Why isn't my Kindle eBook making money?

OK you’ve done all the hard work; years of actually writing the damn thing followed by years of rejection letters from publishers and more recently months of online research and agonising over whether or not to self-publish online. But you took the plunge and joined millions of other authors on Amazon’s Kindle platform. In the end it was pretty easy, apart from the IRS tax bit, and now you can check sales as often as you like!! Only there’s a snag – in your mind’s eye you secretly dreamed of being pleasantly surprised by how well your book was doing but you forgot to brace yourself for the worst case scenario – not selling any copies. None in the first week. None in the first month. None in the first twelve months. None at all in fact.

But you haven’t given up yet and now you’re a Kindle junkie, devouring all the online blogs and webinars about how to make your book more visible and more successful. But what if you’ve done all that? What if you changed your cover, updated the categories, improved your keywords, dropped the price and tweaked your actual content to make it more Kindle compatible, and still saw no sales spike? Surely it’s time to give up?

Maybe not. Let me share what I’ve learned about being on Kindle since 2011. And before I do that let me share my personal opinion about writing which is that you can still consider yourself a writer without being rich and successful; you write every day, and all day you think about writing and how to make the next book better, you never go anywhere without your Moleskine notebook? You are a writer. Maybe not a professional writer, but a writer nonetheless, and with the advent of Kindle the definition of what exactly constitutes a professional writer probably needs redefining. There are thousands of good writers who are not successful, and thousands of bad writers who have tasted success!! Don’t you just hate them? I know I do.

If you don’t live in the USA and buy a lot of books online on your Kindle are you really qualified to know much about what makes the brain of the average Kindle reader (customer) tick? No, you aren’t. So it’s time to rationalise. Take a deep breath and take a break. Regroup. It’s still not too late.

If you’re anything like me you made a lot of mistakes with your first Kindle books and left them uncorrected for several years. In short, like me, you were naïve and ignored the good advice which is actually readily available on the Kindle site itself in the instructions but it’s only with hindsight that things like the searchable Table of Contents become important. Only after years of no sales do you start to think that maybe your name plus the names of your book’s characters are not good keywords. No one who’s never read your book is going to accidentally search for these terms in the Kindle Store.

Leave the first book where it is and write a new one. Actually writing again will be therapeutic and now you know much more than you did last time. Make it better, more commercial with a title and a cover that will attract the attention of readers who’ve never heard of you. Go for it!! Channel that frustration into a new project and see how much better than the last one it does.

I’m a big fan of some of the Kindle Conventional wisdom – like DIY Book Covers.com for example, he talks a lot of sense. BUT be warned, the bottom line on most of these guru sites is that you should give away your writing for free in order to build an audience and get return – paying – customers. I disagree. My experience of Free book promotions and Kindle Countdown Deals is that they are a waste of time, unless you are going to dedicate a serious amount of your time to promoting each new discount deal on one of several dedicated websites some of which are not free. What a palaver!! Is that why you became a writer? No, I don’t think so. Stick to your guns. Believe in yourself and your book. If the bestselling books in your genre are all $9.99 why not stick at $9.99. If they’re more like $3.99, go for $3.99 instead.

And wait. Find a friend or family member who can buy your book and hopefully post a 5-star review. That one review and one sale will give you a kickstart. The rest might be in the lap of the gods but at least you’ve got a foot in the door!!

Nick Green is the author of Boathouse to Botswana, Three Journeys to Patagonia and Tezcatlipoca’s Dream…he is the publisher of My Forever Heartache 

 

