Final Beta Released

Beta 4/5 still has some gender swaps for War Arrow.

Fixed those post beta.

I have no clue how to do that. There is no setting that I’ve seen on the publishing pages. Maybe there is formatting code?

I will look into it though.

A lot of these features are sort of random/they turn them on, or are very obscure. The don’t document them at all.

Well, you could always “fake it” it doesn’t cost anything other than time to set it up.

The tools are pretty simple, and very poorly documented. They have this community forum where people ask questions and experienced authors reply, but Amazon says very little in terms of answers.

They have official documentation, but it’s marginal at best.

Take for example getting your book into different categories.

You are allowed two main categories. Period.

So I chose

Fiction > Fantasy > Epic
Fiction > Fantasy > General

They also let you have 7 “keywords” or “phrases” officially used for people doing searches (according to instructions)

And those were the only places I was listed, or ranked on the book’s page. But then I saw that other books form other authors were in more categories.
I had to search and search both forums and google to find out how they did this.

It turns out that if your keywords match certain categories, e.g. “Sword & Sorcery” EXACTLY then they will put you there (or in one of them, if the category is in two places

e.g.
Fantasy > Sword & Sorcery (goes there)
Teen & Young Adult> Science Fiction & Fantasy > Sword & Sorcery (not here)

And there are other places down other trees where Sword & Sorcery appears (e.g. College & New Adult) and it doesn’t go there.

It’s all trial and error.

About all I can control is:

Match Book (meaning free or cheaper ebook with paperback)
Kindle Unlimited
Allow Lending

And that’s about it. Most everything else is a random act of Amazon or something for those who “figure it out”

Shelfari was the biggest secret. I randomly filled out details on stuff there for the first book and voila X-Ray turned itself on.

Then they killed Shelfari and there is no good tool for independent authors to populate official “X-Ray” or at least not that I can find.

Hi,

Yes, I did that originally.

I was at Smashwords and published to various of their subsites and several others on my own. Google Play, Apple, BN.com etc.

However, what I quickly discovered is that none of them could come even remotely close to the volume on Amazon.

Mainly because it was very hard to find the book on some of those platforms. BN and Apple are too focused on the big publishers. Smashwords has a lot of lower end stuff (and lots of porn).

Smashwords probably sold the most after amazon, then google play, then BN. Apple sold none.

Amazon did nearly 100x as much business as the others in the first months. Literally.

In the first month on Amazon, I sold 1,161 copies. I sold 10 at Smashwords, 2 at Play, 1 at BN.

And then comes Kindle Unlimited. It’s optional, but exclusive. To be on Kindle Unlimited you cannot have the same book at any other e-bookstore. You could have, say an illustrated version on Apple, or compendium of 3 books etc, but not the same book.

Now, at first the payment wasn’t so great since they treated all books the same and this ended up being advantages to people that wrote lots of short books. They changed that in the summer of 2015. Now they pay per “virtual” page read. I make pretty much the same amount of money whether it is KU or purchased. (although if they don’t finish the book–I only get paid for how much they read with KU. However, that is not noticeable)

So I signed up, and at first it boosted my income by 50%, even after dumping the other sites.

Once they changed the payment scheme last year?

I make 2x as much money (on average) from Kindle Unlimited readers as from sales of the e-book. That is simply volume, since the royalty is about the same.

And this has been consistent. Sales of Books 1 and 2 are being boosted by my ads for the preorder of Book 3.

I.e. people see Book 3 and go and check out books 1 and 2.

At the moment, people reading it via KU have brought in almost exactly 2x as much as people buying books 1 and 2.

So….long story short, for most indie authors, KU is a very profitable drug. Quitting it to put your book on other sites can be very expensive and not worth it.