Self Publishing done? – now Bookshelf, Edits & KDP on Amazon

Standard

Hi there.

Hope you managed to get a book uploaded. My first one was a very, short book of poems. A test really. It’s only got 5 poems and I think I made one sale! But it was the first step in the process so I will always be proud of it.

Bookshelf – this is a great tool that Amazon provide for authors. It’s your control centre within KDP. Here you can see your books, a thumbnail cover is displayed alongside important info; you name as shown with the published book and the price and the ASIN.

ASIN is the assigned code for your book, the shortcut to it. You must note these down so you can publish links to your books across your social media sites.

So you have the basic:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/  OR  http://www.amazon.com/dp/

and after this you add the ASIN.  When added to say Twitter or Facebook, this creates a link with an image of the book’s cover.

From Bookshelf you can check your book is live and organise editing and/or promoting options. >>>

Editing

So, you uploaded your book, proudly told friends and family who nodded with approval and gave you praise and promised to buy it and read it.

Then, one of them comes back to you and starts pointing out mistakes. “There was a big spelling mistake in chapter three!” and “…oh my gosh, that grammar in the final chapter! What were you thinking?”  and “I told you, not to make up the facts around autopsies. I read Scarpetta all the time. It, it just doesn’t sound real. Sorry.”

Don’t cry. Don’t argue with them either. They are your real friends, the ones who tell you about niggles. Side-note: in future ask them to proof read, yes it lets them get the book free but it’s worth it! Now – stay calm, go and find those problems and fix them. It’s easy!

Change the mistakes, then simply upload a replacement file. Click on EDIT ~ under the right-side menu – the ellipsis (now it is three little dots).

Don’t worry about people who already bought it – there is an auto update to any book purchased and the customer can opt to replace their version. You may want to tell people this 😉

You can also alter the categories, blurb, keywords, cover! Anything really.

And don’t be afraid of change.

If you have a gut feeling that there is a better title/cover – go for it! I wrestled with about four covers for my eBook: Towards the Stars, before going back to the original design! I read that an erotic book does better with flesh on show but my instinct was to stick with a sci-fi theme as my primary style is SF/F/H. I slept better after I changed it back.

KDP options (not Kittens Dancing Playfully..)

Kindle Direct Publishing offers ways to promote your book with special deals for the customer.

You have to select enrolment in this scheme. Check the conditions as books have to be above a certain price to qualify. [don’t up the price to get KDP options, that’s not ethical]

FREE book – so you can make your book free for up to 5 days in any 90 day period. The days can be separate/consecutive or a mix. You can set them in advance to allow you time to market the deal. This applies worldwide so is great for exposure!

of course, you won’t earn royalties as there is no cost, this is about promotion so use it carefully – think about what you want to achieve from this option.

Countdown Deals – these are only for US & UK markets (currently) and as above feature 5 days in a 90 day period when you can reduce your book price.

Example: book at £1.99 ($3.99) and you set it to £1.09 ($3.00) on day 1 raising each day until back to usual price. Or you can stick to a discounted price. [books must be priced at least £1.93, $2.99 to qualify – also upper limits].

And finally – you can use paid ads too. This depends on your budget of course. I have no budget, so no paid ads for me just yet! Though Amazon KDP offers a unique twist that you only pay for an ad if a customer clicks through it, so they are more likely to buy at that point.

~ so check your book/s – feel free to edit & think about promotion.

If you haven’t had any feedback yet – ask! Tell people you trust that you want honest feedback too. You need to be realistic.

all the best! 🙂

Lizzie HW

~next week: Your Reports, Sales, Author Page

Advertisements

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://lizziehw.com/2015/06/03/self-publishing-done-now-bookshelf-edits-kdp-on-amazon/
lizziehw.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-51
63012
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:6FZYBVJ373U32TVNNWADYC4NFKUY7HTF
<urn:uuid:c5b2e43e-a43e-4662-9e4c-ee0748dd509b>
2018-12-10T00:56:51Z
192.0.78.25
text/html
sha1:YPD7GGSCTNNNT7DOMCJ4EVFYS5HFOXAC
<urn:uuid:2c6991ae-2601-4e1b-820c-8f1e74451387>
https://lizziehw.com/2015/06/03/self-publishing-done-now-bookshelf-edits-kdp-on-amazon/
response
<urn:uuid:f6c4bb17-b5fe-474b-afdf-6fbf55bb5fea>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-51
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-137-134-86.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/