than it ever had before—in December and January.

Let’s look at the actual numbers.

  • From November 2015 to December 2015, the pages-read increased by 347,751,042. (about 350 million)
  • From December 2015 to January 2016, the pages read increased by 716,220,032. (about 700 million)

Can Kindlemas account for this gigantic rise? Can we just chalk it up to Christmas growth?

Well, let’s look at the year before:

  • December 2014 shows 1,154,321,678 pages read. (1.1 billion)
  • January 2015 shows 1,402,376,812 pages read. (1.4 billion)
  • Between December 2014 and January 2015, that’s an increase of only 248,055,134. (about 250 million)

That’s about 1/3 of the increase we saw between December 2015 and January of 2016 (which was an increase of 716,220,032 – about 700 million)

Historically speaking, this giant increase is suspect.

So let’s go back and look at this year’s dramatic jump.

  • December 2015: 2,929,051,855 pages read (2.9 billion)
  • January 2016: 3,645,271,887 pages read (3.6 billion)
  • If we add those two numbers we get: 6,574,323,742 (6.5 billion) pages read

Now, just for chucks and giggles, let’s subtract the “average” historical Christmas/Kindlemas jump (which last year we saw was about 250 million…) from that total. Or, hell, let’s go a little further, let’s add to that historical average and say we should have historically seen about a 300 million pages-read increase from Dec 2015-Jan 2016…

If we do that, we’re left with a 763,971,074 difference.

 

There’s that shocking, inexplicable 750 million pages-read increase.

For speculation’s sake, let’s say that huge page-read increase is actually the result of scammers. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say they’re the ones who have caused this dramatic rise in pages read.

If you translate those pages-read into dollars (multiplying it by the last known pages-read amount Amazon paid out, which was $0.0041 per page)… that comes to…

About 3.1 million dollars.

That’s a lot of money. 😮

Okay, I get it, I hear you – that maybe it’s an exaggeration. Maybe Amazon did have a big jump in program growth this year, because they were pushing Kindle Unlimited around Christmas time and offering discounts. Okay, that’s possible.

So let’s account for that. Even if natural growth increased enormously this year – what if scammers accounted for just 1/3 of that 750 million increase in pages-read?

That’s still a million dollars out of the pot.

But that’s not all, folks.

No, because not only are these scammers stealing money out of my pocket and every author’s pocket who participates in the KDP Select program, they are getting “All-Star” bonuses on top of it. Just to add a little insult to injury and rub some salt in those wounds.

Amazon awards All -Star Bonuses to its top-sellers in the KDP Select program. Some of those bonuses are $25,000. Scammers most definitely got bonuses last month – and legitimate authors who have gotten them all along for being top-sellers discovered that their usual pages-read didn’t qualify. The bar had been set suddenly higher, and not by real authors, but by scammers.

And Amazon could have prevented all of this. They could have anticipated all of these issues – just as they could have anticipated the problem of erotica surfacing on children’s Kindles and done something proactive and preemptive about that. But Amazon works like the pharmaceutical companies. They make a lot more money ignoring root causes and treating symptoms.

The question now is – what are they going to do about it? And is it going to hurt?

I’m afraid the answer to the latter question is “yes.” As to the former one? Well, they’ll treat the symptoms again, I’m sure. They’ve already screwed over legitimate authors claiming they now have TOC and bonus content issues in their books, whether Amazon was aiming at the scammers or not. We’re collateral damage, as usual.

And frankly, I’m beyond angry. I’m appalled. I’ve become an unwitting participant in this “scam,” because Amazon lied to me. Amazon informed me in no uncertain terms that skipping over content in book would not result in pages-read, but they lied.

How can I ever trust them again? How can you?

Whatever trust I did have (ha) has been completely decimated. I don’t even trust their royalty reports at this point.

And you know what really sucks? Thanks to Amazon’s deception, I’ve been cheating other authors without realizing it. I suppose, if I were in the Hunger Games (which is exactly what this whole thing feels like) I’d just end up dead. I don’t have the stomach for this sort of zero-sum competition they’ve set up in KDP Select between authors. But like Katniss, I don’t have a lot of choice, if I want to feed my family.

In the end, the worst thing of all, at least for me, is Amazon’s stranglehold on the market. They’ve forced me into this horrible, socialist program of theirs where it is a zero-sum game – and I have to fight or die.

If you want to make a living at this, Amazon has created an environment where we’re all getting in the same bread line and fighting each other for crumbs. We’re all hungry. And getting skinnier every day.

(And OMG if one person in the comments says, “You’re not ‘forced’ into the program! You have a ‘choice!'” I will delete you so fast it will make your head spin like Linda Blair. We’ll talk about Amazon’s algorithms and how they weigh the visibility of KDP Select and the decreasing ability to make a living on any other vendor some other time, okay?)

