Goodreads Gravity Giveaway!

We are getting closer and closer to launch of my next novel! I’ve reviewed the print proof, got the last of the beta reader fixes in, and submitted what I hope are the last of the changes to CreateSpace and KDP.

Next up is running a giveaway on Goodreads, which started today and ends on launch day, March 28. Please click here to enter. I’ll wait.

The reason I run a Goodreads giveaway is simple: It’ll get my book on the “to read” shelf of several hundred people. Will they read it? Nope. The people who enter these things have literally thousands of books on their “to read” shelf. So why bother? Because when you look at the book page, it’ll have lots and lots of activity with all those people adding it to their “to read” list. I believe that when people stumble across the book page, they’ll see all that activity and assume this is a “real” book, not just some random self-published vanity project.

To maximize the numbers, I run my giveaways globally. US-only giveaways are a lot cheaper because you can ship the book anywhere in the US for just $3. If someone outside the US wins this, it may cost me upward of $25 to send the book. Maybe more if it’s someplace particularly remote. And the winner will probably be international, because that’s the bulk of the people who will enter. The US-only giveaway market is crowded. There are tons of them going on all the time. But fully international ones are more rare, so my book will be among the few those folks see available.

Seriously, please go enter. And good luck!

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Authoring Milestones and Other Numbers

I have a big spreadsheet where I keep track of all the numbers that define my fledgling career as an author. I pull reports from Amazon and other places periodically to keep it all up to date. Today I did that and I found I had passed two milestones:

  • 500 books sold
  • $1000 in royalties

(For context, my first novel was published about 18 months ago. Since then I’ve added a free short story, a $0.99 novella, and a second novel. A third novel will be launched at the end of this month.)

By “sold” I mean someone actually paid money for the book. I have a short story that I give away for free, and I recently let Smashwords run a free promo of my novella. I’m not counting those. (That would add just over 600 more to the total.)

And by royalties, I mean the gross royalties I’ve received. Other than $15 here and there for a stock photo or a print proof, I don’t have any other costs to pay back, because I do my own editing (with a lot of help from author friends), promotion, etc. In round numbers that $1000 breaks down to:

  • $300 in the bank
  • $100 in stock photos and proof copies
  • $300 in Twitter ads that generated $200 in royalties
  • $100 in promotions that were probably worth it:
    • Goodreads Giveaways to make my book look popular
    • Amazon Giveaways to build a following on Amazon
    • A Fussy Librarian promo of the free short story Attractions to reach new readers
  • $200 in “learning experiences”:
    • BookBub ads don’t work
    • Only US/UK/CA people will buy my books
    • Buying ads to promote $0.99 sales is pointless

There are some other interesting numbers in that spreadsheet. In terms of units sold, my channels break down:

  • Print: 9%
  • Kindle Sales: 69%
  • Kindle Unlimited Reads: 18%
  • Signed Copies: 4%

However, the royalties tell a slightly different story:

  • Print: 9%
  • Kindle Sales: 62%
  • Kindle Unlimited Reads: 17%
  • Signed copies: 12%

Signed copies are a pain, of course, but the margins are a lot better because Amazon isn’t getting a cut. I charge $18 which includes shipping in the US. That’s only $5 more than my paperback goes for on Amazon, and probably the same net cost to the buyer unless they have Amazon Prime. (Send me a Twitter DM if you want a signed copy of any of my novels.)

Another interesting metric on that spreadsheet is my sell-through rate. That is, what percentage of people who read Entropy go on to read Duality. It’s a little tricky because I’m mostly interested in people who just read Entropy going on to read Duality, not people who read Entropy a long time ago. So what I do is look at gross sales of each, but only starting a couple months after Duality had been released. Using that approach, my sell-through rate is 32% and that number has been consistent for the past few months. So a third of the people who buy the first novel choose to read the sequel. I have no idea if that’s good or bad by industry standards, but that’s my number.

One last number that I like to watch is my average net royalty. This is the $300 that actually made it into my bank account divided by the 500 books I sold, so 60 cents. (Actually it’s 64 cents right now when you use the actual numbers, not the rounded off ones.) This has been steadily dropping since I launched, which makes sense because I have lowered my prices over time and a lot of my Entropy sales are a direct result of Twitter ads, which I try to keep at break-even, but sometimes don’t quite make it. The “learning experiences” I mentioned above that didn’t sell any books also drag this down. Without those it would be about a buck.

