Ebooks

Just when you thought the fake reviews scandal ushered in by Locke-gate was over, along comes newbooklaunch.com to assist Locke-minded authors who are willing to pay for Amazon reviews.

On the site’s Book Reviewers Wanted page, someone named “Jerry” makes the following offer:

——————–

Book Reviewers Wanted

Buy A Book & Agree With Tags to Receive $2 Plus Cost Of Book

Post A Pre-Written Review & Receive $5 More!

Example:

Buy a $2.99 ebook & Agree with tags 3-5 days later we send you a review to post

You Receive: $9.99 Via Paypal $7 profit for a few minutes of work!

——————-

Notice how these people aren’t even being paid to write fake reviews, they’re only being asked to post reviews written by someone else under their own name and Amazon account. And many who respond to this offer will be blissfully unaware that this kind of activity is against Amazon’s policies and can get you banned from the site.

Still, with so many people hurting in this economy I’m sure the offer looks very attractive to potential “reviewers”. But what about the authors who are obviously paying “Jerry” to recruit these not-quite-sock-puppets to post pre-written (e.g. fake) reviews?

Their fraud hurts all of us by shaking consumer trust in Amazon book reviews, and by subjecting all of us to whatever measures Amazon elects to take to put a stop to it. Remember, after the last fake reviews scandal Amazon revised its review policies to bar authors from reviewing one another’s books, then it went a step further by retroactively removing book reviews written by authors.

If you are an author or publisher who only wants honest, legitimate reviews for your book(s) and would like to see this kind of fraud stopped, please report the newbooklaunch.com site to Amazon. Here’s how:

1. Login to your Amazon account

2. Click on the Help link in the upper right-hand corner of any page on the site

3. Click the yellow Contact Us button in the right-hand column.

From there, you’ll have to navigate a series of drop-downs to zero in on the issue you’re reporting; just keep selecting ‘Other’ until one of them includes a ‘Customer Reviews’ option. Select it, and you’ll be able to enter an email and send it to Amazon.

Be sure to include the URL for the page with the offer quoted above:

newbooklaunch.com/book-reviewer/

When you become a blogger you move into the role of content creator and media publisher.

As a publisher, you need to establish a posting schedule and stick to it. After all, when you ask people to subscribe to your blog, most people like to know what’s coming up or what to expect.

And meeting that schedule will go a long way toward establishing trust with your readers.

Your next challenge is doing it on a regular basis.

Sure, when you’re a new blogger it seems pretty easy to create 2, 3 or 5 new articles a week. But what’s going to happen 6 months from now? Is the enthusiasm you have now going to carry you all that time?

6 months of articles at 3 per week is 78 articles you’ll have to come up with. It’s starting to sound like a lot of writing, isn’t it?

But if you’re like most of us, the most difficult part of sticking to that schedule isn’t doing the writing: It’s figuring out what to write about.

Trust me, there’s going to come a day when you realize you need an article to post to your blog tomorrow, and you feel like the bottom of an old streambed. Dry, dry, dry.

You stare at the screen, wondering how all those other bloggers seem to be able to crank out posts day after day. Every post seems to have a reason for its existence, an enthusiastic audience, and lots of meaty content.

All you’ve got is that blank screen.

Don’t despair, there is help.

How to Create Tons of Blog Post Ideas

On a recent flight I pulled out my iPad and started a mind map about a topic I’ve been wanting to blog about.

I love using mind maps when I’m at the conceptual stage of writing an article. There’s nothing that helps me organize my ideas as quickly and efficiently as well as a mind map, and I highly recommend you check them out.

This article was written from a mind map developed in iThoughts HD, my favorite iPad mind mapping program.

The subject was this:

How do you know when your new blog is ready?

This thought had stuck in my mind when I was working on the Hub & Outpost Method of Social Media Marketing webinar. It seems to me that the best hub to use when you venture out into social media is a blog.

