Kindle Unlimited

 The rise of the independent author ("indie") has set up a curious dance between the indies, their readers, and Amazon, which leads the world in indie-published books.

It all goes back to a little over fifteen years ago, when Amazon introduced the Kindle.  The idea of an ebook had been around for a while, and business people had long been reading documents on the screen (and often then printing them out), but the Kindle was different.  About the dimensions (width & height) of a small paperback but much thinner, its screen showed what looked like a page in a real book, not like text on a web page.  And the person reading could choose their favorite font to read it, Times or Helvetica or whatever, and make it bigger or smaller for reading ease.

Great!  People loved it!  But wait!  There were hardly any ebooks to read on the Kindle ereader.  Amazon begged traditional publishers to digitize some of their list, quickly digitized a whole lot of out-of-copyright classics (Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, here we come), and launched.

Immediately people bought up Kindles and loved them.  One could have dozens of ebooks ready to read on a device lighter than one paperback.  Half a million were quickly sold.  But there were fewer than 100,000 titles for those half million readers to read.

Enter the indies.  Everyone knew that there were thousands of people out there who imagined they could be great writers if they ever had a chance, or who had been trying to interest traditional publishers for years without success.  Come right on in! cried Amazon.  Give us your Word document, and we'll do the rest!  No more gate-keepers1  Anyone can publish a book!  And so KDP was born (Kindle Direct Publishing).

It was very exciting for the indie authors who got in early.  Pretty much anything would sell, and because the indie books were new, readers snatched them up in preference to the out-of-copyright classics they'd had to read in high school or college.  It quickly became obvious also that there was a great reader hunger for books "just like" popular books, and the indies could provide that.

For example, traditional publishers wouldn't publish a book too similar to one already out there, not even because of plagiarism issues, but just because they thought the market was saturated. But it wasn't. These were the days when the "Twilight" series, teenage romance with vampires and werewolves, was very popular.  Amanda Hocking sold hundreds of thousands of copies of KDP ebooks about teenage romance with vampires and werewolves (different setting, different names, different plot of course).

And traditional publishers rarely let their authors publish more than one or maybe two books a year.  KDP didn't care.  Anyone could crank out a book every couple of months, or put up a whole lot of books that had been written over many years, and KDP was fine with that.  So if someone found a new favorite author, they could count on lots of ebooks by that author on Amazon.

Other companies noticed what Amazon was doing.  Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Borders (with their Kobo branch) all jumped into ebook publishing.  And they started offering 70% royalties, rather than Amazon's 35%.  At the same time, traditional publishers all raced to digitize anything to which they had the publishing rights, and they put their own ebooks up on all platforms.

So Amazon had been first, but others were coming up fast.  KDP quickly raised its ebook royalty rate to 70% (at least for ebooks priced from $2.99 to $9.99) and tried to figure out how to hang onto its indies, who were starting to "go wide," that is publishing on all ebook platforms, not only Amazon (including me by this point).

Once traditional publishers had all their books as ebooks for sale on Amazon, B&N, etc., of course, that spelled the end of the brief golden indie age.  Now readers could choose from a great many ebooks, including new releases from the traditional publishers, often better than the average indie book (once a lot of people who should never have imagined themselves authors saw what Amanda Hocking was doing and thought they too could make big bucks).  Maybe gate-keepers weren't as bad as we thought?

But Amazon's big advantage was its indies, even if the indies quickly found out they weren't going to come anywhere near Amanda Hocking's numbers.  Amazon still had more indies than anyone else.  Even if a lot of bad indie books were flooding the market (by this time most lucky to sell 3 or 4 copies, ever), there were also a lot of good indie books, promising readers lots and lots of titles by their favorite author, not only one a year, and books "just like" some book everyone loved.  So Amazon had to make sure its indies didn't wander off ("go wide").

It did so by promising benefits to indie authors who stayed exclusive to Amazon.  It tried offering various marketing tools to its exclusive indies, but soon it settled on "Kindle Unlimited."  Avid ebook readers could pay $10 a month (it's recently gone up to $12) to "borrow" and read as many exclusive indie ebooks as they wanted.  Given that most indie ebooks are priced around $4 or $5, this was a bargain even if one just read three books a month.  But avid ebook readers, especially in genres like contemporary romance, might read three or more books a week.  They loved it.

