Tag Archives: KDP

Indie News Roundup

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The indie publishing space online last week was hopping with news, and there was some good mixed with the bad. Let’s jump in!

KDP will now allow customers to read a sample of a book on preorder
KDP will now allow customers to read a sample of a book on preorder like they do with books that are available for purchase or to be borrowed in Kindle Unlimited. I think this is great, though not everyone was happy about it. A few people I saw who were arguing might have just been eager to jump on Amazon about something, one going so far as to say this will cheat us out of KU reads–I just rolled my eyes–but most had a positive reaction to the news. This is what my email said:

Hello,

We’re excited to share that Amazon will test allowing customers to read a sample of your eBook pre-order starting the week of April 14. This feature will work exactly like the “Read Sample” feature that displays for books on Amazon today. It’ll show a preview, up to 10% from your current manuscript’s content to engage potential readers.

If you’ve already submitted your manuscript, Amazon will automatically generate the reading sample. If no manuscript is currently uploaded, then no reading sample will be shown.

I think this will be a game-changer for preorders. Before, unless you posted a sample somewhere or tried to generate buzz with excerpts, there was no way for a reader to know if they were going to like it and that might have dissuaded a reader from preordering. I’ve never put much stock in preorders because my books are in Kindle Unlimited and readers will wait until the book is live to read–meaning, I don’t get many sales. But I’ve been putting books on preorder more and more, usually just a couple of weeks so that I can have the buy-link for promo graphics and whatnot and it also frees up my mind to move on to other things. I’ve always uploaded the finished files because I don’t want accidents to happen, like the wrong file to be pushed out to readers or being locked out of editing during their quality check because I miscalculated. Some authors will put a book on preorder without a finished book or even a finished cover. I wonder if this will prompt authors to at least have the first chapter written and available for the sample. However authors end up using it, I think this was long overdue, and I’ll be watching to see if it makes a positive impact on authors’ sales.

KDP has been terminating accounts (again).
I’ve heard in various author spaces that KDP is terminating accounts again, though whether those authors have done something to warrant it, you never know. Because KDP doesn’t like to tell you if you’ve done something wrong, shooting first and asking questions….never, you won’t always know if you’ve accidentally done something to make them mad, either. Author CD Reiss has put together a Google doc that outlines the steps you should take when trying to get your account back.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PKd94sSvgD3XoFFWHaUC6Gxey2GOU6WH7cRLNpb3428/edit?tab=t.0 Various authors have said that CD Reiss is okay with this being shared, so I thought I would post it as well in case you want to bookmark it. I have it saved, but this is pretty much the main reason I’ve invested in an Alliance of Independent Authors membership. I don’t want to take on Amazon alone, and I write off my membership every year when I do my taxes as a business expense. But, if you can’t afford a membership to an author organization like Alli or the Authors’ Guild, then having a step-by-step of what to do is the next best thing. Thanks to Zoe York for reminding me it’s out there and able to be shared.

NaNoWriMo goes out of business
NaNoWriMo issued a statement last week that said they were closing their doors. I’m not surprised because of the various scandals they’ve been involved in recently, but it seems like it’s an end of an era for a lot of authors and writers who got their start participating in NaNo. I didn’t know NaNoWriMo was a thing until a woman at my day job found out I was writing something and invited me to participate. Back then, I was writing my fantasy series, but for that year’s NaNo, I stopped and started a sports contemporary romance that turned into my Tower City trilogy I published many years ago. Since then, a lot of the people she introduced me to have stopped writing, but it was a fun experience to meet at Perkins, order pie and coffee, and just sit and write a few times a week. That was really the only time I participated, actually counting my words in the website. I’ve always had plenty of time and drive to treat every month as a NaNo month, and actually November was really difficult to write a lot because of my birthday, my daughter’s birthday, and Thanksgiving. For the past year or so since NaNo has been involved in some shadiness, such as the grooming incident and a pro-AI stance, other challenges have taken its place.

Like I said, it just seems like an end of an era, for me, too, since this comes on the heels of some of my favorite podcasts stopping, like Mark Dawson and James Blatch’s Self Publishing Formula, and earlier, Six-Figure Authors hosted by Lindsay Buroker, Andrea Pearson, and Jo Lallo, not to mention all the issues at the Romance Writers of America that I used to be a member of for a very long time. Things change, time goes on, but no matter what kind of trouble NaNo had fallen into recently, they will be missed. For more information on the closure, you can look here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/02/creative-writing-nanowrimo-to-close-after-20-years and here:

All that being said, I saw one author who said she went on to nanowrimo.org and deleted her account. She wanted to be in control of her information, and that seemed like a good idea. Though I didn’t have much under my profile, only one book, and I’m not sure how many connections, I went ahead and deleted mine too. You just never know, so I did that before I forgot.

