The Great Amazon Suck - Why Other eBook Distributors Don't

How to Blow-Off Any Chance at a Fan Base.

(Cover: Seattle Weekly)

[Rant Alert]

For all the hype about Amazon, you will seldom see any fan clubs for Amazon or its execs. (Just lots of those "smiley" boxes.)

That became crystal clear when self-publishing a few public domain books to KDP Amazon recently.

The pattern became obvious: your first communication is apparently from a computer, not a person. If you're accepted - great! It's a form email!  If you're rejected, it's one of about five responses that computer spits out.

When you answer that, you'll get someone like "Sophie T." or "Ford K." - who won't answer any query other than a single terse sentence or short paragraph.

Nice bedside manner.

There's nothing about public domain that any of the other distributors have any problem with. They all accept it - no questions asked. They let the market take care of it. And will even pay you like a regular author. Only one other distributor will make you take a lower royalty is Kobo (who says that 20% is  "standard" - compared to Amazon's 35%. But Kobo doesn't mess you around with impersonal emails.)

Having "done the dance" with Amazon over public domain, I've found that they positively will make your self-publishing life hell - and it doesn't mean anything to them. (Example: in every single email - other than the glossy "your approved" ones - they threaten your account.)

Amazon really, really only wants original works.

Really.

I've just never had any problems at all with publishing everywhere else virtually anything I wanted, testing all sorts of various texts to all the major distributors. Only Scribd (which isn't a major distributor) has some sort of "duplicate content" script which auto-rejects anything they already have.

Aggregators (like Smashwords) won't accept public domain or PLR at all. Lulu will accept it, but won't distribute it. And those two questionably fit as "major" distributors.

Kobo will flag a book if you don't declare it public domain - but that's an easy fix.

No emails flying back and forth, no suspense, or angst.

In the middle of these Amazon tests, there was a short interaction with an editor who claimed I "infringed" on his work. He was very charming in his first email, but then wouldn't reply to other requests for data (such as emailing Amazon that we'd handled his problem.) My "infringing" book is still blocked, and I'll have to make another version of it and go through resubmission process again.

All for a silly Kindle version. (No, Amazon won't block a hardcopy book. They can't be sued for that.)

What that editor doesn't see is that his reputation - and that of his company - just lowered a few notches. There's seems to be a seedy side to this industry - where people are unimportant.

The moral of this story: treat people like people. Treat them like you'd like to be treated - or better.


What you send out is what you'll get back.

Hope this helps you with your own business.

PS. This reminded me of some work I did with a character who had a problem with being criticized (not my first time). He was himself critical of others,   constantly, behind the back or to the face of everyone around him. I blogged about it to vent - much like this, keeping it all anonymous. Of course, he searched this all out. After our association was over, he sent me a final email, which gave me the links to those posts. Of course, "it was all my fault." But the email itself wasn't worth even reading. His final email just confirmed what he felt about all humanity, not just me. All he will ever attract to himself are those who use critical comments to boost their own self-esteem. The truly talented and gifted will move away from him - he's just shutting down any creative impulse they offer, as an attempt to protect himself from imagined slights. Sad, but everyone dances their own way.

Related articles

• The Numbers Racket and Amazon's Public Domain Problems.
• What We Got Wrong About Books
• Focus on Value Instead of Delivery
• Screw Leanpub - original works only.
• Making Sense of Amazon's Public Domain Policies
• Getting Booksales on Amazon - and Everywhere Else

Getting Booksales on Amazon - and Everywhere Else

There are two distinct venues for selling books - Amazon and Everywhere Else.

(photo: Nicholas Eckhart)

This separation was made clear to me when I worked to publish a large handful of books to Amazon that I'd already published elsewhere.


The test was to port 30 books to Amazon which I'd already published on Google, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo.

Two-thirds made it, and I'm still waiting for the last four after three days handling Amazon's queries.

The results of this are analyzed here, here, and most of all - here.

This morning, after spending last night publishing to Google Play and Kobo, the problem of how to sort this out as a working assembly line was still racketing around my head as I walked the pastures checking my cows and enjoying the warmer weather this snow-filled March finally provided.

Book Marketing Research comes first.

One might think that Amazon would be the lowest common denominator, since they are the most restrictive.

But that's throwing away a lot of marketing mojo that any public domain book already has.

The sales from any book come from

• The author's brand
• The book (series) brand
• The cover
• The description
• The price

(Features like "look inside this book" and reviews are icing on the cake. Amazon is the only ebook distributor which uses or emphasizes reviews.)

When people are looking for a book, they are looking for an author or title - and places like Google Books already send people your way based on the established link-mojo that these have.

Selling on Amazon usually means making a new version or a completely new title for any given book. This means you will be marketing (via search engines) from scratch, other than including the author's name.