Indie authors are paid on the basis of how many pages a KU member has read.  (Your Kindle knows what you're reading, how fast, how far you've gotten...  Does it know what you had for breakfast?)  It's helped a lot of indie authors find readers in today's saturated market, because someone would "borrow" and read an indie book through KU, knowing it cost them nothing extra, even if they might not lay out $5 for an ebook by an unknown.

(Incidentally, KDP has also started publishing paperbacks, and a lot of indie authors like having a physical book, but for almost all KDP authors ebooks far, far outsell paperbacks.)

That brings us to my own current experimentation with KU.  My ebooks are mostly "wide," available on all major ebook platforms.  But fantasy is a genre that can do well with KU members.  So I've made my "Shadow of the Wanderers" exclusive to Amazon for 90 days (one promises exclusivity for 90 days, then can renew if desired).  It's never sold very well, either as an ebook or under its original title of "Voima," when traditionally published.  Yurt fans don't like that it's not Yurt, but it's one of my favorites.

 

So if you are a KU member, you can read it all summer for free, or anyone can buy it.  Here's the link.  It's epic fantasy, in the spirit of Norse legend (though without Thor and Loki).  I've given the opening below to whet your appetite.  Happy reading!

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

______________________________________________

Roric put his sword across his knees and his back to the guesthouse wall.  When they came to kill him in his bed asleep, they would find him neither in bed nor asleep.

Swallows swooped through the twilight air, then disappeared back toward the barns as the sky went from yellow to darkest blue.  He shifted on the hard bench, listening but hearing nothing.  Even the wind was still.  He reached into the pouch at his belt and absently rubbed the charm there with his thumb:  the piece of bone, cut in the shape of a star, that had been tied into his wrappings when he was first found.

It would be good, he thought, to see Karin one more time.  But it did not matter.  They had said their farewells as though they knew they would not meet again short of Hel.

The moon rose slowly above the high hard hills to his left.  His shadow stretched at an angle, dark and liquid, across the rough surface of the courtyard.  He bent to tighten a shoelace and turned his head to be certain the soft peep off to his right was nothing more than a night bird.  There was another shadow next to his.  Someone was sitting beside him.

 

Ebook Covers

There's an old saying, "You can't tell a book from its cover," meaning that what something looks like on the surface doesn't necessarily tell you what it's really like.  It's certainly true literally, that sometimes a very boring cover will be found on an exciting book, or an intriguing cover on a very weak book.  And we all know in getting books from the library that often their hardcover books have just plain, cloth covers in a solid color, with the old paper jacket long gone.

But how about ebooks?  You aren't going along a shelf, either looking for something specific or waiting for a title to catch your eye.  You're browsing a series of small ("thumbnail") images of covers.  As ebooks burgeon in numbers (there are at least 8 million on Amazon), authors try to make their book covers say, "Buy me!" to separate them from the pack.

Now, back when I first published the first book in my major fantasy series, A Bad Spell in Yurt, this was way pre-ebooks.  Books were sold in physical bookstores.  But it had an intriguing cover by Tom Kidd which made it stand out from the other fantasy books on the "new releases" table.  (The image below is the Kidd cover, now the ebook cover on Amazon.  I paid him for the rights to be able to use it again.)

I picked up enough readers with that cover (and have continued to do so over the years) that the rest of the series has sold just fine, with varying covers.

But recently I decided to redo the covers on the series novellas.  A novella is a short novel, and these were designed to recount events in between the events of the six main novels.  They stand alone (that is, you don't need to have read other books in the series), so I was also hoping to lure in new readers.

Originally I published them with covers I made myself using a simple graphics program.  The Lost Girls and the Kobold ebook has magical mountains as a major plot component, so I used a photo I took of mountains (the foothills of the Rockies, between Cody and Yellowstone), and the Below the Wizards' Tower story takes place in a city with towers, on the ocean, so I used a tower (Fougères castle in Brittany).

 

But are these covers intriguing enough?  I have nothing against my own covers, and my "blog book" (image and link at bottom of this page) features my own photo of Fleckenstein castle in Alsace.  But these novellas had been doing well, so I decided to "reward" them with new covers from Self Pub Book Covers.

Independent book publishing (which is what I do) has, as I have discussed previously, spawned a whole service industry of "helpers," including companies that design covers.  This company specializes in "pre-mades," where the graphic artist designs a lot of covers with different images, and the author comes along and chooses one that looks good and puts their own title on it.

