Amazon – Page 4 – President of Outskirts Press

Amazon Self Publishing Royalties

Over the past few posts I have been comparing the distribution sales channels and the author royalties of a book published by Amazon (HCG Protocol) with a book published by Outskirts Press (Sell Your Book on Amazon).

To recap, Amazon’s book HCG Protocol is available through 8 unique sales channels while Outskirts Press’ book Sell Your Book on Amazon is available through over 50. HCG Protocol earns $5.23 for the author every time a copy is sold on Amazon, while Sell Your Book on Amazon earns $6.58 every time a copy is sold on Amazon.

Actually, since we’re now going to discuss that paragraph in more detail, let’s be more specific. A few postings ago when I compared royalty rates for different distribution channels, I wanted to compare apples to apples, so we pretended HCG Protocol had a retail price of $14.95, so it compared exactly with the $14.95 retail price of Sell Your Book on Amazon. The reality is that HCG Protocol has a retail price of $12.77, so in reality, it actually does NOT earn $5.23 every time a copy sells on Amazon. It actually earns 35% of $12.77, which is $4.47.

In my last posting, I revealed how Sell Your Book on Amazon’s pricing works at Outskirts Press, and how the 100% author profit of $6.58 is reached.

Retail Price (14.95) – Trade Discount (20%) – Production Base Price ($5.36) = Author Profit ($6.58). That equates to a 44% retail profit.

So how does Amazon’s pricing work? Well, for books published by Amazon that are sold on Amazon, Amazon pays a 35% retail royalty. Obviously, that is less than a 44% retail royalty paid by Outskirts Press. 35% does seem good in comparison to most self-publishing companies, just not in comparison with Outskirts Press. But is 35% on Amazon good? Let’s not forget that HCG Protocol is only 50 pages in length. If you use the same formula above, you discover that Amazon’s publishing printing costs are pretty high:

Retail Price ($12.77) – Trade Discount 20% (this is probably actually 0%, since they’re selling it from their own website, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here) – Production Price (X) = Some profit, a certain percentage of which is $4.47.

First, let’s determine the trade discounted price, which is 20% of $12.77, or $10.22. From that amount, the author is earning $4.47. Ergo, the difference is the production cost and whatever percentage of your profit that Amazon is taking (since they don’t pay 100% royalties). $10.22 – $4.47 – (% of your profit) = the printing price, which must be less than $5.75 for a 50 page book.

Here’s an interesting hypothetical situation, particularly if you are the authors of HCG Protocol, Tiffany Prinster and Linda Prinster; or perhaps if you happen to have published YOUR book with Amazon… The same book at Outskirts Press would have a retail price of $12.95, and would earn $5.84 instead of $4.47 for every sale, through 42 more sales channels, including Barnes & Noble. Does that justify the $1000 publishing package price of our most popular Diamond package? Well, it depends upon how successful the book is. In their case, with a current Amazon Sales Rank of 1,851, the answer is an unequivocal “YES.” They’re probably selling 100 books a month or more. So if they were making $1.37 more in profit for every sale had they published with Outskirts Press, plus widening their distribution channels from 8 to 50, at 100 books a month, they would break even in 7 months and would then be reaping the increased benefits of higher profits and greater distribution. Only the authors know exactly how many books they are selling, and perhaps how many MORE they could be selling through 42 additional sales channels. They might break even much faster.

And that brings us to perhaps the most ironic part of publishing with Amazon, which I’ll reveal next time when I wrap up this comparison of HCG Protocol with Sell Your Book on Amazon…

Amazon, branding, marketing

Altering the Amazon cover graphic

Yet another posting referring to the screen shot I took of an Amazon search results page which displays two larger graphics for my most recent book, The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors. Already we’ve discussed the importance of adding a Kindle edition to secure two such listings, and the importance of not having a white cover, lest it get “lost” among all the Amazon screen clutter.

But what do you do if you have a white cover? Or what do you do if you want to increase the size of your book cover on Amazon (as I have done with many of my books). You change your cover graphic on Amazon…

I wrote on this topic a while ago, where I detailed the advantages of increasing the size of (and/or changing the color of) the Amazon cover.

Take a look over to the right and see the cover of the second edition of SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON (it’s right below Self-Publishing Simplified).