But you don’t want to be sending people to a blog that’s not ready for visitors, do you?

I put that question at the center of my mind map. Next I just started to free associate about the things you need to have on your blog to get started.

I created a branch on the mind map for each item that occurred to me that you would need for a blog to be “ready for visitors.” Most of them are common sense, like what plugins you need, having subscriptions available, and collecting email names with an opt-in form..

You can do the same thing without a mind map, by the way. Just use an outline instead.

Both outlining and mind mapping lend themselves to developing hierarchies of information, or “branches” of items as you develop the details of your idea.

For instance, under “Plugins” I started to list the different plugins you really want to have on your WordPress blog when you get started.

Under “Customization” I listed the different ways you could do this quickly and at little to no expense.

And under “Opt-in” I added a sub-list of 2 items: “picking an email provider” and “offering a freebie”.

Just putting in words like this isn’t like writing at all, it’s a completely different activity, and kind of fun. After all, all you’re doing is making a list. How hard can that be, right?

By the time I was through I had 9 items like this, each with their own sub-list of items. The whole thing took about 20 minutes.

Now for the good part

What I had was the outline of a useful article that would help any new blogger organize themselves. In fact, it seemed like an article that would be bookmarked for later use, something all bloggers hope for.

But take another step with me. There’s more to this article outline than just a great blog article. Since I had 9 items each with its own sub-list, the next step was apparent.

I treated each top level item, like “Opt-in,” as the subject of its own new blog post. Each topic in the sub-list under that topic would become a subhead in the new blog post.

I changed color to salmon and started writing just the headlines of these new blog posts. It was surprisingly easy.

For instance, under “picking an email provider,” I wrote the article headline, “Why Every Blog Needs an Email List.”

Under “Offering a freebie,” I wrote “How to Create an ‘Ethical Bribe.’”

Now I have 9 blog posts, and the most difficult part—picking good subjects and deciding what topics to deal with in the article—is already done.

Do you see where this is going? With a small amount of thoughtful planning, you can create a system of article generation that will keep you in blog post ideas forever. Yep, it really works.

(Attentive readers may have already realized that the blog post from Monday, How to Create Foundation Posts for your Blog, came directly from this mind map. And you also know that the remainder of topics contained in this one mind map will continue to produce blog posts for weeks to come.)

So the next time you get stuck for a topic, don’t despair. And don’t settle for just one article, either. Get out your mind mapping program or even just a pad and a pen and start outlining.

You’ll be glad you did.

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

I have no problem with authors deciding not to put (or keep) their books in KDP Select because there are a number of good reasons not to sell an ebook exclusively through Amazon. What does bother me is when people put a book into KDP Select with unrealistic expectations, or don’t do their homework about how KDP Select works, or blame Amazon when their books don’t sell, and then announce that KDP Select is not a good strategy to follow for independent authors.

It is my hope that this post will help educate authors about what KDP Select can and can’t do, thereby creating more realistic expectations and better decisions about whether or not KDP Select is right for their books.

However, before reading the rest of this post, I do recommend that every author read the KDP SELECT FAQ page first so that they have a basic understanding of how the program works.

Four Things KDP Select CAN NOT DO for you:

1. If there is some reason why people are not buying your book when they run across it (too few reviews, negative reviews, badly designed cover, ineffective product description, badly written or formatted free excerpt, wrong price–too low or too high), then simply being in KDP Select will not change this, and people will not start to buy or borrow your book just because it has the Amazon Prime designation.

2. If people can’t find your book when browsing in the Amazon Kindle Store because the book isn’t in the right categories, or doesn’t have the right key words or tags associated with it, simply being in KDP Select will not make it easier for people to find the book, and they will not start to buy or borrow this book. (There is no special promotion by Amazon of all KDP Select books).