(This works for the graphic artist, who can crank out some "pre-mades" between assignments, and who doesn't have to worry that the author will come back and say, "I know I told you to make the cat a tabby, but now I've decided it should be white.  Plus add a dog. No, not that kind of dog."  It also works for the author who might have trouble visualizing a good cover without some samples.) 

So below you'll see my new covers.  They are by respectively R.L. Sather and Viergacht.  How do you like them compared to the originals?

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For aspects of medieval history (rather than fantasy), see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other platforms, both as a paperback and an ebook.

Book covers

There's an old saying, "You can't tell a book by its cover."  What it means of course is that what something looks like on the surface is not necessarily an indication of what it's really like.

However, when it comes to indie publishing, this isn't really true.

There are something like 7 million ebooks for sale on Amazon, at least half of them written by independent authors.  It's going to be hard to find the book the reader might find most interesting in all those books.  This is where the cover comes in.

A cover is an ad for the book.  It should catch the reader's eye and give a sense of what the book is about.  A look at the cover of my book, "The Starlight Raven," will indicate at a glance that it is teen fantasy.

You may not even have thought about it, but if you go to a regular (physical) bookstore and look around, you will see that the most elaborate, almost-photographic-realism paintings are the covers for fantasy, that horror covers tend toward red and black, that SF has planets and/or spaceships (and rather angular lettering), that mainstream fiction (stories set in the modern world) often show part of a person but not their face, romance has people embracing (or at least standing close), and so on.  (Medieval romance, like my "Sign of the Rose," needs a castle too.)

Non-fiction often is illustrated with a photo, as is my medieval social history book, "Positively Medieval" (see below). Even the font for the title varies with genre.

So a cover doesn't really illustrate the story as much as give you an idea of it.  Its purpose in life is to look intriguing enough that someone who likes that particular genre will read the description (blurb).  (This is what is on the back of a paperback.)  If the description is good, with luck the reader will read the first few pages, whose purpose is to make the reader buy.

But how about physical (print) books?  They need a cover too.  The cover on a paperback wraps all the way around, so if it is laid out flat the back cover is on the left, the front cover is on the right, and there's a strip in between where the spine goes (with title).  You may not even have thought about it.

One of the challenges for indie authors is getting good covers.  You can make your own covers--I made the "Positively Medieval" cover from my own photograph.  But with the explosion in indie ebook publishing, there has also been an explosion in services for the indie author, including providing covers.  My "Starlight Raven" cover is an original painting by Dane of eBookLaunch.  My "Sign of the Rose" cover is from SelfPubBookCovers, where graphic artists with some extra time on their hands create covers that they think would be interesting, using stock photos combined in interesting ways, and authors look through the (extensive) collection to find one that they think would work for their book.  Each of these is sold to someone only once.

Amazon has their own "cover creator" for people who are both unartistic and cheap, where, for free, indie authors can pick an image out of Amazon's collection and put their  own name and title on it.  The problem here is that in a particular genre you may see the same image used again and again for different books.  Better try for something unique.



© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For medieval social history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

The Sign of the Rose

As I've noted before, we indie fantasy authors have to work to promote our ebooks.  And I tried something new with my latest, "The Sign of the Rose."  Here's the link on Amazon.

I enrolled it for a campaign in "Kindle Scout."  They eventually did not select my book, but it was an interesting experience.  For a successful "KS" book, Amazon themselves publish and promote and advertise it, which would be great.  There are so many good books on Amazon (and bad ones), that it's easy to get lost.

Amazon is essentially crowd-sourcing the decision of which indie books to publish.  Authors (like me) are invited to put their books up on the Kindle Scout site, where the first two chapters are available to give readers a preview.  Amazon restricts entries to full-length books and to certain fictional genres only (mystery, romance, science fiction/fantasy, and general literature).  Readers can preview the books for free and vote for their favorites by "nominating" them.  They can nominate up to 3 (and can change their minds if they find a better one).

At the end of 30 days, Amazon looks at the ones that have been the most popular and chooses from those which ones it will publish.  To reward nominators, those who have a "winning" book among their nominations at the end of the 30 day period will get the entire book, free, a full month before anyone else.