My next novel launches in a couple weeks, and it’ll be interesting to watch how it impacts everything. Even though it is the third and final of the series, the new book actually makes a good stand-alone read. So unlike Duality, which I couldn’t market on its own, I am going to do some marketing of Gravity by itself. If it works, that could generate sell-through back to the earlier books, as people want to get to know the characters better. Time will tell.

Gravity Launch Plan

Gravity, the third and final novel in the Entropy series has survived my beta readers. All but one of them loved it, which is par for the course. The one who didn’t like it had issues with the story line, not the writing, which I’m okay with. Here is a tremendously helpful quote from Stephen King (whose writing I alternately love and hate, depending on the book, but who I admire very much as an author). I re-read it every time I send something out for beta reading…

The best beta feedback I get is the “hey, he forgot to take off his pants” or “you just used that exact phrase two paragraphs ago.” Along with the perennial, “would you please fucking learn to use commas correctly?”

Anyway, that one hater hasn’t derailed me, and so with all the pants removed and redundancies sorted, a final copy has gone to my printer, CreateSpace. They will have a gorgeous paperback proof copy in my hot little hands next week. Actually, I ordered two, so I have one to give away on Goodreads. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

I’ve picked a launch date of March 28. There is a lot to do before that, and I thought it might be fun for you to see it all laid out. I’ve launched novels twice now, so I have a pretty set procedure.

  • Receive the print proof. Start proofreading when I can find time, but do that in parallel with all the other stuff I’m about to list, none of which requires that my text be final.
  • Publish on CreateSpace, then immediately pull it from all channels. This creates a page on Amazon.com for the print version. (See this post for an explanation of why we do this.)
  • Make the Kindle version, and upload that to KDP. Publish it for pre-order, with a launch date of March 28.
  • Ask KDP support to link the Kindle and Print versions on Amazon.com.
  • Set up shortcuts at mybook.to for both versions.
  • Set up pages on Goodreads and Librarything for the new book.
  • Schedule a Gooodreads international giveaway of that extra proof copy.
  • Send my beta readers a link to the Amazon page so they can post reviews.
  • Draft a couple ARC (advance review copy) reviewers who write those crazy reviews on Goodreads with all the animated GIFs.
  • Send out ARCs to folks who have reviewed my previous books on their blogs.
  • Finish proofreading the paperback and update the print and Kindle versions as needed.
  • Update the back matter on Duality Kindle edition to include a link to Gravity.
  • Order a dozen copies of the final book, for signed sales.
  • Make pull-quote graphics for Twitter? I don’t know. I didn’t get any traction from these for Duality, so I might not bother with them this time.
  • Send a note to my mailing list announcing that the Kindle version is available for preorder, and telling them how to get signed copies if they want.
  • Gently remind my beta readers that I really need them to post that review.
  • Send the proof to whoever won the Goodreads giveaway.
  • Tweet about Kindle preorder.
  • Run a Twitter Ad campaign and tweet a lot on launch day.

Did I miss anything? I’ve never been a fan of the online launch party, or the “blog tour.” After all this is done, I’ll be focusing on awareness on Twitter, making sure everyone who read the first two books knows the new book is out. (I still find followers on Twitter every day who don’t know I’m an author. It boggles the mind.)

Gravity Title, Cover, and Blurb Reveal!

You might be aware that I’ve been working on the third novel in the Entropy series. Entropy was supposed to be a standalone novel. But my readers complained that I left it on too much of a cliffhanger (I totally didn’t). I finally gave in and wrote Duality. That was definitely the end of things. Nowhere to go from there.

Then NaNoWriMo rolled around and all the authors on Twitter were writing about writing. And I started to get the itch to maybe do something. Not write a novel in a month. That’s bonkers. But to maybe work on a new novel. I talked to a bunch of my writer friends about what I should do, but I wasn’t making any progress. That’s when my buddy Vania piped up and said I was blocked thinking of something to write about because the Lisa & Sir story wasn’t finished. I had to write another in the series. Vania is the absolute worst. Because she was right, of course.

And so I went ahead and wrote another novel. I used the same process I used for the first two, which is a sure-fire way to get a novel done in about 100 days. (You write 1% of it a day. You can do the rest of the math yourself, I guess.) I finished it this past weekend, and it is in the hands of my beta readers now.

