Guys: Kindle is the Ticket!

Comic is like Beano Or Dundee?

Anyone still having problems getting reviews on their books? Its a review exchange group. Join this site while membership is still free.

http://kdpreviewersclub.com/

For you guys who post books or know alot about agreements and such, would this copyright agreement work between me and the ghost writer I have hired for writing my book?

http://www.printablecontracts.com/Writer_Ghostwriter_Agreement.php?

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update on my Kindle journey, as I've been posting sporadic updates. My first book published sold pretty well, usually between 10-12 copies per day on an average month. I've been slowly adding to the books in this niche, and each book has done alright, but less well than the original. Probably to be expected, as the first book was an "overview" and appealed to the broadest audience. However, each of my new three new books have added between 3-5 sales per day. Not great, but overall it means I have got a foothold in the niche, and it's difficult for a new author publishing subpar books to topple me. I bring in around $1000 per month with minimal marketing for these books.

I actually did no marketing at all to get myself established. Just good niche/keyword research, and a commitment to producing the best book in the niche. I think I succeeded in this, and so my book hit the ground running, with sales coming in from around day 2. I see too many Kindle publishers throw together a crappy 20 page book and an awful cover, then expect to sell. Some of them do, probably supported by loads of fake or exchanged reviews (which personally, I don't agree with). These people should put more work into creating a great product, rather than using loads of black hat tactics to "trick" customers into buying, which is all the fake reviews are. I'm not hugely successful like some of the authors here, but that would be my tip for people starting out: focus on quality.

To try to scale up, I've tested my foot in a different niche under a different pen name. I used the same niche/keyword research, and the same mentality. I produced a great book, used a distinct cover (all other covers in the niche seem quite generic) and took my time to write a great description. I was expecting a similar story to my first niche, but the sales just haven't happened. Two months in, I think I've had 2 KDP sales, and 10 paperback sales -- which is strange, as paperback sales seem to take longer to pick up.

I know I've got a good book (looking at it objectively, it's at least on a par with the top selling self-published book in the niche, which ranks around #8,000). It's well written, it's got substance, and at 20,000 words it offers a lot of value for $2.99. For some reason, sales just haven't happened. Has this happened to any other well established authors here, where the book just doesn't take off as you'd expect? If so, any tips for getting the sales moving from someone like Gringo?

Thanks!

->Dennis_797

I know some of these guys don't agree with me, but normally when I have a high quality book that isnt getting the sales that I think it deserves I do the kdp freebie promotion or the kindle countdown promotion in order to help it get that boost it needs to raise the rankings. It seems to work for me most of the times, though it is getting less effective now since everyone is doing it. If you dont want to give your book away for free try the kindle countdown, or perhaps some outside marketing.

Also just curious, if you don't mind sharing, do you use any tools when you look for niches? ive found that finding successful niches are probably the most important part of the success of an ebook, and im trying to find better ways to find niches besides eyeballing. Also it sounds like you are writing some good quality books, do you self publish or outsource your books? I started just writing them myself since its hard to outsource really good books for 100-200 dollars, but I obviously don't want to do this forever

Hi Morgadeshou, thanks for the response. I have already done a free promotion actually. I got a reasonable amount of downloads each day but no sales afterwards. I might run a countdown, but I thought that would require sales already to have much impact? I might give it a try though as I've nothing to lose.

I've always analysed potential niches myself. It's time consuming but means I can get all the information I need. I know it's a good niche for self published books as several books do well so I'm scratching my head as to why my book hasn't taken off this time. I outsource my books and then edit myself. I'm a writer so I find this brings it up to a good quality. You're right, it's very difficult to find good writers for a few hundred dollars, so I've actually stopped outsourcing at the bottom end. I've got a few books just sitting there that will takes far too long to edit to bring up to standard so I think some are a write off. I've recently used the profits from my successful niche to hire a top writer to see how this works out for me. It will be good to know how to drive the initial sales for when that book hits the market too!

Dennis_797,
10-12 copies per book is good! I'm still searching for the right niche.
In mine I can sell 1, maybe 2 copies of a book each day.
All I can do is continue producing books and hope 1 takes off and makes me big $$.
If it doesn't.. Well, there's powers in numbers that's for sure.

I have a question:
I have a book that gets a lot of KU/KOLL borrows. About 10-12 per day.
It only SELLS 1 copy though.
My amazon ranking on that book is #15,000~.

If I stop borrowers, will I see any difference in sales? Anyone?

Thanks Given! Already doing this Kindle thing!

Hi,

dennis_797 - I agree with you about quality. Similarly I don't get any fake reviews or promote other than the pen name website.

