How to Market Test Your eBook - Before You Port to Amazon

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Test Your Book's Sales Ability Before a Big Amazon Release

Simple really: sell everywhere else first.

Why?

Because Amazon is known as the new book graveyard. That is why there are so many, many books written about how to "crack" Amazon, how to "make it big" on Amazon", "make a killing", all that sort of stuff.

Amazon, simply, is the 900lb. gorilla in the room, but also a complete pain in the butt.

Reason? It's weird algorithms which only push up regularly-selling books. You get one chance - for about 2 weeks - to prove that your book will sell well for them. And then, it's back to the bottom of the heap for you.

The source of this (besides their ruthless capitalism) is that funny review system they have. Not only do people not rely on reviews (according to survey) - also, Amazon's reviews are bought, sold, faked, padded, and gimmicked to be unreliable. They even pay people to do reviews - and those people have such a volume that they don't have time to read the books they are talking about.

That said, Amazon is where you can make the most income if you are able to make a hit.

The simple strategy to this is to

• publish on all other platforms first and 
• let it sit for a couple of months 
• (while you work on your release campaign, book trailer, launch emails, etc.)

The story behind this approach

I've written and/or edited and (re)published a couple hundred books now. None of them were marketed. Some have never sold, some have sold occasionally, some sell regularly, and a very small handful are bestsellers.

Note: without any marketing.

Mostly public domain (PD) and PLR books, plus a handful of my own.

The reason for no marketing was simple - I got fascinating with all the great books out there which didn't even have good covers and descriptions, but sold enough for me to do this full time. That small number of books is paying all my bills and then some.

I've been testing ebooks and book publishing for a decade now.

When I decided to leverage that book income into a higher range, I realized that I would have to crack Amazon.

PD books on Amazon are very discriminated against. Because they only want unique books, not more of the same. Anywhere else who will publish PD books will generally accept anything you throw up there.

Getting PD books into Amazon proved to be very time-consuming affair, with additional research far beyond the time you already spend editing, creating a fascinating cover, working up an enticing description, and cross-checking to make sure the book is actually in the public domain.

The extra research is to find out what your competition within Amazon actually is. Then you have to re-edit the book to add in additional material so it will be "(annotated)" or "(illustrated)" enough to pass their sentries. (Even then, I've had books simply be "unavailable for sale" after they were first approved.)

Amazon, for public domain editions, is an additional "special" edition you publish after you've already gotten it everywhere else.

Books that sell well, sell everywhere well.

The funny part is that the books which (finallly) sell well on Amazon are already selling everywhere else first.

What is making these books sell? Titles, covers, descriptions, price.

No where else uses reviews. Amazon already bought up Goodreads, which is the only other place that sponsors reviews on their sites. (Unless you count Amazon's Shelfari, which is a "red-headed stepchild" these days.)

Every book that sold well, sold well everywhere. Some books sold well on certain platforms and not others. But a bestseller on one was generally a bestseller on all of them.

Reversely, why put a lot of work into marketing a book into all the various places you have to log into and create content for - if that book will never really take off?

That means: Publish on iTunes, Nook, Google Play/Books, and Kobo before you approach Amazon.

What you can do meanwhile is to set up all the marketing you need to do (which is a long list of steps, plus lots of content ported from your book.)

It can take you a few weeks or a couple of months to get all those sites lined up for your "big release" event. Meanwhile, you can be test-selling your book, and tweaking things with your audience.

At that point, start ramping up a release schedule and either pull the other versions or increase their prices drastically, so that your Amazon release is a spectacular bargain.


This approach is really good if you don't have a mailing list of trusted loyal fans who are beta-reviewers and helpful tipsters.

How about the Amazon Bestseller Tactic?

Where you simply get a few hundred people on your list who go out and buy your book the day it's released on Amazon and instantly post rave 4- and 5-star reviews...

Well, Amazon got wise to that one - you need to have regular and ongoing sales after those first two weeks. Otherwise, you get demoted for another book to take your place. And while your book now has reviews, so will get promoted as an "also-bought" more than a book with no reviews - Amazon is interested in leveraging their own sales, too.

Which is why they are the new author's graveyard. Your book is consigned to the very long tail of sales - which means you'd better have your next book ready to be published if you're going to make any living with original fiction or non-fiction books.

Getting your list to buy and recommend your book to others (particularly if you can sign them up as affiliates to get paid for pitching your book - not Amazon Associates, which pay piddly if at all.)

