Do any of you guys self-publish on Amazon?

Can't you just buy fake reviews? Maybe amazon will catch you now.

To be honest, that's not something I've looked into. I might get a couple of friends to write positive reviews, but that's it. I figure those bought reviews are fairly formulaic and easy for Amazon to spot.

black hat forums.

We used to hire people from china with good english skills, have an intern edit their work, and then post all their shit from proxies to promote our business.

What price range were they in?

Like a .50 a review?

We used to pay 10 dollars a website for professionals who wanted their own site and wordpress.

This was like 5 years ago though so who knows.

I assume you need an amazon account with a credit card attached or wouldn't you just be able to easily fake your own reviews by making throwaway accounts and maybe using amazon prepaid cards on it to make it look more legit.

This is the only annoying part of the process, I am considering generating genre fiction in a formulaic way through a plagiarizer bot.

I have a question for you, Veeky Forums. Do you think an Amazon reader would buy a collection of short stories, all in the same setting? Or is that just too much of a cop-out?

Who the fuck knows? Amazon's readers are like, human beings, they're all different and have their own tastes, man

A fair point. I suppose I was wondering if anybody had heard of short story anthologies doing well on there.

I don't publish things on amazon but I lurk in some communities with people that do, and from what I've heard, anything with short stories (collections or singular) is extremely difficult to sell.

But that's just what I've heard. Maybe someone with experience will say otherwise.

That's sort of what I figured. Guess I'll stay plugging on my longer narrative, Thanks user.

I plan to release my almost finished book on Amazon soon. Trouble is I don't really know how to promote it.

I'll show my real life friends and maybe see if I can get the local bookstore to help me push it, as they have with another local author, but other than that I'm not real sure.

Honestly, it seems like getting people to pay attention to your work is very difficult.

My friend and I wrote a book together, we didn't have any success getting a literary agent so we made our own publishing company and published it ourselves. Got a load of paperbacks printed, those and the ebook are on Amazon now.

Sales are pretty non-existent desu

How are you advertising? Are you getting some of your paperback's into shops? What were your initial investments?

Shill hard on websites. Writing Forums, Reddit and anywhere else you can think of.

We spent about £380 on 100 paperbacks. Really nice quality prints. Got the cover made by a guy on Fiver, that was pretty cheap. The ISBN was pretty costly as well. At least the ebook was free.

We haven't spent any money on marketing, just doing it ourselves through Facebook and Twitter. I can't stand Twitter, man, so many desperate authors in one place all vying for the same attention. I don't know where to begin getting it into stores. Not a success story, but we had fun doing it.

There is such a lack of negotiation it's redonkulous. It works well for short frippery i.e. pulp genre fiction where you can develop a small following and pump out decent volume, but that you'd probs find hard to sell to a normal publisher.

What did you make off Amazon specifically? Are you going to re-strategize? Can't you get paid per page read by people with Amazon prime who can borrow books with their subscription?

Does anyone have any figures for Amazon's ebook market?

If you don't have a budget or support from the establishment, you really have to go directly to readers using places like Goodreads and reddit. Look for people who read the type of thing you wrote and offer them a free copy. If they accept, then save their contact info and give them a bit of time to read it. Once you release on Amazon, hit those people up for a review. If you get enough ratings your book will start getting organic views from Amazon.

And get a good cover. Don't try to make one yourself unless you're professional graphic artist. People will judge your book based on the cover, and if your cover looks bad they will bury you.

How do you get to that shill mentality? I'm an artist, not a salesman. The mere thought of talking about my works to someone if they don't ask first just disgusts me, let alone doing all that buy-buy-buy spiel. Whenever I see some self-published faggot bluntly selling their shit online, all I can think about is what fucking tool and a clown they are. I don't want anyone to feel the same way about me. Then again, for reasons I can't understand, those clowns have followers while I don't.

>Why do people shill their work?
>their work sells better than mine.

It seems, Gregory, you've answered your own question. Right now e-publishing is a huge opportunity, you can make your work available without having won the lottery of good-mood/bad-mood publishers. But if you don't tell people about your work, if you don't put in the effort, you can't reasonably expect anybody to read your book.

You didn't answer the question.

You think it's not the same for the ones who have an agent or a publisher to promote them? You still are the best promoter of yourself. Why do you think writers do interviews? It's because agents can't talk about your book for you except saying "it's great, got a ton of good reviews, blah blah buy it."

They shill because it gets their work attention. They sell more copies than they would and they get much more feedback. Having a fantastic story is all well and good, but if nobody knows about it then how can it possibly sell?

yeah I self-published my first book on amazon

How did it go? What was it about?

Well actually it was createspace, but they're a subsidary of amazon, so I was able to publish the ebook version pretty easily.

It was just a little fantasy story I'd been working on and off for over a few years. It's a self-contained story written like a memoir, and while the timeline of the plot spans decades, the tone isn't very epic. It's supposed to feel more personal.

I never expected sales or recognition from it, I was just happy to know I could write a book. It's the first entry in what I'd like as a collection of other books written by the same narrator - though with different/unrelated self-contained stories.

Where do you self-publish from? Does Amazon allow you to create paperbacks directly or do you have to go through a third party like Lulu?

as someone a little farther along, thats the darwin situation at work. if you cant be a whore you better learn it or youre done. It sucks. Its gross But its the reality. become a huge shameless whore or get buried. Theres NO alternative

Dunno if you replying to me but CreateSpace is its own paperpack self-publishing platform. I published paperback on there and then Amazon incorporated it into its catalog.