(I recommend search engine marketing as it's affordable to indie authors/publishers - as long as you incorporate it at every step of your publishing.)

This gives us two camps:

1. Amazon, which wants distinctive titles for their Kindle books (which will help sell your hardcopy versions.)
2. Everwhere else, which will send you more traffic if you do use the original title and author. 

Why bother with Amazon?

Because they still have somewhere under 50% of the ebook market, and will feature your hardcopy version right alongside.

Why not? 
Amazon is the pickiest about Kindle books and can leave you re-handling the submission two and three times with their queries.

Why bother with Everywhere else?

Because you are throwing away 50% of the ebook market if you don't. Also, as I'll go over shortly, you'll make money from the other distributors while you are still waiting for a the first sale from Amazon.


Why not?
I have gotten next to no rejects from publishing on the other four main distributors (iTunes, Nook, Google Play, and Kobo.)  They all will accept just about every book as long as it passes epubcheck (has no internal errors.)  

Note: I'm now working at completing my second dozen-dozen books, so I've got some history at this. 10 rejects out of 30 compared to 2 or 3 from several hundred. Which burns more of your time?

How to line this up for profits.

You do your market research while you are selecting your titles to publish. Search for the Kindle title of the original book. Use the search bar on Amazon to give you ideas about what terms should be in your book title. 

• If the book doesn't have a Kindle version at all, you publish it as fast as you can.
• If Amazon is giving away a free version of it, you are going to have to make an "(annotated)" or "(illustrated)" version of it.
• If Amazon is selling the only Kindle version of that title, then you are going to have to have a completely different title. They don't have to accept your book.

Those steps add to the bulk of your other market reseach, they don't replace anything.

The publishing sequence:

• Original books should start at Leanpub, then get ported to Amazon and everywhere else by Lulu. That gives you great royalties at the start, plus a built-in affiliate sales link for your readers to evangelize for you and get paid. (Meanwhile, you can use the extra time at writing your next book or marketing this one.)

• Public domain books start at Lulu, but are then ported by you to all the other distributors.

This probably means two versions, one for Everywhere Else, and a tailored one for Amazon. First send out the regular public domain book everywhere as an ebook. If it sells well, then create a hardcopy (trade paperback) and get this distributed by Lulu via their Global Reach - which shows up on Amazon almost immediately.

Depending on your Kindle research, you'll have to decide if you are going to have to make a radically different book for Amazon. More than likely, you'll create a bundle out of various combinations of your public domain books, with a hardcopy version as well. These titles then get finessed as above - before you publish them.

Your collection/bundle of ebooks can go everywhere.

It's possible, depending on what you find in your Kindle research, that you can create a book with the original title/author and add in other material. Then you are just fine.  But don't stress trying to get a one-size-fits-all approach in your publishing. And your title for sale in Amazon can have a slightly different title to get it approved on Amazon than other places (with the "annotated" or "illustrated"). You could even have a different cover if you have to, with that title on it, maybe a little editing on ebook's meta-data as you think it may need it.

What you want to watch for is having to create two versions of any book for any reason. That's just a built-in headache later on.

The ideal is to have the Kindle/ebook cover match your title/author of the hardcopy version. Ebooks help sell hardcopy versions.

The short answer is: publish single books on Amazon if you can, but otherwise just sent the collections their way.

Why Everywhere Else will make you money faster than Amazon

• The other distributors refer books by author, book series, publisher. 
• Amazon refers by what is selling best, and what has reviews.

Only Amazon uses reviews - and one reason they bought Goodreads. Google will pull in reviews from all over the place, but doesn't use them in there recommendation algorithms.

If you don't have reviews on Amazon, you won't get listed as easily.

Amazon, like most distributors, will push what's selling ahead of what hasn't. They may even have more titles than any single other distributor, as they've been hyped more than the rest for self-publishing, and have encouraged this through their Kindle-only promotions.

Books that don't sell well really don't sell on Amazon. They get buried - fast.

If you have one decent seller on other distributors, they will recommend other books by you and/or in that series - so chance discovery of unknown books is better.

All distributors will give you a fleeting chance on their "just released" areas.

Otherwise, you have to count on your sending traffic to the buy-links by your own search engine marketing, plus your own email list.

Once you start getting reviews, your book starts up the rankings on Amazon and then you start getting accelerating sales. (Which is why the get-rich-quick publishing books tell people to leave reviews as a promotional tool - only works on Amazon.)

Something like 80-90% of the books on Amazon get nearly few or no sales at all - ever. (It's in that Anderson "Long Tail" book.)

My own experiences proved this out. The books I published elsewhere were bringing me enough income to cover my bills long before I got more than pennies  every month from Amazon. Finally, some of the Kindle versions started getting reviews and payments from Amazon's network eventually started paying double from Everywhere Else - chiefly from one bestseller - which proves the Long Tail theorem.

