Trolls and Bullies, in the Kindle Author Graveyard

Would you believe me if I said I had proof of Amazon KDP being a bully? How about that they are trolls as well?

Well, it happened to me like this: I had a book up which got a DMCA complaint that wouldn't resolve. You see, you can use DMCA to complain about someone else's content and never have to give that person a copy of your complaint - so they have to take their content down, or in Amazon's case, they block it and you can't do anything about it.

The long and short is that someone at Kindle got a hair up and went to suspend my account over it. I answered right away and pointed out that it was because they left the book in question on their site and it could still be found by the DMCA trolls.

But I got the dirty end of that stick.

The next day, someone else at Kindle reversed it, but I was still guilty as accused. So, as usual, they put their boilerplate threats at the bottom of the email.

Why does Kindle put threats at the bottom of every email?

The answer - they are bullies. KDP has around 60% of the market and they don't have to take your book if they don't want to. And if you try to publish public domain works, they can be downright hateful about it.

Sidebar: What made Kindle into troll-bullies? Their own "success." Yes, there's the corporate cult in place, which comes down from the top. It's that take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth policy they have. Besides that, it makes them a great target. I've published that one complained-about book everywhere else. But who got the one and only DMCA complaint? Amazon-Kindle. Because it's an easy target and Google searches will pull up that title there first rather than anywhere else. So the DMCA internet trolls simply have to fire off an automated request to Kindle, and the book is shut down. If it doesn't disappear entirely, they complain again until that title is removed. (That is the actual strategy: to eliminate the "competition" for a specific book title, which isn't trademarked.) It's the mutual troll society. Amazon-Kindle doesn't have to care. They've got 1.6 million books out there, and yours is just one tiny drop in their ocean.

The bottom line is that I've finally had enough with these guys. It set me to thinking about what I was actually getting out of my dealings with them. Frankly, I have one book that sells decently, and a lot of other books (about 70, maybe) that don't. Some have never sold. Which brings up the fact that...

Amazon Kindle is correctly the "Graveyard of Indie Authors"

Out of over 1.6 million titles on their Kindle site, less than 100,000 sell more than one per day. That's 16 percent. (See http://www.theresaragan.com/salesrankingchart.html)

And the more people publish to Kindle, the bigger that graveyard grows.

Now if you had a book that sold one a day, and you were getting a royalty of maybe $2 per book, what kind of income will that give you?

Yup - $720 a year, more or less.

So you can figure what I'm getting with my book whose sales rank says it's turning over maybe 5-10 per day. Nice pin money, but won't support any family by itself. And that is my Kindle star player.

Then when I have to put up with Kindle's nastygrams in order to do these submissions, it doesn't really seem worth it.

Here's the surprise: I make more money on paperbacks and hardbacks.

Meanwhile, neither CreateSpace nor Lulu give me any grief at all about my books, as long as they are technically able to be printed. They trust me from the start. (They don't accuse me right off the bat of doing something illegal, like the Kindle trolls.)

iTunes, Nook, and Kobo similarly don't care what I publish there. And they also just accept the stuff I give them. On each publisher, my books sell differently. But only Kindle has that weird review hang-up. (OK, it does affect CS sales, I imagine.)

The point here is that I can help you best with all these books I'm finding if I'm not hassled and stressed every single time I submit a book or revise it.

The Kindle Trolls just made up my mind for me with their last round of bullying. I'm really through with having to fight for the "privilege" of getting books up there.

So if I do find a great PD book, it's going everywhere except Kindle. It will wind up on Amazon as a paperback and maybe a hardback as well. I'm just not going to fight over measly profits from their Kindle version. (I'm sure there's no love lost on either side.) What I will do is to offer that ebook to you directly with it's Kindle-ready version, and pocket something like 97% of the royalties. Members only, of course.

Where I come out with an original work, Lulu is going to distribute it to Kindle for me. So I lose some royalties out of it, at least I'm not losing sleep.

I think that if authors wised up, they'd see how they are getting screwed and would quit their Kindle addiction. There are 1.5 million, 9 hundred thousand Kindle ebooks out there that sell less than one copy per day.

It then makes sense that the average income of most indie authors by survey is about $500 per year. Because most of these have published a single book which never sells, especially on Amazon-Kindle. And people can't find your ebook because it isn't recommended because it never sold to begin with. That's the way Amazon works.