That’s how the cover looks of the actual book. But, strangely, that’s not how I want the cover image to look on Amazon. And this has to do with online marketing in the new millennium, combined with the aspect ratio of books in relationship to the aspect ratio of the graphic footprint Amazon uses on its sales pages. In other words, a 6×9 rectangular book cover is not OPTIMAL for use within a 260 x 260 square space, which is the graphic footprint Amazon allocates for product images on its detail pages. Showcasing portrait-shaped books results in a graphic that is 260 pixels HIGH, but only uses 50% of the available WIDTH. In other words, most book covers on Amazon sacrifice some of the space Amazon is giving to them. And let me tell you, with the number of shoppers on Amazon, that is some expensive square-footage going to waste.

So, the solution is to provide Amazon with a different graphic other than the “actual” graphic of the book cover – one that is square rather than rectangular. Of course, most books are rectangular (portrait) so this means you must ”change” the appearance of the cover. You can either “squash it” so that the entire cover fits in a space that is 33% shorter. Or you crop off a portion of the cover in preference of greater online sales. I opted for choice number 2.

So when SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON was first published in its first edition, I manually uploaded an alternate “square” cover image (doing anything “different” through Ingram or Amazon requires some manual intervention). By “square” I don’t mean boring — rather I mean that it utilizes ALL the space Amazon allocates for the image, thereby making the cover image “bigger” than other cover images within search results, or even within Listmania or Guide listings (see the image of Sell Your Book on Amazon along the left-hand side of our screen shot for an example).

Of course, the more observant readers may also notice another difference between the Amazon version of the graphic above and the “real” version to the right — other than the shape. Yes, the Amazon version is a nice garish YELLOW. And this brings me to one of the most wonderful things about marketing on the Internet — you can have your cake and eat it, too.

What do I mean by that? I would never design an actual cover of a book to look like the image above. It’s too… well, “ugly” for lack of a better word. I don’t want ugly babies, because I submit my babies to contests and awards and I want them to have a chance to win. But sadly, what makes an effective cover “in person” is not always the same as what makes an effective cover online. That yellow sure is ugly, but when you’re scrolling through 25 books about self-publishing on Amazon’s search page, guess which image your eye is going to see first? The big ugly yellow one…

In other words, yes, you can have a great actual cover that wins lots of awards and you can have an image on Amazon that attracts lots of attention. Having your cake and eating it, too.

This marketing tactic isn’t just reserved for authors of “Amazon books” either — Outskirts Press is going to soon launch a new a la carte marketing service to help any author perform this function, regardless of where you decided to publish your book.

Previously on this blog I’ve provided other examples of this, and here’s a good link to one of those…

Amazon, self publishing

Amazon search results and cover colors

Now let’s discuss the color of the covers in this screen shot below:

This exemplifies the importance of cover design, and specifically, the importance of planning ahead when designing your cover, or working with a cover designer. You want your book to STAND OUT on search results pages like this, which means you want to avoid having a white cover. After all, let’s look closely at the screen shot above. The only cover that is harder to see and pay attention to than the 6th cover is the 8th one, and that’s because the 8th cover is missing!

Does this mean you should never design a white book cover? Well…. maybe. I would challenge book cover designers to rise to the occasion in the “Amazon world” and create covers that are specifically designed to be seen on visual search results pages like the one above. That means, no white covers. But, even if the book cover for the physical book itself is white, that doesn’t mean your Amazon cover has to be.

Gasp! Change the cover image just for Amazon? Yes – and in past posts I’ve given specific examples of how I’ve personally done that with my Sell Your Book on Amazon listing. The actual cover is 2/3 orange and 1/3 white. That’s too much white for me, so for the Amazon cover image, I replaced the white with an obnoxious bright yellow. You know what? It works. In fact, if you look at the screen shot above, there’s a chance the most noticeable book cover among ALL the books on that page is that big bright yellow cover along the left, which, not coincidentally is for SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON. I say “not coincidentally” because that is actually the result of quite a bit of planning and effort on my part, but as you can see on this Amazon search page, it pays off.

And we can talk about that more in the future, along with why you would want to create a cover image specifically for Amazon (and how you do that).

Amazon, branding, marketing, self publishing

The Amazon Kindle and Search Results

In the last posting I began analyzing this screen shot, which is the first page of the Amazon search results for a particular phrase.