That's a complete different tangent to go down, not for this blog post.

Your Amazon Release Strategy For Success:

1. Publish everywhere else first and watch the sales. 
2. Then either 1) work up your marketing material, or 2) write the next book in that series.
3. When you a) have a sales record established (and meanwhile have been building up your mailing list) and b) have your marketing materials figured out, and c) have a series of books to release over a period of time (like every two weeks on Amazon)
4. Now you can launch your set on Amazon over a couple of months.

What will happen is that people will go back and buy the earlier ones in the series because they liked the last ones - and Amazon will push your earlier ones as an "also-bought" or "by this author" or "related books" when people look for your later ones.

Using your loyal list in this, with some nice email enticements, they'll then buy and review all your new books in that series, which will set the stage for new readers (who discover your book in other ways) to then go and buy the earlier books in that series - a rising tide that floats all old boats as well as new ones.

The secret is to test on other retailers as well as your own list.

And no, this isn't set in stone. You can probably see lots of variations in this already.

Just wanted to get this out to you so you could earn more income from your writing.

- - - -

Stay tuned for more ways to sell your book online (and make more money) - subscribe by email or newsletter today!

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"Edward's First Book" - A Children's Story About Self-Publishing.

(Just a first draft. Illustrations to follow.)

 - - - -

Edward would wake up at night because of the voices in his head.

They weren't unpleasant voices, but they did want something.

They wanted to be heard.

Not just by Edward, but by the whole world.

Edward didn't mind listening to them - in the daytime, when he wasn't doing anything important.

But waking him up at night got to be annoying.

So he asked the voices, "How do you want to be heard?"

They were silent all day. They were silent after dinner.

So Edward asked them just before he went to sleep, "How do you want to be heard?"

Edward slept peacefully that night - until just before he was supposed to wake up anyway.

Then a single clear voice said to him, "Edward, we've decided: write us into a book and get it published."

Edward smiled. He had never written or published a book before. This could be fun.

Edward smiled all day during school, as he thought about how to do this. Edward stayed by himself on the playground that day during recess, just so he could keep thinking and smiling.

After school, he came home and went straight to his room.

He got out a big yellow pad with lines on it and started writing.

The voices didn't rush him, they told him their story.

Every once in awhile, they stopped and insisted that he change a word into another word. "It just sounds better that way," The voices told him.

Edward wrote and wrote and wrote.

Finally he was done writing the book.

- - - -

"Now, type it into the computer," a clear voice told him.

So Edward began typing on the desktop he used for his homework.

Edward typed and typed.

He learned that when the computer put squiggly lines underneath the text, this meant he had a spelling error to fix.

Edward learned that a dictionary would help him find the best spelling, although the computer would often give him hints.

Edward didn't get the book all typed right away.

He typed when he got home from school every day. He typed on the weekends when he could be out playing.

As long as he was smiling, his Mother was fine with him writing a book. It made her smile, too.

Finally, Edward finished typing his book.

"Now, you have to put it online," another clear voice said.

But Edward told that voice, "But isn't going online bad, something I have wait to be an adult to do?"

The  voice answered, "Edward, as long as you only do good, nothing online can hurt you."

So Edward found a place to put his book online. The voices helped him find a site which would take his book and publish it.

The site he used had nice people who wanted to help him publish. The nice people gave him hints and tips and ideas on how to improve his book. Edward learned about titles and chapters. He learned about how to make the ideas flow through the words like a stream flowing to the river, and then to the sea.

The voices in his head helped him when he needed to change the words and make them better.

Edward had to spend a lot of time making the words say what they were supposed to.

Edward still went to school on schedule, and did his school homework. He still went on trips to visit relatives when his parents wanted him to. He even watched sports on TV when his Uncle came over.

He would have rather been working on the book. But the voices understood. And they helped him do all these other things, too. They waited until he had some free time before they started giving him advice about the book.

Chapter by chapter, the book started looking like a real book.

Finally, Edward thought he was done.

- - - -

"No, there's more work to do," said the voices. "You have a cover to make."

Edward got out his sketch pad and started drawing some ideas for a cover based on what the book was about.

The voices would say "No" to that one, or "Try this" to the next one. And this went on and on, until he had the floor covered with sketches of book covers. Every new cover was better than the last.

When he would get stuck, and the voices seemed stuck, too - he went online and looked at other book covers. He found several that he liked, and the voices liked. He saved them to his computer so he could look at them when he needed to.