Amazon Kindle is the ebook author graveyard. Cue the funeral dirge, please.

What Turns a "BestSeller" into "Makes a Living?"

You'll find that all these "bestselling" authors have built up an audience of rabid fans who buy everything they come out with. Takes some time, and some good writing, but it can be done.

Like Amanda Hocking, they don't just write a bunch of good books. They also borrow other's audiences until they can get enough of them to join theirs.

This is the lightbulb moment most authors are missing.

And frankly, it's a point of visiting podcasts as a guest. In Content Marketing, it's called guest blogging. Hocking got the book bloggers to take up her cause. Steve Scott and Mark Dawson visited the book podcasters. Same approach in all cases. Enough of these visits, with your own opt-in's and list in place, and you have your own audience.

At that point, you can do the Kindle Review Dance. You know the steps:

a) Give your audience advance review copies,
b) get some of them to put reviews out on the first days,
c) get some to buy it right off.
d) Then tell the rest of them so they can get it during the first opening week, and
e) then raise the price and get some more to keep buying it.
f) So then Amazon starts pushing it and drives the sales even higher.

That's all it takes to make a "bestseller" on Kindle. Yes, the reviews are all contrived. (Normally, about 1% leave reviews there or anywhere. But this strategy is legal and accepted.)

But what does it take to make a living there?

Well, the honest truth is that you can't get there from here.

No author I've studied makes their income strictly and only from Kindle. No one. Not any. Lots of "conventional wisdom" guru's say to just get your books on Kindle exclusively and - voila - instant 6 figures.

Nope. Doesn't happen. Except for the 1% - usually those with lists of rabid, buying fans. Like celebrities. (Cue the zombie march.)

It takes a couple of years to build up your audience to even start approaching 6 figures from book sales. It's a real grind, but necessary. Learn by doing, not by hoping for lucky breaks.

Let's crunch some numbers. Smashwords' Coker  has done surveys say ebooks sell the most at $2.99, but produce the most income at $3.99. We don't know how many 6 figure authors are using those numbers. Mark Dawson won't run Facebook ads for anything under $4.99. He's pulling down $500K per year, spending over $100K on FB ads - and making twice that back.

Let's figure you want to make $100K in a year. In New York and other high-tax districts, $50K won't even get you out of the poverty zone.

You need $2K per week. Let's take Dawson's book price - that's about $3.50 royalty per book. Just over 570 units sold per week. Or around 82 units per day. Your sales rank needs to be between 1500 to 3000 - meaning that you have that many books which sell better than yours in all of Kindle-land. The air is thin up there, for sure.

That's just one book to do all the heavy lifting. Most of these guys have an average of 10 before they get any decent income. That makes more sense, as then your average sales only need to be around 8 per day, meaning your sales rank for these are between 10K to 50K.

Now you can see why 84% of all Kindle authors make diddly-squat.

But crunch the numbers for yourself. Come to your own conclusions.

What the guys making real income from booksales are doing.

Their money is made with multiple versions on all possible platforms. By my last notes, Scott was sticking to KDP Unlimited with his ebooks and had given up around $100k per year. But around a third of the rest of his money was coming in from other versions. Print books, audio books, foreign rights. It was only when Scott moved into these additional versions that jumped him into the $300K range.

That's the model. Get all your books available everywhere possible in all versions possible.

If you're publishing original books and have a decent audience built up, you can very probably keep making 6 figures indefinitely - as long as you keep producing books they can consume.

If you're trying this with Public Domain books, figure that you're going to have to publish a few hundred to do this. The problem is that PD has been commoditized on Kindle so that the bulk of them are either free or very low price of 99 cents.

However, in print, it's a different story - with the proper approach, one can make those few hundred crank out 6 figures. And those sales are more regular, if "weak" compared to the topsellers.

Having a couple hundred PD books out there, giving you about $2 royalties, you only need them averaging about a sale every other day.

The trade off is about the same. It can take years to build up a backbench using either method.

What most starting publishers don't know is that to submit PD books to Kindle gets you a nastygram almost every time you do. (Of course they quickly find out.)