Obviously I don't know what you have done exactly about your second series. But a mistake people make is they keep starting from scratch in a totally new niche, rather than milking the niche they are successful in.

Lets say series 1 is recipes and you want series 2 to be on exercise.

Ensure your series can spawn spin offs by picking a large niche for example "diabetes" then create spin offs of "diabetic recipes" - another spin off could be "exercises for diabetics". It means you are not moving from recipes to exercise as a newbie and all your diabetic readers will be interested, so you make sales in the exercise niche from your existing readership and that gives the series traction. Then you have traction in exercise, recipes and diabetes and can create more spin offs and spin offs from the spin offs. Hope that makes sense.

It is really hard finding a new niche - I make all my sales from only 4 niches, but I create lots of spin offs and that's where all the money is. Look at Marvel they have 1 niche - superheros - but look at how many spin off they have.

Morgadeshou - I have tried pretty much every tool out there and I am afraid none of them do everything you need, in the end I have simply developed my own system.

Basically this is what you need to know BEFORE you should even bother creating a book in a new niche.

1. Can I produce a book better than my competitors in the niche?
2. Can I turn the core idea into a series with spin offs?
3. What categories will I place the book in?
4. What keywords will I use.

I have then got my own system to analyse each of those points. For example how many searches are done on a given keyword.

Then I decide if it is likely to be a winner or not and only then do I bother about actually creating it.

If you write a book and then see if it sells chances are it won't. If you see what people want to buy first and provide it, chances are it will.

alkemist - Some books people buy, some they borrow. Yours is clearly one people don't buy but borrow. I have a book that makes about 60 sales per month, but 1000+ borrows. All the money comes from the borrows not the sales. The people in that niche clearly don't buy. But that is good for you, bad for Amazon. Just saturate the niche - with good quality books - because they don't pay they will download everything you create and Amazon will pay you $1.40 a time! Done properly it is literally a license to print money. I much prefer lots of borrows to sales for this reason on my fiction books.

Thanks Gringo,

You're right, and I've actually clicked onto the "spin-off" niches that you mentioned. My main niche has potential to expand into two or three different areas, but it's been slow progress so far. I only use one writer to keep the voice consistent, so that limits me to sporadic publishing.

My second niche also has the same potential, but I just need to get that first book moving!

After a few months of reading and researching about kindle publishing, I decided to embark on my journey!

I decided to write a cookbook to test the waters because I thought it would be relatively easy and I actually enjoy cooking.

I found my niche, collected hundreds of recipes, organised them in a logical way, removed any personal opinions found in the recipes and did some basic rewriting of the directions.

Then, I ran into various formatting issues and yesterday, I finally published the book before I went to sleep.

This morning I woke up quite excited and nervous. After a couple of minutes, I received an email from Amazon stating the following:

During a review of your KDP submission, we found content in your book that is freely available on the web. Before we can publish your book, you need to take one of the following actions within five days:

1. If you hold the publishing rights for all of the content in this book, resubmit your book for publishing following the instructions provided below.
2. If the book is in the public domain, please confirm the initial publication date of the work and the author?s date of death. We will contact you if we need additional information.
3. If you do not hold rights for all of the content in this book, please remove the book following the instructions provided below.

If you publish books for which you do not hold the electronic publishing rights, we may terminate your account or you may lose access to optional KDP services.

Click to expand...

I decided to be on the safe side and unpublish the book for now.

Has anyone experienced this? I'm planning to rewrite the directions, have the book pass a plagiarism checker, such as Copyscape and reupload. Would this fix the problem?

Since we are talking about recipes does anyone actually own the rights to them?

Any thoughts are welcome.

Thanks!

todorare said:

I received an email from Amazon stating the following:



I decided to be on the safe side and unpublish the book for now.

Has anyone experienced this?

Since we are talking about recipes does anyone actually own the rights to them?

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You cannot copyright a recipe, but if you have simply gone around the web and collected them Amazon probably is not that interested in publishing the collection as it is freely available in the public domain.

GringoMonkey said:

You cannot copyright a recipe, but if you have simply gone around the web and collected them Amazon probably is not that interested in publishing the collection as it is freely available in the public domain.

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I understand that and I'm not trying to trick Amazon. I did find the recipes online, but I improved them.

I added nutritional information at the ingredient level and included UK and US names for the ingredients. So, it wasn't an easy copy/paste job.

To my understanding after doing all that, if I go ahead and completely rewrite the directions, it is my practically my version of the recipes. Am I missing something?

I just wonder, did anyone else publish recipe books? What was the procedure you followed to avoid this issue?