3. If your book has demonstrated its salability, is in the right categories, has the right keywords and tags, but the book has not sold enough in the last 30 days to put it in the top 100 of the popularity lists for its categories (or in the last 24 hours to put it in the bestseller list of those categories), then simply being in KDP Select won’t change its discoverability, and people will be unlikely to find the book, and they will not start to buy or borrow this book.

4. If you do a free promotion of your book using the KDP Select free days, this will not automatically ensure that it gets a lot of downloads, and, even if it gets a lot of downloads, this will not always result in an increase in sales or borrows of the book.

For example, if your book fits in category one above (there are problems with the book itself in terms of why people don’t buy it), doing a free promotion won’t necessarily cause a lot of people to download it. I routinely look at the free lists of the categories I am interested in, and I routinely take a pass on free books that don’t appeal to me for a variety of reasons. In this case a book that already has problems probably won’t get enough downloads to cause a rise in visibility afterwards. And, even if a number of people decide to take a chance on a book, just because it is free, when the book goes off free it will face the same problems it had in selling that it had before the promotion.

Or, if the book is only listed in one category, and that is one of the larger categories (say it is only listed in contemporary fiction-where there are 109,000 books and where not every free book makes it to the top 100 free books in that category), then the free promotion may not gain enough attention for the book to make it visible after the promotion is over. Again, this means the promotion will not result in increased sales or downloads.

Or, if you do nothing to publicize your book’s free promotion, even if it is in the right categories and has demonstrated its ability to sell well when people find it, there is no assurance that enough people will download it (under the new algorithms) to result in increased visibility when the sales are over. This again means the promotion will not result more sales and borrows.

In fact, a failed promotion (one that generates few downloads) may hurt your book’s sales since the book will not be selling at all for the days of the promotion, lowering your average sales for those days. In this case your book will be worse off in visibility than before the promotion.

Three Things KDP Select CAN DO for you:

1. If your book is already selling well enough so that it is visible on one of the browsing category popularity lists or bestseller lists, then people who are looking for books to borrow through Amazon Prime can now borrow it. Since borrows translate as sales, KDP Select can help you maintain your visibility and add to your earnings for the book. A number of authors have mentioned that they can’t imagine that readers would bother borrowing a book unless it was a highly priced book, but this does not seem to be the case.

At $3.99, my two historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, have been borrowed 4108 times through Amazon Prime in the last year and made me $8,161 (just short of $2 per book). These borrows have also helped keep my books visible between promotions.

2. If you do a promotion where you get enough downloads to put you on the top 100 of a popularity category list, being in KDP Select will result in at least some increase in sales and borrows after the promotion.

However, to ensure you get enough downloads, you need to make sure your book is ready (cover, description, categories, etc) and that you have done adequate marketing of the promotion. (see my Simple Steps to a Successful KDP Select Free Promotion.)

This has become particularly important because of the increase in the number of free books that are available in any given day, and the change in the algorithm for translating downloads to sales that has limited the impact of all promotions. Presently, if you don’t break through into the top 100 Kindle free book list with your free promotion, your promotion will be unlikely to bump your book up high enough afterwards to effect subsequent sales (unless your book was already doing well, and the promotion is designed to maintain that visibility.) Using sites like the Author Marketing Club, having your book picked up by a site like Pixel of Ink, or doing a paid promotion, for example through BookBub, is increasingly necessary to achieve that level of success. Here is a recent post at BookBuzzr on 7 Resources to Help with KDP Free Days Promotions.

If your promotion is successful (you break into the 100 Free Kindle books list), and the book is saleable, and you have your book in categories where you have a fighting chance of being visible after the promotion is over, KDP Select will increase your sales and borrows.

For example, the two weeks before my recent December 28-30 KDP Select promotion, Maids of Misfortune sold an average of 25 books a day, and Uneasy Spirits sold an average of 9.8 books a day. The first 10 days of January, after the promotion, Maids of Misfortune sold an average of 43 books a day, and Uneasy Spirits sold an average of 40 books a day. In addition, in those first 10 days of January 907 people borrowed one of these books.