Hardcopy versions on CreateSpace and Lulu don't get that bizarre treatment. These two are only concerned with your technical accuracy so the book reproduces well. They aren't concerned with what the content is, but expect you to hold up your own end.

Quite a different scene entirely. You aren't threatened with account closure every single submission.

Meanwhile, as I've covered before, print books can bring you in twice or more income for the same text.

For my business model, the current work is converting all my ebooks that sell at all over to print versions. And meanwhile, look for additional PD books which are poorly marketed by their publishers and sell well in paperback despite of it. Adding these to my existing backbench then should take my income up to those six-figures, and perhaps beyond.

While PD publishing requires no audience (it actually works based on the legacy audience of those long-dead authors) I'll be also investing in audience-building to accelerate that process. That audience will tell me what books they want, giving us both a virtuous feedback loop for the marketing cycle.

All of this is based on those two points from our last episode:

1. Deep backbench - lots of titles selling well.
2. Multiple eyeballs - all possible versions on all possible platforms.

Add to this:

3. Velvet Rope Members

That's where you get your own audience on board, and give them a membership so you can talk freely with them and give them what they want.

There's only a few more key points to this system, but I've talked at you long enough for today.

This episode should give you the paradigm-shift you need to consider your own marketing plans. The days of the Kindle trolls and bullies can reach their end. But only if enough of us get people to examine the conventional wisdom Kool-Aid they've been swallowing.

Bullies get to keep bullying until they are stood up to.

Then they reform, or run.

Takeaway Steps

Of course, this is my trademark end to this episode - steps you can take today to fix things.

For original works:

0. Get an email provider, plus your own domain and web site. I use AWeber and Rainmaker, respectively.
1. Use an aggregator for your ebooks, either Lulu or Smashwords. Make sure they have a Lead Magnet that works to build your audience through the LookInside/Preview.
2. Publish paperbacks through CS and Lulu and get their extended reach options (cost you nothing but proofs.) Ensure they also have Lead Magnets for their own Look Inside/Preview.
3. Publish hardbacks through Lulu to their extended reach.
4. Record your own books into audio and post them to Audible and CDBaby. Also use them as podcasts to attract your audience.
5. Make the podcast interview rounds for your books. And tell people how to opt-in to your membership.
6. Build relationships with your list through give-aways and pre-release offers. (Several good workouts exist on this, such as Dawson's.)
7. Write more books. Publish. Repeat.

For PD/PLR works:

0. Mainly, these steps are the same, they just take longer. Probably twice as long or more. (Just how fast did you want to get financially independent.)
1. Aggregators won't ship PD or PLR anywhere, so you have to submit all your books manually.
2. My personal advice is to skip Amazon - it's way too crowded to be worth anything. Instead, use them to show you where the best prospects are. They publish sales rank data, which gives you clues (see my last episode for this.)
3. Publish all books to as many places as you can, especially hardcopy versions.
4. You might be able to use PD audiobooks (if you choose the right originals) for your podcasts. Otherwise, use the example of mine where I take the 4000 character description and podcast these.
5. The rest is no different. Build your audience and give them what they want.
6. Then find more books, publish them, rinse, repeat.

That's it for now.

See you next time.

PS. I'm working up the real marketing campaign that any self-publisher can use, so stay tuned.

How to Completely Fail and Go Broke in Public Domain Publishing

Bottom line: it's all a numbers game that's been rigged against newcomers.

Let's go over some patently obvious facts:

1. Public Domain books are a commodity. They are sold like cattle at auction. People buy as low as they can. Meanwhile, publishers are into this scene of each diluting the market with their own version. Search for a classic and you'll usually find about 400 versions of it for sale.
2. They are available for free - why bother. Visit Feedbooks.com or Manybooks.net or Gutenberg.org (where they get their versions from.) You can get any popular PD book there for free. Meanwhile, Amazon did that same thing when they set up originally - importing tens of thousands ebooks for free to get people to use their Kindle. All free to download.
3. PD ebooks books give you lousy royalties. Amazon won't give you more than 35% for any PD book. Kobo only gives you 20%. Itunes does better, but has around 9% of the ebook market share (Compared to Amazon's 65% or so.) Meaning:
4. You have to sell on Amazon to make any real money - and that's nearly impossible. Plus, they actively discourage you every time you post another PD book there - and make you say it's "annotated" or "illustrated" or "translated" in order to 'differentiate' it from the free versions. And what does that do? You have zero reviews to start with, so their algorithms put your book at the bottom of the heap. (Amazon alone uses reviews seriously, very seriously.) Oh yeah, Amazon also threatens your account with their robot emails every time you submit a PD ebook. Nice.