Just more of a general question, but yeah, I looked at that a little. Seems pretty close to Lulu which is the one I've looked at the most.
Thanks

Why not put something up for free if nobody is going to buy it?

I'm writing a short erotic book, shouldn't be more than 50 pages. I've seen posts on here about writing things like this on this board. How do I make this successful on Amazon?

I actually came across an interview with someone the writes e-book erotica, a few months back. I can't find it now, but the gist of it was that volume is key. You wont make much money off of one shlick-fic. But you will get a relatively steady stream of monthly purchases if you advertise well and if your stuff is good. So if you make a few dozen of these novellas, over the course of a year, you might end up making a respectable income.

Another issue is specialisation. You need to find a niche that wants your stories. A particular fetish that is under-represented in the current amazon store. If you can pull that off, then you're onto a winner.

I won't publish my novel. I'll print it out, walk into the forest at night, and read it to the full moon

Naked, I presume?

I guess I need to. yes.

Thanks for the legitimate advice. It's nearly finished, so I'll be doing something of a giveaway before too long.

I have an artist to make a cover for me, but he's not a professional, just a hobbyist I know who's pretty decent.

What were your sales like?

Find a great title for your novel and a great cover or picture that suggests a lot. Then it better be written well.

I've been looking through the back catalog of smut on Amazon, and it seems like the more successful erotic novellas have titles that let you know exactly what you're getting. If you're writing a story about being fucked by a pair of Russian soldiers that bought you as a sex slave, then you better have the words "Russian", "slave" and "fucked" somewhere in your title.

Erotica isn't high literature. Your audience wants a very specific thing, and you have to let them know that what you're selling is what they want to buy.

I'm not saying it has to be high litterature...it has to do the job for this very specific fetish and style of book. And as you say, the title has to be understood right away.

With regards to cover art, what do you think is the ideal style of cover art for modern Science-Fantasy? I was thinking something in the style of pic-related. Some dude over on Veeky Forums makes these (yes, I'm trash) and something about the almost impressionist style of it really appeals to me. Or is it a tad overwhelming? Might something more simplistic be more appealing?

Yes, and it would seem that the correlation between Amazon/CreateSpace's self-publishing program and a 'landfill' is accurate.

Bro, just use Facebook to promote the book. With the payments you make Facebook can select the average-target-audience and spread the news about your work to people that might actually buy it. Also, don’t think that editors are all of that: they don’t make much effort to promote you, a lot of the work must be done by yourself.

Source: I published a book by a Publishing house.

I am finishing a new work in 2017, and this time I think I will publish with Amazon and market the work on Facebook.

What sort of price range do Facebook operate in?

If you make a page about your own work, let us say:

>The literary works of user Anonymous

You can make several posts on the page, just like you make on your own Facebook profile. For example, you can post a picture and a small excerpt, a passage, of your book. You can make several of those passages

Why did I explain you this: because you can boost (with money) either the complete page (The literary works of user Anonymous) or every single post on your page (for example, a post where you state that your new book is now viable on Amazon, or simply a post where you share an excerpt you find especially good).

Now, for the prices. You can pay any amount you want. One of the base divulgation prices is $ 7,00 a day for your main page. You can also boost any post on your page (let us say the post about the launching of your new book) for, let us say, $ 4,00. With only $ 4,00 you reach an amount of circa 290 to 750 people. Just imagine: 750 people with only 4,00 bucks!

You are the one who selects how much money you want to spend. If you are a little well-found you can spend, let us say, $ 1.000,00 to promote your page. With that amount of money you are going to reach much more, much, much, much more people than with any sort of campaign an editor house can make for you.

Also, Facebook allows you to personalize your public: you create the public you want to be the main receiver of your ads. So you can select interests like “literature”, “novels”, “films”, “science fiction”, “poetry”, !theater”, you name it.

It is no wonder Facebook is grossing millions and millions with advertisement: there are countless companies and individual Businesspeople using it to promote their products or services.

>You can make several of those passages

you can make several of those posts with small bits of your work-in-progress or even finished work.

I have a Facebook page of my work, with almost 10.000,00 likes, and I havent spend even $ 300,00 on it.

Do you have any return on investment stats?

I self published my first horror novel on Amazon. I'm going to turn it into a trilogy and am about 1/4 done with the sequel. I only have one review on my novel, but it is for 5 stars and calls it "absolutely hilarious and very engrossing". Sadly I barely push any sales. Maybe once there are sequels, people will be more open to checking out a trilogy.

Have you done any advertising? Have you tried any of the suggested tactics from this thread?

I tried buying Amazon ad space and that didn;t do anything. So far, the only time I get a couple sales of my novel are when I do free book giveaways of my various short stories. People enjoy the shorts and buy the book to get more, but only one buyer bothered to leave a review. I also tried the route of doing short erotica to try to bring in new readers, those bring in some sales. My mom just bought 2 paperbacks to give out as Christmas presents, that's my big sale this week.

don't fall for the self-publishing meme anons

Interesting. Do you give away the short stories in anthologies or do you have them listed as individual works? what sort of length do you aim for on your short stories? Are they related to your novel in any way?

Individual stories so I can do more frequent giveaways with an anthology offered as well. Length goes from 3k-12k words. They are not related to the novel outside being horror. The novel is 58k words.