Authors – when we were actually selling books, did we feel we were “cheating” each other out of dollars? Nope. Because we knew there was (arguably) an unlimited amount of dollars to be had. Competition in the marketplace is great – that’s good for the ecosystem. But competition for a “pot” of something?

That way lies… this madness.

And that’s all on Amazon.

They created this KDP Select monster. And remember that their whole company is run at a loss. In effect, Amazon is being subsidized by their shareholders. Authors keep complaining about Nook and Apple and Kobo and want to know why no other retailer is challenging Amazon for marketshare?

The real answer is, because they can’t afford to – they aren’t being subsidized.

And we, as a culture, have created the monster that is Amazon.

That, unfortunately, is on us.

selenasigsmalltrans

How to Become a Millionaire Writing Erotica

by | December 18, 2015 | | 4 Comments

by Donna George Storey

I’m always amused when I see erotica writing workshops that advertise the potential for big money in our genre. More power to those who’ve gotten rich, and there are some out there, aren’t there, E.L. James? But most of us are doing this for love and the occasional check for the amount of a modest family dinner at the local Thai restaurant (without the tip).

Actually, I tend to take a familial attitude toward my writing, as if my stories and novels are my children and deserve my best, if imperfect, efforts at nurture and support. Two recent columns here, Lisabet Sarai’s “The Care and Feeding of Your Back List,” and Elizabeth Black’s “Preparing for the Publication of a New Novel” reminded me that I have not been as attentive a parent as I should be.

Namely, I have several dozen previously published short stories in my archive that I would like to re-issue in themed ebook collections. I managed to drum up the energy to find a new publisher for my novel, Amorous Woman, when I got the rights back from the original publisher, but I haven’t gotten it up to move beyond a list of tables of contents for my collections. But Lisabet is right. I should be doing more for these “children” in the digital age.

Part of my reluctance can be explained by Elizabeth’s thorough list of what an author needs to do to promote her work. I’ve been down that path for my novel. It was exhausting, even though I did meet some wonderful people and had some very cool adventures. But how do you promote collections of previously published short stories? And won’t they all just be relegated to the erotica desert on Amazon?

With the New Year close at hand, I figured this is a good time to resolve to do something this year with my back list, but I am wary of the realities of publishing. Larger publishers are prestigious, but in my experience, they’ve dropped the ball on promotion and take a much larger cut of the proceeds, even if I could get their interest (highly unlikely).

My preference would be a smaller publisher, but there are horror stories out there about author abuse and publishers melting into the dew, resulting in a hassle to get the rights back. Then there is self-publishing which takes the stress from the submission process and puts the responsibility for promotion all in one place.

No one said this is easy, but… is there any erotica writer out there who’s been happy with her choices? What do you think about the trade-off between a small publisher or self-publishing? I really would love to dialogue with my fellow erotica writers about these choices in the current market. It seems the pro’s and con’s are changing every day. Erotica publishing is not at all what is was when I started writing in 1997 (when Libido and Yellow Silk were still around) nor when I reached a peak of output in the mid-2000s (Bay-Area-based Cleis, Seal, Best Mammoth Erotica, Best American Erotica and Clean Sheets).

It is so valuable to share our experiences of publishing, especially in terms of how the reality is very different from the dream of publication as a path to validation and riches.

Although come to think of it, some of the most validating moments of my life have been when a reader tells me she loved one of my stories. That’s worth millions to me.

Wishing you all a happy, productive and creative New Year!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Pornocalypse 2015 – Part Two (The Barnes and Noble Version)

by | October 22, 2015 | | 1 Comment

psaPSA: Barnes and Noble has made keywords and publisher names unsearchable on their site.



I hate to be the bearer of bad news twice in a week, but here we go again. This time it’s the folks over at Barnes and Noble. I’ve had reports (that I’ve now verified) that erotic keywords are being severely restricted. A search for “menage” comes up with a total of 3,661 titles. BDSM returns 6,988 titles, and incest comes back with just over 1,000 titles. Subkinks (like father-daughter or mother-son incest) are coming up at 20 to 40 total. Now, I haven’t checked the erotica keyword search results on Barnes and Noble in over a year, I admit, but back then, menage returned somewhere around 175,000 results, BDSM 110,000, incest about 80,000. For menage to suddenly come back with less than 4,000 books – it’s pretty clear that something’s happened.