If you look at the first two titles (Entropy and Duality) you will notice they are both from the Jeopardy! category 7 letter science words ending in y. So obviously, I had to choose another one of those for this book. I wrote a program that generated the list of 1,367 words ending in y with 7 letters. Then I wrote another program to sort them alphabetically backward (ending in ay, by, cy, etc.). That made it easier to scan the list, and I culled it to this list of 20 words that fit the bill:

fallacy primacy cogency urgency prosody synergy theurgy alchemy destiny euphony harmony mystery roguery rivalry fantasy ecstasy impiety satiety clarity tenuity gravity ataraxy

There are some great titles in there, but only one that is a real science word. Gravity.

I figured that out shortly after I started writing, so I was able to work various references to gravity (both meanings) into the story. Here’s the blurb (I used the formula I explained here):

A chance meeting brings Sir and Lisa together after five years. But Sir is in a budding relationship and Lisa’s life is in chaos. Could a radical change in Sir’s situation finally let things work between them? Gravity is a complex and moving exploration of the turmoil older people face bringing romance and commitment back to single life.

Main points I’m getting across: we are going to try to get the band back together and they are “older” (a euphemism for mid-fifties). Nobody writes erotic romance novels around people in that decade of life, so that’s a distinguishing thing about this book.

All that’s left is the cover:

Full wrap cover

Full wrap cover

This carries a lot of design elements from my other covers, which you can look at on my Amazon author page if you like. There is a ton of symbolism going on here, as you would expect. I’ll do my best not to give away any spoilers as I explain it…

Starting on the back, we have a feather. That’s a literal reference to something said in the book, and also the falling feather is a common visual metaphor for gravity. Up front we have two pool balls. There’s another gravity reference there, as they are a little like planets. But more than that, the fact there are two is significant. Entropy had two flowers. Duality (ironically) went to a sole glass, representing how that story was more centered on Sir. Now we are back to two, as we try to get the couple reunited.

The pool balls are touching, which is a hopeful sign. And to me, it looks like the cue ball is a little bigger, dominating the 8 ball—again, representing our main protagonists. It goes without saying that billiards is a literal thing that happens in the story. And here’s one subtle thing: in the game “8 Ball” (which is what most American’s play) you sink the 8 ball last. So we have the cue ball meeting up with what we hope is the last ball it’s ever going to touch.

I’ll get the beta feedback soon, do my final edits, then get a print proof from CreateSpace and read it on paper. So it feels like we are 3-4 weeks from launch. I’ll keep you posted.

Back to KDP Select

You may recall that a couple months ago, I pulled Entropy out of KDP Select. These were my reasons:

  1. Being able to run $0.99 sales at a full 70% royalty resulted in negligible additional royalties.
  2. My Kindle Unlimited reads had dropped to zero in October, 2016.
  3. One would expect that having the book on iBooks, Kobo, and B&N would bring new sales.
  4. I thought BookBub might be willing to feature me if I wasn’t exclusive to Amazon.

Duality comes off its exclusive with Amazon in a couple days. I was planning to take it off KDP Select at that time and put it onto the other stores as well. But let’s sanity check that idea: In the last two and a half months, I’ve had not one sale on any store other than Amazon; BookBub rejected me again, despite being in a bunch of other stores. So the main two reasons I had for dropping off KDP Select are not good reasons.

In related news, you may recall that I cranked the list price of my print editions so that I could distribute through stores other than Amazon. Well guess what? That didn’t work either. I haven’t sold a single print copy through any store other than Amazon since I did that.

So what I’m starting to think is that my original strategy of all Amazon all the time was the right strategy. I’ll leave my teasers Attractions and Regrets out there on those other stores, because why not? But for my novels, I think I’m going back to KDP Select.

The next novel in the Entropy series should be coming out in March, and I think I’m going back to my original print price ($12.99) for all three books and I’ll have all three books in KDP Select so Kindle Unlimited readers can catch up on the first two books.

Anyone want to try to talk me out of it?

BookBub Ads? I’m calling it. The patient is dead.

First test ad

First test ad

You may recall that I was skeptical about BookBub Ads when they were first announced. While it’s exciting to get a crack at that population of known book buyers, I didn’t really think CPM advertising (paying for impressions, rather than clicks) made sense, since they count opening the email as an impression. Yet you have to scroll down to see the ad. That means that a lot of those “impressions” aren’t really impressions at all, so we would expect the CTR (click-through rate) to be low. Well I’ve run a lot of tests, and I can tell you that my skepticism was justified. The CTR on BookBub ads is horrible. Pretty consistently about 0.4% for what should have been a very clickable ad. (See above.)