Potential eight-figure deal for a thriller written by James Patterson and MrBeast
I didn’t even know who MrBeast was when I first heard of the deal, not that I was impressed when I looked him up. No one was happy that James Patterson was involved in a book that was generating so much attention, saying all that money could have been used to lift up mid-list, BIPOC, and marginalized authors. It’s just another piece of evidence that publishing is in a bad place and doesn’t seem to be getting better any time soon. Considering that James Patterson has a net worth of 800 million and MrBeast aka Jimmy Donaldson is said to be worth close to a billion dollars, I think they could leave some crumbs for us little people. Whether the book and potential movie will earn out that much money remains to be seen. If you want to read more about it, look here: https://deadline.com/2025/03/james-patterson-mr-beast-novel-1236352620/

There were other things that happened last week, like romance author Tori Woods getting arrested after her book Daddy’s Little Toy was rumored to have pedophilia in it–https://www.ndtv.com/feature/australian-author-charged-for-child-abuse-material-over-daddys-little-toy-book-8005994–but I’m a little tired between all that and the government BS that has been going on lately. I’ve had friends ask how I’m doing, and I’ve said I’m staying close to home. Writing, taking care of my kids and making sure we have what we need. Working. Still getting used to how I’m always going to feel, I don’t have a lot of mental energy for extra things. I’ve stopped posting on my FB author page again, don’t have any motivation to post there. I have a TikTok video made, and it’s been made for a week, but I can’t decide on the music, so I just exit out of the app in frustration and don’t post at all. I don’t want to get too much more into what I’ve been doing–I’ll save that for a proper author update next week–but I have an author interview coming up that I’m excited about and I’m almost done writing Wicked Games. Anyway, I’ll fill you in on all that next week.

Have a great Monday, everyone, and I’ll see you next time!

Monday’s Author Update

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Happy Monday! I don’t share many pics of myself, but this one was taken at the hotel in Minneapolis while we were decompressing after a day of shopping at the Mall of America. I literally have bedhead, haha. I hope the Thanksgiving weekend treated all of you to good food, fun family times, and some quiet relaxation for yourselves before the frenzied weeks of Christmas kick in.

Despite how busy my November has been, I’ve been able to get a few things done. My Lost & Found trilogy has been reedited and the covers have been updated (that was a lot of work and I’m glad it’s over). I haven’t taken the time to run ads to it yet, so I don’t have any data to share as to how the covers made a difference in sales. People actually have to know of a novel’s existence before they can buy it and right now the only way I do that is with ads. I can share now more on social media because I’m proud of the covers and before I didn’t really want anyone to see them. It’s difficult to market a book you’re not proud of and at least now I know the covers are the best they can be.

Ad cost over the next four weeks during the holiday season won’t be that great, and I won’t start any new ads until after the holidays. Everyone is going to be running ads to their products. I’ll keep the ads I have now going (keeping an eye on the cost-per-click), but I’ve heard CPC goes up around this time of year, and I don’t need to contribute to that.

I was a little curious as to how my rockstars were doing read-through wise, so I did some math to calculate. I’m not going to say how much they’ve made since their release (and with the numbers I share, please don’t try. So much varies with KU and sales, not to mention countries). I struggle between wanting to help fledging authors feel better about lower sales and showing my readers all that I have talked about and implemented over the years really did help me find readers and level up without flashing numbers. When you write a nonfiction blog it’s important you know what you’re doing, or at least if you’re going to experiment you’re honest that you’re experimenting and willing to share the results, but you can’t say “do this” without proof it works. No one would listen to me if I did that, and my blog would be worthless and meaningless. I’m not one of those smarmy marketing gurus that lands in your inbox, and I’m not trying to sell anything, but I do give advice and it is nice without taking screenshots of my KDP sales dashboard to be able to prove that my advice has a little weight behind it.

So, I took a few minutes to look up my stats. Twisted Alibis, in total, has sold 252 books. That’s with KENP page reads turned into full “books,” ebooks, and print sales. Twisted Lullabies has sold a total of 147 books, and that is with all the formats. Twisted Lies has sold 119 books, and that includes all the formats. I did the math and if you divide Twisted Lullabies’ sales (147) by Twisted Alibis’ sales (252) you get 58.3%. That means 58.3% of readers who read book one of my trilogy went on to read book two. I did more math and calculated that 80.9% of readers who read book two went on to read book three (119 divided by 147), and I was really really happy with those numbers. Especially since I’ve been told book two’s characters were hard to connect with and it wasn’t a classic, “boy meets girl, they fall in love, they break up, get back together, and get married” kind of romance. It’s not, really, but I believe there is room for all different types of tropes and stories and characters. I’m glad book two, despite the negative feedback, is enough for people to go on to book three, and I really hope book three nails the ending and gives my readers the closure they deserve after investing time to read 300,000 of my words. If you want to read more about read-through, how to calculate it, and why it’s important, you can read an article here by Mallory Cooper for Kindlepreneur.

What’s next for me? Right now I’m pleasure-reading/editing book two of my duet. I fell into a weird cadence overusing “while” “before” “after” and “when.” I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, unless I read a book while writing those that did the same thing. I don’t particularly like it, and there was one paragraph where I used five “whens” and it sounded like crap. I love the stories, though, so I’m pleasure-reading as much as I am fixing the sentences. It’s not a huge, anxiety-inducing priority to edit these books as my trilogy was, so I’m taking my time and still doing other non-writing things while I’m doing that. Mostly that has to do with the trip I was on for my daughter’s birthday, Thanksgiving I cooked for, and this week, tree-trimming and celebrating my birthday. I also want to spend more time on social media promoting my Christmas novel (I have five weeks to push it until no one cares), and I’ll do that while casually finishing reading book two and replacing all those files once it’s done. It’s not a big deal, and editing those books gives me a chance to update my Also By pages–I’ve written a lot more books since publishing my duet.