Finally, he was happy with a cover that looked good on his sketch pad. The voices said, "Yes, that will do."

So he went back into his computer and created the cover as best he could. Then he put the cover online with the book and asked the nice people what they thought of it.

Some thought was good, some didn't. Many people gave him ideas on how to improve it.

Edward thanked them all, and used their ideas to improve the book cover. Then he put the new cover online with the text.

Most people liked it. Some still didn't. But the voices told him, "That's fine. Let's go with that one. Time to publish."

- - - -

The site Edward used to make the book wasn't where he needed to publish it.

Edward found from the helpful people at that site where he needed to upload his book and cover.

"Next, you'll need to write a description," said the voices. "We'll help you with that."

Edward waited for the voice to say something, but everything was quiet.

Since it was night-time anyway, he went to bed.

Edward dreamed of books and covers and libraries and flying through clouds to big shelves full of books in the sky.

And then a though came to him, "Make it sound exciting. Make it sound like an adventure."

Then Edward woke up. It was still early, and his parents weren't up yet.

He got out of bed and went straight to the computer and started typing.

What he typed was only a few paragraphs long.

He used what he had learned from the nice people and wrote his best. Once he was done, he looked it over and changed a few things here and there to make it sound just right. He even read it aloud to see if it would make him feel excited to read his book.

And it did.

- - - -

Then it was time for breakfast, and school. So he got dressed and went downstairs.

All day long at school it was hard to keep his attention on what he was supposed to be doing.

He kept thinking about the book.

The voices would interrupt him and tell him to pay attention - they said that the time for school was now, that the book would still be there when he got home.

Somehow he got through that day.

When he got off the school bus, he flew upstairs and tossed his backpack on the bed as he dropped into the chair in front of the computer.

He had to make an account at the book publisher like he had learned.

And the book publisher site suggested what price he should charge. "That sounds fair, I guess," Edward though to himself. The voices agreed.

Finally he was done. He hit the "publish" button.

The voices cheered and were happy.

Now the book was in review. Edward had to wait.

It was still in review that night.

Edward went to sleep and dreamed of flying again, but there were storms in the air and he had a hard time reaching the bookshelves like before. Finally he did.

And Edward saw there were many other people there, they all had a book in their hands. Edward looked down and found that he, too, was holding a book.

His book had the cover he had created. When he looked inside, it said everything he had written down on that yellow pad. And the back cover had the exciting description.

All this made Edward smile.

Just then he woke up, still smiling.

Edward jumped out of bed and rushed to the computer.

His book was accepted!

Edward danced around the room and hugged himself.

The voices were happy. Edward's parents were happy when he told them.

Edward's parents read the book and thought it was good. They told their friends and they got their copies. Their friends told their friends. All of this helped the book sell more copies.

Edward had published his book.

- - - -

1432 words - way too long for a picture book, too short for young adult.

Like I said - first draft.

What do you think? (Please leave your comments below...)

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Another distributor for self-published authors - Feedbooks

Found this outlet for new authors (again) - original works can publish on Feedbooks

Strictly speaking, it looks like almost anyone can publish there, since I see that there are many public domain books published at various prices.

Why don't I use it?

You can't upload the entire book as an epub. You have to put the book as a block of text using their interface. Details are at http://www.feedbooks.com/help/self-publishing

A fuller description of the publishing process is found at http://www.feedbooks.com/help/public-domain

I "roll my own" and then upload everywhere. Simpler, faster.

One possible point would be to use them first, then take that epub to use elsewhere, like Leanpub. Practically, you'll get some of Feedbooks formatting (and branding) with that, so you're better off simply copying and pasting the content from LibreOffice while you have it open.

The biggest drawback is that I can't find out anywhere how to get paid. One review says they don't - it's only for free work. This is confirmed with other research. The paid books they have are from large publishing houses, probably the way they stay afloat.

Not a great deal of support on that site for this, so this is perhaps why they aren't better promoted for self-publishing. I found some tests I'd done earlier, and played around some more. Results: while fairly simple to add content, links don't show up in an epub or PDF by any other color - so it's a crap-shoot for people to find your link as promo. (You'd have to specifically tell people they were links.)

Pros: 

• Get published quickly, in all ebook formats.
• Promote your book as a free sample to get more discovery.

Cons:

• Proprietary interface.
• It's not an income source (don't know why some books are for sale there).

