I tend to be very cautious now, so usually no. The conditions have to be perfect. And by that, I mean I want references, mother's maiden name, and your second grade teacher has be nominated for the best teacher of the year award five years running.

I got bit hard by doing a promotion with authors who I naively trusted (and who knew exactly where my ethics fell on the spectrum). So basically, those four or so authors burned me for doing any kind of swapping without me doing some serious digging and if there's even a whiff of a relationship (no matter how loose) with anyone I know to be shady, I walk away. For a while, even doing a swap on Bookclicker was enough to black ball an author.

I have no problems with links going to my sign up form. It's through Mailchimp at the moment, and has been like that for years. This is what everyone I know has been doing, without issue.

This is something not actively enforced, but I imagine it's something they might do in the future.

I already have a Bookbub. I have book one free later in the month on a Bookbub feature deal. The series is 4 full length novels.

Put the box set together, then in the back matter of book 1 include a link to the next book in the series or the box set.

If you are wide and have 3 or more books, I don't think there's a compelling reason not to put together a box set. I also think it's sometimes nice to include a little bonus in a box set. Either an extended epilogue, something you might have for your newsletter, or an "interview" with the main character. But then, I don't think of box sets as just a collection of books in a series. For me, it's a special edition with all the books in one volume and I want to make it special.

I'm just getting started setting up a mailing list. I thought that putting a link to your list signup in the back of your books was standard practice, but now I'm hearing that Amazon does not want you to put in a link to any form that requests an email, which a landing page obviously does.

However, the rules do say that you can post a link that offers relevant content to the book, which you can offer through a reader magnet via your mailing list. So...which rule reigns supreme? Anyone here have links to their mailing lists in their books who can tell me how it's going?

My understanding is that as long as the link goes to a landing page and not the form, it's okay.

There's no increase, there's a currency exchange based on the current exchange rate, or you can price it yourself in the correct currency for the region.

So if I price a book at $2.99 US for the world, Google takes that price, converts it to other currencies and puts it on the market for that price. Or... I can can price according to country or region, taking the current exchange rates and VAT into consideration.

Most people have profiles set up for regions. I use US (USD), UK (GBP), AU (AUD), CA (CAD), EZ (EURO), and World -US, -UK, -CA, -EZ (USD). (Note: if using a spreadsheet, using USD twice can cause issues). This way I can keep my prices consumer friendly.

If you set your price for 2.99 USD for the world, it won't discount in US, CA, or AU, but will for the rest of the world. So it will take 2.99, convert to local currency, then discount the price.

Screenwriters went on strike because they weren't getting paid for DVD episodes. (The strike killed quite a few promising series that came out that year.) Writers should get paid for their work, regardless of how that work is presented. And if the terms change after they agree, then they should be able to opt out.

Audlbe can caption all the books they want, as long as the authors are either compensated for their words appearing in another media or able to opt out.

My understanding is that the entire front matter is counted towards the 10%. It's why many of us have limited front matter, so as not to reduce the actual story that shows. I'm uncertain whether they count the cover image they insert, I know it was worked out by someone years ago how things like this work.

So, in the looking at other things, I realized that the 10% isn't word based if there are images involved. If you have an image in the front (cover or graphic for something else) it represents a larger percentage of the book than just words in the same space. If it doesn't make sense, break down the idea of words even further to bits of data. An entire book consists of X bits and the look inside represents .10x bits.

Fairly certain the 10% takes from the entire book, so all of front matter counts.

I ran a YA fantasy with them as well as a contemporary romance. Both had about 67 downloads. It cost $200 at the time. That was for the main list. I also ran those books on their genre lists (The Portalist and A Love So True) which performed even worse per ad dollar spent. It's possible with sell-through to the rest of the series that I actually broke even, but definitely not something that happened immediately. Looking at the dates now this was in 2017 so maybe they've improved since then.

Yeah, definitely not worth it.

From what I was told, retailers would not wide distribute a book (print or ebook or otherwise) with an amazon assigned ISBN ONLY.

Unless the book was really popular, and it's being talked about all over town, a Createspace/Amazon KDP Print book without an ISBN, is not going to be featured on other bookstores. Even if it would be, the publisher would be "Amazon or Print Publishing". etc. I don't know about you, but I would like to see my own company or print name on the sell page. Bah. However, Whether this is ebook or print. Maybe the rules have been changed, and I'm misinformed. I stand completely corrected then.

No I'm not confusing this with the amazon select ebook terms at all. That's a whole another issue.

If the author wishes to use other free printing services that don't require ISBNS (like Barnes and Noble Nook for example etc.) then that's that. Again, that's an exception.

This is categorically false.

Other online stores carry print books under Amazon's expanded distribution and have since the Create Space days. Getting them  into a brick and mortar store is far more difficult. And at least in BN's case, they want to see X number of print books sold online before they are willing to consider carrying them in the store.