Now all the recent hype has been about ebooks, ebooks, ebooks. All this has done is to get all the self-publishing wannabes to invest heavily in ebooks. So the competition is huge, PD or not.

The Big 5 and also-rans also are on this schtick. They've come out with their own cheap versions of public domain books and work to dominate the low-end market for these.

Even worse, there are some companies who apparently have a business model of coming out with new versions of the top 250 or so classics, apparently under different imprints, which then get featured for a month or so as "new" versions, and then get replaced by the next imprint doing the same thing. (Apparently "big" publishers have a way to mass-import their catalog which the self-publishers don't have access to.)

Unless you love competition just for the sport, you aren't going to find a lot of support in this scene.

Meanwhile, you can't make any real money just throwing new ebook versions up there.

Say you wanted to duplicate the model of the publishers - you can't, but lets say you have a few months where you can do nothing but edit, re-cover, re-describe, and publish PD books to Amazon (and don't mind winding up banned because you screwed up one too many times.)

There are the usual curves about sales which hold true anywhere and everywhere.

The 80/20 rule says that 20 percent of your books will generate 80% of your income.

More narrowly 4% (about 20%  of 20%) gives you a 96/4 split on which of your books will sell well (and generate about 60% of your income.)

And, as usual, less than 1%  (20/20/20%) will be responsible for nearly 50% (80/80/80%) of your sales.

Say you came out with the 200 most popular titles.

• Statistically, 160 of these will barely sell, if at all.
• 8 will sell decently.
• 2 will sell regularly.
• (and 30 basically won't sell.)

So lets say you could crack into the market for a top PD book like The Great Gatsby.

Go ahead, open this page up in a new browser tab or window. What do you see?

• 267 Kindle versions that come up for this search.
• The recommended one is 9.99, sold by Simon and Schuster
• There are 3 more .99 versions which have an average of less than 5 reviews each.
• Then there are three more which sell for 2.99 or better.

Lets look at sales. More specifically, sales rank. (Amazon is the only one who provides this data, by the way.)

First, visit (new tab or window) http://theresaragan.com/salesrankingchart.html to see what Amazon's salesrank means.

• The top seller (9.99) has a sales rank of 2,114 - meaning about 80 books a day (probably why Amazon likes to keep them on top, since they get about $320 daily after they take their "delivery" fees out.)
• The top .99 ebook has a 6280 sales rank, or about 20 books per day. (Meaning about $7 royalties every day, as there are no fees at 35%)
• The next .99 ebook has a 5646 sales rank, or about the same sales.
• The last .99 ebook has a 39730 sales rank, or about 10 books a day - or $3.50 royalties daily.
• The $3.82 Kindle has a 101411 sales rank, so it sells less than one per day.
• The "bookhacker summary" version (a short summary) has a price of $2.99 and a sales rank of 416437, or about even less than the one just above. 
• Finally, the last $2.99 book has a 288653 sales rank, which puts it into the miniscule sales category.

So, if you could come out with a competitively priced book to the market leader, you'd wind up on the bottom of the heap and have to climb up somehow. (Unlikely.)

If you went for the bottom end, at best you could take out the next runner-up and make $7 a day.

Let's use that as a base, not accurate perhaps, but it's somewhere to start.

Back to Pareto's 80/20 rule - A year's income from this book would be about $2520 per year.

2 books are 50% of your income. $5,040 annually, then your total sales would be around $10K annually. 

But, maybe that doesn't hold. Lets use that breakdown for Great Gatsby above:

• Your 1% (2) of 200 books would give you $5,040 per year. (@$7 per day)
• Your 4% (8 books) would generate about $20,160 per year (@$3.50 per day)
• Your 160 books might generate $18,144 per year. (@maybe .35 per day)
• The last 30 books just suck your time. 

So out of 200 books, you might possibly make $40,804 per year. And that's optimistic. (If you don't select your books carefully, you'll probably be closer to that $10K figure.)

