What do you think, Veeky Forums? Not bad, eh?

can you securely use a pseudonym? i wouldn't mind writing some queer scifi bullshit, but i don't want anyone to find my name on that ever, like i don't want it to end up like when youtube changed everyone's channel name to their "real" google plus name randomly one day etc. also, i have a tech tutorial book i'm working on that i want to publish under my real name, not such much to actually sell but as a way to pad my resume and look like an expert on this somewhat obscure api, so i don't want queer sci-fi to mingle with my recruiter-bait linkedin padding tech shit

>With Kindle, you get 35% royalties if you price your eReader book at $0.99-2.98. From $2.99 and higher, you get 70% royalties which is VERY substantial. The most traditionally published authors usually get with their books is maybe 15%, but that's quite high. I think first-time authors only get like... 8%? Anyways, to get down to brass tax, 35% of $0.99 is $0.35. For $1.99 it's about $0.70. For $2.99 however with that 70% commission, it's a lovely $2.05. Though with that in mind, I am not a famous author. I am new, unknown, so I stick to $0.99 with most of my books. I've finally dabbled in $2.99 with my sequel to my first book, which was Living amongst the Dead, and the sequel is Living amongst the Dead: Dark Days. I must say, that $2.99 bit is quite juicy, but I feel greedy using it.

holy shit what a rip-off! and nerds have the audacity to complain that itunes takes 30% cut of app sales, meanwhile amazon only leaves you with 30%, god damn!

that reminds me, has anyone tried publishing your books on itunes? how did the sales and exposure/discoverability/etc compare to amazon? i think itunes has a slightly higher barrier of entry to discourage ponyporn and smash bros fanfic, like you have to pay $100 to get a legit isbn for your book to list it etc, but then the cut they take is a bit less than amazon, so if you know you can sell a lot of copies it might be worth it, on the other hand if you're just spamming out genre fic hoping for people to randomly stumble across your book and buy it on a whim with no promotion which means sales in the dozens not thousands, maybe not worth it

Facebook ad campaign? Nah, never tried that before. I'm really not one for social media. What I mostly do in terms of marketing is when I've got a promotion on the go where I've got books going for free, then I'll bring it up on /k/ where a fair few people like my books and also here on Veeky Forums. Most people just get free copies of books, and that's perfectly fine, but I also get a few sales here and there which is pretty badass and the sales tend to remain high for a few days after the promotion for some reason.

The thing about marketing, or 'shilling', is to try not to be obnoxious about it. Honestly I'm feeling a bit sick, just took some medication to help me out, and now I just feel like talking about Kindle, self-publishing, stuff like that. I guess it's kind of inevitable that my books would be brought up eventually, but I swear I didn't start this thread to shill. Just feel like talking about self-publishing, which has kind of changed my life. For months now I've been steady writing and editing, basically since late August, which is nearing 8 months. Self-published since late October which is nearing 6 months. So pretty much 5.5 books in less than 8 months. A total of around... what was it... 240,000 words? Well, more like 270,000 words or so with the book I've got about half finished.

I actually met a fellow recently who's working on a book, too. Been working on it for about 10 years now though, and is aiming for 2020 to be his year of publication. Going for epic fantasy. Not really my thing, to be perfectly honest, but all the same I told him I can help him out with self-publishing, no problem. HUGE learning curve, but well worth it.

Yeah, I've become something of a regular on Veeky Forums, I lurk pretty much every day now. Glad to hear I've inspired you, I've written 2300 words so far today, see if you can beat me ;) To be fair though I'm feeling pretty wonky, almost like I'm hung over even though I didn't drink last night, so I probably won't get around to writing any more today. Tomorrow is another day though!

>So pretty much 5.5 books in less than 8 months. A total of around... what was it... 240,000 words? Well, more like 270,000 words or so with the book I've got about half finished.

this isn't a university class and we're not your professor, no one cares how many pages you wrote or what the wordcount is, how many copies did you sell and how much money did you make is what matters in the hack game

240,000 words is a lot! I'm going for 100,000. I wrote a book last year that was about 60,000 words, and I want to write a bigger one this time. For a full year, I lounged around doing nothing, bored. Self-publishing is exciting. Writers are living in a great time for it. Keep posting about it!