This is how the ISBN system works and how Ingram plays a huge role in that system.

ISBNs identify not just a book, but the publisher of that book. The more ISBNs you buy, the cheaper they are. Amazon uses the same ISBNs as everyone else, including BN, D2D, and anyone else who offers "free" ISBNs. They can do this because they are buying an ISBN for a dollar, if that. Amazon owns those ISBNs and is the publisher of record. If someone is selling only on Amazon, it doesn't matter, but when using Expanded Distribution it can matter if your goal is to get into brick and mortar stores. If that isn't your goal, then again, it doesn't matter much.

Amazon is not a POD Clearing house the same way IS is, so they outsource ED to IS. That means your books showing up on BN are showing up because its in the IS catalog because Amazon added it when you selected ED.

Using your own ISBN is a business move and is helpful so that there is not the exact same book out there with 3 different ISBNs, but it doesn't help getting your print book listed on BN.

And every print book that is sold through a store requires an ISBN. BN requires an ISBN. The only times an ISBN is not required is when the publisher clearly states that the book is being used for personal reasons (family cookbook, memorial book, whatever).

KDP Print books can also have that "out of print" or "limited stock" message as well. This usually only last for a week if that, and more stock is printed. Ingram Spark/Lightning Source doesn't play like that. They print books really fast, and offer overnight shipping if you like.

While I don't doubt this is possible, I have never seen it. I have seen the delays or limited stock, but usually only during holidays. The point of POD is that Amazon doesn't keep X number of books available for every book. They'd never include that banner because it was hit at least 3/4ths of the books available for sale.

You can call amazon customer service (or email, whatever), and the sale pages will automatically be merged if it's the same title and edition, unless it's an abridged version, or translated version etc.

It still doesn't solve having multiple editions of the same book. Sleeping Cat's advice most closely follows best practices for self-publishers and is good advice that several other very successful self-publishers share with others and follow themselves.
That's a solution to that, which I assumed everyone knew about.
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The other thing about piracy is to just quit worrying about it. They're "stealing" ebooks, which cost you... how much, exactly?

But they could have been sales.

Maybe. Maaaaaybe. Likely not. People who pirate don't buy.

Regardless, there is nothing you can do about it except play ring-a-roses whackamole. It gives you anxiety and stomach ulcers and it's just not worth it. The meds are too expensive for one. It also makes you a miserable person to  be around.

A great study was done in the UK (without any grants from the MPAA or RIAA) showing that pirates, as a group, actually spent more money per year on digital content than non-pirates. They also displayed higher levels of loyalty and forgiveness. When it came to making recommendations, they tended toward often, where non-pirates tended toward seldom.

Because the industry doubled down on how bad pirates were, they can't backtrack, but and executive at HBO made an official statement once about GOT being the most pirated show - it didn't impact their sales at all, in fact, the DVD sales exceeded projections.

It can be for permafree books. The incident one of my books was involved in was a permafree book going from 20 to 5,500 downloads in one day. I contacted Amazon IMMEDIATELY about it and asked them to rank strip it rather than ban me. They were very kind and helpful, and asked me a lot of questions about who I had been advertising with, how many downloads I usually got, had gotten on X day, and other things I can't remember now. They were very detailed and I was glad I had notes. They didn't rank strip me in the end, which was nice.

Yeah, and I agree. I was more responding to a specific post rather than the overall thread. I have heard of more than a few authors who have taken preventative action and reached out to Amazon as soon as they noticed odd behavior.  In all of those cases, Amazon has never once accused them of wrong-doing, but instead took their concerns seriously and looked into it.

The premise that rank bots are unimportant for anyone except KU authors is faulty on just about every level.

I doubt they care as much about rank, which can change hourly anyways, than about reads, which is where the money is actually determined from.

Only those in KU are the ones obsessed with rank, even more so than actual sales.  Wide authors couldn't give a flying bleep bleep about it.  They care more about sales (the money).

You're making a few assumptions here and while some might have been true last year, not so much anymore. With the 10% bonus cap, it's far more difficult to maximize the reward to the risk of using bots for page reads. Instead, you can lower your risk and use rank to gain visibility, which in turn generates organic borrows and reads. Watching a few of the authors who appear to utilize questionable tactics looks as though they are following this approach since the books are too short to maximize on the KENPC.

Another assumption is that (at least this is how I read it), you believe I am in KU and therefore obsessed about rank. I am wide and while I am not obsessed with rank, I am concerned about some of the actors in  my genre. Each time they pull a fast one, they mess with the landscape and while am not fixated on rank, I still rely on certain algorithms to boost my visibility. When those algos are manipulated by multiple publishers/pens in a genre who insist on incorrectly catting books in my cat, then yes, I do care whether they are manipulating rank. Page reads don't bother me because I'm not part of the pot, the page rate is irrelevant to my bottom line. Rank is not as important for wide authors, but yes, it does matter.