What's your current salary for your home? Do you have debts? Insurance? Car payments? Don't forget that the self-employed pays both sides of Social Security.

Could $40K cover all your costs? Or would your spouse/partner have to keep their day job to support your publishing efforts?

Let's also be real about how long it would take you to find and publish 200 books. Say, you could carefully select, and edit, and get new covers, and write descriptions, and publish 2 ebooks a week. That's about 100 a year.

So it's going to take you 2 years to get up to the point of making maybe $40K.

What's your personal track record of sticking with a project that long? Remember, this is probably going to take all your spare time for the next two years. Sure, it's possible that after the first 6 months - if you already knew what you were doing (and reverse-engineered the above with some creative thinking) you might be able to start making $10K off your first 50 ebooks. Woot, woot.

But is that a living? Sounds like a profitable hobby. Pin money. Vacation savings.

The best advice about giving up your day job is to move over to your home business when that business makes twice the income of your day job. 

So look this over. If you want to support your whole family, take both of your incomes and double that. The average income in NYC is just over $50K. So you're looking at making $200K from your home publishing business before you can both quit your jobs (and consider moving to a much lower cost-of-living state.)

$200K means about or over 1,000 books that you've self-published. And that's 10 years worth of work.

Are you ready to commit all your spare time for the next 10 years to having a 6-figure income that would support your family?

For most of us, no. And for most of us, figure that your family isn't going to support your habit for that long. And divorces can be expensive...

On the bright side (if there is one) you could support yourself after only 5 years of self-publishing PD ebooks. Lonely, but profitable (after alimony and child support, that is.)

Consider all this before you start publishing in PD and discover that you "can't make any real money" at this. 

PD is built on commodities, which means low price and volume sales. That's what the big publishers do in this arena, and that's what you need to be prepared to do.

Good Luck.

PS. How did I get to financial freedom in this area?

1. Paid off all my debts over 5 years. Now I pay cash for everything, or know it's in my budget.
2. I live on a working farm, where my living expenses are basically free (paid for in sweat-equity, for sure. which takes my time every day.)
3. Cost of living in these boonies is very low. Internet is high, though, so that's a factor.
4. Entertainment is low-cost: $5 DVD's at Wal-Mart, lots of great PD books to read (free), and the few shows I can stand on over-the-air TV.
5. Long walks in the woods (when I'm not finding more books to publish) rounds out the mix.
6. Do I make my money off PD ebooks alone? No, I've written and published my own books for years, and some of these PD are in paperback. Remember, just a couple of bestsellers on Amazon will more than cover my costs - and I have over 200 books already up there, having made most of the stupid mistakes I outline above. But no, just having 200 books doesn't mean you get an "automatic" 40K per year - far from it.

And that's the point of this. Going blind into PD publishing (like I did) means you usually get diddly-squat back. Going with your eyes wide open and willing to study the real successes (who don't PD publish, they publish their own original works, BTW) can show you a route that would work.

So, mostly I'm telling you to keep your day job and enjoy a possibly profitable hobby. Otherwise, start writing original non-fiction short-read works like Steve Scott in a market that will support it. Or invest in FB ads to spike your sales like Mark Dawson. Both of those two started making 6-figures in less than two years after seriously starting into self-publishing.

And that's why I wrote this for you. PD publishing can be a living, if you know how to make it. For me, frugality and simplicity make it all possible. 

But if you have a high-overhead life, keep your day job and start figuring out what you're going to do when you have to retire - it's coming sooner than you think...

Related articles

• When to Cave Over a Fake Copyright Claim
• Making Sense of Amazon's Public Domain Policies
• The Numbers Racket and Amazon's Public Domain Problems.
• Solving Competition and Making Profits by Indie Publishing
• How to Game Amazon at Their Public Domain Publishing.
• Reading Between the Headlines

My Google Play Books Were Killed and Replaced With Zombies

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They came for a friend of mine first, and I didn’t have anything to say. Then they came for me. Then I did want to say something, but it was too late.

My self-published books now lay dead – or were they?

None of which I’m about to say can easily substantiated.

That’s probably because self-publishing on Google Play never really took off. So there are few self-publishing authors affected, and as their sales have been piddly, those authors could care less if a minor player ditched them.