Money first started coming in first from Everywhere Else, and only later from Amazon - over a year later.

That's why (along with ease of publishing) you first publish to Everywhere Else and then last to Amazon. That also gives you time to be distracted by Amazon's queries. Your publishing needs to pay for itself - or you'll always have to keep your day job to pay your publishing bills.

Takeaway:

Use Amazon first for market research and last for publishing.
Everywhere Else gets fit in between.

Related articles

• Solving Competition and Making Profits by Indie Publishing
• How to publish public domain books and profit nearly forever
• How to Publish Public Domain Books and Profit Nearly Forever - Part 2
• Market Research Starts With Amazon?!?
• The Numbers Racket and Amazon's Public Domain Problems.
• Summary of Getting Started: Lists and Sequences

Solving Competition and Making Profits by Indie Publishing

Competition Can Be Both Good and Bad For Indie Publishing -  Particularly With Public Domain Books

(photo: Ronel Reyes)

Some ebook distributors don't want you competing with other titles, others encourage it. Amazon and Google seem to be at different ends of this scale.

Publishing the same books to both of them shows why.

Amazon hates Competition

Just finished up a rant on getting a reject from Amazon (that made 5 out of a recent batch of 30.)

What this showed was that you want to only submit unique titles to Amazon for them to process as Kindle ebooks. On hardcopy books, they don't (can't) care. If you go head-to-head with an ebook which Amazon itself is selling or giving away, you lose - unless you change the title radically so it's now a "different" book.

The two solutions to dealing with Amazon are to a) Submit content with only new, radically different titles from the original - which includes "(annotated)" or "(illustrated)" tacked to its end, or b) Offer collections of ebooks, which also have titles which aren't in their database of books.

The titles are the key.

Google likes Competition

But on the other hand, submitting those same books to Google Play/Books showed the opposite. Google took them without question or reject.

With Google, you profit when they send people to your ebook and they buy it via Google - or are sent to Lulu to buy your hardcopy book. And in this case, you want to have the exact same title, or very close. Because then you fit into their search patterns for "other editions". And getting your book so Google will index it and send people to you - that is the Holy Grail of online marketing.

Here, having the same title works to your advantage - since Google now sends them to your ebook and your flashy cover shows up better than the stodgy versions that are sitting there. If they want your hardcopy instead, it's just a click away. (And when you sell a hardcopy book on Lulu instead of through Amazon, you can make 2-3 times the income off the same book.)

The titles don't matter.

Caveats

A couple of caveats here: for both Amazon and Google, it doesn't matter if the epub itself is called something slightly different than the book cover.

When you upload your epub to Google, they read it for the embedded meta-data, which includes the title - and so match it up with other books that have the same title.

Amazon takes the meta-data you give it when you submit via KDP. So you could have two titles for the same epub, in theory.

This isn't true for hardcover books. I've had to re-proof books on Lulu going out through their Global Reach where the title page of the book didn't exactly match the cover - at least the title and subtitle and author(s).

Your meta data has to match your cover on iTunes and Amazon, not so much everywhere else. Since we are dealing with an assembly line here, it pays to be excruciatingly honest.

How you win on both counts.

It's all in your marketing. The whole point of commerce is to add value to people's lives. Your bliss has led you to books which are out of print, or poorly offered. And you've done your research to find out that they are in an area which people will pay good money for those solutions. You know where you want to go in order to add value and get rewarded for your efforts.

The trick is in what you are offering.

Ideally, you create a single book which is published everywhere. Just assembly line your batch of books for this area and get them all ready.

But Amazon doesn't want what you post freely to Google, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and everywhere else (that accept PD books.)

Solution:

1. Edit the books into shape with new covers and nice descriptions, etc. 
2. Post these to Google, iTunes, Kobo, Noot - everwhere except Amazon (yes, the hardcopy versions will show up there, anyway.) That's unless Amazon doesn't have that title in their Kindle database.
3. Create collections of these works and give these unique titles and flashy covers/descriptions, as usual - and post these to Amazon as well as everywhere else. (Now your 6 books can become 9 or more...)

Everyone wins at this.

• All your readers get high-quality books in the format(s) they want.
• You choose the races you want to win, and win all the races you choose. 
• The race tracks have their nice little races just the way they want them.

Have fun with this...

Related articles

• Tips to Increase Direct Sales From Google Play/Books
• Why all these books and what will you get?
• How to Post Your eBook to Multiple Distributors - Ease and Profit
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.
• Lulu gets finicky about publishing ebooks - tsk, tsk.
• How to publish public domain books and profit nearly forever

Tips to Increase Direct Sales From Google Play/Books

An Idea Came Up to Increase Your Sales and Commissions from Lulu

I had last told you that I didn't get much sales from Lulu, but they had the highest commissions. That's if you use them to distribute your books (and is not a bad idea for most authors, who are writing their own books and should concentrate their time on this.)

