KDP Select - A New Self-publisher's Experience

I published my first short story (A Cat Named Mouse: Pig Hunt, Vol. 1) back on April 20th, 2012. I was actually curious about the KDP Select program so I started writing a few shorts - to practice the publishing process. I've been surprised at the reception of the books. Definitely not best sellers, but they're selling. I used a pen name, Nick James, as the style of writing is not reflective of what I would prefer to be associated with (Sci-Fi, Dystopian).  In fact, I've used more vulgarity in those books than I had in my 32 years of life.

I've since published ten more shorts and they have all been selling (8 more Mouse volumes, a collected works and a How-To book). The KDP Select program allows me the option of selecting five days in which to give the books away for free.  In return, I must make the books available through Amazon exclusively for 90 days.  I've enrolled all but one of the books in this program.  I've given away over 700 books so far this month.  I'm not certain if the freebies have resulted in any sales.  The majority of the books are sitting at around the 500k rank on the sellers list. The How-To book is around number 10 in the speech category and 80k overall, but it just finished the freebie promotion, so those numbers will unfortunately climb.

The one book that I didn't enroll in KDP Select was a prequel that I wrote in the beginning of May. I put it on a different site for free, to see if there is any difference in sales. You can find it here.  For the month of May, it actually sold the most (4 copies as of the 30th).

From what I understand, the KDP Select program allows premium users the ability to borrow books. I'm not entirely certain how it works, but from what I gather, they can borrow one book a month. Amazon puts up a fund of about $600k, then at the end of the month they tally up how many books were borrowed through the library and the authors get a share of the fund. I think the average amount that Amazon pays the authors for each borrow is around $1.50.

Of all my books, I received my first borrows on my most recent upload, How to Swear Like a Pro. Two borrows the day after it came off of a three-day free run. It actually had the most downloads of all my free giveaways too, at almost 300 in three days. (Not that I expect many people who have downloaded actually read it - there seems to be a lot of collectors).

Here is May's report so far:

Combating Low Sales

While having a book become a best seller overnight is probably possible, for the majority of us indie authors, it most likely will not happen. That doesn't mean that our books are all trash, but we really need to work at getting them out there.

I was pleased when I started receiving reviews on my books.  A friend actually reviewed one of my first books and I told him to not review any others as it didn't show up as a verified purchase. I had let him read a word file before I published.  While I have been tempted to pay for reviews, I have decided against it in order to see how far an indie author can go on as little upfront cash as possible.  So I just sat back and waited for the reviews.

After a while, it was nice to see a lot of five star reviews. I've had a couple four stars and a three star as well, which I'm actually pleased about. For a new series of short stories, when a potential reader looks through the reviews, they will see good, honest opinions and I think that matters more than just a bunch of five stars.

I would like to get a couple sales each day, so I've been looking at what I can do better for the books.  I've been tempted to top the series at ten, make a collected work of ten short stories and sell it at the cost of two shorts ($1.98), then only publish collections of short stories.  We'll see how that goes.

My titles were a little vague as well. Originally each book was titled: Mouse, Subtitle.  I've since changed them to A Cat Named Mouse: Subtitle, Vol. #.

I also noticed that my covers were causing a bit of confusion among some of the forums where I had posted them for critiques.

The first cover:

I did a search on Google for Photoshop Movie Poster Tutorials and sifted through hundreds of different styles before finding a few that I could use. The text for Mouse was done separately, the background was the most time consuming and the image was made by my good friend, Nancy.

The problem that surfaced the most was that people weren't sure what Mouse was. Was he a cat or a mouse? Also, the volume number was a bit small for their liking.

Instead of shoving aside their ideas, I went with their experience and made some changes - not only to the cover, but to the title of the book as well.




The new cover:

When I started writing the series, I wasn't writing them with any goal in mind, other than testing the waters of self-publishing.

I decided to clean up the cover and bring in the feeling of country life that the books were giving.  The new title, A Cat Named Mouse seemed to have an effect immediately and I made a few more sales. Although the title of each volume is still a bit too small for my liking, I haven't had the time to go through all of the covers to redo them as people have been pushing me to write more.

I've decided to slow down the pace of publishing and lengthen the shorts from 2500 words to 5000+ words.  Since the minimum price that Amazon allows is $0.99, I want people to get value for their money.

Marketing

So with the newly revised covers, I decided to do a bit of marketing.  I came up with a business card design that was cheap and simple.  I added a QR code with a small write up: Experience the world through the eyes of a vulgar cat named Mouse.

The code takes people to my author page on Amazon, where they can sift through my various works.

Handy for posters or business cards.









I also started a twitter account and have been following people with the various #followback hash tags.  Using bit.ly, I added my author page to my profile description and people have been clicking on it.  So far I'm maxed out at 2001 people that I've followed and I have about 1400 followers.  My tweets were promoting the free days for How to Swear Like a Pro and after the end of the promotion, I just went back to tweeting humorous quips, with a small bit.ly link to the book.  Seems to be generating some clicks.

I need to go through my followers and remove those who haven't followed me back, so I can get past the magic 2000 number.  I think there is a ratio involved, where I need around 2000 followers before I can follow more.

I've also started a Facebook fan page for the Mouse series which has 26 fans and in each of the books, I have links to the fan page as well as to the other books in the series.

Conclusion

While I had hoped that the books would sell a few copies each day, they are selling, which is nice to see.  If the books do not ever achieve a best seller status, having a lot of books might at least make up for it.  Time will tell.

My novel, The Connected: Origin of the Sleepers, is still being edited and I've been going over cover ideas with some graphic designers. I haven't decided on a price yet, but I'm leaning towards $3.99 for the ~80k word novel.  I'm not sure if people have been shying away from $0.99 books, having been inundated with poor quality reads from other indie authors, but only time will tell. Perhaps my short stories are part of the $0.99 problem?

Steady Progress

Things have been going well. I have eight short stories under the pen name, Nick James. The series is called A Cat Named Mouse. After having them published for about a month, I've been averaging about one or two sales per day across the entire series.  Not enough to let me quit the day job, but nice to see anyways.

Just published a new non-fiction short, called How to Swear Like a Pro.  It will be interesting to see how this one does compared to the fictional shorts.

The Connected novel is still undergoing an intensive edit and I've been working on another short novel called Health and Safety.

Well, back to writing!