Google Play Books is dying/dead because for all they may know about search engines, they know squat about hosting ecommerce. I’ve been supporting them for years because, well, they’re Google – and any book there will show up in their rankings.

That’s probably also why the pirates liked them. Pirates would be able to simply come back once they were dumped off GooglePlay, often within hours. They were pirating original works of other authors with the same cover and description. Google had a convenient bulk upload which made this turnaround extremely fast. So Google shut down their site to all new authors, as of May 15, 2015.

And apparently, they are gradually getting rid of their remaining self-publishing authors.

This is very hard to find data on. It’s happened to me and a friend of mine, but apparently not enough to cause any outcry on forums. Searches bring up more about app developers, and no one has complained about not being able to publish their books on Google anymore.

Google has also had the worst royalty set up (52% flat rate) and also auto-discount your book/ebook by 20%. Meaning that if you put up the same title with the same price on Amazon, both would shortly be 20% lower. Which means 20% less royalties on both platforms.

If you haven’t guessed, Google cancelled my account last week. Which explains the sour grapes. No real explanation or recourse, just “you violated our terms of agreement.” This week, they sent me a jovial auto-responder broadcast saying”you’ve just received another payment! Check you Google account to find out how much it is!” Of course, my account is shut down, so I’ll have to wait until that last payment shows up in my account, and guesstimate what my actual book sales were.

The 217 books I had there are now gone. That took a few more days to scour clean. Today I searched and somehow my books I just recently published through Lulu have appeared there with the Lulu description. Like Living Sensical. You can buy this as an ebook. But look at the price – instead of $2.99, it’s $2.51 – meaning that Amazon will price-match that. Thanks for the lower royalties, Google.

Google Turned My Books Into Zombies

How did my new books wind up on Google? The hint was that Lulu description (which reads like a pile of unfolded laundry, right out of the dryer and dumped in a basket.)

It looks like Google is now simply going to get their books from distributors. Like they do with Shopping. Lulu won’t distribute public domain or PLR books outside their own garden, so that makes it safer for Google. They’ll just get their books from regular publishers or aggregators and play it safe. Their experiment in self-publishing then looks to be over. Contracting with aggregators is much safer.

The Zombie part is that now you are going to have to set your price higher on Lulu in order to keep Google from taking your price down on Amazon.

Thanks Google. Thanks Lulu.

My official opinion is now for authors to pull their works from Google while they still can. This is based on how they treated me – and how they will screw your royalties if you give them half a chance. So pull them now, so you can still have an account. Only leave original works up there. You may yet survive.

Further thanks are still in order, however. I will now have to start removing all traces of Google Play from my earlier posts anywhere. And all my Google Play buy now buttons on my book landing pages.

Factually, I’ll go further and update my “How to Publish on Google Play” with a short addendum right in the beginning (so it’s visible in Amazon’s “Look Inside”) to tell people not to submit anything to Google Play, but buy my other books on self-publishing instead – from Amazon.

Lulu Plays Sharecropping Vampire

This is what I concluded, that Google is getting my latest ebooks from Lulu, who sucks their own bit of blood out in passing. The problem is more than royalty deep.

On paper, Lulu takes only 10% of what it gets for distributing your work elsewhere.

Actually, these other distributors are taking out their pound of flesh through “distribution fees.” See this chart, for a $3.99 ebook:

price	$3.99		fees
Lulu	$2.70	68%	$0.99
iTunes	$2.51	63%	$1.20
Nook	$1.80	45%	$2.00
Kobo	$1.71	43%	$2.09

Per Smashword’s survey, $3.99 is where authors could have the highest income, $2.99 is where they have the best unit-sales.

Now, with Amazon’s cold-blooded price-matching we have to adjust things. In order to not let Google suck your Amazon royalties down, you tell Lulu to set your price at $3.99 and Amazon (you publish direct there) at $2.99 – so $3.19 would be their price. Just 20 cents different. You’ll make about $2.00 in royalties after Amazon subtracts the broadband charge (still cheaper than Lulu’s .99 each.)

Note: I don’t recommend Smashwords over Lulu as 1) they also only give you 80% of what they get from their outlets – meaning you lose even more, and 2) you have to create a special edition just for them. I already change the links inside the book for Amazon and non-Amazon. I don’t need a third version.