I’m using my latest book as an example to demonstrate the actual positive effects of completing some basic Amazon promotion tactics. Let’s specifically look at three elements of this screen shot:

there are two of the same graphics in the top 10 (thank you Kindle edition)- repetition matters
the cover graphic isn’t white – see how book #1 and #6 get completely lost?
the cover graphic is significantly bigger than all the other covers on the page

Let’s discuss the duplication effect, seeing two covers of the same book. Relatively easily, my book is garnering twice the exposure and therefore, hopefully, receiving twice the attention from Amazon shoppers browsing this list. In other words, my book has twice as much potential to be “clicked on” because the cover is appearing twice. Getting two cover images of your book to appear on an applicable search term phrase on Amazon is as easy as adding an Amazon Kindle edition of your book (the money you make from sales of your Kindle Edition may even be more icing on the cake — in fact, it may even start to be the cake itself. Three of our top 5 selling books in any given month are often the Kindle editions, and they’re all fiction.) Any fiction author looking for a way to level the book marketing playing field shouldn’t do anything before adding a Kindle edition to his book.

We’ll talk about the other two points from this screen shot next…

Amazon, self publishing

Kindle and Amazon Search Results

Over the next few postings I’m going to examine the following screen shot that I took on Amazon when I entered the phrase “successful authors self publishing” into the Amazon search box on August 11. Sorry the graphic is so small; I had to make sure it could fit in this narrow column on this blog template. Basically, this is showing the first nine results of the search phrase. The 8th book is missing its cover image. There is an advertisement in the lower left-hand corner. And directly above the advertisement is an Amazon “promotion” for listmania lists.

Since we’re currently on the topic of the Highly Effective Kindle edition, I first want to draw your attention to the double exposure my book, The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors, is receiving on the first page of this search results screen. I mentioned in a previous post that the $0.35 I make every time the Kindle edition sells is merely icing on the cake, and not particularly important to me. What is important is that when applicable search terms are typed into the Amazon search engine, my book cover appears TWICE. This, I feel, is one of the true benefits of the Kindle edition and is a concept I discuss to some degree in my book Sell Your Book on Amazon.

Getting a book to place on Page One of any Amazon search is an art onto itself, and there are many techniques and tactics an author can employ to reach such objectives. The value, therefore, of having a similarly-titled Kindle edition is that once you reach that objective on the search page, you are receiving “two bangs for your buck” through the visual repetition of your book cover and book title.

It’s hard to say whether The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors is the very FIRST thing your eye gravitates to on the screen shot above. After all, it’s fighting for attention from the red ad in the bottom left corner, which has the advantage of being the single largest graphic image on the page. It’s also fighting for attention from those two obnoxiously bright yellow cover images along the left-hand side (and more on that in a future post). But among the actual results themselves, it might be fair to say my book attracts the most attention. Certainly it’s competing with the bright red Self-Publishing Confidential cover (which is an effective color AND an effective title); but my book has three things going for it that my “competitors” don’t – and by competitors, I mean the other books listed in this particular search, all of which are vying equally for the customer’s attention and dollars. Those 3 advantages are:

there are two of the same graphics in the top 10 (thank you Kindle edition)- repetition matters
the cover graphic isn’t white – see how book #1 and #6 get completely lost?
the cover graphic is significantly bigger than all the other covers on the page

So we’ll discuss each of these elements of this screen shot in future posts…

Amazon, self publishing

The Highly Ineffective Habits of Barnes & Noble

I like Barnes & Noble. In fact, as a writer myself, it probably doesn’t come as a shock to learn that I love all bookstores. But times haven’t been kind to the traditional bookstore since about 1995 or so. That is when Amazon.com came into existence and slowly (quickly) began changing book buying habits. Now, the physical locations of Barnes & Noble bookstores are becoming more of a liability than an advantage; and much like Blockbuster was forced to examine its business model in the wake of NetFlix, so too is Barnes & Noble starting to recognize the forward-thinking of Amazon from behind the 8-ball. In fact, at the beginning of August, Barnes & Noble announced that it was “on the block” and looking for a buyer. Read the interesting article in Fast Company here.

Interestingly, even such news comes with a silver lining. Barnes & Noble’s digital business (its website at bn.com and its Nook) continues to grow and, along with Amazon.com’s growing market share, further supports the notion that distribution-on-demand with self-publishing companies like Outskirts Press is not only a viable solution but is on its way toward becoming the de facto standard for how books are distributed and sold. And with both Nook and Kindle versions of e-books up sharply, authors are well advised to offer not only paperback/hardback editions of every book they publish, but electronic versions as well.

To support this changing landscape, Outskirts Press recently introduced its Amazon Kindle edition on an a la carte basis to authors seeking this electronic solution regardless of where they published their hardcopy book. And in the coming months, Nook and iPad services should follow suit. I could take a moment here to vent about Apple and its monopolistic aggregation agreement briefly (not to mention their cencorship habits) but …. I think I’ll wait until a different post to open that can of worms. After all, I’m still in the middle of discussing the Highly Effective Kindle edition, and will continue with that topic in more logistic detail next time…

Amazon, self publishing

The Highly Effective Kindle Edition

How clever. The title of this blog posting has a double meaning. For one, I’m announcing the Amazon Kindle edition of our new Outskirts Press book The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors. And two, the Kindle Edition IS a highly effective tool for book marketing, and I’ll discuss why and how in the next post.