To make sure I was being fair to BookBub, I just ran a Twitter ad campaign. I’m using this tweet, which I think is pretty much the same creative as that ad:

Okay, so it’s got more going on than that ad, but BookBub gives you a pretty tiny footprint, so I did my best to capture the essence.

I tried targeting Erotic Romance, Contemporary Romance, and Chick-Lit readers. And I tried targeting Amazon and iBooks readers. And I got the same 0.4% CTR for all of them. I also found that all of those markets had the same CPM: $2.30. I couldn’t get any impressions at a $2 CPM bid, and if I bid $2.50, I’d get a bunch at that $2.30 level.

After spending $70 on BookBub, I had 128 clicks that converted to 5 sales. That’s 4%, which is neither good nor bad. It’s just a normal conversion rate. (My first test got a pretty high 7% conversion rate, but that didn’t hold up, so it was just sampling error, apparently.) 128 clicks for $70 is a CPC of $0.55. Let me put these numbers in context by comparing them to that Twitter campaign.

BookBub Twitter
CPM $2.30 $1.29
CPC $0.55 $0.12
CTR 0.40% 1.05%
Conversion 4% 3%
CPS $12.00 $4.04

(CPM: Cost for 1000 impressions; CPC: Cost per click; CTR: Click-thru-rate; Conversion: % of clickers who buy; CPS: Cost per sale.)

In BookBub, you say “I’ll spend $2.30 for 1000 impressions” while in Twitter you say “I’ll spend $0.12 when someone clicks the link.” So the click-thru-rate in Twitter doesn’t really matter, except that if it’s low, you won’t get as many impressions for your bid. The first three lines in that table are really data about the marketplace. The next line is data about the audience (or how well I’m targeting the audience). The bottom line is the bottom line: What is each of these sales costing me. If BookBub had a killer conversion rate, it could make up for the high CPM or the low CTR. But it doesn’t.

Note that the CPS is not doing that great for Twitter, either. It’s costing me four bucks to sell a three buck novel that I make two bucks on. Also, those Twitter impressions are almost entirely coming from the UK. It seems the US advertising market has not settled down from the inflated US Election ad rates yet. (This especially sucks because I make even less on UK sales because of that insidious VAT that has to appear in the list price; in the US, sales taxes are on top of the list price.)

So here is what we can conclude: BookBub ads are a terrible way to sell books. I think other advertisers have figured this out, because the ads I’m seeing in my BookBub emails are all for home security systems. And I think, in a way, that’s the reason the book ads don’t work. The CPM for BookBub book ads should be about $0.50. But the CPM for ads in general is almost five times that high. And since BookBub is mixing book ads from their publishing partners with general ads from anybody, those general ads drive up the book ad CPMs to make them unjustifiably pricey.

A couple other notes if you want to try BookBub ads: their support people are very responsive and very nice. But they don’t understand the ad market at all. (The nice woman suggested I narrow my targeting to just followers of individual authors, to lower my CPM. I explained that narrowing would certainly increase my CPM, because that’s how markets work. She checked with someone and apologized for the bad advice.) Also, their dashboards are riddled with math errors. So be very careful when you look at the data. I reported all these errors, so I suspect they’ll fix them soon. Daily numbers seem to be reported reliably. It’s the roll-ups that are messed up.

If anyone from BookBub happens to read this post, here’s my advice if you want to make BookBub ads work for authors and publishers of books:

  • CPC bidding, not CPM, since your impressions aren’t impressions
  • Better demographic data, so we can at least tell who is clicking the ads
  • Throw out the random advertisers and have a pure book market

Every one of those things is going to cost BookBub money, so don’t bet on any of them ever happening. For now, I’m going to stick to Twitter ads and lower my CPC bid so I’m not losing money on every sale. Because you should never pay people to read your book.

BookBub Ads Experiments Continue

First test ad

First test ad

When last we met our hero, the BookBub gatekeepers had smote his attempts at a featured ad, and he was trying BookBub ads as a backdoor to get into the email boxes of all those potential readers. (I had to look up the past perfect of smite for that—it’s had smote—who knew?) I now have a little more data, and some preliminary conclusions.

The first thing to note is that there isn’t just one BookBub advertising market. Assuming you target by genre (and not by author, which seems insanely hard), I would expect the going CPM rate (the amount you pay for 1000 impressions of your ad) to be wildly different, depending on which genre you choose. My numbers are for Erotic Romance.