Best Survival Strategies from Blood-sucking Sharecropping

After all this time, I’m still amazed by  how much I’m leaving on the table. Let the self-publisher beware.

You have to realize that all these book distributors are just letting you sit there as a sharecropper, farming on the land they own. You have to be prepared to be ditched at any time. (You do have your own email list and your own site, don’t you?!?)

What I recommend at this point:

Publish to Amazon and iTunes directly to control your sales best. Both have various programs to give you pre-sales and promotions. (No, that doesn’t include KDP Direct or their worse-yet KDP Unlimited, which are both financial fiasco’s.)

You want to be able to update your meta-data each month to keep them fresh in both the distributors and Google’s eyes.  Direct to Amazon and iTunes means you don’t lose out to all those fees above.

You do let Lulu publish for you to Kobo and Nook – since whatever sales you do get from these are nice, but not much worth your time.

Right now, you don’t have a choice with Google Play.

So your price is always at least a dollar higher on Lulu to make up for the lousy sales and royalties these areas give you. That keeps Amazon honest.

Your iTunes price should be competitive within iTunes – and as least the same as Amazon, probably.

Is Public Domain the Victim Here?

Not hardly. Since it’s actually harder work to get income from these. That friend of mine who suffered at the cruel teeth of Google Play, found that the best way to publish public domain is at .99 on Amazon, and skip everywhere else. But he is a trained writer and his descriptions and covers can make you shudder as you pull out your virtual wallet to buy that version first. You’re still competing with a commodity. The .99 price cuts everyone else out but the freebies. And those publishers simply don’t care to make nice covers and titles. That’s why you get the sales there.

My own option is to channel existing demand by creating special reports out of chapter-excerpts which then point to collections of these books, which can be priced at $4.99 or better.

No, you don’t ever, ever publish those collections on Lulu. Why bother? Google will just undercut your price, or they’ll be too high to buy.  The special reports you publish on Lulu then send them to your own landing page, where they can buy from you direct.

What you can publish where is on this chart:

Distributor	Original Works	Public Domain	PLR
Amazon	yes	yes*	NO
Lulu	yes	yes**	yes**
iTunes	yes	yes	yes
Nook	yes	yes	yes
Kobo	yes	yes***	yes
own site	YES	YES	YES

Notes:
* Has to be “translated”, “illustrated,” or “annotated”
** Won’t distribute anywhere else.
*** Only gives you 20% and you have to publish directly here – not worth your time for the piddly sales.

Another Stalker Lurks – PayPal

Micropayments suck your royalties on everywhere except your own site – and they take a sizable piece out there.

Paypal charges 2.99% plus a .30 fee. You can opt for 5% and a .05 fee, but you can only do one or the other, not both.

If you sell your books on your own site, you get this:

Pay Pal – 3%
Price point	You Get	Actual % at 2.99+.30	Royalty
$0.99	$0.67	32%	68%
$1.99	$1.64	18%	82%
$2.99	$2.61	13%	87%
$3.99	$3.58	10%	90%
$4.99	$4.55	9%	91%
$9.00	$8.44	6%	94%
$10.00	$9.41	6%	94%
$11.00	$10.38	6%	94%
$12.00	$11.35	5%	95%
$13.00	$12.32	5%	95%
$14.00	$13.29	5%	95%
$15.00	$14.26	5%	96%
$50.00	$48.21	4%	96%
$100.00	$96.71	3%	97%
Pay Pal – 5%
Price point	You Get	Actual % at 5%+.05	Royalty
$0.99	$0.89	10%	90%
$1.99	$1.84	7%	93%
$2.99	$2.79	7%	93%
$3.99	$3.74	6%	94%
$4.99	$4.69	6%	94%
$13.00	$12.30	5%	95%
$14.00	$13.25	5%	95%
$15.00	$13.25	5%	95%
$50.00	$14.20	5%	95%
$100.00	$94.95	5%	95%

These two models swap out at about $14.

But that’s if you’re selling direct from your site. This is the reason for the 10% fee which Lulu and the rest charge. (I have no clue why they are sucking those other exorbitant fees out of you.)

This came up on trying to pay my VA a .97 payment as a test – and only .63 went through. Similarly, a $50 payment wasn’t just 3% cost.