Well, knock on wood, but so far my pseudonym/pen name seems to have remained secure. I've not told too many people who know the real me that I have written my books, and I've also shilled on Veeky Forums and /k/ thus far without any hassle. One time on /k/ a guy got me a bit shaken, saying he would just need 10 minutes and he'll have what he needs. Then in almost exactly 10 minute's time he said he had gotten what he was looking for and I should expect a 'surprise'. Probably BS, and the other guys in the thread told me not to worry about it. Ultimately, thankfully, nothing came of it. At least not yet, and I hope it never does. Though with all the positive feedback I've been getting from people, including a retired English teacher who is traditionally published, I'm becoming steadily more comfortable with the idea of telling people that I wrote my books, and I am 'J N Morgan'. So if you just play your cards write and don't piss anyone off, nor go around to people who know your real name and tell them you're your pseudonym, then you 'should' be ok. I mean, there's quite a fair bit of smut in my books, including a lesbian rape-and-murder scene in one, so yeah, I'm not overly thrilled with the idea of people knowing who I really am.

Yeah, 35% might now SOUND like much, but remember that traditionally published authors usually only get 8-15%, and Brandon Sanderson I think once mentioned that SUPPOSEDLY someone with Lucas Arts managed to get 21% but it's never been confirmed. So really even 35% is pretty badass, and 70% is just... WOW! I mean, for my first 6 days after self-publishing Living amongst the Dead: Dark days, I averaged one sale a day. Doesn't sound like much, but that's $12.30 US! Around $17 Canadian, probably! I mean, shit, I self-publish a sequel while just trying out the $2.99 price to get a taste of that 70% royalty for the first time and I get nearly $20 in less than a week. INCREDIBLE!

Well I mean, sadly those 6 sales are the ONLY ones I've gotten since it went up, and I only got 1 KENP/KU page read, so I'll see how things go after my promotion. For my promotion I'll be putting that $2.99 book on Kindle Countdown for probably $0.99, however I'll still get 70% commission meaning I guess 70 cents, which is sweet. If the sales completely dry up again afterwards then I'll put it back to $0.99 like my other books. If I still get sales occasionally after the promotion though, then I'll leave it at $2.99 until I get my 7th book finished. Right now, as mentioned, I'm working on my 6th.

As for promotions/iTunes, I'll start another reply for that; I think this one is nearly at its limit.

>I averaged one sale a day. Doesn't sound like much, but that's $12.30 US! Around $17 Canadian, probably! I mean, shit, I self-publish a sequel while just trying out the $2.99 price to get a taste of that 70% royalty for the first time and I get nearly $20 in less than a week. INCREDIBLE!

dude, you could make more than that writing fakenews articles at $5 a pop for content farms, 12 bucks for 30k words or something must be significantly below minimum wage

One moment...

DEM HOLY QUADS THO!

Ok, so to my knowledge nobody has tried to publish my stuff anywhere else. I hope nobody has, at least. I don't intend on publishing on iTunes, mostly because I simply didn't know until now that they did books but I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but also there's no way I'm going to spend $100 on an ISBN. Also, when you go up for KDP Select, you sort of sign a contract with Kindle saying that you don't let anyone else publish your eReader stuff. I can get traditionally published for paperbacks with other companies, that's ok, but not with eReaders. The contract only lasts 3 months at a time, and it does come with some perks. I believe it is well worth it, and can go into more detail if you like.

As for exposure/discoverability, that is ALL on the writer. Amazon doesn't really do anything in that regard. There's a service you can pay for, I think, but I can't afford to spend actual money on marketing so I do it all myself. I don't spam genre fiction though. I write what interests me, and my zombie survival series 'Living amongst the Dead' is something I've wanted to write for over half a decade. Yes, since before Walking Dead. I do free promotions when I can and also am going to try Kindle Countdown for the first time soon.

I find the wordcount interesting, and yeah it's cool to make money by doing what you love, the main reason I'm doing it is because of love. I mean I still haven't made $100 however I've been writing/editing (I HATE editing) for nearly 8 months. If I was doing this for money... I'm not being particularly efficient at it.

That's 240,000 words for all 5.5 books combined. 100,000 is quite lengthy for a fiction book unless it's perhaps epic fantasy or something. It's generally advised that for your first book, it should be a bit modest in length, perhaps 60,000-80,000 words. My first one was about 77,000, then the 2nd draft was around 79,000, and by the third it was about 81,000 so I just went and self-published it. Felt I was spending too much time editing.

