Amazon Kindle Publishing Journal

When I happened on this thread, I was already planning do release something on the Kindle. I took some tips from here though, including enrolling in the KDP program. I already had a book on my topic, albeit from a different perspective. I had been using it as a textbook for training classes I sometimes give.

I took what was usable, wrote about 3 new chapters, and released it in Kindle format. It came out to be about 50 pages on the Kindle at 10,300 words.

First day of release, I started offering the free promotional period for 4 days. I went to Fiverr and had someone do 1500 .EDU links to the Amazon sales page. I also did an AdWords campaign that led to a landing page on my site, explaining the book was free for a limited time, no strings attached.

During the 4 days, I got about 1,000 downloads across Amazon US, UK, and DE. The book was top of the free chart for the 2 categories I put it in.

It has since gone back to paid status, and I am making about $25/day off the title with no further promotion. I actually plan to test the waters with the Kindle version, take any feedback, tweak, and then offer it as the main content for a program through ClickBank. So far though, the Amazon launch has been worth the effort.

mimix said:

For non-fiction, if you don't have a very solid idea for a book, then try publishing short reports on a variety of categories and different pen name for each category. Upload all of them at the same time and enroll them on Select. Run a two day free promo and see which one gets more downloads. If you get more than 1k downloads on one of your reports then you are on the right category. Go and create a high quality book on that category, publish it with the same pen name and price it low, run another free promo on your short report and you will start making sales on your high quality book. Even better you will also start getting reviews and lots of attention from Amazon. If you are consistently making more than 5 sales a day, then increase the price and see what happens. If sales still keep coming in.. then go an create another high quality book! This formula will guarantee that you are not wasting your time and money on low demand categories. Just make sure that your books are really really good!!

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What's the best way to get these written? I don't want to do the writing myself, but have no issue in outsourcing these short ebooks? When you say short reports are we talking about 15-20 page ebooks here? Any suggestions?

Couldn't you just submit books that are out of copyright? Is that legal?

plycrmla said:

Couldn't you just submit books that are out of copyright? Is that legal?

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I believe that it is legal, but frowned upon if not done right. I read somewhere on this forum that if you're making a better copy (i.e. the ones available are all really low quality OCR scans that aren't edited or something equally as messy) of a public domain book available, you're actually providing somewhat of a valuable service by providing the best quality copy of that work. I don't know how well of a strategy it would be by itself, but it might be worth experimenting with, but only if you're willing to put in the time and effort to make a quality ebook copy. Submitting dozens of quickly scanned, improperly formatted public domain books isn't likely to yield any real long-term success, unless you just get really lucky.

flist said:

I believe that it is legal, but frowned upon if not done right. I read somewhere on this forum that if you're making a better copy (i.e. the ones available are all really low quality OCR scans that aren't edited or something equally as messy) of a public domain book available, you're actually providing somewhat of a valuable service by providing the best quality copy of that work. I don't know how well of a strategy it would be by itself, but it might be worth experimenting with, but only if you're willing to put in the time and effort to make a quality ebook copy. Submitting dozens of quickly scanned, improperly formatted public domain books isn't likely to yield any real long-term success, unless you just get really lucky.

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Many of the out-of-copyright books offered on Kindle are indeed poorly formatted (or not formatted at all), they usually lack illustrations and photos found in the original and this is a pet hate for many readers. When the text says "refer to Figure 27" and there's no pictures at all, folks tend to feel ripped off. Even worse are junk characters and misspelled words from poor OCRing. If you wish to go the out of copyright books route, and have the expertise and software required to do the books justice then you need market info. Best bet for out of copyright market info is Project Gutenberg's Top 100 (google it). Work through the top 100 for the month and search on Amazon for the ones which interest you most. Look at the previews for ones with the most positive reviews and skim through the reviews looking for anything about missing pictures or crappy formatting. If you can do better, then do so. It's simple as that. You already know people are interested in the books. Sounds easy and I suppose it is. It's just time consuming.

For the record, I have had 7 books up on Kindle for the past 3 weeks and have made a grand total of US$98 so far. That's with no marketing and with absolutely no thought put into descriptions, etc. - I typically just recycle the first couple of paragraphs of the introduction/preface/whatever in the front of the book. Seems to be a doable moneymaking method if you can put the effort in.

I write print books for a living, so my Kindle adventure has been more of an experimental lesson for me (one which has so far paid me $98 to learn) - to see if I can deliver a decent product on the Kindle platform. Seems I can, so as soon as my latest writing project is finished I can start "Kindling" my backlist.

I have question, does Amazon checks content plagiarism? for example, if i wrote a story in my blog and later i formatted it into a kindle book, will it be accepted?

What's your refund rate?

70 Amazon US sales and 4 refunds due to dodgy formatting which I've since corrected.