Sub-Saharan Independent Publisher v. The Whole World

It is suddenly a world of landing pages and click funnels; new releases are simply invisible in amongst the bestsellers. Browsers cannot find your book accidentally unless it already has several five-star reviews to its name. And your family and friends are tired of you asking them for reviews. To get your Kindle eBook noticed in amongst the millions of other titles is harder than ever before. Is it even possible to take on the USA from outside it? Can you publish or self-publish in Sub-Saharan Africa and expect success if you're not affiliated to Penguin South Africa? Shouldn't we all just give up?
Here I'm reminded of an eminent Professor at the University of Botswana who reminded me that poetry's purpose, like folk music's, is to scare the establishment, to change governments. In times of revolution it is our words that give the multitudes a voice. That is why I don't give up, and why I refuse to write the kind of book that apparently sells millions of copies - be it a romance novel complete with picture of topless man and his sweaty six-pack, or a self-help book about how to publish your book on Amazon. I mean seriously? Are Amazon championing the little guy here, or simply pyramid-peddling fool's gold?
As an independent publisher in Botswana it's sometimes pretty daunting to take on the whole world and the might of the established bestsellers at the same time but if we keep supporting each other we can do it!! We are busy improving our Kindle eBook products across the whole range, to incorporate new covers, searchable tables of contents and a Black Crake Books page for readers to stay in touch and receive special offers plus new, unpublished free materials. In the meantime it is only through reader reviews, sharing posts, tagging friends, recommending books to friends, that our titles slowly migrate from invisible to visible-and-trending. My recommendation? Tezcatlipoca's Dream - well worth a look.

Write of Abode - From Newlyweds to Refugees

At the end of our ten-day honeymoon on the island of Hydra, my wife and I took the Flying Dolphin back to the mainland as many star-crossed lovers had done before us. In Piraeus we stayed at the Hotel Triton – an old standby – and had our last Greek meal which, like most Greek meals, was terrible but unforgettable nonetheless. Before going to bed we rambled around the block admiring homemeade soaps, sponges from the ocean, giant sacks of drying and dried herbs, there were fish shops, and magazine-porn-selling kiosks and a chocolate shop with a talking parrot. A large demonstration of some sort complete with TV cameras and police escort marched on the capital. A decision was due on the Euro deal with Germany and politics was rife in the air.

The next morning as we waited for the airport bus by the statue of Karaiskakis outside the church, we saw for the first time dozens of Syrian refugees on the grass. They had obviously spent the night in this little park and were in various stages of waking up and getting up but all under the gaze of the Athens public going to work – many of whom were just as surprised to see them as we were. We’d all heard about it on the news but now here they were, people like us whose country had suddenly been plunged into a war that the rest of the world didn’t know or care about. The women and children had blankets and there was water at least from a public bathroom block but the men made do with what they stood up in and stoically smoked. One family with three kids in tow made their way bravely to the middle of the intersection with their possessions tied in a cumbersome see-through plastic sack. It was like a scene from a movie except we were not in New York and, one suspects, there was no fairy tale ending.

We smiled politely and tried not to stare and wondered what we could do to help. We did not know at the time that we were a) pregnant and b) about to become refugees of sorts ourselves.

I’ve long been interested in immigration law. In Botswana there’s a big refugee camp near Dukwi housing thousands of refugees from not only Southern and Eastern Africa but all over the continent. Put up as tents in 1978 it is now something of a small town with houses and infrastructure. As a teenage humanist and idealistic sixth-former I knew in my heart that I cared passionately about people’s rights to three things; free education, free health care, and freedom of movement. I was soon to discover as I got older that none of these things can be taken for granted. The one I thing I clung to as I travelled the world and lived life as an expat in various enclaves was the knowledge that if everything went wrong I could at least go home to England.

Yet now I am forced to reckon with the reality that not even the latter statement can be taken for granted any more. What then has gone wrong? Have I and many others like me been naïve for all these years or has the world suddenly become extremely paranoid and xenophobic? Does it not look and feel like the political climate that presaged the Second World War?

If we as British citizens cannot rely on the benevolence of our own state, if we are not free to come and go as we please with our spouses and children, what then is left? My wife and I cannot afford to have our baby in the UK and she does not qualify for free NHS treatment even though we are legally married (our child would be allowed NHS treatment after birth apparently). We can only apply if I am normally resident and earning more than GBP 22, 400.00. Until then she (and our child when it is born) will have to wait elsewhere. Can the law really discriminate against non-EEA spouses and children in such a way?

In another twist that it won’t do to go into here, although my wife is Zambian and we were married there, I do not qualify for a work visa just as she would not get one automatically in England. In Botswana where we met and still live, I have work papers but a recent change in the interpretation of the labour law means that I lost my job. So, like many other couples, we are forced to live apart until the immigration minefield can be negotiated.