Kindle Scout is, as the name suggests, designed for ebooks to be read on a Kindle.  But since my novel was not picked up by KS, I've also made it available as a print book, for those (like me) who prefer a physical book to reading on a screen.

Hope you enjoy the book!  It's as close as I've ever come to writing real historical fiction set in the Middle Ages.  There's no magic in it, and it's definitely inspired by medieval history.  In fact, the inspiration for the book is a story written in Old French around the year 1200, "Guillaume de Dole."  I loved the strong heroine and the plot twists and thought modern readers would enjoy the story too.  (I did recast it.  Medieval authors routinely did things like have the hero and heroine fall passionately in love just by hearing about each other, without ever meeting.  Or authors would forget to include an important plot point and just mention much later that it had happened.)

What we call "romance" was invented in the twelfth century, as was so much else.  This book is a romance in the medieval sense--adventure, glory, and love all mixed together.  But I think it also passes muster for the modern definition of romance, although no bodices are ripped.

For those of my fans who want Yurt-or-nothing (and I know you're out there), never fear, more Yurt is coming.  But that pesky day job slows my writing way down (so inconsiderate), and this story just showed up in my brain late in the winter and demanded to be told.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Indie book promotion

As I discussed in an earlier post, one of the big challenges of publishing as an independent (rather than through one of the Big Six New York publishers) is getting noticed.  No one can buy a book if they don't know it exists.  Standing on the corner with a wheelbarrow full of books, like a stereotypical old-fashioned oyster seller, might work, but only for print (physical) books.  It's not going to work at all for an ebook.

So the first question after a new author publishes an ebook (typically through Amazon, B&N/Nook, iTunes, or Kobo) is, "How can I promote/market my book?"  No one likes to hear, "It's a ton of work and probably will have minimal results."  "There must be a secret!" they insist.  No, if there was a secret, either we'd all be doing it (in which case it wouldn't be secret), or else the few who had figured out the Secret would guard it with their lives, not wanting to dilute its effect.

It's actually simple and not secret all.  First, write a book that's as good as you can make it, including editing, cover, and description, as well of course as excellent content.  Make sure it's in a popular genre (tip, romance, SF/fantasy, and mystery/thriller usually do OK, poetry and children's books do not).  Then let everyone you know (especially on social media) know about it.  Then hope the Sales Fairies drop a big load of fairy dust on you.  Then write more books, even better than the first.  ("Your results may vary.")

Social media promoting can be difficult because, if your Facebook is nothing but "Buy my book!" no one will bother checking it out.  Same goes for Twitter.  I blog (well, duh, you say as you read my blog), but I doubt I get many sales of my books as a result.  Most people who come to the blog just seem to want to know about medieval farm animals (or, as one person recently asked, "Why were chickens sacred in the Middle Ages?"--hard to know how to answer that one….)

This is why promotion companies have sprung up.  Authors give them money, and they send out an announcement of a Special Sale on an ebook to a mailing list made up of people who have specifically asked to be notified of books on sale in their favorite genre.  This is targeted selling at its best, much better than randomly tweeting "Buy my book!" to anyone left on your Twitter feed.

The biggest and best (and most expensive) is Bookbub.  In the fantasy genre, they have roughly 1.8 million folks on their mailing list, and they anticipate that, on average, about 1800 of these will buy a particular book as a result of their mailing.  This is 1/10 of 1%, even though the recipients of the promotion email specifically asked to be notified, and indicates why most authors' own random mass blasts don't have much effect.

But 1800 sales in a couple days is good.  It is believed that a decent proportion of all Amazon ebook sales are due to a Bookbub promotion.  Sale of a first book in a series will, if the book's any good, lead to follow-on sales for the rest of the series, at full price.  This is why authors line up to give Bookbub lots of money.  There are other, less expensive promoters of this sort, but BB has by far the biggest mailing list.  They can afford to be very picky about which books they promote, which in fact helps, because the recipients of the emails know the books have been pre-screened for decent writing.  (Though some good books never get picked!)

I had a Bookbub promotion this weekend, A Bad Spell in Yurt on sale as an ebook for only 99 cents, on Amazon and other e-tailers.  As the first in the Royal Wizard of Yurt series, it's the gateway drug to the rest of my books.  I managed to sell over 2500 copies at the sale price, so I'm hoping that readers will want to continue with the whole series.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016