25% off all books! (opening sale)

Lello bookstore, Portugal

Well, I’m a few months late to the party, but it  seems that Amazon has finally admitted that there is a life outside Kindle!

It’s now apparently possible to load EPUBs onto your Kindle through Amazon’s discomobulator which turns them into Amazon’s proprietary format. In fact, the Amazon ebook publishing service gave up accepting DOCs and DOCXs some time ago, and now only accepts EPUBs. I’m guessing that technology has now made it over to the consumer side of Amazon, having had the suppliers as beta testers to iron out the bugs. Here’s how you do it!

What this means for readers is that there is a vast sea of public-domain and other titles out there which are now available for reading on Amazon devices.

And for me and other authors who do their own production and sales, it means that there’s only one file that needs to go up on ebook sales pages.

So now having set up a shiny new shop, courtesy of Payhip, where my books were neatly arranged as both EPUB and MOBI, I find I really needn’t have bothered. [UPDATE – I simplified everyone’s life by only offering the EPUB]

Anyway, take a look at the store, poke around, kick the tyres, buy something if you want something to read, and get a 25% discount on everything using the coupon code 1B57WFAEZI (valid until 17 September 2022). And give me some feedback on things you liked, and things you didn’t like about it.

Book promotions

business plan schedule written on the notebook

If you have written a book, or several books, you are likely to get quite a few messages offering to promote your book, putting your title and your name in front of several tens of thousands of Twitter followers, likers of Instagram accounts, etc. I get one or two of these each day.

Once in a while I go for the cheapest option on the offerings of these people (typically there are Silver, Gold and Platinum options, sometimes worded differently), and the Twitter feeds appear together with a link.

And the results? Almost nothing. In fact, I ran a week’s worth of these Twitter ads with a link, not to a direct sales outlet, but to my book page here. I can check where clicks to this page come from – and none, repeat none, came from the 300,000 (or whatever the number was) followers of this Twitter account, Instagram or Facebook entity.

So I look at another one which promises to do more – they will actually write reviews, promote a book as “Book of the Month” or even “Book of the Year”. All for a fee, of course, but on the face of it, quite a good deal. So, just for fun, I checked the Amazon sales rankings of a recent Book of the Month. In both the UK and the USA, they were actually lower than On the Other Side of the Sky. The book actually had quite an interesting premise, the cover was a far cry from the topless over-muscled male torso that seems to find its way onto the cover of so many titles now. The Look Inside feature showed me that the style was at the very least competent, if a little wooden and pedestrian (in my opinion, of course; others might like it).

So what had this author got from paying a reasonable sum for a review and the chance to become Book of the Month? Perhaps half a dozen sales? I don’t believe this is untypical of these sites.

Now there are more reputable sites around, BookBub being one of the largest (reviews/ratings very welcome, please), and Reedsy now offering a Discovery programme, in which On the Other Side of the Sky was featured by a reviewer who picked up both the good and the less good points of the story, ending up with four stars (read it here). There’s also Kirkus, where you can pay for a review, but is that really going to get you anywhere?

So… are these smaller autotweeting book promotion sites simply an extension of the vanity press industry? You have to wonder sometimes. But if anyone knows a good cost-effective way of getting your titles noticed by purchasers, I’m very happy to listen to what you have to say.