Giveaway
I’ll start with this because it will be the quickest. I plan on starting up two contests when my book is finally live and I’m setting up for one of them now. They are the following:
1. Amazon Review Contest- Basically, at the end of March, I will put the name of everyone who made an Amazon Review of Beginning of a Hero into a Randomizer and 3 people will win a free PDF version of the sequel, Prodigy of Rainbow Tower. I’m hoping this goes smoothly and I’m not faced with a slew of ‘one sentence 5-star reviews’, but that’s the risk.
2. This one is more difficult and the prize with be 3 people winning free Beginning of a Hero ebooks or a paperback if they lack the ebook reader. I took a tip from Candace Knoebel and made this contest dependent on my Facebook Author page. The official contest will start when I have 150 likes on my page, so I trust the everyone will share, like, and enjoy. Here’s the page:
http://www.facebook.com/CharlesYallowitz?ref=hl
Thank you for any help and support that you’re willing to provide. A self-published author can only succeed through a strong word-of-mouth campaign, which I’m really hoping to have.
Oddities in Publishing
I got my book in a saved draft for Kindle, Pub It! (Nook Publisher), and Createspace (paperback). Smashwords didn’t have this option, so Ipad users will have to wait a little bit longer. Sorry about that. Now, two oddities have come up that I should mention instead of feigning ignorance because that would be wrong.
- The indentation on the Nook is a mess. I spent 2 hours fighting the system and trying everything. I followed their instructions to the letter and looked on forums for advice only to find that it cannot be helped. The bizarre part is that I have the entire document formatted exactly the same all the way through. My book is from a much older version of Microsoft Word, which might be part of the problem. I honestly don’t know and I apologize for the wild indentations. I tried my best to fix it, but I’m out of tricks. At least Kindle only does this a few times. I’ll try to fix it again when the time comes.
- The paperback is not going to be 6 x 9. It’s going to be 8.5 x 11, which is your standard printer paper size. The reason is that at 6 x 9 my book is 621 pages and would cost $20. At 8.5 x 11, my paperback will go for $10, which I think is more sensible. The size might be strange, but I’d rather not terrify people’s wallets just to get a normal sized book.
Question
I’m trying to figure out how to do the pricing for Kindle and Nook. I’m probably going to do a .99 cent opening month, but I’m not sure what to do after that. I’ve been told that e-books don’t sell when they go over $1.99, but Kindle has a program that anything $2.99 or higher is a 70% royalty instead of the 30%. With my June deadline of proving that this is a viable career path, I’m tempted to up Beginning of a Hero to $2.99 at the end of March. Does anyone who published on e-books or buys a lot of e-books have any suggestions? I don’t want to put the price too high because while I hope to make enough money to make this a career, I want people to read my book.
Legends of Windemere 
Are you following Catherine, caffeinated blog? Loads of good advice.
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I’m not sure. That sounds familiar, but I recently started following a lot of new blogs. I’ll take a look for it. It’s Catherine, caffeinated blog?
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Try this: http://catherineryanhoward.com/
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Thanks. I’ll follow and give her posts a look.
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Woo hoo! I don’t know how I missed this post. I’ll be looking into your contests, and I’ll spread the word.
As far as pricing goes–that’s tricky. All I can really tell you about that is I have a healthy appreciation for books that are priced at about 2.99. I buy a few that are less than that and some that are more than that, but not as often.
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I don’t want to go high than 2.99, but I think I should start at .99 cents for the first month. It’s hard for me to figure out because a lot of friends and family have been pushing for me to stay at .99 cents. Though, these are the same people who won’t like my FB Author page or spread the word, so I don’t know if I should listen to them.
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I know. I don’t know why it’s so hard for close friends and family to be able to visualize authors as actually succeeding and being able to live the dream. Maybe they just don’t want to see us get hurt, but sometimes it just feels like a lack of belief in our abilities. Okay. Done venting now. May that be the only negative thing you ever know of me saying (or writing)!
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I think with family it’s a bizarre sense of ‘protecting loved ones from failure’. Sadly, this also ends up being a strike against the author because family should be part of the core of word-of-mouth support. I’m still baffled on the silence of friends. Though, the 5 highly supportive friends kind of make up for that.
My personal opinion on venting is that sometimes it has to be done. The alternative is to keep things bottled up and that can lead to festering. From experience, I can say that is not a good thing.
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I’m ashamed of my momentary bad attitude. So sorry I shared it!
I hope you have a wonderful day.
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No reason to be ashamed. We’re human and it happens. Don’t have to be sorry. 🙂 If you’ve noticed, I tend to vent my frustrations more often than I probably should. So, I’m the last person to judge a vent. 😉
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Thanks! 🙂
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Ye Velcome.
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