Recommend?

Would I recommend Feedbooks for authors?  As much as I just did. Promote your book here, if you can find the time. You'll be reaching the freebie seekers, mostly.

Practically, it's easier to jump through Leanpub's hoops, and they are designed for actual sales.

If you're self publishing, and have an original book, you might as well add this distributor to the mix. I plan to come back and try this out with one of my original books, just to see how their scene rolls out.

With public domain, they have to verify the author, and some of my recent authors can take some verifying - the common ones are already available there.

Essentially, if you have a book ready to publish on Feedbooks, then you'd be as well off publishing through Lulu, Nook, Google Play/Books, and iTunes.

If they'd update their interface to enable epub upload (like Smashwords and Leanpub) then I'd include them in a flash.


But that, and their lack of obvious support tells me why I never included them to begin with.

Again - when I have the time, I'll do some tests and report on them.

For now, you can try them if you want.

PS. Another place for actual sales (but, like Leanpub, are mostly unknown) is BookieJar. I won't be trying them. Discovery is poor, you do get paid (70/30 split) but they don't accept public domain.

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Rambling Prose and Lack of Focus Explain Why Tradition Publishing Fails

Traditional publishing Won't Use the Tools That Make Indie Self-Publishing Work - They Can't Afford Them.

(art: Tobias Mikkelson)

Found a great piece with gold nuggets in it. 

His rambling prose is off-putting (how's that for a typified descriptive phrase?)

The value of this work to indie publishers and self-publishing authors is so intense, I thought to excerpt it so you'd see the fruit trees out of the forest they grow in. (I'm excerpting directly without prettying-up these phrases - or the ellipses which cut to the chase.) My comments follow.

audiences are at the heart of it.

unique research is needed into the audiences for every book and every author and that the flow of data about a book that’s in the marketplace provides continuing opportunities to sharpen the understandings of how to sell to those audiences.

Marketing research starts ideally before you publish anything. Or - you can work like all hell to get the entire series out and then find out what the market is buying and why, as you then get your marketing going.

the book descriptions are the basis for all marketing copy

Give by-title attention to the backlist

Research, analysis, action, observation. Rinse and repeat.

Study "Breakthrough Advertising" by Eugene Schwartz. You analyze the market and analyze the product (book) and then work up your approach accordingly. All book descriptions need to pull like a well-tuned advertisement (which they are.)

“landing pages”, are one of the most useful tools to improve discovery for books and authors.

much basic knowledge about discovery and SEO is lacking in publishing. 

Every book has a landing page, period. This page uses SEO to enable search engines to more rapidly digest it. Meanwhile, your marketing is creating backlinks to that page on other properties, such as YouTube and video sites, PDF's on Slideshare and doc-sharing sites, covers on Pinterest, Flickr, and G+, etc.

Hugh Howey described the sales curve of the successful indie — “steadily growing sales”.

“word of mouth” is the most effective means of growing the market for a book. (Such) books would tend to have a sales curve that was a relatively gentle upward slope to a peak and then a relatively gentle downward slope.

This is capturing email addresses with an opt-in on your book's landing page (which could become a blog in and of itself, with excerpts and so on.) Surveying your email list will find out what content they want more of - which you then blog about and even use to write the next book.

distributed retail demands a completely out-of-synch sales curve. In the brick and mortar world, the book will effectively be dead if it doesn’t catch on in the first three months. And the reality of staffing, focus, and the sales philosophy of most publishers means it won’t be getting any attention from the house’s digital marketers either.

in the world of indie success, you are repeatedly seeing authors breaking through months after a book’s publication, at a time when an experienced author knows a house would have given up on them.

one challenge in the digital age is to see readership as many pretty small and discrete audiences, not one big one at the level of the “subscriber”.

This explains why these huge traditional publishing firms cannot reliably earn enough income for the bulk of the indie authors/publishers out there.

Let’s say you have a story on any particular topic. Your total “theoretical market” within the publication’s readership is every person who ever read a single story on that subject. But your “core market” is every person who has read two stories on it.

seeing your audiences that way, and growing them that way, will allow monetizing them more effectively. This would be harvesting the benefits of audience-informed content creation.

Even in your email list, you will have subsets of this which want different things. If they will pay you for it, they are worth catering to.

looking for search terms that suggested opportunity (lots of use of the term and relatively few particularly good answers), could tell through research what book to write.

the same point that SEO should be employed before titling any book.

