Richard Parise's Blog: Writing for fun and profit

In the world of self-publishing on the internet, reviews come in every form and fashion, from friends and relatives, to author swaps and pay as you go. Many authors will take them any way they can get them. Others are more "moral" and stick it out for the occasional honest review from an unknown reader. It's similar to professional sports during the steroid era. The need to "not fall behind the competition" weighs heavily against a player's "better judgement."
The problem with honesty in publishing is the same. Do I fall behind hoping "doing the right thing" will in the end prevail or am I simply being naive.
What hurdles will you face if you wait for legitimate reviews which could take months to accumulate? For one, there are many sites that will not list any eBooks without a minimum of ten or more reviews averaging over four stars. Some won't even list your free promo without that requirement. Secondly, readers will pit your eBook against others in the same genre with a higher "star" rating even if those reviews were tainted.
The only fair answer to all of this is to do away with reviews by the public since they are so easily manipulated by unscrupulous authors. This I'm afraid will never happen.
In conclusion, you need to decide if you want to play by the rules and be at a disadvantage, or join the crowd of unknown authors looking for a faster way to climb the sales ladder. To this day, I've had over two thousand downloads of my new eBooks but only four reviews. Two from the UK and two from God knows where. I've kept friends and family away since I do this more for a hobby in my retirement. If I was in search of a career, however, I just might be tempted to participate on a more level playing field. Good luck.

As stated in past blogs, I used KDP Select to get exposure through their free promo platform. Authors are given five free promo days but must sell only on Amazon for a ninety day period. As time has gone on, the amount of free eBook offerings has increased from roughly a few thousand a day, six months ago, to over thirty-five thousand today.

As a result, new authors without a substantial fan base will find it extremely difficult to compete with the myriad of free offerings in their genre. After all,if you walked into Barnes and Noble and saw a wall of free "new releases" by self-published authors and a second wall of the same quality offerings for $1.99 to $5.99, in which direction would you go?

Once the initial ninety day contract with Kindle is up, the logical next step would be to add your book to Nook and iTunes where B+N and Apple readers will be added to your customer base. Not only could these new readers find your book at the Nook and iTunes bookstores, but they might also here about it from friends with Kindles who have previously downloaded a past free offering. In this way, you are not trapped competing with the thousands of freebies being posted every day for Kindle. Good luck

You need to be aware of the fact that over a million eBooks have been self-published over the last year with over 900,000 selling less than one a week. This being said, if you write for the pleasure of creating something new and entertaining without the need to become the next Stephen King, you will have a much better experience with less headaches.

One thing that I discovered following the ratings of new authors was that the genre made a huge difference in the number of free downloads. I wrote under the humor genre and could expect roughly three to four hundred free downloads per promo. Those authors who wrote under romance or mystery garnered thousands of free downloads.

Armed with this information, if you have the ability to write equally as well under a variety of genres, I would suggest you start out with romance or mystery in order to gather a larger fan base earlier on. I am strictly a humor author and as a result will need much more patience to succeed since there are so few readers out there searching for books in this genre. Good luck

As an unknown author, I recognized the fact that I needed to develop a fan base to succeed. Posting my work on Facebook would only reach a very limited number of readers since the majority of friends there did not own a Kindle. Tweeting my work also would be futile since most tweeters are not using that media to look for eBooks to purchase.

After realizing the futility of these two venues, I proceeded to use KDP Select free promos to gain recognition. As stated in my prior blog, I did accumulate over a thousand free downloads.

Through my experience, an author can plan on less than half of these downloads to actually be read during the month they were downloaded. Since my issues were less than twenty pages, I assumed the great majority were read within a few days.

The down side of this free promo strategy became quickly apparent. As I continued to schedule free promos for each additional monthly issue, I realized that the great majority of readers were simply waiting for the free days rather than purchase the issue for $0.99. The up side was that new readers were going back to buy previous issues that were no longer free.

The lesson here is that as an unknown author, KDP Select is a great way to expose your work. It is also more effective if you have more than one or two books so that free downloaders who enjoy your book have other offerings to purchase.

The key to all of this is patience. New authors will not be able to develop a fan base overnight. It's my opinion that there are millions of readers out there who eventually will convert to ereaders. The market can only expand with time. The more downloads of your work that are out there, free or purchased, the more likely your fan base will grow. Good luck.

I began testing the waters of self-publishing back in January of 2012. Before retiring from teaching middle school physical education, I had dabbled in writing comical short stories. Never dreaming of ever publishing any of these works, it was mainly a method of relieving day to day stress.

Once Amazon's KDP Select became familiar to me, I decided to submit a monthly humorous issue entitled, My Husband's On Facebook! These were very short editions,roughly ten to twelve pages, meant to be read in one sitting. My main objective was to create a customer base by offering these quick reads for free through KDP Select. With each new monthly issue, I was allowed an additional five days of free promos.

By the end of the fifth month, I had used over twenty days of free promos which resulted in over a thousand downloads.

At the end of the fifth month, I now had accumulated enough material to create a complete edition of roughly sixty pages which I released the first week of July. I then unpublished the monthly issues to avoid any confusion for new readers. Each monthly issue was listed for $0.99 while available for purchase. I sold roughly one hundred during the time they were not on free promo. My complete edition is now listed at $2.99.

I feel that by listing the short monthly issues first, I was able to see if there was any interest in the subject material or my style of humor before taking the extra time to write an entire submission. With the encouragement of many downloads and some positive reviews that ensued, I then felt confident in submitting my longer complete version. As time goes by, I will inform you of any positive results. Good luck in your endeavors.