Otherwise I don’t have much else. I was going to take December off, but you all know me and I couldn’t take time off my books without feeling listless and, let’s face it, sad. I wouldn’t have much else to do, but I am going to read while I get my series ready because I want to start my research and plan/plot what I’m going to write next. I can’t write what I want if I don’t read and make notes of tropes and reader expectations (skipping from billionaire to rockstars to mafia), and honestly, some of these I picked up on TikTok and I want to know if they deserve all the hype. But, one thing at a time, and I want to delve into my series first, see how much work they need. I haven’t read them in a long time, and now that I’m aware of my writing tics and my new favorite garbage words, I can edit them with a fresh eye and publish them knowing I did the best I could. I need to take a deep breath and go slowly. We’re looking at a half a million words and that won’t be easy, even if they are, by my guess, 75% ready to be published. I’ve been talking about these for so long, many of you probably think they’re a myth and they aren’t really written at all. They are very real, and it will be a relief to get them polished and on preorder. I’ve held them back long enough.

Oh, and I did manage change out my Lost & Found trilogy files on IngramSpark, and I put my rockstars on there, too. I don’t use expanded distribution on KDP, preferring to use Ingram on the off chance I’m asked to do a signing and they want to order their own stock rather than me bringing in author copies. I always thought it was tacky anyway, asking bookstores to sell Amazon copies when Amazon is a bookstore’s biggest competitor. Have a little class and use Ingram for their distribution. I do both. Amazon doesn’t play well with others, so I publish there first, wait for the books and ISBN to “settle” for a few months (three or four), and then when Ingram publishes, they skip Amazon because my books are already there. It’s a system that has worked for me for 20 books, and if it’s not broken, I’m not going to try to fix it or do something else. I only messed up one of the six covers I submitted, and that by far is my best record yet. I must be getting used to how picky they are. Also, I recouped my Alli membership fee. One of the benefits of being a member is free IS file replacement. You can upload new titles for free, but if you make changes to existing books (I think it’s more than 60 days after publication) you still have to pay the fee for file replacement. That’s $25 for the interior and $25 for the cover ($50 for both). Being that I replaced both for all three books, my membership paid for itself and then some. Membership is $119 dollars and replacing all my files in my billionaire trilogy would have cost me $150. That alone was worth it, but I like being a member for peace of mind. You never know when you’re going to need an advocate to reach out to Amazon on your behalf. Anyway, so I was glad to get that done, and now my rockstar paperbacks are available everywhere. I don’t sell many, like I said, it’s mostly in case I’m ever invited to a book signing and they want to order their own copies. I do a 40% wholesale discount and don’t allow returns. I’ve heard some horror stories about dealing with IS, but I have never had an issue with getting hit with a huge return bill. There’s a first time for everything, so read up on what is best practice and make decisions for yourself and what’s good for your book business.

That’s all I have for this week. I hope you all have a fantastic one!

Until next time!

Brief Author Update and KDP Changes

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I haven’t been doing much except re-editing my Lost & Found trilogy and redoing the covers. I said in a previous blogpost that book one didn’t have the problems books two and three had, but I was mistaken. I went back and edited it more thoroughly which took time, and then I read all three of them again just to make sure I didn’t edit in any typos. My proofs come today, but I’m not reading them–okay I might spot-check them, but that’s all–I’ll page through them to look for formatting errors and make sure the back matter is how I want it, and then I need to move on. They are going to be as good as they’re going to be and I’ll have to be happy with that. I’m pleased with cover changes, and I hope that it will bump up sales. I haven’t been pushing them because I didn’t like the covers, but now I can promote them with confidence. I’ve said I don’t have imposter syndrome, but maybe I do. I’ve never been fully confident thinking my books are any good to read, but my trilogy is good, and I remembered that editing them. It’s a good story arch, and I want people to read them.

Just because I like the story, I’m reading my duet over again. Not with the express desire to edit them, though I am making changes and editing out the “when” sentence structure if I come across it. I also like “because” and with a quick sentence rewrite, I can usually edit it out. These aren’t bad–I hadn’t fallen into a writing tic while I was writing these, and I’m reading more for pleasure than to edit them. After those are done, I have a lot of admin stuff to do, and I’ll spend most, if not all of my free time in in the second half of November and all of December getting them done:

*Changing from the MailerLite Classic to the updated and newer version of MailerLite. We need to do that by February and I’ve heard stories ranging from it’s super simple to horror stories of lost email addresses. There’s a tutorial somewhere, so I need to watch it. Luckily, I don’t have anything complicated there, just one landing page and one welcome email that is sent to everyone regardless of how the sign up. It should be cut and dried, if not, dare I say, easy, but we’ll see. I’m going to set aside a whole day for it because I don’t want to stress myself out. This is a good time to redo my welcome email anyway, make it prettier, but I think I’ll have to redo the integration I have set up with Bookfunnel. I have 771 subscribers right now. I’m not running an FB ad to my freebie at the moment, so the past few subscribers I’ve managed to gain have been through the back matter of my books only. I’ll send an email letting my subscribers know that my Christmas novel is live, then I won’t send one out until I’ve moved my account over. That’s the top item on my to-do list for now.

*Publish my rockstar trilogy to IngramSpark. I always let a couple of months go by between publishing on KDP and publishing on IngramSpark. I’ve heard it’s good to let them settle, and it’s what I’ve always done. I’ve never had an issue publishing to IS after KDP, so I’ll keep doing it that way. The interiors are the same, but I’ll have to tweak the covers. IS uses different paper and the spines are thinner, which means I usually have to adjust the font to avoid it lapping over to the front or back covers. I can’t do that until my trilogy is done and published with new covers. I want to put the Lost & Found covers back there pushing readers who like trilogies to buy my other one. This is a back matter page of Safe & Sound telling readers I have my rockstars available:

I made the graphic in Canva. One of the best things you can do is use your back matter wisely! I do the same things with all three of my standalones–if you like this standalone, I have another available, and you can find it here.