SEO is part of your basic research on any book. One of the few tools left standing in this area is Market Samurai.

Of course, we don’t sell that kind of help very often or we haven’t so far. It would require getting marketing money invoked early to pay for research like that. But we know it is useful.

Again, the indie author - following their bliss, their burning desire - can afford to do this, where the huge traditional publishing dinosaur can't turn fast enough.

Luck to us all.

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The Numbers Racket and Amazon's Public Domain Problems.

Amazon's problem with public domain books are overcome by sheer numbers.

(Photo: Conor Lawless)

You beat Amazon at public domain publishing by having a lot of dogs hunting for you.

Recently was in the middle of a test which had 30 public domain books submitted to Amazon to see how many I could get approved (thinking at the outset - all of them.) Also, I wanted to test their policies in this area.

Looks like it may have a great deal to do with their internal policies which aren't available.

What inspired this post was a reject which simply said:

Thank you for the information you provided regarding the following book(s):

....

We have reviewed the information you provided and have determined that we will not be making the book(s) available for sale in the Kindle store at this time.

And...?!?

Since each of these books had been carefully researched to be in the public domain, the only other problem is that it directly conflicted with a book which was being sold by Amazon itself which had the same or similar title/author. The problem with this reject was that they are giving no solution or recommendation - like "not well enough differentiated."

So the book was just blocked.

It could have been the personal problems and attitudes of the person having to deal with the decision on a Sunday evening.

It does make Amazon look a bit heartless.

And we are talking Kindle here. Just Kindle. I've got epubs everywhere else.

Otherwise, if you look up this book, you'll see my hardcopy version is sitting there.

These are the three points I learned from this test:  

• When Amazon has the only Kindle book for sale, they won't be letting you put up competition to them any time soon. 
• If other people have other public domain items there (and especially if Amazon is giving that title/author away for free) then you have half a chance, provided yours is "(annotated)" or "(illustrated)" in the title. 
• If no one else has a Kindle version of that old book up there, then you can shoo right in.

It takes searching for your book title before you put your dog in the hunt.

The other option is to make the title completely different from anything seen before. (So that new title sounds like no book they've ever seen before...)

The bottom line here: Amazon doesn't really seem to like competition. They like unique, single, different items.

Everyone else who published ebooks simply let the market decide. The better cover, description, and price wins. Except on Amazon.

However, I'm not going to worry about it much (after I get this particular rant done.)

Look, in just under 72 hours since I submitted 30 books to Amazon, I've gotten 2 blocked, 4 are in "Draft",  4 are still "In Review" and 20 approved. Almost all of the books I submitted this time have hardcopy versions as well. Ebooks and hardcopy books supposedly sell more of each other (that's another test being done with this.)

The most important takeaway is what you can learn from this:

1. Amazon doesn't apply it's public domain policies unless they are the exact same book with the exact same title. Technically, if you create a new version, it's not now in the public domain - whatever is yours about it, if it's only the cover - that gives you a new copyright. However, your agreement with them is that if it is composed mostly of public domain material, you can't claim the 70% royalty.
2. If you compete head to head with Amazon, expect a query and a reject. Learn to research your books before you simply try to "float another book" up to Amazon.
3. Amazon now has somewhat less than 50% of the ebook market. If you also publish on iTunes, GooglePlay, Nook, and Kobo - you'll have the rest of the market.
4. Amazon is the pickiest of all of these. (Except outlets who won't even accept anything except original works - Smashwords, Leanpub, Scribd.) All the other distributors will take just about anything. And they don't base their "if you liked" recommendations on inflated reviews - only Amazon.
5. The only reason you are at Amazon at all is to get better leverage over your sales. The bestsellers I have at Amazon generally sell well everywhere else as well. I am getting sales on the other distributors which are from PLR or PD books which haven't had to be specially edited or combined to jump over Amazon's higher bar. Meanwhile, any hardcopy book I'd publish will pass that Amazon bar easily. It's all leverage. Some leverage is better than having no book selling out there.
6. Finally, recognize that Amazon is trying to keep a walled garden growing with their Kindle books - and failing. Their market share has been dropping every year for the last decade. (Something to do with how they are treating people.) If you make your book available everywhere else and are making income off these - it's more income than you'd make off Amazon alone. If you are also making money from those same books you have on Amazon, you are still making more money than you would have made on Amazon alone.

