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
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