Kindle Scout

Quick Link: KINDLE SCOUT –STEP INSIDE FOR A TOUR

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Have you tried using Kindle Scout for one of your titles? What did you think? I love it as a reader. (Because we all know I haven’t finished anything yet.) If you haven’t heard of Kindle Scout, or you wanted to learn more Debbie Burke from Kill Zone has an excellent article on the process. Check it out!

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KINDLE SCOUT –STEP INSIDE FOR A TOUR

By Debbie Burke

Kindle Scout is Amazon’s innovative program where readers “scout” for new books and vote for ones they believe should be published. Back in April, I covered the basics of Scout for TKZ. Since then, I submitted my thriller Instrument of the Devil and went through my own 30-day campaign. Today, let’s open the Scout door and take a tour inside.

SUBMISSION PROCESS:
To submit to Scout, Amazon requires a cover (at author’s expense), a complete, never-before-published, edited manuscript of 50+K words, a 45-character one-liner (logline), a 500-character book description, author bio, and a thank-you note to readers who nominated the book (more on this later).

After Scout accepts the submission, they select the dates for the 30-day campaign, and provide a link that shows the preview exactly as it will appear on the Scout site. The first 25 or so pages of the book are excerpted as a sample for readers to vote on.

Read the full post on Kill Zone

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

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Quick Link: Publishing: Kindle Scout Case Study

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Do you Kindle Scout? I do, as a reader I love it. I love being able to help authors generate buzz for their titles and finding new works to read. If your book is selected by Amazon, you get a contract and I get a free book.

Even if your book doesn’t get published by Amazon, you can still self-publish. The readers who voted for you are notified so they can buy the story. I have, especially if the price is right. would know how great Kindle Scout is for authors. Check out her Kindle Scout experienc at Self Publishing Advice Center

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Publishing: Kindle Scout Case Study

kindlescoutBy Katherine Hayton on July 14, 2016

New Zealand novelist Katherine Hayton shares her inspiring success story about her fourth novel’s success in a Kindle Scout campaign, leading to a publishing contract with Amazon’s own imprint, Kindle Press.

Back in January, I ran a Kindle Scout campaign for my fourth full-length novel, The Three Deaths of Magdalene Lynton, and was accepted for publication by Kindle Press on the 8th February. After the effort of the campaign, I was excited to be selected, and so far my experience with Kindle Press has shown me they can sell a lot more of my books than I could manage on my own. I’m in my second month (release date 29th March) and I think I’ll have earned out my advance by the end of this month, or early next month, so it seems on track with their expectation of 25k over five years.

Regular Promotions by Kindle

Because they’re an Amazon imprint, they have access to place their published books on the advertising slots available to Amazon, and their aim is to place each book in some kind of promotion every ninety days or so. These range from month long $1.99 promotions in genre selections to individual book titles featured on the $0.99 Kindle Daily Deals. From talking with other authors in Kindle Press, there are mixed results among the books they’ve selected. Some authors have taken a year or more to earn out their advance of $1,500, while others have earned over $12,000 in their first year.

Degree of Author Control

An author with Kindle Press retains a lot more control than they would with a larger press, so I had final say over all edits, title, cover, and book description. Anything else (eg categories) can be suggested but not necessarily taken on board. The pricing is determined by word count and seems unshakable apart from a book’s inclusion in discounted pricing promotions. If there’s anything about the book that Kindle Press thinks will harm the chances of promotion slots, they’ll discuss it directly with the author so they have the chance to either change it or stick to their own vision.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

 

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Quick Links: Turning Losing into Winning: The Kindle Scout Experience

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Have you heard of Amazon’s Kindle Scout program? I love it! Authors submit their titles to the program in hopes of winning a publishing contract through Amazon. Users vote on the different titles and if a book that they nominated is selected, they get a free copy.

But even if you are not selected for a publishing contract, authors can still win. The people that voted for you are notified when the book goes on sale at Amazon. I have purchased titles this way because I didn’t want to miss out on the story.  Melissa Bowersock at Indies Unlimited has all the details.

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Turning Losing into Winning: The Kindle Scout Experience

Melissa Bowersock

Posted on

kscoutWhen I finished my latest book, Finding Travis, a time travel story, I sent it out to beta readers and prepared to self-publish as I always do. But then a friend began broadcasting the news that she had entered her latest book in the Kindle Scout program and was looking for nominations. I remembered that another friend had entered his book in the program months ago, and had won the coveted publishing contract with Amazon. Because I really, really liked this new book of mine, and because I had built up quite a decent fan base, I decided to try Kindle Scout for myself.

The Kindle Scout campaign is a two-pronged deal. Amazon evaluates the book on its own merit, but they also look at the number of nominations a book receives from potential readers. Because Amazon doesn’t ever tell us how it writes its algorithms or how it decides what’s a winning book and what isn’t, it’s hard to know exactly how to go after the win. The only things that were in my control were (1) writing a good book; and (2) getting as many people as possible to nominate the book. So that’s what I did.

Some people might balk at the idea of nominating a book they haven’t read. I totally understand. However, Kindle Scout creates a landing page for each book and includes the cover, a short blurb, and the first chapter as a sample for voters to read. Readers can then decide for themselves if they feel the book is a winner, or they might simply go on the author’s past performance.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Which Bad Novel Is Perfect for You?

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This post by Katy Waldman originally appeared on Slate on 3/18/15. While authors who are interested in exploring the possibilities of the Kindle Scout program may find the article’s tone dismissive or even inflammatory, it provides some solid insight into the reader’s-eye-view.

Reading, and voting on, the books of Amazon’s new Kindle Scout program.

As the title of one of the new century’s most beloved novels reminds us, complexity can exist where we see only the absence of complication. A single color contains multitudes. That novel’s author, E.L. James, might have been commenting on the category to which her own work belongs: “bad” books. Fifty Shades of Grey is a bad book—cheesy, boilerplate, and silly, despite its silky dreams of sophistication and naughtiness. But man, the simple descriptor bad encompasses so many other vistas of badness, strange and terrible to behold. These are planets of implausibility and awfulness that revolve beyond our wildest imaginings.

Welcome to Kindle Scout.

Kindle Scout is a new initiative from Amazon, a “reader-powered” publishing platform for “new, never-before-published books.” It works like this: Authors submit their manuscripts, 5,000-word excerpts of which are posted on the website for a 30-day scouting period. During that time, Amazon members can browse the selections and nominate the ones they’d like to see published. A reader is allowed just three swappable picks at a time, to preserve the integrity of each recommendation. At the end of the trial run, a team of staffers tallies the nods, applying its own secret rubric to decide which manuscripts get released. (A Kindle Scout representative declined to elaborate on the criteria it uses.) Selected books, explains Amazon, “will be published by Kindle Press and receive 5-year renewable terms, a $1,500 advance, 50 percent eBook royalty rate, easy rights reversions and featured Amazon marketing.”

On the writer’s resource site Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss has a smart post assessing the authorial incentives and drawbacks of such a deal.

 

Read the full post on Slate.