*Make hardcovers for the rest of my books. I offer hardcovers of my Cedar Hill Duet and Rescue Me. That was all the further I got with my hardcovers, but now that my books will be 100% finished, I can make hardcovers of the rest. I’ve never sold a hardcover (only a handful of Large Print I can’t offer anymore because KDP blocks them as duplicate content) but I like how the buy-page shows more than one buying option and it shows readers that I’ve invested in my book to make other versions available.

*Try to enjoy the downtime and the holidays. That list will take me more than a few days, and while I’m not writing, I’m going to try to enjoy the holidays. I have a tooth that’s going to need to come out soon (I have PTSD from a root canal gone bad and I will never subject myself to another one) but I’m going out of town from November 15-18th and I would like to have it done after I come back. There’s no good time to have an extraction, and my November is busier than it’s ever been, but having an achy tooth in my mouth ups my anxiety, and I would like it out the sooner the better.

*Plan my next books. I’m thinking of another duet, but bigger ones, 150k per book or so. I want to incorporate the underground king concept I blogged about here, with the kidnapping/psychic element that’s been knocking around in my head. To write these as well as I want, I’m going to need to read some dark mafia books. I want these dark too, but not in the sex kind of way, well, not only the sex kind of way. Drugs, crime. Violence. The vibe I was looking for when I wrote All of Nothing. I don’t have a plot yet, and I still have to put my series up, but it’s never to late to plan.

*Try to enjoy walking more. I have a lot of negative feelings associated with going for walks, and I’m trying to sever those ties. When my ex-fiancé and I would talk, I would go outside for privacy. As our relationship deteriorated, I didn’t go outside just for privacy, I would go outside because we were fighting and I needed to walk off the nervous energy (and the fear but let’s not get into that). Walking now brings back a lot of those memories and feelings. We’ve been split up for a long time, and I’m used to him not being in my life anymore. Our five years together were more tumultuous than happy and splitting up was better for both of us. Still, those feelings are still there, and I need to push them aside to enjoy walking again. I also walked to get air at the beginning of the pandemic to try to quell my anxiety. I wasn’t anxious because of COVID though I know many were. I was anxious because unbeknownst to me at the time, I picked up a box of Snuggle dryer sheets, and they were wreaking havoc on my girlie parts (more specifically, they gave me bacterial vaginosis). Three years later, I’m still having issues my gynecologist doesn’t seem to understand, and now walking brings back those feelings too–of sucking air into my lungs, trying to calm down because while those dryer sheets were screwing up my body, they were also screwing up my mind. I’m still dealing with the side effects of that unfortunate purchase, but at least I know the cause of my health issues. There’s nothing keeping me from going for a walk and enjoying what that time outdoors used to mean to me–plotting my next book, listening to music, listening to publishing podcasts, and enjoying the health benefits that come with moving your body. I’m already doing better for myself recognizing those ties, I just need to do better with making time to do something about it.

I should probably make this a different blog post, especially since I don’t know if I’ll have time to post anything next week, but I wanted to chat about some of the new features KDP has been rolling out.

The first one is KDP will allow you to schedule when your paperback goes live. This isn’t the golden ticket people think it is though. While it’s nice you can schedule a release date, that doesn’t mean it’s on preorder. The only way you can schedule a preorder of a paperback is to publish it through IngramSpark, and I really discourage you from using IS to fulfill Amazon orders. You’ll end up with a bunch of problems, that, unfortunately, will be difficult to fix with the way I’ve heard IS’s customer service is since the pandemic and Robin Cutler’s exit. I’ve also heard that you need to have your files available before you choose a date (this was in an FB group and I have no idea if it’s true or if placeholder files can be used), but that actually makes sense, because the only nice thing I can see about pre-scheduling is that you can order author copies before your book goes live, and they won’t have the ugly stripe over the front. Paperbacks aren’t a big consideration when it comes to my books–most of my sales come from KU. I like to offer paperbacks, and Vellum makes it easy to format them and make them pretty. Lots of people were excited about this new development, but they still need the 72 hours to review your book and you can’t order author copies until your book has passed that review. As far as I can see, nothing much has changed there, except you can schedule and check it off your launch list.

For more information about using IS with KDP, look here: https://www.authorimprints.com/ingramspark-pre-order-amazon-kdp/#:~:text=Pre%2Dorders%20are%20accumulated%20in,or%20before%20the%20publication%20date.

The other thing KDP is playing with now is opening up audiobook creation using AI. So far, it’s by invitation only and in the beta stages. Beta in KDP language can take years (look a how long the new reports were in beta and how long the old reports hung around) and how long it will take to open to all of us (or at all) will be something to keep an eye on.

Of course this caused an uproar in the writing and author communities. Some are really against AI anything, and some totally embrace whatever AI has to offer. I like to be in the middle–there are good and bad aspects of it, and I think if you totally brush it aside because of the bad, you can miss out on the good. I don’t like using AI art for covers, and it’s becoming prevalent with romance authors because hot men who haven’t been used to death are becoming harder and harder to find–especially for authors on a budget who can’t afford to look beyond DepositPhotos. The only problem is, I can spot these a mile a way and all the covers that use AI to generate a man standing in a suit with a blurry background behind him are starting to look the same. No matter how long or how hard I have to dig, I will always buy stock. I believe in paying the photographer and I believe in paying the model. I don’t think creating an audiobook is entirely in the same category as using art. AI in this regard, I believe, is just technology moving forward. There is already text-to-voice options on devices, and using AI in this way is just opening up accessibility for readers who want to listen to the books they consume and for authors who can’t afford to pay a narrator. I don’t like gatekeeping and telling someone they shouldn’t create an audiobook because they can’t afford it is in its own way. There could be drawbacks to using text-to-voice, and we won’t know what those are until authors start reporting back. There needs to be way to correct the voice if it pronounces something incorrectly. The voice has to sound natural, but those voices are getting better day by day. On the author side, you have to take the time to listen and edit if that option is available. You can’t just upload your book, let AI spit out an audio version and put it up. There was one woman on Twitter who was using AI to translate her books into German, but she wasn’t using someone who knew German to double-check the translation. That’s irresponsible and scary. God only knows what it was coming up with. The last thing I want is to be a laughingstock in Germany. Good luck to her, I guess.