That is the key takeaway to this rant: show up everywhere you possibly can with as many offers as possible. (And meanwhile, don't sweat the small stuff.)

I'm now busy porting those same 30 plus the other 70 I didn't even bother putting up on Amazon to get them to work hunting up sales for me. (I can just about hear those hounds calling...)  I've got 4 more distributors to post these works to, and little time to be distracted by arcane rejects. Posting 400 versions is still a lot of work.

But you can see that 400 hound dogs will do a lot more hunting than 30.

Just because you were handed a mystery sandwich, don't get stuck on it. Just swallow hard and fuggetaboutit. Like I had to tell myself - I've got 20 out of 30 approved. So this is 20 more books which potentially can give me more income.

The six I've had rejected I've learned from. The four still in review I've got a 50/50 chance. Two of those, I'll ask (again) to withdraw so they don't get blocked (they are both competing directly with Amazon and look to be a problem - pulling them now would prevent them getting blocked.)

That would bring me up to eight which didn't make it. So it's just shy of a 75% success rate. Used to be about 66%.  So now I know.

The other point is that it's just been 72 hours. Sure, with these other distributors I may get some rejects, one or two maybe. So 398 books out there is still a much better reception than what I got on Amazon. But it's really their loss. My hardback is up there, and could be giving them a two-for with the ebook. My ebook looks better, has a better description, and will sell better - making them more profit than they will get by rejecting that one book. Again, it's their loss - I've got a lot more hounds to hunt with.

Frankly, I won't be trying a bulk test like this again. It's a lot of stress. I'll do my homework better, and then I should be able to raise it to closer to 95% or more. (Working on unique titles is the key, little else.)

So Amazon can stick their rejects where it could do them the most good. I'm just little fish to them. Not worth getting in a snit about this, or doing something which would reflect badly on my account.

I've got a lot more dogs doing my hunting than just one. So it's back to work.

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Adding a New Distributor for Book Discovery

More multiple eyeballs to add to your list of book-buying promotional outlets.

(photo credit: Jackie)

Which means more discovery and more sales = more income.

Found it when I was chasing down a new series of books which had fallen in the cracks.

Actually, I've been stumbling on it for some time - over and over. Finally saw through my own fog.

Open Library (http://openlibrary.org)

An offshoot of the Internet Archive, this enables people to access an online lending library of ebooks, plus also buy the print version. It's that last item we are interested in, of course.

You are the first to see this as another income source. I've not seen this come up anywhere else. It has the features of being able to offer free books and yet help people buy a copy of their own.

It seems straightforward, but takes a little work. You upload your ebook to Internet Archives - which at this writing makes it free (more research coming.)

From their help section:

I wrote a book, and I have it in digital form. Can I make it readable on Open Library?

Yes! It's a three step process.

1. Create an account and upload your book to the Internet Archive (you will need to set up a second account to do this, you can't log in with your Open Library credentials).
2. Create a record for your item on Open Library by clicking the Add A Book link in the header and adding the proper information.
3. Add the Internet Archive ID to the Open Library record in the ID Numbers section. To do this, click Edit to edit the record, scroll down to the ID Numbers section and add the Internet Archive identifier which is the last part of the URL. As an example for this book, the Internet Archive ID is historiaephilipp02just. Adding this link will activate the "read" buttons. Make sure you click "save" at the bottom of the page when you are done adding the link to the Internet Archive.

What's fascinating is that you can add ID numbers from Amazon, Google, Lulu, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari - all sorts of places.

You can see from that short list above, that this is a nice way to promote the book. Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari - these connect your book to you as the author, and have author pages, etc.

This doesn't help you if you don't want to give your ebook away.

However, this is also a way to get your hardcopy versions sold.

For this test, I submitted a book which I had slated as a free promo anyway: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25616736M/Breezy

It's not limited to giveaways

While I'm working on figuring how to only "loan" books, you can meanwhile promote your hardcopy editions through Open Library.

What this does is give more link-love to your booksellers. This the makes the search engines more likely to offer your books to searchers.

Oddly, I'd recommend a hybrid approach. Both ebook and hardcopy have distinct ISBN's.

• Google's ebook link will also offer the hardcopy versions.
• Amazon.com giving an ebook version will also list the hardcopy versions.
• Shelfari will bring up Amazon's data, so this makes it simple.
• LibraryThing and Goodreads have to be manually edited to make the book show up, so I have more research to do on how to get these showing up. 
• Many authors use Goodreads to communicate with their audience, so this is a probable site to include in promotion.

