The month of June has past with several of my books in the Kindle store on Amazon. I priced the download of my books very cheap. I’m an unknown author so my paperback books in the list of choices in the different genre is near the bottom of thousands of titles. I’ve searched Amazon for them myself, and by the time I went through a few hundred books, I was tired of looking so I know how buyers feel. Then there is the fact that $16.00 plus $4.00 postage is a lot of money to pay to take a chance on a paperback written by an unknown.
So I’ve tried Kindle. I was amazed at the wide variety of my books sold in June including one download of my western book, The Dark Wind Howls Over Mary. Still my best sellers are my Amish books. Now part of the Kindle buyers will know me as an author. If they liked what they read, they will find my books by searching for my name. They will watch for my latest books in the future and tell someone else about my books. Word of mouth has always been a great way for me to get buyers. Also in the back of each of my books is my bio with email address and a list of my other books.
In June, I didn’t have an easy experience with kindle downloading. I wanted to use PDF because that’s the format I downloaded my books to publish and save, but the system warned that PDF conversion didn’t format well. Amazon was working on that but couldn’t guarantee conversion with PDF yet. I found that out. The sentence structure was all out of whack. I don’t have Microsoft, but my Open Office should work just as well. I found the format that worked one time didn’t the next. I’ve went from PDF to rft, to hmtl to doc. I kept trying until I found a format that is fairly neat, I hope. Thank Goodness for the preview pages so I could check. Two years ago when I put the first book in my mystery series in kindle, I didn’t finish filling out the form. When someone in the mystery community asked when my books would be on Kindle, I finished the download only to hear about the odd sentence structure so I stopped the production and resubmitted that book. Next problem was the cover downloads. They are blurry. I was wondering why Amazon didn’t transfer the covers from my book page to Kindle. Checked the Kindle store and found my covers had been transferred.
What a difference a month makes. The last books I downloaded didn’t give me as much trouble. The different formats to download a book weren’t mentioned so I used PDF. Amazon has fixed their system to automatically help with conversion when needed before publishing. Hopefully, my next Kindle books are neater now. A discussion on Amazon mentioned the problems with the format downloading so now I feel better, knowing this wasn’t a ME thing.
Amazon’s 35% royalty wasn’t very much. By July 1st, a new royalty has been added with a choice of 35 or 70%. I stopped all my books and repriced them so that I get a descent royalty. The bottom price is $2.99. Now my books are back for sale. The Kindle download at $5.99 is still much cheaper than the price of my paperback books. With 70% royalty, I have to pay for the buyer’s download of the book according to the size. In my case that amounts to 2 – 6 cents.
Here is a review of Neighbor Watchers from Luv2read in Amazon kindle community discussion group I started titled New Amish Books On Kindle. She looked for my Amish books and found my mystery series book one Neighbor Watchers so she downloaded it, too.
She wrote I loved this book! The characters were so well written, it was easy to see it played out in my head as I read. Gracie was my great grandmother and Sam Elliot was the sheriff. Gracie & Melinda get into quite a few predicaments trying to "Help" solve the murder across the street. It kept me turning the page to find out what mischief these two adorable old ladies would get into next. I see more books in the series. I would definitely buy them.
Another time she wrote
I highly recommend this series to anyone who has ever known or had a nosy elderly neighbor that seemed to ALWAYS know what is going on in the neighborhood. This is a funny laugh out loud easy read. Neighbor Watchers is really unique as the time period is the turn of the century.
Of course, the thing I can’t do in the Amazon discussion groups is advertise that my books are cheaper in my online bookstore( http://www.booksbyfaybookstore.weebly.com ), on ebay or from me personally. Not everyone wants to read a book from a screen on Kindle. Since my books sold on Kindle in June, it looks like what buyers are looking for is a bargain. Next month I’ll update you about July sales after I’ve raised my prices. What I need is to get the word out to buyers of paperback books that I am the keeper of my book bargains and am glad to accommodate customers.