In March of 2007 I published Sell Your Book on Amazon, which reached #29 on Amazon.com in its debut month. In a strategically-planned effort, I first recorded a series of podcasts on the same subject matter, and distributed them through RSS and Podcast feeds (including iTunes) in the late fall of 2006. I then transcribed those podcasts into a first draft (an exercise which resulted in a rapid writing process–a process I highly recommend).
In the nearly-three years since that book’s publication, Amazon has changed a lot! Some of the tactics I recommended in the book have changed or have been removed entirely. Some of the reviews (175 at last count, with an average of 4.5 stars — nothing to sneeze at!) even started to imply these were short-comings in my book, rather than recognizing that Amazon’s policies, offerings, or guidelines had changed. What was a short-coming is that a second edition was long overdue! I admit it. Sorry — I’m kinda busy.
Nevertheless, over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the Second Edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon, and I’m pleased to report it is done. The “newly revised for 2010” edition is being proof-read one last time and a new subject index is being created (one of the services we offer for authors of non-fiction books). Once these steps are completed, the revised edition will be sent to Ingram, for distribution via EDI to all the locations Sell Your Book on Amazon is available, like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, etc.
We will also update the Kindle edition with the Second Edition at the same time, and that will drastically improve the Kindle edition, too. You see, Sell Your Book on Amazon was the first Kindle edition Outskirts Press released — I use my books as “guinea pigs” for all our author services, because if our services work for me, they can work for our authors, too — and it’s no small secret that Kindle isn’t the best when it comes to converting specially-formatted books. But our Kindle option now excels at providing Kindle with versions that compensate for that platform’s formatting short-comings.
I will also upload the Second Edition to Amazon’s Search Inside, and I’m looking forward to that change, because I’m making what basically amounts to an aesthetic change to the Table of Contents which actually should improve the overall sales of the book by giving the impression of a greater degree of content. Let me explain:
With the first edition, I was purposefully sparse with the Table of Contents, forcing it entirely on one page, even though each chapter of the book was divided into sections defined by sections on the various Amazon pages I was describing.
When looking at the book via Search Inside, the table of contents makes the book appear to be lacking information because the Table of Contents is so short.
So, when writing the Second Edition, I’ve changed my philosophy with the Table of Contents to include all the various sub-sections included within each chapter. This didn’t take any additional skill, or even much more time, but it makes the book appear to be filled with way more content.
The presentation of information is often just as important as the information itself. These are the kinds of things it is important for self-publishing authors to consider…
President of Outskirts Press 