When it becomes available, I’ll give it a try. Apple already has given its authors a chance to create audiobooks with AI, (and people were excited about that, so I don’t know why KDP is getting flack) so it will be interesting to see how this goes. Just because I try it doesn’t mean I’ll publish with it. I might not like the voice choices, or because I write dual first person POV, I may not be able to publish using a female voice for the female POV and a male voice for the male POV. I’m definitely not going to shun something before I can even experiment with it. Ethics aside, you have to think of what you want for your business. I don’t listen to audiobooks–my mind drifts too much for me to concentrate–but I’m hearing now that listening to an audiobook is experience. It’s doubtful something that KDP offers will compete, but it’s nice to have to the option.

That’s about all I have for this week. I’ll be out of town November 15-18th. We’re driving down to the Twin Cities and we’ll be going to Mall of America, looking at a few museums, and going to the zoo if the weather permits us to be outside. I may take a pass at blogging or just put up a quick post I’ll write Sunday. Things won’t be calming down much after that either–we have The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to watch that following Tuesday, then Thanksgiving. We’ll be at the end of the month after that, and I have my birthday to celebrate. We’re going to Napoleon and out for a fancy dinner so I’m really looking forward to that. All in all a very busy month and I think I’m going to sleep all of December.

For my last piece of news, A Heartache for Christmas is available right now–it went live today! The reviews have been coming in through Booksprout, and readers are really touched by the story (and I am really really in love with the cover!). You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Heartache-Christmas-VM-Rheault-ebook/dp/B0CM2BLRPF/

Enjoy your week, everyone!

Mid-Year Check In and Author News

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open journal with rose petals and pencil. text says midyear check in and author news

It’s not exactly mid-year–we’re two months past that, but I thought I would write a check in, look back and what I’ve accomplished this year, and try to drag myself out of the self-pitying hole I fell into these past few weeks due to circumstance beyond my control.

January started with a bang, as that is the month I published my Lost & Found Trilogy. By no means did I have a strong launch, and while Give & Take, the first book in the trilogy, has sold better than a lot of my books, the trilogy in total has earned less than a thousand dollars since release. Depending on where you are in your career, that may sound pretty good to you, but I’ve put money into ads and promos and actual take-home from that total is less than five hundred dollars. Still though, despite my ongoing doubt about the covers, readers seemed to have liked them so far, and I’m going to put the first one in a promo in September and see how it does.

February, March, and April were slow months, only because I was busy writing my rockstar trilogy. I thought the first book was going to be a standalone but it turned out, like most side characters do, they wanted their own stories told, and I spent December of 2022 to May of this year writing them. Editing took some time, more adding and rewriting than I’ve done in the past to make them cohesive since the two others weren’t planned until I was almost done writing book one. I did the usual Amazon ads for my backlist, struggled with if I wanted to be on Twitter anymore, helped a friend edit and format one of her books, and mostly kept my head down.

In May, I published Faking Forever, a fake fiancée standalone I wasn’t sure about. I haven’t checked the reviews to see if anyone liked it or not. The reviews from Booksprout were favorable, but it’s not often, in my experience, people will really tell you what they think. Since I published it, it’s made less than a hundred dollars, and I really don’t know what to do about it. My other standalone, Rescue Me, has made around five hundred since I published it in October of 2022, but that’s also been on sale for a while now and I ran Facebook ads to it. That five hundred is not take-home, but if I look at how much I spent on ads to push that book, I just get depressed, so I won’t do that here. I’ve been thinking about pulling it off sale and putting Faking Forever at .99 to see what that does. I have a hooky hook for the ad copy, so I may do that at the end of the month and see what happens. I won’t do that until my SNAFU with KDP and the last book in my rockstar trilogy has worked itself out, but more on that later.

June and July were for getting my rockstar trilogy ready to release. Lost a beta reader and a friend, so that was disheartening, not only because I was counting on her feedback, but you know, it’s tough when people move out of your life for whatever reason. My other beta/friend/co-worker is still plodding along even though my books are (kind of) up. I told her I need to get them going for marketing purposes and if she finds anything I didn’t, I can change out the files later. She found only a couple things in book one, nothing major, so I’m confident that books two and three are just as clean. It’s not like I haven’t released books without feedback before, but I was trying something different that didn’t end up working completely in my favor. Such is life.

This month, August, I had a free book promotion opportunity fall into my lap. I had passed it by and then it opened up again, so I decided to take that as an omen and enter my book. I put Captivated by Her for free from August 4-6, and I’ve been moving some books–528 at the time of this writing, but we’re only half way through the promotion. Not a lot of people read free books, though, and so far that movement hasn’t gone on to the other books in my backlist. I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks if anyone reads it and goes on to buy/borrow Addicted to Her. I think the cover changed helped, but that duet has earned only a little over three hundred dollars since I published them in June of 2022.

