Rules for Reading

Author Ryan Holiday details his down-to-earth reading habits/strategy.

“If you see a book you want, just buy it. Don’t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, that’s still a pretty good return on investment.”

— Ryan Holiday

Music and cultural critic Ted Gioia outlines his lifetime reading plan, and it is very impressive and inspiring.

“When I was 18, I tackled War and Peace. When I was 19, I did Don Quixote. The next year, I read The Brothers Karamazov, and after that it was Moby Dick and The Tale of Genji and The Magic Mountain. And I’ve kept doing this for decades. The cumulative impact of this is life-changing.”

— Ted Gioia

Choosing Amazon Book Categories

Uploading your book to Kindle Direct Publishing / Amazon is the beginning of a process rather than the end. The next task is to optimise your metadata for visibility / search. Reedsy is offering a free course on the basics of Amazon advertising.

“In this article, we’ll reveal the importance of choosing the right categories and provide you some practical steps to perfectly place your book on Amazon’s bulging shelves. ”

— Reedsy

K-Lytics

If you are serious about optimising your online presence as an author, K-Lytics is worth checking out. Their site asks the following rhetorical question:

“Do you want to sell more books, face less competition, and achieve a higher return on your publishing investments?”

— K-Lytics

Their paid market reports burrow into the details of hundreds of genres and micro-genres. Seeing the maths underneath the book markets is a bit disconcerting, but in a world governed by algorithms and visibility, these insights are essential. The specificity of some of the genres and sub-genres is almost comic: Scottish Romance (what about Scottish Time Travelling Romance?); Cosy Mystery; Urban Fantasy, etc.

“You do not have to be afraid of numbers. We will help you to understand and use them to your advantage.”

— K-Lytics

Get Your Title Onto Borrowbox via IngramSpark

Bolinda Audio produces a book-borrowing app (Borrowbox) used widely by Australian libraries. An author client contacted them recently to see if there was a way of including their ebook title on the platform. They responded promptly with the following:

“We would be happy to distribute your titles to libraries via our digital lending solution BorrowBox, but we simply don't have the resources to deal direct with individual authors. If your titles are available from a digital distributor such as Gardners, Ingrams, IPG, or Faber Factory, then we could make them available via BorrowBox.”

Borrowbox is an excellent app with a very wide variety of audiobook and ebook titles, and represents an great opportunity for independent authors to get in front of new readers.

Jenny Wellington on ABC Radio

Jenny Wellington, author of the very entertaining novel Damengin, was interviewed on ABC Sunshine Coast — audio below.

“Damengin is a country town in Queensland weighed down by the worst drought in living memory and its inhabitants are all desperately waiting for government drought relief.

The bad news is that the funds have been sent and spent by Council's Shire Clerk Shifty Grey and his corrupt cohorts.

This is a rollicking fast-moving story about political skulduggery, greed, love and lust. It features outrageous characters, blossoming romances, pathos and importantly, has an incredibly happy ending.”

“A lovely Aussie story that everyone can relate to. Loved reading the book right from the start. I could hear the author reading the story to me at the start and as I got further into the book, wrapped into the characters of the story, I couldn’t put the book down as I sat in on the edge of my chair wondering what was going to happen next.”

— Christine, Queensland

Making Sense of Amazon's Pricing Algorithm

An interesting plain-English explanation of the multiple algorithms behind Amazon’s seemingly capricious and constant price changes. Authors are often surprised to learn that while Amazon may pay royalties according to the prices they enter when uploading their new title, the price seen by potential purchasers will vary from day to day.

“Though daunting to many, these algorithms don’t have to be intimidating once you know what they want and how they work. ”

— Reedsy

Keywords are the Key

The most important part of uploading to Amazon KDP with ebook files is getting the metadata right. This turns out to be a little more complicated than one might expect. Fortunately, others have done the legwork and put the information out there for KDP users.

The following two free titles are well worth consulting on this front:

Let's Get Digital by David Gaughran

Ricardo Fayet's How to Market an ebook

and David Gaughran posted some verypractical tips recently:

https://davidgaughran.com/amazon-book-category-kindle-categories/

and he put up a video too on a related topic before that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fXU8R0cHOM

Joanna Penn goes into this topic too in some detail:
https://www.thecreativepenn.com/book-categories-keywords/

https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/the-basics-of-book-metadata-and-keywords

More Recent Book Covers and Drafts from WorkingType

Authors, Don't Forget Libraries

Independent authors sometimes forget the library market. Libraries have made a largely successful transition to the era of the Internet, becoming multi-use spaces, offering ebooks and audio books and maintaining their print collections. Many libraries are quite supportive of independent authors. Joanne Penn has posted about getting books into American libraries, but similar principles also apply in Australia. Apart from contacting individual library corporations, try reading this kindle book on the Australian market. URLs for Australian library distributors below. And don’t forget to register for Public Lending Rights!

ALS
https://www.alslib.com.au/

James Bennet
https://www.bennett.com.au/

Peter Pal
www.peterpal.com.au

Inside Kindle — Analysing Sales and Market Data

An interesting webinar staged by Reedsy on the dynamics/underlying principles of the Kindle webstore. With an astonishing 70,000 titles published per month (!) independent authors really need to understand the platforms to which they are uploading their titles. While it may be dispiriting to see one’s book chunked into tiny little categories and subject to algorithmic vagaries, there is also power in exploiting this really quite remarkable flood of sales data.

“With 70,000+ books being published each month, you need tools and strategies to help you and your book stand out from the crowd. Knowing your market is the essential first step.”