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...I'm not coming CLOSE to making up the KU numbers.
I may panic and pull soon.
I may panic and pull soon.
I have heard that it takes several months before you are likely to reach and surpass the numbers you get from Amazon. And those months have to include plenty of promotional work to get the message out there that your book is available in numerous stores.GeneDoucette said:...I'm not coming CLOSE to making up the KU numbers.
I may panic and pull soon.
I don't think so, traction is everything and if you're happy to let borrows happen, then it will raise your rankings. I tried launching a book wide without KDP and it surprised me by tanking. So, don't lose that little extra help you get from Amazon in the first 30 days.GeneDoucette said:One thing: I am still debuting books on Select and giving it the 90 days before going wide. Am I hurting myself by doing this?
My sales have always been more than my borrows, so, I have that in my favor...Elizabeth Ann West said:I too planned a good six months for things to take off. The hard part is remembering what it was like when we started on Amazon. It took a couple of months and releases to get the ball rolling. Readers are not stupid. When they see an author doing things like "Amazon gets it for 90 days before the other vendors" they get frustrated and don't feel good. The ereader or app people use is a personal decision for them. When we take actions that make it appear we don't like one vendor over another, we are inadvertently insulting their choice of reader.
I think how fast sales rebound on Amazon has a lot to do with what your sales to borrows ratio was before you pulled out. IF your borrows were MORE than your sales, then your previous sales ranking was heavily inflated by the borrow clicks. You may or may not recover that right away. If you borrows were less (like mine had fallen to less than a 1/3 of my sales when I pulled out), it's much easier to bounce back because my ranking was primarily my sales, and a few new sales that could no longer be borrows made up for the revenue.
I will say that where we see Amazon as Mount Everest, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that Amazon is more Mt. McKinley (tallest mountain in the United States) and the true world's tallest mountain is Apple and Google combined because their apps/devices/brands have been international ones for much longer than Amazon. Yesterday, I received a comment from a reader asking for the next book's release date on Google Play. It's anecdotal, but it's the first time a reader from another venue has said "Hey, I follow you over here . . . " and that's really neat. I've only been wide since end of January, really end of February for all books.
No I haven't! but let me amend that remark. I went to google play and did the stuff it said and then nothing appeared to happen. they have a rather annoying interface. But, it looks like the book went live after all. Now I better get the other ones up.carinasanfey said:Have you read the gigantic thread on here that tells you how to do all things google? It's very useful.
That interface is soooo hard to figure out. Here is the major land mine - you upload your cover EXACTLY the same way you upload your book. The same button is used for both. So, you upload your book with that button, and then upload the cover. Other than that, just be extremely careful to fill out all metadata. It takes awhile to figure out that you've done everything right.GeneDoucette said:My sales have always been more than my borrows, so, I have that in my favor...
And I'm not on google. I cannot for whatever reason figure out how to use their interface.
Everything's a slow burn right now. Having 3 books seems to help where having only 1 did nothing.anniejocoby said:That interface is soooo hard to figure out. Here is the major land mine - you upload your cover EXACTLY the same way you upload your book. The same button is used for both. So, you upload your book with that button, and then upload the cover. Other than that, just be extremely careful to fill out all metadata. It takes awhile to figure out that you've done everything right.
Google Play is definitely worth being on. As I said before, though, it's a sloooowwww burner. I sold nothing there for months, then, little by little, it started to pick up. Like a snowball going down the hill. Last month I finally broke $1,000 there.![]()
Yup. You still have to use that formula to get the right pricing. It's on that big Google Play thread. I'm kinda lazy, though - I make the price $1.50 more than what I want to charge and call it good. That works too.Sophrosyne said:Is Google Play still a pain in the a** with the pricing?
When I was wide, I found I only sold during active promotions. That's why I'm not going wide until I'm ready to make the first book in my series permafree.
And definitely go direct everywhere you can.