The next variable is targeting. I’m targeting people who signed up to see Amazon books in US, UK, and Canada, because I’ve never had a Twitter ad work in any other market, so I figure I should stick to the markets I can compare to Twitter.

After that is the variable of conversion rate, which is a function of your price, and of how good your blurb and reviews are. Yours might be better than mine, or it might be worse. But the important thing is that it’s not the same as mine.

So the bottom line is that these results apply only to me. You can use them as a benchmark, or to help you shape your own experiments, but you must not assume your results would be anything like mine, because I can pretty much guarantee they won’t be.

Okay, so that said, I ran a $30 campaign Friday through Sunday. I paid $2.30 CPM, which works out to 13,000 impressions. Remember that we are a little skeptical about whether an impression is really an impression, since opening the email will count as one, even if the person does not scroll down to view the ad.

My initial test ad got a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.7% which is almost identical to the CTR I get on Twitter. However, that was either a total fluke, or it was due to the fact that I left India and Australia in that first test. Regardless, with proper targeting of US/UK/CA, I’m getting a CTR of just 0.45%. That means my $30 bought me 56 clicks on my ad.

My conversion rate was really good: 7.1% (in other words, 4 of those 56 clicks turned into sales; 2 UK, 1 US, 1 CA). At the $2.99 price point, I’d expect about 5% with Twitter ads targeted at the same geography, and people who follow popular romance authors. However, the last big Twitter ad campaign I ran got much lower conversion of about 2.5%. Also, my Twitter campaigns included some Kindle Unlimited read-throughs, and I’ve since dropped out of KDP Select, so we are only looking at straight ebook sales here. So the bottom line is that BookBub ads are kicking Twitter ads ass in conversion rate. These people are buyers. A low conversion rate is also a sign of click fraud, so this high conversion rate is an indication that BookBub is trustworthy.

Unfortunately, you put all those numbers together and they kind of suck. $30 in advertising sold 4 books, resulting in $7.72 in my pocket.

I can’t get impressions with a lower bid, so I’m stuck with the CPM of about $2.25. That means to break even, I need either a higher click-through-rate (CTR) or a better conversion rate. A better conversion rate is not happening, since this conversion rate is already awesome. So we need a higher CTR. How much higher? A lot higher. I need the CTR to be 1.67% just to break even. It’s 0.45% now. It needs to be 4 times as good.

I ran an experiment today to tackle the low-hanging-fruit. The creative I was using was blurry, because BookBub beats the crap out of ads in JPG compression. So I tried re-creating the ad in photoshop and uploading a nice PNG. I’m sure they converted it to JPG before they served it, but I don’t have any way to see what they are actually serving. (I’ve asked them to fix that, because that’s kind of bonkers.) Anyway, the campaign ran all day with the cleaned-up ad you see at the top of this post and my conversion rate is… drumroll please… the same. Actually slightly lower 0.38%. Sigh.

There aren’t a lot of things I can play with to get the CTR higher. I can try to improve that ad (any ideas?). I can try putting “SALE” on there, but that’s prone to drive up CTR at the expense of conversion, since $2.99 isn’t a compelling sale price.

I can try targeting just the UK, since I’ve typically gotten better numbers there than in the US. I think maybe they like the flowers on the cover.

I can try targeting iBook users instead of Amazon. However, I just got on iBooks and I have no reviews there, so I suspect my conversion rate would suck there. It’s still worth a $10 experiment, of course.

My mission now is to improve my CTR. I’m going to try a bunch of different things and then I’ll report back. Stay tuned!!!

BookBub Features and Ads Update

EntropyI was rejected once again in my attempt to get a Featured slot on BookBub. The difference this time is that my book is now on lots of different stores, not just Amazon-exclusive. BookBub chooses very few Amazon-exclusive books, so I thought maybe my chances would be better this time. No such luck. I’ll keep trying.

Meanwhile, BookBub has allowed me into their advertising program. I wrote about this when they first announced it. I did a small test campaign to figure out how it compares to Twitter ads. I haven’t been able to use Twitter ads for a while because the election jacked up the CPC rates. When you have to compete like that to get impressions, the economics of advertising stop working.

My First BookBub Ad

My First BookBub Ad

That’s the ad. It looks a  little fuzzy because BookBub compresses the crap out of ad images. If you scroll to the bottom of your latest BookBub spam, you’ll see that whatever ad is there also has the crap beat out of it. I chose that text because it’s the heart of the tweet I have been most successful with on Twitter Ads.