Another interesting search restriction that’s been verified is that searching for a publisher on Barnes and Noble returns no results (unless the publisher’s name is in an anthology or listed somewhere other than the “publisher” field – our Excessica anthologies come up, for example, but none of our books do, and yes, they used to!) From Excessica to MacMillan – no results. For small publishers, this is a disaster. Many small pubs have spent years building a brand, and have readers who search those publishers for new books on the larger distributors. This eliminates that as an option (unless you do a search from Google – the results clearly come up there – which serves to prove further that this is a Barnes and Noble restriction.)

The conclusion we can draw here is that publishers and keywords are now restricted from the general search on Barnes and Noble.

My guess is this – Barnes and Noble is using a nuclear “quick fix” option. (Like when they dropped ranks on books by 1000 a few years ago – or anchored other books to keep them out of the Top 100…) They wanted to make keywords unsearchable going into the holiday season and in doing so they had to turn off publishers as a search term. I think keywords and publisher search were linked in their system somehow. So when they shut off one, they shut off the other–like throwing off a breaker to turn off one light in the house.

grinchxmas
Barnes and Noble has been known to panic like this in the past.

And now, we’ll see – but I think they’ll move on to individual books that have keyword-stuffed titles still coming up in searches. Because those are the books still showing when you search for things like “menage” and “BDSM.” Most of them have long keyword-stuffed titles that Barnes and Noble’s search engine is still finding.  Suppressing publisher and keyword searches decimated the titles available that come up in a search – and made less work for them. Now instead of 200K titles they have to comb through, they have to go through only a fraction of that.

If you’re an erotica author thinking, “Ohhh! I’ll just keyword-stuff my titles then!” let me say one thing – I wouldn’t if I were you.

Earlier this year, Barnes and Noble threatened to close Excessica’s account if we didn’t get rid of keywords in parenthesis after our titles. We had to go through and remove them all and clean things up or face being banned from publishing on Barnes and Noble. I didn’t blog about it at the time because we seemed to be targeted as a publisher – I didn’t hear anything through the erotica grapevine about it happening across the board. I’m sure a few others were targeted as well, but it didn’t seem to be widespread.

This, however, is a sweeping change I think all erotica authors need to know about. I know, in the wake of KU 2.0, many erotica authors went wide with their books and were starting to gain some traction on Barnes and Noble. I have a feeling this is going to ruin Christmas for quite a few.

Thanks, Barnes and Noble. Amazon didn’t give us any warning or use any lube, but just because you got sloppy seconds doesn’t make it hurt any less.

eggnog

Pass the eggnog, erotica authors. We’re gonna need it. Because while the storefronts will be safe “for the children!” this holiday season, none of the grownups will be able to find your books. Again.

 
Selena Kitt
www.selenakitt.com
Erotic Fiction You Won’t Forget
LATEST RELEASE: A Modern Wicked Fairy Tale: Peter and the Wolf

Does a Print Option Lend Credence?

by | May 23, 2015 | | 2 Comments

by Lucy Felthouse

A while back, I posed the question on my Facebook page about whether, if I put one of my self-published titles into print via Createspace, people would want to buy it. I got various responses, most of which were favourable, so I did indeed go through the process of putting the title into print on demand.

But a comment one person made really made me think. I can’t remember the exact wording they used, but it was something along the lines of, if an eBook is also available in print, it makes it appear more professional, less like a self-published title. Even if it is self-published. Apparently, it just gives the impression of more professionalism, probably something to do with that if the author has gone to the trouble of putting the book into paperback format, that they’ll also have gone to the trouble of getting the book properly edited, formatted, etc. I can understand the thinking – we all know how many crappy quality books are out there, and not just self-published ones, either. We have to battle against opinions that eBooks are somehow inferior to print books, and also, that indie published stuff hasn’t been professionally produced. It’s infuriating, but there it is. All we can do is hope our books get into people’s hands, and that those people will then leave positive reviews on Amazon. Or even negative ones, if they didn’t like the story – you can win ’em all, after all – but at least if they make no comment on terrible formatting, spelling, grammar and so on, then at least other readers can rest assured that the book’s been done right.

But simply selling a book in both eBook and print format – does that give it extra credence? Make you more confident you’re buying a quality product? There’s no right or wrong answer here, guys, I really want to know what you think. As I said, the original commenter really gave me pause for thought, as it wasn’t something I’d considered before, so your opinion would be much appreciated. And please, share the post and encourage your friends to weigh in, too. It’s a very interesting topic, so the more opinions, the better.

Happy Reading!
Lucy x

Author Bio:

Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over 100 publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include several editions of Best Bondage Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica 2013 and Best Erotic Romance 2014. Another string to her bow is editing, and she has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies, and also edits for a small publishing house. She owns Erotica For All, is book editor for Cliterati, and is one eighth of The Brit Babes. Find out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk. Join her on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to her newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9

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