Ganxy and Sellfy both take 10% off after you pay the Paypal fee – only Gumroad does the activity for you, and charges a flat 5%+.50 per transaction.(Much less blood-sucking involved.)

Plantation Owners Make the Best Vampires/Zombies.

When you self-publish to Amazon and the rest, you are committing digital sharecropping. They can (and will) shut you down at any moment. This is an old MLM tactic, as you don’t really own your downline.

The trick is to have your customers on your own mailing list. With any MLM opportunity, you can simply take your downline somewhere else – and this gives you instantly high payouts wherever you wind up. That pyramid scene again.

Self-publishing doesn’t scale that well, but scale it does.

The way to make your books into bestsellers on Amazon is to get early, high numbers of reviews and sales that last more than just the first few days. Then Amazon will start marketing your books for you. To do this strategy, you have to have a decent-sized list with both pre-reviewers and regular folks. You price your book low for the first few days or a week and let your list in on it. Then you raise the price right after that.

Amazon can forces you to profit from your own site is when you want to offer multi-media bundles – such as audio, plus your book collection, plus book trailers, plus infographics.  Again, bundles are in the $4.99 range and up for just the book collections on Amazon (original books, anyway.)

So you can let your insider reviewers in at $.99, your regular list in at $2.99 and then everyone else at $4.99 – all over the span of a few days or a week.

The general strategy is to keep Amazon buyers going to Amazon, but opting in to your email subscription. For all other platforms, you send them to your own book landing page so they can buy your book there – or go to one of the other distributors. (Frankly, I’d actually only send them to iTunes or Amazon, everywhere else you make much less than you would selling direct. Might as well build up your own sales locally.

Now, your hardback is similar, but your royalties here will be far greater.

Like this:

And that is the difference between renting as a sharecropper and being owned by them.

Right now over 50% of my Lulu monthly income is from hardcopy books. I can only see increasing these, due to that difference in royalties. While my PD ebooks which sell well everywhere else have a hard time getting on to Kindle, my hardcopy versions do not have that problem with Amazon.

My own site (even Lulu’s bookstore) are fairly unknown, I can put links inside these hardcopy books which can get email subscribers and possible book sales just from the “Look Inside” feature. The viewer doesn’t even have to buy from Amazon to click over to my site. (The trick is to upload a PDF with hard-wired linked in it as the preview – which is under testing as I tell you this.)

Audiobooks vs. Spoken Word Albums

Amazon owns Audible, and gave them an exclusive platform for audiobook sales there. They also have an exclusive contract with iTunes, which expires in a couple of years or so. Meanwhile, another test I’m gearing up for is creating “spoken word albums” via CDBaby with the podcasts I’m creating. I hope to use the same audiobook I’d earlier created and pitch these as a discounted CD so that it’s obviously promotion for the audiobook. It should sit right up there with the Kindle version, the trade paperback, the hardcover, and the audiobook. This gives the reader even more options. to have a set of CD’s up there which they can buy through Amazon – or as digital downloads direct from CDBaby, or – wait for it – my own site.

Again, I can offer discounts to members inside my own site. Amazon can’t see these and so can’t lower their prices to match. But chiefly, I’d give the value that they can’t. Bundles with these other media materials, and the option to buy dust-jacketed, limited-edition hardbacks – all at a steep discount for members.

There’s a lot to be said for having a sensible approach to this.

Join Today.

While I’m just getting this site started, you’re welcome to join me here. Big plans are afoot, most of which has to do with enabling you to access books, podcasts, courses, and even video webinars to get the data you need to improve your life markedly. Of course, my work has to go one title at a time. I do hope to have our first collection-bundle available within three or four weeks.

Yes, I’ll set up discounts for everyone, especially if they leave a review on Amazon.

The point is to stay focused on what you are actually here for. For me, it’s serving humanity by giving them a site they can visit which will unlock the secrets of the universe. Oddly, these secrets have been hidden in plain sight. The trick is that we’ve all been trained not to look, and where to not look. Fortunately, this is all easy to fix. It only takes a personal decision. And then be responsible for that decision and all the ones that follow.

Your choice.

See you up the line.

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My Google Books Killed and Turned Zombie from Robert C. Worstell

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