I also lost a cat this month. Blaze was sick when we got her (we didn’t know that though), and we’ve had nothing but ongoing medical issues with her for the past five years. It was a relief to make the decision after some bloodwork, but I miss her dearly and it’s been such a blow to my mental health as this is the first time in over twenty years we haven’t had a cat in our apartment. We can’t get another unless my financial situation changes because we were grandfathered in when this property management took over our apartment building. We’ll be starting from scratch with them, and I can’t afford the pet deposit or pet rent they’ll charge us if we wanted another. I’m still missing Harley, too, so I’m just not going down that path right now, and maybe never will again.

So to recap the year so far:

Books published: 6.5-7
Royalties: $1,711.49 as of this writing. (I write my posts in advance so add, oh, I don’t know, ten bucks to that total unless for some reason I got extremely lucky.)
Ad spend: I don’t feel like doing the math, but I’ve spent $569.00 on Amazon ads, ran an FB ad to Rescue Me off and on for a couple of months and bought a Freebooksy promo through Written Word Media for Give & Take at $120.00. So obviously, the total royalties are not all take-home, but rarely is any author’s.

I haven’t found a way to get “sticky” with Amazon, struggling to “level up.” Each book I write has the “will this be the golden ticket?” feel about it, and then each book has a lackluster turn. I cleaned out my newsletter subscriber list–I got rid of 103 inactive email accounts. MailerLite is making me move over to their new platform so once my trilogy is out and I’m done sending newsletters for that for a bit, I’ll do the migration. Apparently it’s not smooth, and I’m worried about the setup I have with BookFunnel. I learned just enough to put in place what I needed for them to collect email addresses for me when I give out the link to my reader magnet. If that gets messed up, I’ll have to learn it all over again, and that will be painful since, for the most part, I’ve given up drinking for my physical health.

Ghost Town’s Fate:

So, I was able to publish book one and two without an issue, but I was one of the (un)lucky ones and KDP asked me for copyright proof for the cover images for book three. I sent them what I had from DepositPhotos–screenshots of the licensing agreement that they give you when you download/purchase. I also gave them a screenshot of my DepositPhoto’s account profile. I’m lucky that my email address and my physical/mailing address match what I use for KDP as well, so they know it’s me. The first rep approved my proof and told me to go into my account and resubmit the books for publication. I did that, but then got another email from their content team and was asked for proof again. So I sent what I had before, plus the screenshot of the first rep’s email that said my books were okay. It didn’t take them long to get back to me and say my books were approved and would take up to 48 hours to publish. So, that is where I am now–this morning when I got up, they were still in review, but while I was writing this, I checked my dashboard and they have moved into “Publishing.”

So I’m going to assume that the third book is going to go through after all, and maybe by the time you read this, it will be live. (At the time of this writing, it’s only been 15 hours since the last email correspondence.)

As far as reviews, I put the books on Booksprout, and this trilogy is the slowest to get picked up since I started offering books. Only 16 of 35 copies have been claimed for each book, and either it’s because they’re long (I did warn readers of that in my note to readers section) or because no one cares about aging, depressed rockstars. Maybe both. Whatever the case may be, I hope this isn’t going to be more of the same when the books move out of preorder and are live. Once the third book is actually published and accessible, I can start ads to the trilogy, but I hope these do better than my gut is telling me they will.

I have to be honest, all this put me in a real downward spiral last night, and just an FYI, crying in the grocery store is not a good look. It also gave me a really queasy feeling for the past two days and I have not felt well. You’re probably thinking I sound burnt out, and I probably am. When that book goes through I’ll have published 7 this year, 8 if I get my Christmas novel done and published by November like I hope. I haven’t made much progress on it, as I went through my Ghost Town paperback proofs myself (glad I did) but that took an extra little bit of time. When I finish the first draft, I need to put it aside and take a real break while it breathes. Watch the shows I want to watch, read through some of the books on my Kindle (I still need to read the Hunger Games sequel before November). Network with some authors in my FB groups, experiment with making videos for TikTok. I need to find my joy because it has been sucked right out of me, and never did I want to throw my laptop over my balcony as much I did last night.

I don’t have any books planned for the next little while. I have that King’s Crossing 6-book series I need to polish up and publish starting in January. I’m having second thoughts about the covers, and my proofer/coworker went through them some time ago, and I haven’t looked at her feedback yet. That will be a project and I will love to get those off my plate. I also haven’t read them myself in a long time, so it will be fun to read them one last time before I publish.

Anyway, so stats here show that this blog post will take 10 minutes to read, so I’m going to wrap it up for now and get going on my Christmas novel. Have a great week, everyone, and thanks for listening!

Catching up with what I’m doing and Bits and Pieces of Publishing News.

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Lately my blog posts have been a hodgepodge of little things to make up a whole post. It’s tough when you don’t have a lot going on, and sometimes I feel like my blog posts are the blind leading the blind. I don’t have much to offer in way of advice, particularly because I haven’t found anything that is working for me sales-wise.

Anyway, like everyone else, I’m glad the election is over, though I”m sure we’re far from finding peace. Hopefully that won’t deter readers from reading like it has over the past few weeks. I can’t tell you the number of authors who have complained about sinking sales. It is what it is. I’m in the hole with my ads this month and I paused all of them and created a few new ones to target holiday romance for my series. What’s really nice is that Amazon now lets you run ads to your series page which allows a reader to pick up all the books with one click.

