selling on Amazon

Amazon Is An Evil Sith Lord, and Other Dumb Arguments Against Doing Business With Amazon

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Wow, over on The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder comes out swinging against The Writer’s Workshop article Darth Amazon  – or – Why Amazon Is An Evil Sith Lord, And Apple Is Luke Skywalker by David Lieder. You know what? Nate is correct.  Both Amazon and Apple are big companies and suffer from the issues that plague big companies. But every author I have ever worked with has had the same consistent results. They get the majority of their exposure and sales from Amazon, with the iBook store a far second. Not only that, but to even upload your manuscript to the iBook store you must own a mac, and not a cheap one. (Is there even such a thing as a cheap mac?) It is also very difficult to get exposure on the iBook store unless you are already a very well established author. What are your thoughts or experiences?

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Amazon Is An Evil Sith Lord, and Other Dumb Arguments Against Doing Business With Amazon

Posted on 24 January, 2016 by Nate Hoffelder

Industrial 3D LetterWith Authors United’s debate recitation coming up on Wednesday, this week promises to have an excess of “evil Amazon is evil” whining, and David Lieder is getting a head start on the competition.

Writing over at The Writer’s Workshop, this David Streitfeld wannabe reaches into the depths of his ADS* to argue that authors should not not deal directly with Amazon.

So I want to argue that authors should avoid Amazon Kindle, ACX and Create Space, and explain why I recommend that authors use other distributors, except for allowing your books to trickle back onto the Amazon platform after the fact (from another propagator, such as Smashwords, Ingram-Spark, even Book Baby). I want to explain why I teach authors to boycott Amazon ACX (audiobook production) and to replace Create Space with the much better choice of Ingram-Spark (which has print books available to authors at about half the price of Create Space).

Apparently Lieder is a believer in what I am calling the condom theory, which goes something like this: So long as you wear a condom, you’re not technically having sex with your partner. (Yes, it is a dumb theory, but it’s his theory and his arguments, not mine).

To put it another way, this pint-sized Melville House thinks it is okay to do business with what he sees as evil so long as you have an intermediary in between. In his mind, you’re not dealing with the devil if you use a distributor who deals with the devil on your behalf.

I could explain why Lieder’s arguments are wrong, and point out the factual errors, half-truths, and errant nonsense in his piece, but I have already lost several brain cells reading that piece and I do not wish to expend any additional brain cells arguing the point.

So let me simply list a few:

Read the full post on The Digital Reader

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How to Get your books into the right Categories and Sub-categories: Readers to Books/Books to Readers—Part Three

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This post, by M. Louisa Locke, originally appeared on her blog on 12/16/13.

Introduction:

Two years ago, I wrote a blog piece about the importance of using categories, keywords, and tags (which no longer exist) to make your books visible in the Kindle Store. A year later I wrote an update that expanded on this and discussed how having your book in the right categories could make free and discount promotions more effective. The basic argument I made hasn’t changed––that an author needs to understand how categories work in order to use them to improve the chance their books will be found by readers who are browsing in the Kindle store.

If you aren’t convinced of the importance of categories in improving discoverability—you might want to go back and skim through those two posts or just Google “discoverability and categories” to see the multiple posts on this topic. However, for most of you, it isn’t the importance of categories but how to get your books into the right categories that you are most interested in––and there have been a number of significant changes warranting a new update on this topic.

First, the number and kinds of categories and sub-categories in the Kindle Store have increased dramatically in the last year.

Second, the methods of getting a book into the correct categories and sub-categories have expanded, with keywords becoming particularly important.

Third, these changes have made the process even more confusing to authors.

Definitions:

Because these changes have resulted in a good deal of confusion in terminology—I am going to start here. While KDP has generally improved the experience for authors by introducing a whole plethora of help documents, the terminology used in these help documents and by KDP help staff is not always consistent. I will try and delineate some of these inconsistencies and provide some clarity below.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.