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Hi @ChickenHawk ! I decided to pick up my writing after reading your posts. I scrapped the 7000 words I had already written and started a fresh story. I am curious... How do you format your text for Kindle? Do you use double spacing? Single spacing with a double space between paragraphs or just use an indent? I have read mixed reviews on this. I started writing yesterday and I am 4400 words "deep" so far. Anyway, thanks for all of the inspiration, again
Hmmm...I wish I knew! As I mentioned previously, I didn't do any marketing or promotional activity. I didn't expect to gain a lot of readers right away, so my primary focus was on crafting an entertaining story. Honestly, the success of this caught me a bit by surprise, but happily so.
I know this varies a lot, but my goal was to make it look as close as possible to the printed books released by traditional publishers. If you look at traditionally published books, they look much different than blog posts, for example. This led me to use these specs:
A friend who's a fellow writer gave it a good read, but I wouldn't call it an edit -- mostly because I wasn't asking or expecting that. So basically, my books are self-edited. I'll probably have to reconsider this in the future, because over time, I've caught some truly embarrassing mistakes.
Thanks so much, @Vigilante and @McNandez! You have no idea how much encouragement like this means to me! It's made a huge difference, especially in those times when I was questioning my sanity.
Sorry if this sounds pedantic, but can anyone actually edit poetry? Or did you mean proofread? It seems to me that if you allowed someone to suggest changes to poetry, it would no longer reflect the artist's vision.
Mattie, if it is any consolation.... I have a friend who is an editor and she did edit my book. I'm glad I had her do it because I have forgotten some grammar rules. I made the same mistake, like on dialog, 100 times. It took...FOREVER to fix all the little mistakes. After I did that, then I went back through and did some re-writing. I then found some errors my friend didn't catch. I also found several areas where I forgot to finish a thought or a scene and it was confusing. I did all this after not looking at my manuscript for about 4 weeks. COSenior had suggested I do this from the beginning but I was afraid. I'm glad I had my friend do this first one but I think I can do it myself in the future. In the future I will do my initial edit myself and then have some friends read it. I am glad I had the first one edited professionally though, that really helped me for future writing.
If you join KDP Select (basically clicking a button during your Amazon kindle publishing process), making your book free for up to five days is super-easy, just the click of a few buttons. However, by joining KDP select, you also give Amazon exclusivity on your book for 90 days, meaning you can't sell on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, etc. Another way to offer your book for free (meaning permafree) is to make it free other places, and try to get Amazon to price-match you.
For the record, I highly recommend using a professional editor if you can...just not on poetry, which is what my comment referred to. The rules are entirely different, and unless you're writing in a specific poetic style or meter, editing can only apply grammar to a medium that has no use for it. Glad the tip to let your book rest for a while before you try to self-edit worked for you. Again for the record, I'd recommend something less than a whole month. You must have the patience of Job!
Personally, I'm not a fan of free. I think the issues are pretty similar whether the book is free forever or free for just a few days. While it's free, you'll get more visibility, but it might not be the kind you want.
This month, so far so good! Both are still in the top 1,000 (just barely), and sales are drifting lower each day. So far this month, I've sold about 3,000 books. This is significantly lower than last month, but I'm still beyond thankful for each and every sale.
That's really interesting, considering how the pen names did relative to each other. Does it just mean that free isn't an effective marketing ploy, as you suggest, or does it mean something more...that the author valuing a book too much to make it free has the effect of making the readers feel the same way? Is 'you get what you pay for' working here?
I think it's a little of both. From what I understand, free used to be a lot more effective a couple years ago, but as Amazon changed their algos, and readers became jaded, it became less and less effective.
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