We’ll see how that goes. I haven’t done the math to look at read-through for all my books, but I can do that now, out of curiosity. The last book was published in May of this year, so I only have five month’s of data too interpret. Using the read-through instructions and formula by Malorie Cooper on Dave Chesson’s Kindlepreneur website, read-through is dividing the copies of the second book sold by the copies of the first book sold. You have to do a little math if you’re in KU.

Remember, the number of KU pages read divided by the number of KENPC pages in your book will tell you how many books those page reads equal to.

Doing the math, I have sold 214 of the first book in my series between June 1st 2020 and October 31st. That total includes both sales and KU pages read.

I have sold 97 books (together with sales and KU pages read) of book two.

That’s a read-through of 40%. 40% of my readers who read book one went on to read book two.

A profitable series will have a strong read-through for all the books, and we can calculate read-through of book two to three doing the same math:

Book two’s sales and KU page reads was 97 books. Book three has a total of 76 books sold. (Together with sales and KU reads.) That makes read-through (76/97=) 78%

And read-through from book 3 to book 4 using all the same formulas: 88% read-through. Meaning 88% of people who read book three will finish the series and read book four.

According to Mal Cooper, my 40% read-through from book one to book two could indicate a problem. I already know from reviews that the reception of my male main character is lacklustre at best. As I’ve said in the past, a physically damaged character is neither sexy nor romantic. Besides trying to market the book as a beauty and the beast retelling, there’s not much I can really do. His injuries make the whole book. It’s nothing I can go and change to encourage read-through. My sales from book one to two will just have to be a lesson in the future. It’s also a reminder if you’re going to invest time in a series, you need to hit it out of the park or the other books won’t matter. Your book one won’t be good enough to entice readers to read them.

I will keep an eye on my ads, make sure they stay profitable. With the holiday season approaching, if I can grab a couple sales and come out ahead, it will be worth advertising.

photo taken from their website

In other news, IngramSpark has decided to give ISBNs away if you publish through them, like Kindle Direct Publishing has done all along. The only problem with that is if you publish on Amazon and use their free ISBNs, you can’t turn around and use those on Ingram. Then you take the free ISBNs from Ingram and all of a sudden your book is listed under many numbers, and that doesn’t sound good to me.

I realize buying ISBNs in the States is a big pain, not to mention very costly, but when people say you need to invest in your business, this is what they’re talking about. You need to protect your work. I buy my ISBNs from Bowker and use the same paperback ISBN on both Amazon and Ingram. That way my paperback is listed under one number. The one I paid for that belongs to me. That’s important to me. I also use an ISBN number for each of my ebooks. Some will say that’s a waste of money because Amazon will assign your book to an ASIN number, but then if you’re wide, you can’t use that ASIN number as that belongs in only Amazon’s system. So there again, you have different identifying numbers for every ebook platform you publish on.

There is has been argument in the past that you can’t use the same ISBN number for a .MOBI file and an ePub because they are different formats. Then you have people who say that a digital file is a digital file. When I went wide, I used the same ISBN number for my ebooks across all platforms and nothing bad happened. I can’t imagine this would even be an issue now that Amazon asks you to upload an ePub to their platform instead of a .MOBI file.

You can have Ingram distribute to Amazon, but I’ve heard of people having trouble with their books being available (listed “out of stock” instead) and you don’t have access to your KDP dashboard and you can’t run ads if Ingram supplies your books to KDP. It’s always better to go direct where you can. It might take a little hassle, but then, we went indie to stay in control, didn’t we?

I’m 20k into my new project, about a man tasked to finding a husband for his boss’s daughter in exchange for a portion of the company he helped build. It’s going well, though I feel like no matter how much planning I’ve done with this book, I’m pantsing it. Maybe I’m just tired or maybe I’m still not used to writing in first person present, but it’s coming along, and if I keep up the slightly faster pace than a NaNo participant, I should be done with it by the end of the month. We’ll have to see if that happens. I have a lot coming up in the next couple of weeks, namely a longer work schedule, Thanksgiving, a couple of birthdays and possible jury duty. I write when I can, though, so if not by the end of the month, by the middle of December, for sure. Here’s a sneak peak of a sliver of a scene I wrote the other day. There is potential for spin-off books, but I still have my 6 book series I need to polish to release next year. I’m grateful there is so much to write about.

Man in suit leaning against a grey stone wall. Text: I meet his eyes. They’re hard, bits of frosted green glass. “We’re beyond that now, don’t you think?” We aren’t talking about sex, we aren’t talking about love. We’re back to his fucking fifty percent and what he’ll do to get it. “I—” “I’ll fulfill my end of Dad’s bargain. Sit back and collect.” He nods, turns to go. “Don’t come back, Colt. There’s nothing between us anymore.” “Don’t fool yourself, Elayna. There never was.”
created with Canva Pro. Photo purchased on depositphotos.com

That’s going to be all for today! I hope you have a productive week! Good luck to those participating in NaNo!

Adding categories to your book

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In Monday’s blog post I talked about relevancy and mentioned that the categories you put your book into when you publish should closely fit what’s inside your book as possible.

There are a lot of questions about categories, such as, is there a list to choose from and where do we find it?

Amazon hasn’t provided us a list of categories they offer their authors, but they do let you add categories to your book–up to ten. All you have to do is ask.

But how do we do that?

The first thing we need to do is find a book that is most like ours on Amazon. This can be a traditionally published book, or choose an indie who has been publishing for a while who knows what’s going on. Meaning, they have probably already done this process, and we’re just going to borrow their categories.

To show you, I’m going to do The Years Between Us. The categories that the book is in right now is what I chose when I published:

You can choose two, and I think I did choose Coming of Age Fiction and, well, let me look. It’s easy enough to remind yourself if you go into your Bookshelf on KDP and look at the ebook details.

