The Amazon Experiment: One month in…
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It has been just over a month since I have made the plunge into eBook Self-Publishing and I thought I would take a look at my progress so far and let you know all the gritty details. Spoilers: It’s been a wild ride, and Solyent Green is People.
On April 8th, 2011 with a bit of inspiration from my good friend and Writing Mentor Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff, I finally got off my butt and decided to take my writing to the next level. When I first started writing, self publishing or POD (Print On Demand) was fairly new and exciting. So was Podcasting Novels. I never really expected the eBook Market would be as huge as it is now. I kind of half expected it to be, but nothing to this large extent as it is now. That was 4 years ago. Cut to today and indie authors who work hard not only can publish their works on multiple platforms relatively easily, but they can put it on the largest online book market: Amazon. Plus, make a very decent living off of it. I’m no where near that state yet, however that blip on the horizon just became a bit more clearer than before.
So with mouse in hand I uploaded The 39 Book #1: Haven, The 39 Book #2: Packet Loss, The Legend of Blackwater Cove, and Got West? to the Amazon Kinde store, and boy did I not expect the reception it did. The first two 39 stories went up first and three days before I even announced to anyone the books were on Amazon I had made three sales on Haven. How is that even possible? I got excited. I mean really excited. After announcing the books, I started to see some more sales come in. I started to see my Book rankings go up. I made it to #55 of the top 100 in Sci-Fi Anthologies at Haven’s peak. (I wish I grabbed a screenshot of that).
Before I move on, I wanted to mention the discussion that is happening online in regards to eBook pricing. Should a novel be $0.99? Should it be $9.99 or more? Authors, publishers and even friends have been going back and forth as to what is working or hurting the market. My thoughts are there will still be an uncertain period of price adjustment for the time being, but I don’t think we’ll all get the $0.99 pricing scheme Apple enforces, because Amazon doesn’t. The pricing structure I’m going for, for my books is simple: Short Stories $0.99, Short Story Collections $2.99, Novellas $2.99 – $4.99 and Novels $4.99 – $9.99. Seems reasonable for all my stories and is easier for my potential audience to get behind.
Moving on, I then set up an Amazon Author Page to collect all of my books and everything about me in one place. I have to give a major compliment to Amazon for making it really easy to set up everything from uploading books to setting up my author page. Within minutes I had my own slice of the Amazon Marketplace.
Slowly my books showed up on Amazon UK and even was launched on Amazon DE (Germany). Speaking of the UK I even made it to the top #100 of Sci-Fi Short Stories, which I did get a screenshot of:
As of the writing of this blog post I have sold almost 60 books in just over a month and I couldn’t be happier! This has given me new vigour and inspiration to keep going with my writing and put out more material for you all to read. I want to personally thank you all if you are reading this and have purchased one of my books. It means a lot to me that you have done so, and you’ve given this author the push to keep filling your Kindles, iPhones, iPads or any other eBook readers with more content from me. So thank you, thank you, thank you and thank you!
I’ll have another report in a month to see how this experiment is going.
As always I remain, obediently yours.
Steve
About The Author
Steve Saylor
Steve Saylor is currently the Web Content Editor at Blackburn Radio in Wingham Ontario for CKNX AM920, 101.7 The ONE and 94.5 The BULL. Steve is a New Media Specialist and has worked in this field since Spring of 2005. He is a self-published author, a techie and a geek. To read more about Steve, click HERE
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