Certain periods of the year I get enthusiasm to publish a mini kindle book.
However most ofvthe other time I have no enthusiasm at all to write.

I looked at ghostwriters but they do not have my way out brain

I.am not good at English but find this to be possibly the only way to make big cash for my pension Apart from finding a super rich wife

So anyone.got advice to stop this total lack of enthusiasm as I looked at ghostwriters on elance and was not impressed really with portfolios

todorare said:

I understand that and I'm not trying to trick Amazon. I did find the recipes online, but I improved them.

I added nutritional information at the ingredient level and included UK and US names for the ingredients. So, it wasn't an easy copy/paste job.

To my understanding after doing all that, if I go ahead and completely rewrite the directions, it is my practically my version of the recipes. Am I missing something?

I just wonder, did anyone else publish recipe books? What was the procedure you followed to avoid this issue?

Click to expand...

You misunderstand something about Kindle they don't have to publish your books if they don't want to. It doesn't matter legally how you created it.

If you have created a book that is in a category that is saturated and they don't feel it adds value they will just not publish it, this is particularly the case with public domain works. Recipes frequently fall into this category.

However you changed it they have clearly found that the core content is "freely available on the web", as that is what they are telling you. And you are stating that is actually correct.

So you will have to remove it option 3.

If you got the recipes from 1 or 2 public domain books, you will have to tell them which it is and pick option 2 or you can lie and pick option 1!

But if you pick options 1 or 2, chances are you will get a follow up email where they say after reviewing your book they have decided not to publish it.

If you lie and then they find out they will give you a warning. You get 1 warning, do it again and they close your account.

Personally I would learn a lesson and create a better quality book, as chances are this one is not going to sell that well anyway. I doubt you have made the recipes and taken nice pictures of them all, else you would not be getting that message.

GringoMonkey said:

You misunderstand something about Kindle they don't have to publish your books if they don't want to. It doesn't matter legally how you created it.

If you have created a book that is in a category that is saturated and they don't feel it adds value they will just not publish it, this is particularly the case with public domain works. Recipes frequently fall into this category.

However you changed it they have clearly found that the core content is "freely available on the web", as that is what they are telling you. And you are stating that is actually correct.

So you will have to remove it option 3.

If you got the recipes from 1 or 2 public domain books, you will have to tell them which it is and pick option 2 or you can lie and pick option 1!

But if you pick options 1 or 2, chances are you will get a follow up email where they say after reviewing your book they have decided not to publish it.

If you lie and then they find out they will give you a warning. You get 1 warning, do it again and they close your account.

Personally I would learn a lesson and create a better quality book, as chances are this one is not going to sell that well anyway. I doubt you have made the recipes and taken nice pictures of them all, else you would not be getting that message.

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Thanks for the insight.

You are right. I didn't really take into account that Amazon might not want to publish a book for their own reasons. If I knew that, I probably wouldn't have gone with a recipe book at this point.

I may properly edit and reupload the book in the future, but I don't think it's worth it right now. And I definitely don't want a banned account, so I'll just stick with the 3rd option.

todorare said:

Thanks for the insight.

You are right. I didn't really take into account that Amazon might not want to publish a book for their own reasons. If I knew that, I probably wouldn't have gone with a recipe book at this point.

I may properly edit and reupload the book in the future, but I don't think it's worth it right now. And I definitely don't want a banned account, so I'll just stick with the 3rd option.

Click to expand...

I've said it before in this thread and I cannot stress it enough. The days have gone when you could sell any old crap on Kindle.

Look at the top books in your niche and what they are producing. That is the benchmark for your niche, if you are not doing it to the same or better quality you will struggle with sales.

For example a day or so ago I launched a new book in a brand new category for me. After making sure it was better than the rest it went straight in at #1, which is typically worth about $1500+ per month per book.

You sort the quality, put it in the right categories, with the right keywords and the sales will sort out themself.

I put up my first book up 5 days ago, a 30 page book that I had ghostwritten for me and I listed it for $0.99 for now and so far got 13 sales and 1 borrow so I'm pretty happy with that! I did the cover my self and im pretty confidant in that the cover for my book is making the sales (well the story as good as well ofc). Anyway, I'm having two new books written for me and heres my question:

When creating covers, I've heard people buy photos from Stock photo sites like dollarphotoclub.com because it's like 1 dollar. But when I went to check it out, it's way more then $1 if you're going to use the pic to sell products etc, it's like $50 or so. So how do you guys do it? Can they even check if I got the $1 or $50 license? Can I say that I bought the cover from fiverr and I don't know anything more about it? If I would get in trouble I mean. Anyways I would love to hear your opinions here.