But I'd dropped a big batch on Google and was busy cleaning up the missing details in the meta data.

Here's a shot of what I ran into:

 

You have a buy link, and a publisher's website link.

Note: This is the buy link for the hardcopy edition:

Both are great for SEO, but wouldn't it be better to get sales? I was sending them to that book's landing page - which is great SEO, but not direct sales. (And yes, these days I'm making a hardcopy version of every book, whether I distribute that book to Ingram or not. This tweak means going back to ensure all my earlier ebooks are represented by Lulu in hardcopy...sigh.)

So I now have the Publisher Website with the landing page for that book (was formerly http://midwestjournalpress.com) and use the Buy Link to get real sales.

The real leverage on this is to get the person to go ahead click through. Lulu gives you a direct shopping cart address to use for sales. You don't go there, then click again to buy the book - it's a shopping cart. You next click to get delivery.


[Update: The plus side of this is that you get from 2-4 times or more royalty from your hardcopy book from Lulu than you do from anywhere else. Like comparing $10-14 there to $3-5 elsewhere. Nice Ka-ching when you can get it.]

The drawback on this is that Lulu isn't in as many countries as Google, Amazon, or Kobo. The plus is that the links can be to your own storefront with something like:

But it will probably get more sales if you send them directly to the shopping cart (the link is in their sales button code - but you have to know their proprietary content ID.)

 

They can't get back to your other books, but the next button is to checkout - which is one less than your site.

Why not send them to iTunes, Nook, Amazon, or Kobo? 

The model I use, and the one I recommend for indie publishers and self-publishing authors, is to get the free ISBN from Lulu first, and then port your content to all the rest. You don't have to get an ISBN, but it makes generating the sales codes quite easy, as you can search by ISBN on all the sites except Amazon (which has their own proprietary code.)

[Update: when you set up that book on Lulu, you'll be able to get that proprietary number they assign. Just note it on Calibre somewhere, along with the tradepaperback ISBN and the hardback ISBN (if you go that far) - plus the Amazon number when it's assigned. Then you can enter these all into your spreadsheet to generate the links for the buttons on your landing page. Sounds complicated, but it does speed things up.]

In other words, Lulu always has all your content. (You can even sell PDF versions there.)

Other reasons to use Lulu:

1) Amazon isn't popular with everyone, they give you lower royalties, insist on being the lowest price, and only give you back an ebook version you can only use on their ereaders. And there's that extra step of finding out what that special code is.

(ex: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NH9X8DM)

2) For iTunes, you need a MAC - or download their special program.

(ex: http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9781312821941)

3) Nook is OK, but I haven't ported all my books there.

(ex: http://barnesandnoble.com/s/9781312821941)

4. Kobo gives me the absolute worst royalties on PD books - 20%

(ex: http://kobobooks.com/search/search.html?q=9781312821941)

My landing page currently goes to Google Books, but should probably go to Google Play: (ex: https://play.google.com/store/search?c=books&q=9781304420114) Now, that will take extra clicks to get a sale from that search, but these links all show up as buttons on the landing page, so we expect that they prefer to have their books on Google Play (syncs between devices, you can download your books anytime you want for local viewing, as many times as you want.)

One other point: if you follow those links, you can see the relative approaches these sites have. Amazon and Nook give "also-bought" recommendations which aren't your books. iTunes and Google tend to show my books which are by the same author and in the same series. Kobo doesn't give recommendations (at least for that link I gave) - but with such poor royalties, it's a desperation play to eke out some sales I wouldn't get otherwise.

Other option is to set up your own site with a shopping cart. Disadvantages are

• EU VAT you have to pay to the buyer's country as the sales point - 20%.
• Lack of traffic compared to the big boys above. The sell for you - you just have to keep adding books and link to them with your marketing.

You can always sell digital products via iAmplify or JVZoo, etc. But this is actually in addition to selling through the major distributors - something you use with your mailing list. The distributors finance expanding your direct marketing.

Summary:

Lulu should be number one place to refer buyers to, as they give the best royalties and aren't auto-discounted like Amazon and Google. Nook would be second - and I'd also have to wait 60 days to get paid.

Your mileage may differ - leave a comment if you've a better approach.

The takeaway: Use Google for SEO to link to your site. Any sales should go to your Lulu storefront. You make more income on your hardcopy books by sending them straight to Lulu.

Related articles

• How to Build a Public Domain (Self) Publishing Assembly Line
• Summary of Getting Started: Lists and Sequences
• How to Post Your eBook to Multiple Distributors - Ease and Profit
• How to Set Up a MAC for Self-Publishing to Itunes
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.
• How to Drive Yourself Sane - Checklist for Self-Publlshing