But first thing’s first. Within 72 hours of ordering our own Amazon Kindle Edition option from our Outskirts Press website, my Kindle edition was up on Amazon and available for purchase on all the Amazon Kindle devices worldwide. Not bad for $99. And I had the option of earning either 30% of the retail price, or 70% of the retail price, as defined by Amazon.

The benefit of ordering this service through Outskirts Press rather than… say… any other publisher… is that Outskirts Press does not take ANY of the split. Amazon pays you directly, so you are getting whatever Amazon sends to your bank without any skimming from us. You see (and this is one of the secrets to our publishing success) we pay 100% author royalties, and in the case of e-books, there isn’t a production cost. So Amazon takes their share and the author takes the rest. No wonder so many authors, regardless of where they published, are using our new a la carte Amazon Kindle Edition service from the new Outskirts Press store. Click here for more details.

Since I wanted as many readers as possible to read this latest book, I set my Kindle retail price at the minimum of $0.99 and as a result, the 30% royalty option was selected for me. You see, Amazon requires a retail price between $2.99 – $9.99 to receive a 70% royalty. In most cases, I would encourage authors to set their Kindle price at $2.99 and receive 70% (roughly $2 for every sale). At 30% of $0.99 I’m receiving a whopping thirty-five cents with every sale, but in my opinion, Kindle sales are currently just icing on the cake. The real motivation is to drive Paperback sales, and I’ll talk about that in a future post.

Heck, for a limited time, for my blog readers, I’ll GIVE the e-book of The Highly Effective Habits of 5 Successful Authors away. Click here to read the e-book for free (and in a way cooler method than on the Kindle, too!). Or if you prefer the Kindle edition, click here to get it from Amazon for $0.99. In return, just do me a small favor and compose a positive review for it on Amazon. See, soliciting reviews is an important component of any book marketing strategies and often times you may find that you have to “give the book away” to get reviews. That’s the beauty of e-books – they’re inexpensive to give away and yet they still (hopefully) prompt participation in the review department.

There is more to discuss about the Highly Effective Kindle edition, and I’ll cover more next time…

Amazon, marketing, self publishing

Self publishing book marketing services

I have been discussing the differences brought about to our business model with the introduction of Version 4 of our website at Outskirts Press. The main difference is that we are starting to offer a la carte services to writers regardless of where/how they publish their book(s). Of course, authors publishing with Outskirts Press get deep discounts.

I previously summarized the Writing Services. We also introduced a la carte book marketing services with the launch of Version 4 on Memorial Day weekend, and like with the Writing Services, we launched with a limited number of available options as a compromise to maxed resources and an aggressive launch date.

Out of the gate, the Marketing Solutions “aisle” of our new site featured 7 items:

5 hours of Personal Marketing Assistance with one of our professional marketing experts
5 Celebrity addresses and pitches with our Celebrity endorsements option
500 customized bookmarks
500 customized postcards
500 customized business cards
5 large posters (roughly 2 feet by 3 feet)
25 small posters

We quickly added the Amazon Kindle Edition within a month after launch, since it is one of our most popular marketing services month in and month out. To encourage authors to publish with us, we offer deep discounts to our authors on all our new a la carte services. For instance, authors who have published their book with Outskirts Press can get an Amazon Kindle edition for 25% less than someone publishing elsewhere. Even still, at $135 it’s the lowest price I was able to find for what we deliver (although I didn’t spend hours and hours looking around). And the best part of the deal, and one few of our competitors can match, is that the author keeps ALL their profits. Amazon pays them directly, so they know Outskirts Press is not taking any of the Kindle revenue. We’re not even involved in the financial loop at all. This alone is enough reason for many authors at competing publishers to eschew their publisher’s Kindle edition (if they offer it all) in preference for ours.

But with 8 marketing solutions available on an a la carte basis, we have a long way to go to introduce ALL the marketing services and products available to our authors. And a growing number of authors from elsewhere are starting to join us on that journey. We welcome them, and are excited to be helping them.

Amazon, self publishing

Sell Your Book on Amazon – Second Edition updates

For those of you who purchased the first edition of Sell Your Book on Amazon and are wondering whether it is worth buying the second edition, here is a quick rundown of the major changes. I already discussed in a previous post the cover changes, table of contents changes, and indexing changes — although none of those changes apply to the actual content of the book.

