KDP

Author Tools: How to Change the Price of Your Kindle Book in KDP

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Author Tools – things to help you get your writing done

Want to change your price in KDP but struggling? Shelley Hitz has a video to show you how, along with a step by step process.

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How to Change the Price of Your Kindle Book in KDP

kdp-selectAre you having difficulty changing the price of your Kindle book on Amazon?

This tutorial will walk you through the simple and easy steps on how to change the price of your kindle book in KDP.

The Step-by-Step Process

Today, I want to share with you how to change the price of your kindle book in KDP.

Here are the easy and simple steps on how to do it.

Step 1: Log in to your Amazon author account.

You can click on this link and you will be directed to sign in on your account: https://kdp.amazon.com/.

Step 2: Choose the book that you want to lower the price of.

So you simply have to scroll down the page and click on the title of that book that you want to change the price of.

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Deadly Proof–Anatomy of a Book Launch

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This post by M. Lousia Locke originally appeared on her blog on 2/21/15.

I am proud to announce that Deadly Proof, the fourth book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series, is now available for sale (see links below).

As with the other three novels in this series, Deadly Proof finds Annie Fuller and her beau, Nate Dawson, investigating a crime that will lead them (and the reader) into an exploration of the lives of working women in the late 19th century—in this case women who held jobs in the printing industry.

If you read my last two posts on my marketing strategy for 2015, you will know that I decided to take all my full-length books out of KDP Select and upload them everywhere and make the first book perma-free. My hope was that this strategy would provide a fertile field for this newly published book. So far, my hopes have been realized.

First of all, Maids of Misfortune, the perma-free book, is still being downloaded at a nice pace, making it highly visible in the popularity lists on Amazon and on the free lists in the iBook and Barnes and Noble stores, and I can see sell-through going on. The sales of the second book in the series, Uneasy Spirits, and now the third, Bloody Lessons, have been increasing each week. And now, some of these new fans of the series should be just about ready to  try this new book.

Second, while more complicated than back in the day when I only had to upload my books on Amazon, the process of uploading Deadly Proof for publication in multiple online stores was quite easy since I had recently gone through the process for my other novels and my short story collection.

 

Read the full post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

 

My Kindle Countdown Deal Epic Fail

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This post by Juliet Rich originally appeared on her site.

Over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, I offered The Flaming Geeks Book of Geeky Trivia for .99 on an Amazon Kindle Countdown Deal. I didn’t have tiers, so it was 99 cents the whole time until it went back up to the list price of $2.99.

As I did when I offered it as a Free Book Promotion, I only marketed it by sharing it on my personal Facebook page. I did this a couple of times during the promotion.

The results:

Free Book Promotion – ~150 free downloads (no money for me), followed up with ~5 sales immediately after the promotion ended (yay money). Plus it netted me my first review (yay review!).

Kindle Countdown Deal – no downloads, no sales, no new reviews

 

Why didn’t it work?

Reason #0 – I need to do more marketing in general. But that was true of both cases.

Reason #1 – Everyone who follows me on Facebook who wanted it already had it.

 

Read the full post, which includes four more specific reasons plus analysis, on Juliet Rich’s site.

 

The Perks, Pitfalls, and Paradoxes of Amazon Publishing

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This article by Nina Shapiro originally appeared on Seattle Weekly on 11/4/14.

Amid a boycott and bicoastal culture clash, Amazon has created a new model of publishing. Where does that leave authors?

One day in 2012, Megan Chance, a historical-fiction writer from the Kitsap Peninsula, arrived at Amazon.com’s South Lake Union headquarters for a meeting. The retail giant’s sleek new campus was bustling with software engineers of various nationalities, marketing mavens, and MBAs. The floor Chance visited, though, was practically empty. “There were, like, four people there,” Chance recalls. “It was bizarre.”

The two-decade-old online retailer was still getting a relatively new and little-understood division going—one devoted not only to selling books on the vast digital platform it had created, but also to publishing them. With the frenetic speed of a start-up, Amazon Publishing had in a few years launched a series of imprints devoted to different niches: mystery, romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and more. Now, the company’s fledgling imprint devoted to her genre, Lake Union Publishing, wanted to publish Chance’s latest work, Bone River, a novel about a 19th-century ethnologist who develops a mystical connection to a mummy.

Chance, in her early 50s, was at a low point in her career. She had spent two decades writing books that languished on bookstore shelves, caught in what she believed was a “vicious cycle” common to the publishing world. She had sold her first book to Hachette, which saw enough promise in the work to give her a big advance. The book sold poorly, though, and the publisher paid for a smaller print run the next time around, according to Chance. Those numbers weren’t great either. After that, she says, Hachette “was done.” She moved on to another publisher, where the downward spiral continued.

She was ready again for a new publisher with Bone River, but the New York publishers she approached didn’t bite. “Come back to us when you have better numbers,” she recalls being told.

 

Read the full article on Seattle Weekly.