You will use the ebook to get hardcopy sales. If you have an option, the general rule is to use the ebook ISBN, unless it specifically asks for a hardcopy ISBN.

The probable sequence 

This would be to do this as promotion immediately after your publishing to all the ebook distributors.

1. You already have all your meta-data in Calibre and this is open on your  computer as part of the publishing sequence.
2. You set up all the distributors with their own browser tab for uploading your books.
3. Open Shelfari, LibraryThing, and Goodreads in additional browser tabs.
4. Last tab: open OpenLibrary.
5. (You published your hardcopy along with your ebook right?)
6. Of course, you link in your hardcopy with the ebook where you can. (Amazon is supposed to do this automatically - in a couple of weeks, they say.)
7. Amazon will take a couple of days (or maybe 24 hours, if you're lucky) to clear - so enter your data, so you're going to have to port your meta-data to Shelfari, LibraryThing, and Goodreads manually.
8. Once you've posted everywhere else, then port your meta-data to OpenLibrary, and scrape the ID's from the others.

More promotion possible. 

Shelfari and Goodreads (both owned by Amazon) are good places to also connect with readers. I don't but I'm not in that phase of promotion right now. If you have original works, this is a probable place to start.

The pre-sales aspect of this still needs investigating. However, since all the key distributors have enabled this, it's feasible you could do promotion to your fan base for an upcoming book.  For Amazon, the general strategy is to make it available at a low price and then raise it later, after you have the number of reviews you need to get their also-bought algorithm's attention. (Amazon doesn't value free reviews like they used to.)

The key value of adding in these four discovery sites is in getting all these sites cross-linking with each other and your various versions of the book you just released. The search engines will help drive your discovery, but the only way to get your book into their sights is to put multiple remote outposts on authority sites.

Admittedly, this brings a new research line for marketing via these type sites - doing a real book launch instead of simply publishing first. It's on my list for research.

Your distribution sequence now goes:

1. Lulu (for IBSN)
2. Amazon (takes longest approval)
3. iTunes
4. Nook
5. Google Play/Books
6. Nook
- - - -
7. Shelfari
8. Goodreads
9. LibraryThing
10. OpenLibrary

From #7 on down, it's use is promotion to drive discovery.

The key advantage is because you are publishing public domain books, these will now all start showing up with your book, particularly if it's unavailable other places. Public Domain books are peculiarly long-tail in search format, so you should have no problem getting several of the top spots on Google with your book versions.

Additional notes

Goodreads will import from a page with ISBN's on it, as well you can upload a spreadsheet or text file.

LibraryThing will also import your books that way. Exporting those files is here.

Shelfari also has that import function.

What was mentioned on Shelfari is that you can export your books in a format they can then upload - so once you have done the work to get a series into one of them, you can then export and import to accomplish it on the other two.

Shelfari will import a simple list of ISBN's, so this might be a short cut. (I'll try and then then you know...) Since you generally work from a spreadsheet with a batch of books, this could make more sense than not. Saves you importing all sorts of meta-data if they do it right.

Goodreads wants all sorts of data as a CSV file. If we can get Shelfari to do this for us, then we are that much ahead.

LibraryThing will import from Goodreads. This gives you a nice file, but will need to be tested for import into Shelfari.

Sequence right now is to give a list of your ISBNs to Shelfari, then export from there and import to the other two. (Under testing...)

[Update: Testing of these shows that LibraryThing does the best import, but exports some CSV file which doesn't translate.

All three of these will import (they say) from an html file - so this shows the path, create a page with your series and include the ISBN's. Make sure both print and ebook versions are available.

So insert a step into the above sequence of filling out your landing pages fully (including creating a series landing page) with all the ISBN's plainly visible.

We'd import from Shelfari, but this will take some time for the books to clear. The idea is to get it done simply and not have to return in a few days - when you should be setting up other marketing steps or selecting your next series of books.]

The key point is to import into OpenLibrary. The rest of these are nice-to-haves. You can later springboard from these as social channels if you want.

But that's another article, another time.

Related articles

• How to Game Amazon at Their Public Domain Publishing.
• The Copywriting Classics Publishing Post-Mortem
• A Comparison of Distributors - Who's on First?
• Book III Outline - "How to Sell a Book Online"
• How to publish public domain books and profit nearly forever
• How to Build a Public Domain (Self) Publishing Assembly Line