The first major change was Amazon’s migration from AmazonConnect to Author Central and how that affects methods for updating your bibliography, your author profile, your blog, and other features on Amazon. Some of those features previously existed in your Amazon account profile and others previously existed on the product sales page for your book, like the blog, for instance. With Author Central, much of the specific functionality geared toward authors was consolidated in one place. Does this mean you can focus solely on Author Central now, instead of your Author account profile? No, because Listmania, Guides, Reviews, your signature header, and other important elements of Amazon promotion still exist in your Amazon account profile. Author Central just means that now you have to keep two different accounts updated. Isn’t that nice?

The second major change involved Amazon’s launch of the Kindle and Amazon’s subsequent migration from their previous ebook system to their current Digital Text Platform system. Do I recommend a Kindle edition for every book? You betch’a.

Other smaller changes were made to bring the second edition in line with current Amazon guidelines and functionality. These include:

minor alterations to the recommendations I make regarding reviews in light of Amazon’s guidelines changes
minor alterations to the process for creating a Listmania list in light of Amazon’s guideline changes
minor alterations to the process for creating an Amazon Guide in light of Amazon’s guideline changes
several minor alterations to the Book Detail Page chapter in light of moderate changes Amazon made to the sales detail pages — mostly involving analytic information available for the book after it undergoes Search Inside scanning
minor alterations to the procedure for using tagging and “search submissions” for promotion since Amazon has since migrated all manual search submissions into their tagging engine
alterations to the BXGY promotion since Amazon no longer offers that to non-Advantage members
minor alterations to the Publisher’s and Book Sellers Guide analysis since that page is largely out of date even on Amazon’s own site

That’s about it. So if you want to purchase the second edition of SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON, click here.

Amazon, marketing, self publishing

Sell Your Book on Amazon – cover tactic

Previously I discussed some of the cover issues to consider when publishing a book and marketing it on the internet, particularly Amazon. I encouraged authors to consider altering the cover image they submit to Amazon to utilize a greater percentage of the “space” Amazon allocates for the image.

Let’s look at an actual example, using my book SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON…

Most people won’t search for your book by title or by your name. They will search on Amazon for a keyword or phrase that captures their interest. One of the very popular keyword phrases I optimize for is “book marketing.” When conducting that search on Amazon today, my book appeared number 10 in the listings on the first page, as shown below:

It comes in directly below The Frugal Book Promoter and two places above Jump Start Your Book Sales. But I’ll bet your eyes naturally gravitated to THOSE two books first, prior to mine in the image above. Well, that’s not good — at least, not for me. The white in my cover gets lost within the white of the webpage, while both those covers are bright. In fact, they’re yellow… hmmm, I wonder why that is…

Granted, The Frugal Book Promoter and Jump Start Your Book Sales are both very good online covers because, surprise surprise, they’re about book marketing, too! The authors are experts in doing exactly what they’re doing for their own books. My point is, in all likelihood, your book won’t be competing with marketing experts. If your book is about bank financing, your competition may not be online marketing savvy, but that’s all the MORE reason to take steps to make YOUR book about bank financing outshine the others, right?

But which image does your eye gravitate toward in this next screen shot? It’s the same search for “book marketing” on Amazon. The titles are all in the same order… I’ve simply adjusted the image that comes up for my book cover:

My image is almost twice as big, which makes the title stand out more, and I’ve replaced the white with a bright, obnoxious yellow to attract attention. I’m not trying to win any design contests here on Amazon — I’m trying to sell books!

This is an Amazon marketing option we’re considering offering to our authors, so we’re in the process of guinea pigging it — yes, I’ve made that an active verb again — with all my books and then keeping an eye on the Amazon Sales Ranking to see if it makes a statistical difference…

There are two problematic elements to this that we’re currently ironing out. The first is that the “larger” image gets degraded a little bit if Amazon adds the “Look Inside” graphic for Search Inside the Book books. The second is that the Kindle edition graphic, in my opinion, looks too similar to the paperback and hardback editions on Amazon. Sure, Amazon adds that little “kindle graphic” on the detail page. But I don’t think that’s good enough. For example, due to the “look inside” graphic outlined above, you will notice on the screen shot below, that the Kindle edition of my book actually looks MORE appealing than the paperback. There might be some situations where that’s preferable, but this isn’t one of them.

Hint: the first book is the paperback edition and the 3rd book is the Kindle edition.