 

Introducing Kindle Kids’ Book Creator and KDP Kids

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From Amazon’s press release dated 9/3/14:

Authors can easily publish children’s books and reach millions of Kindle readers around the world

Kindle Kids’ Book Creator for illustrated children’s books available for download today

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sep. 3, 2014– (NASDAQ:AMZN)—Amazon today announced KDP Kids, designed to help children’s book authors prepare, publish and promote both illustrated and chapter books in Kindle Stores worldwide. Children’s book authors can use Amazon’s new Kindle Kids’ Book Creator tool to easily create illustrated children’s books that take advantage of Kindle features like text pop-ups. Once the book is ready, authors can upload it to KDP in just a few simple steps, and use KDP’s category, age and grade range filters to help millions of Amazon customers choose the right books for their kids. Authors can earn royalties of up to 70%, while keeping their rights and maintaining control of their content. Authors can also choose to enroll their books in KDP Select for additional royalty opportunities like Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and access to marketing tools like Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions. Get started today at kdp.amazon.com/kids.

“Authors want to focus on telling great stories and we want to help them do that. No one should have to be a computer programmer to create a beautiful, illustrated Kindle book for kids,” said Russ Grandinetti, Senior Vice President, Kindle. “Kindle Kids’ Book Creator makes it easy. In addition to helping authors craft their books, we’re helping customers find them with things like age and grade range filters.”

By creating a digital edition of their book, authors can reach a whole new audience of Kindle readers, who have already downloaded millions of children’s books this year.

Some authors got an early look at what KDP Kids offers, and here’s what they’re saying:

“The new Kindle Kids’ Book Creator is exactly what I’ve been looking for,” said children’s book author Niki Alling. “I was able to create fun popups with ease. I have plans to upgrade my existing children’s books with this new tool, and to use it with future books also. I highly recommend it to children’s book authors who want to add some extra fun to their eBooks.”

“As a self-published author, doing all the work myself and being no technical expert, I found this so easy to use,” said children’s book author and illustrator Michele Lynn Seigfried. “It will definitely save me time and money when I publish my future books.”

“Since I’ve published books for children of all ages, it’s a big plus that the Kindle Store helps parents find books by their kids’ age range,” said children’s science books author Seymour Simon. “KDP gave me all the tools and information I needed to get my books in front of the right audience.”

To learn more about publishing children’s books through KDP, or to download the Kindle Kids’ Book Creator, visit kdp.amazon.com/kids.

 

How Indie Authors Sell Foreign Rights

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This post by Orna Ross originally appeared on ALLi on 6/6/13.

The good news for us, as indie authors, is that rights issues are greatly simplified. We own our rights and we can decide what we want to do with them. We are not bound by a publisher’s overall policy and loyalties to other titles.

The bad news is too often we don’t know how to deal with translation rights. Here are some suggestions of ways you might handle them.

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1: Sell English Language eBooks in International Book Stores.

Amazon has a number of Kindle stores in different countries:
Amazon.co.uk,
Amazon.com,
Amazon.de,
Amazon.fr,
Amazon.it,
Amazon.es,
Amazon.co.jp,
Amazon.com.br,
Amazon.cn and
Amazon.ca.

Once you load your books, they are automatically for sale in all stores. Those countries that do not have their own store are included in one of the bigger stores. e.g. customers in Australia in Amazon.com. (Note: This information subject to change as Amazon extends into more territories)

Other companies like Apple and Kobo are also aggressively pushing into overseas markets.

 

Click here to read the full post on ALLi.

 

Does What You Paid For A Book Affect How You’d Rate It?

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This post by Jane Litte originally appeared on Dear Author on 2/23/14.

When I first started buying my own books some twenty plus years ago, I had very little money. My favorite authors were starting to come out in hardcover (Julie Garwood, for example) and unless I wanted to wait to be the 80th person at the library to read the book, I had to fork over $22.00 or more which, at the time, was a lot of money for me. It basically meant I wasn’t going to be able to buy another book or maybe even eat anything but ramen and macaroni for the month.

Most of the time, however, I bought my books used at the Half Price Bookstore or some other used bookstore that sold romances for $0.10 or $0.25. And when I bought the hardcover, I knew that I was sacrificing at least four other reads for that one book.

As I got older, I was able to buy more books but my reading habit got to be really pricey so I instituted a book budget of no more than X amount of dollars to be spent a month. Because I read three to five books a week, I was only able to purchase about eight titles a month new and the rest would have to be library lends or used book store purchases. During the heydey of chick lit, I was really struggling!

Price has always been a big thing for me when it comes to books and from what I’ve heard from industry professionals, mass market purchasers are very price sensitive. Most romance readers are mass market purchasers although the new readers coming in to the market after Fifty Shades are probably not.

There’s an interesting concept called anchoring. Anchoring is the tendency of humans to rely on the first piece of information offered. In economic terms, anchoring means that the first price a consumer encounters for widget A is likely the price that the consumer believes she should always pay for widget A. (Widget is an official economic term. No lie.)

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Dear Author.