3. If your book has already had positive reviews and you have a successful KDP Select promotion, you will increase your total number of reviews, which will improve the chances that people will buy the book when they see it.

Although you may garner a number of negative reviews (people who wouldn’t normally buy your type of book may give it a try if free, find it is not to their taste, and a number of them seem to enjoy telling everyone why they didn’t like it.), the increased number of positive reviews ultimately improves the overall credibility of the book.

For example, before doing my first KDP Select promotion last December, when the book had been selling for 2 years, I had 38 reviews for Maids of Misfortune, with an average 4.3 stars. A year later, after numerous free promotions, I have 191 reviews with an average of 4.2 stars. The slight slippage in stars is more than out-weighed by the positive impression of having those many positive reviews gives of the book. Probably even more importantly, Uneasy Spirits, my sequel, which had only been out 3 months before the first promotion (and only had about 8 reviews), now has 88 reviews with an average of 4.3 stars. I would never have gotten this number of reviews in just over a year without the KDP Select promotions I have done.

In summary, if your book is not selling well on Amazon (it is not at least visible on one of the one browsing categories) don’t sign that book up for KDP Select if you are not planning on putting in the work to do a successful free promotion. You will be disappointed, and you will be going exclusive to Amazon in exchange for no discernible benefits.

On the other hand, if your book has the potential to sell, it is in marketable categories, and you work hard on putting together an effective promotion, KDP Select can earn you more money in sales and borrows after the promotion, maintain a level of discoverability that will permit your book to continue to make money, and help your book accumulate a healthy number of reviews. How many sales and borrows you make a month (in comparison to what your sales are out side of Amazon), and how willing you are to continue to do promotions when those sales begin to dwindle (as they will almost inevitably), will then determine whether or not you want to keep your book in Amazon’s KDP Select.

I hope this helped clarify a little what to expect from KDP Select and what not to expect so that any decision you make as an indie author will improve the likelihood that readers will find and buy your books.

This is a cross-posting from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.

This post, by L.J. Sellers, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

I recently read this Facebook post, which had dozens of Likes:

A little advice, writers. Don’t think you have to put a whole lot of words on paper every day. What I find is a few words today will encourage more tomorrow. The point is for those few to be brilliant.

I respectfully disagree… that is, if you want to make a living as novelist, or least sell moderately well. If you’re writing just for your own pleasure, you can do whatever you want. But striving for a few brilliant words every day will not produce a finished novel, let alone a body of work.

I realize many writers have full-time jobs and kids at home to take care of. I did too, for most of my writing career. But I found that setting aside blocks of time in which I could write whole scenes for chapters worked better for me than trying to write a little something every day.

And brilliance? Why even think about it? Most readers aren’t looking for brilliance; they just want a good story with interesting characters. So laboring over every word and every sentence is too paralyzing. If you want to produce something for people to read, then you have to finish the story.

Done is always better than perfect.

I’m not implying that I don’t care about quality or craftsmanship. I definitely do. In the second, third, and fourth drafts, I polish my prose as much as I can. But I don’t worry about producing beautiful turns of phrase or poetic descriptions. As Elmore Leonard says, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

In my prose, I strive for clarity, readability, and rhythm. In my word count, I strive for consistent daily production while I write the first draft. Getting the whole story down in a short period of time is my goal—because it works. The longer it takes to write the first draft, the more I struggle with keeping the whole story in my head and making the timing work out.

I’ve known people who spent five or ten years writing the same novel and never finishing it. That must be purposeful. They must not want to finish because finishing means letting someone read it. And that’s scary. I understand.

But I want people to read my stories, and I don’t care if no one ever calls my writing brilliant.

The woman who wrote the post may have thought she was being encouraging to authors. But telling writers to strive for a few brilliant words every day is bad advice on both levels… unless she was trying to thin out the market competition.

What do you think of that advice? What works to keep you motivated?