With the advent of Kindle and the explosion of popularity with self-publishing, along with the ease with which you can become self-published, it really is a great time to be a writer. I could have started years ago, and I feel I should have, but I never really buckled down and decided to write that book until August. I finally have, and I've felt pride for it ever since, even while it didn't sell at all, but even more-so now that it's getting sales and KENP/KU page reads regularly.

You became a statistic?

Writing isn't my profession, however at the rate things are going I anticipate I will be a full-time writer in about 1-2 years. I'm not writing to make money, I'm writing because I very much enjoy it. I've basically been writing as a sort of hobby for around half my life, since the early-mid 2000s. It's not until recently that I've tried writing a book, and only did so because it's one I've wanted to write for years and years. I don't care about fakenews. I write guest articles on one fellow's blog from time to time but that's for free. I do it because it's always about firearms and/or history and/or survivalism, all three of which are things I'm very much interested in. It also gives me an additional platform on which to market my books.

The key, I think, and I learned this from Derek Murphy, is to give. I've been on Youtube for many years, I've written many comments, and over the years I've found that people often give my comments thumbs-up for being well written, sometimes insightful, or at least very informative. Maybe even entertaining. So if I write a Youtube comment that I think is well-written and also might have something to do with one of my books, then after the paragraphs are finished I'll briefly mention my books. I don't go around spamming "BUY MY BOOKS! THEIR GUD! FIND THEM ON AMAZON, CLICK THE LINK!" If people buy it, that's great. If they don't, that's perfectly fine too.

Another good way to give is by doing free promotions, which KDP Select allows you to do for up to 5 days out of the 3-month contract for each individual book. So theoretically, if I had 18 books self-published on KDP Select, I could have a book for free every day of the year. That's actually a pretty cool idea, actually... at the rate I'm going, I'll soon be averaging one book a month I think. So I might just have 18 books under my belt by about February 2018 or so. Well, we'll see what happens, but I imagine I won't be able to keep up this pace forever.

The top line is the eReader sales I've gotten in the last 30 days. The bottom line represents the KENP page reads from people checking out my book on Kindle Unlimited. Only half a cent per page, but what I find incredible is that so far since about March 27th, I've gotten page reads almost every single day. That means that almost every day for about 3 weeks, someone somewhere has been reading my books. Mostly my first one, but it's still incredible to imagine. I might also add that during my free promotional things, I've had books downloaded in US, UK, Canada, Brazil, Denmark, Japan, Italy, and Australia. Got my fingers crossed that in my next promotion someone in India will spot one of my free books and download it. As for paid sales, they're almost exclusively in the US. Perhaps one in the UK, and maybe 2-3 in Canada.

>pretty soon i'll have 18 books under my belt

i see a lot of indie app saps fall into this same pattern, they figure if they make a dollar on each app they make if they spam a million apps they'll end up with a million dollars, but this is retarded, uber doesn't have an 11 digit valuation because they made a new app everytime they got 12 downloads...

Just because I write a lot doesn't mean I'm trying to spam books. I mean I've once sat down for about 6 hours or so and wrote around 10,000 words. In a 24-hour period I've written about 15,500. It wasn't writing of desperation, or of greed. I wanted to write, so I wrote, and just kept writing. Ended up making my novella 'Another One Please, to dull the Pain' within 5 days with over half of it being written in a single day. It had been a pretty rough day, I found myself with nothing to do and also no internet connection to boot, I didn't feel like reading, so I decided to try out an idea I had for a book. The ideas just kept coming. It was also my first try at 'outline writing' instead of 'discovery writing' which I normally do. It worked alright, but I feel 'discovery writing' feels more natural to me.

A fellow who read LatD and LatD:DD, loved them to bits, also tried Firearm Valhalla which is my shortest book; an action/post-apocalyptic novellette. Only 16,500 words. He didn't much like it, found it too short, and felt that my real talent (yes, he has told me I have talent) was in proper novels with lots of character development, a more in-depth story, and so on. To both of our surprise (or at least to mine), he liked 'Another One Please', my drama novella. Said that he'll buy whatever the Hell I publish, no matter what it is, provided I make the price no higher than $2.99 which I never intended to do anyways. He even said that I'm not in the same class as Stephen King and "the guy who writes the 'Hunter' series" or something, in that he will automatically buy whatever I write. I found that to be a great compliment, for basically a total stranger to love my work so much.