I bid $3 CPM (I started at $2 and got no impressions, so I increased it), and because there’s an auction, I ended up paying $2.29 for a thousand impressions (that’s what CPM means: cost per mille [thousand]). I ran it for $9 worth, and got 4,229 impressions. That led to 29 clicks, which works out to a CTR (click through rate) of 0.7%. That’s almost identical to the CTR I get for Twitter ads.

So let’s compare pricing. Twitter charges me per click (CPC) and I can generally get impressions within my target audience (people who follow romance authors) with a bid of $0.10-$0.15. (Well, I could before the election; hopefully the rates will settle back down there now.) For BookBub, I have CPM=$2.30 generating 7 clicks per thousand impressions, so that’s a CPC of $0.32. About twice what I was paying for Twitter Ads.

However, the people clicking on BookBub ads are really well targeted. They signed up for a newsletter specifically to find out about books they can buy. So although these clicks cost twice as much, the conversion rate might just be twice as high.

As it turns out, the 29 clicks I got on my little test campaign resulted in no sales. But my book is full-price at $4.99 right now. My conversion rate at that price should be right about 0%, if you follow that chart in the post I linked. So we really don’t know about conversion yet. To do a fair test of that, I need to lower my prices.

I had my prices cranked up to $5 primarily to make a $0.99 deal look a lot better to the BookBub reviewers to get a featured deal. And that didn’t work. So here’s what I need to do:

  • Drop my price back down to $2.99 which is the optimal price for advertising-based customer acquisition.
  • Try another BookBub campaign, just like the one I did, but maybe only US/UK/CA, since that’s how I’ve been running Twitter campaigns.
  • Try Twitter Ads again and see whether the CPC rates have settled down, now that the politicians aren’t buying up all the ad space.

I’ll keep you posted!

The Perfect Gift for the Women in your Life!

Entropy & Duality

An actual photograph of the actual books I will be signing! No fake 3D templates here. These are 100% free range, organic, gluten free novels.

Are you trying to figure out what to get that woman who doesn’t need stuff? The one who loves to read great books that challenge her intellectually and emotionally? How about a pair of books signed by yours truly? Huh? Huh? Good, right?

I knew you’d be excited.

You can get the signed pair, including shipping anywhere in the USA, for $37. Hell, I’ll write whatever you want in there! Want my perfect martini recipe? Done! Scotch recommendation? Sure! You want a filthy poem? Can do!

Just drop 37 bucks in my paypal account and be sure to add a note with the address and any guidance on how you want it signed. Paypal gives me your email address, so I can follow up if I need any more info.

If you live outside the USA, message me on Twitter, and we can sort out how much extra the shipping is.

Trust me, and all the reviewers on Amazon, when I tell you she is going to love this present!

Time to Leave KDP Select?

KU DashboardI think my love affair with KDP Select—where you sell your ebook exclusively on Amazon and they give you some benefits—has come to an end. Some of the benefits (like getting 70% royalties in markets where nobody buys my books) have never done me any good, but there were two things that did work for me:

  1. They keep you at the full 70% royalty when you put your book on sale, instead of dropping you to 35%.
  2. They let people borrow your book in Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, and pay you per page read.

The dollar value of the first one hasn’t actually been that big for me. Getting twice the royalty on something you are selling for only a buck still isn’t much of a royalty. Getting full royalties on sales has netted me a whopping $17 extra in the last year.

The KU thing has done a little better for me. As of today, 16% of my revenue has come from KU. But as you can see from that chart I started with, that seems to have ended. I didn’t earn a single dime from KU in October.

So I think it’s time to leave KDP Select.

My commitment to Amazon ends mid-November, so that’s when it will become official. At that point, I’ll use Smashwords to get the e-book version of Entropy distributed far and wide. (Duality will have to wait until January for its exclusive contract to expire.) Getting into more stores certainly can’t be a bad thing, and perhaps doing so will let me get that BookBub promo they keep rejecting at least partly because I’m in KDP Select.

In other news, I’ve started putting my poetry onto Wattpad, as I suggested I might in a previous post. They are all poems that I’ve previously published here, but this blog has gotten unwieldy and I’m betting most of you didn’t even know there were poems here. So I’m taking the best ones and putting them over on Wattpad, so they are easier to find.
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publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-140-252-72.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/