So about a month and a half ago I decided I would have a go at seeing how the whole ebook publishing thing works on Amazon.com. I read a couple of things on the Internet about it but quickly decided the best way to go about it would be to dive in myself and just see how it all works.
Of course first of all I needed something to publish. I was (and still am) trying to focus all my creative time and energies into the book I'm writing at the moment so I didn't really want to wait to finish that in order to try and publish (it might take a while...). I then decided the best course of action would be to use a short story I had lying around from the creative writing course I did last year. It's a bit of a zombie story and I figured they're pretty popular these days, and it would suit my purposes nicely.
I gave the story a bit of a tidy up and then converted it into the special Amazon ebook format (strange that amazon use their own format of .mobi files but most other ebook readers out there seem to use .epub files, oh well!). Now all I needed was a cover. Luckily the place where I am staying has an old abandoned hospital nearby, so I headed out and took a few pictures of that, which I thought might produce something interesting. After sifting through those pictures I decided on one that I thought would convey something of the tone of the story:
So I played around with that for a bit in photoshop until I had a cover I was relatively happy with:
Wait, you say to yourself, who's this A.R. Deschain bloke(apart from an obvious Dark Tower reference)? Yeah, so I decided I would publish it under a pseudonym, mostly because I wanted to use a more classic horror sounding name. I figured the two initials would invoke some kind of H.P. Lovecraft type vibe or something and maybe entice some people to have a look, and the Deschain sounded almost like a classical horror name (plus any chance to drop a Stephen King reference can't be passed up). Also I put the word zombie in the title so people would know what they were getting.
So with that it was time to stick it up on Amazon. I set up an account as A.R. Deschain and then started the process of uploading. I entered a relatively short description for the story, nothing too flowery (I hope) and made sure to mention the length of the story (I didn't want people expecting a full-length novel or anything).
Then it cam time to decide about pricing. Originally I had thought that 50 cent was a good price to set for a short story like this, but then I discovered how pricing works on amazon. Basically they have two tiers set up for royalties for publishers, where you get either 35% of the sale or 70%. If you want 70% of the sale your book has to be priced between $2.99 and $100 (I was surprised to find they had an upper limit), and for 35% the book can go down to $0.99. So basically that made my decision for me, it would have to be a 99 cent book, I guess.
That was basically the whole process completed, and then it was just a matter of waiting for Amazon to approve the ebook, which they said would take 12 hours but in the end only took about 2 or 3. I was now almost a (self) published author! Not quite as exciting as getting traditionally published of course, but still fun.
So all that was left now was to see what happened after it was published. I had already made the decision that this was mostly going to be an experiment about how Amazon itself works so I wasn't going to do any kind of promotion for it (that's why I haven't mentioned it anywhere outside this blog before now). Both the name and the title were chosen to play into my idea that I was going to see what would happen if I just let the story get out there without me doing anything else for it.
Now all that was left was to see just how well this little experiment would go, and if anyone was going to buy my little story.
I think that will be it for this part of the story. I'll be back soon with the second part of this little experiment of mine, where I'll talk about what happened after it went live on Amazon.
Thanks for reading!
James.
Nice post, best of luck with your story. I've been selling on there since 10/11/11 I am seeing better results as time goes on. Sales sucked the first 4 months.. Then I joined the KDP select program in 2/12 my sales tripled then. I feel like my work is finally getting noticed.
ReplyDeleteI found your blog after noticing you are following ours - and I have to ask, our of curiousity, how are sales? I've always thought anything that short (1600 words) would be an impossible sale for most, even at $0.99 - It's the sort of thing I'd be tempted to give away for promotional gain, or sell to a magazine.
ReplyDeleteHave you found shorts to be better than that?
Well, I can't say it's exactly been setting the world on fire at that price point. I would have preferred to set it at 50c (which I thought would be more easily acceptable) but obviously Amazon's pricing structure wont allow for this. But without promotion of any sort and with the slightly higher pricepoint it's shifting 5-10 copies a week. That was higher after free promotions but that has died off.
DeleteI wouldn't do the same again with a short story (as you said giving it away free or selling to a magazine would be more desirable) but as an experiment I thought it went pretty well.