Unfortunately, it made me save changes and republish, so if you plan on going in and doing any promotions or anything, don’t check on your categories until you’ve done what you need to do because while KDP publishes your “changes” they lock you out. Anyway, so you can see that Amazon stayed true to what I set when I first published, but those categories are not a complete representation of what that book is. The Years Between Us is an older man/younger woman novel, and I’m not sure if that’s actually a category, so we need to snoop around. I don’t think it is, but I do know that I can do better than the categories that book is in.

I’ll go to Amazon and search in the Kindle Store, Older Man/Younger Woman and see what comes up. It can be a naughty sub-genre, and mine isn’t dirty like that. So finding a comp book might take a little bit of time. We might need to click through a few books to find a close match.

I’m going to go with this book for the sake of this blog post, but once you know how to check a book’s categories, you can check as many books as you like and search for as many categories as you think will fit your book.

The cover doesn’t look that naughty, and it’s obviously an older man/younger woman romance. I haven’t read it, and never heard of Suzie before, but let’s see what categories she used for her book:

I can’t choose Billionaire Romance because The Years Between Us doesn’t follow that sub-genre, but this isn’t the only way we can see what categories this book is listed under. If you go to www.bklnk.com, you can use this website to insert the ASIN number for any book and we’ll hopefully see if there are more categories this book is in.

Click on Catfinder and enter the ASIN in the field provided.

After you click, Go Find! you’ll be presented with a list of categories that book is in on Amazon.

It doesn’t look like there are going to be any discoveries here, except I do see that it’s listed in Romantic Comedy. She may have asked for that category to be added. That’s not something I can use for my book because my book is all about drama and secrets.

Let’s try another book. After some hunting, I found Reckless Suit: A Hero Club Novel, by Alexia Chase.

You’ll remember The Years Between Us wasn’t even listed in contemporary romance, so that’s a category we can add right away. But looking at the categories for this book gives me a couple of ideas. City Life could be one, because the book does take place in a huge (albeit made up city), and I could add Women’s Romance Fiction. So there are three I could add. Contemporary Romance, City Life, and Women’s Romance.

If your book has a lot to do with families, you could probably add Family Life Fiction, but that might be more aimed at a women’s fiction book dealing with family issues. I would prefer to aim my book at readers who want more romance in their plots.

So now that we have the categories we want, how do we as Amazon to add those categories?

  1. Go to your KDP Dashboard and click on HELP in the top right menu next to Sign Out.
  2. Scroll to the bottom and click on Contact Us. That will be a yellow button on the bottom left of the page.
  3. Click on Amazon Product page and Expanded Distribution.

Then click on Update Amazon Categories.

There it will even give you a template you can fill out, and from here all you have to do is give them your book’s ISBN and ASIN numbers and the exact categories you borrowed from the books like yours.

Here is my list for The Years Between Us that I found from searching Amazon for books similar to mine, and using www.bklnk.com for the string of categories that Amazon requires you to include:

  1. Kindle Store » Kindle eBooks » Literature & Fiction » Contemporary Fiction » Contemporary Romance Fiction
  2. Kindle Store » Kindle eBooks » Literature & Fiction » Genre Fiction » City Life Fiction
  3. Kindle Store » Kindle eBooks » Literature & Fiction » Women’s Fiction » Women’s Romance Fiction
  4. Books » Books » Literature & Fiction » Genre Literature & Fiction » City Life Fiction
  5. Books » Books » Romance » Contemporary Romance

This is the exact text in the message I sent to Amazon through my KDP account:

Please add these categories to The Years Between Us in the .com store.

The ASIN number is: B07Q4143R1
and the ISBN number is: 978-0999677568

Categories to be added (list each category as a separate line item for all applicable titles)

  1. Kindle Store » Kindle eBooks » Literature & Fiction » Contemporary Fiction » Contemporary Romance Fiction
  2. Kindle Store » Kindle eBooks » Literature & Fiction » Genre Fiction » City Life Fiction
  3. Kindle Store » Kindle eBooks » Literature & Fiction » Women’s Fiction » Women’s Romance Fiction
  4. Books » Books » Literature & Fiction » Genre Literature & Fiction » City Life Fiction
  5. Books » Books » Romance » Contemporary Romance

Thank you for adding these to my book! Your time is very much appreciated! Stay safe and healthy. 🙂

I’m always polite, and I’ve never had a problem asking them to do something. It takes about a day to get a response, and if you give them the entire string in the categories you need added, they shouldn’t have a problem fulfilling your request. Unfortunately if you want to add your book’s categories to the other stores like Canada (.ca) or the UK (.co.uk) then you have to send separate messages. (This is per Bryan Cohen and what he teaches in his ads course. I have never added categories in the other stores.)

As with the relevancy post on Monday, you want to make sure you choose the most relevant categories for your book. The correct categories will only help Amazon sell your book by putting it in front of readers who most likely to want to read it.

I always give credit where credit is due, and I learned this tip doing the Amazon Ads Profit Challenge with Bryan Cohen. He’s going to leave the video up for a little bit, so if you want to watch him in action choosing categories for his book, you can check it out here. https://www.bestpageforward.net/july-2020-challenge-prep-work/ The talk about Categories starts about 25 minutes in, but the whole video is very useful! 🙂

Amazon got back to me before I published this post, and they added my categories without an issue:

Let me know if you’re going to add some categories, and what your thoughts are with adding the correct ones. I hope you found this useful! Until next time!