From the President

Happy June! I can’t attend the June meeting, but I’d like to share recent experiences that relate to this month’s topic.

Kindle Scout

You can go to their website for all the details, but essentially this is Amazon’s toe in the water to see if they can bypass agents and publishers and buy content directly from writers. It’s an experiment in crowd-sourcing. People vote on whether a book should be published. If published, the author gets a $1500 advance, 50% commission, and most importantly, Amazon’s marketing muscle.

So, here’s what I experienced. I filled out a questionnaire, then uploaded a complete manuscript titled, TIME JUMPER, along with a complete cover. It took Kindle a couple days to decide that the book was acceptable to put on their site.

How they screen manuscripts is the first mystery in a series of mysteries. I seriously doubt they read the submissions. I suspect they run the manuscript through software to check for profanity because one of the items in the questionnaire was whether the book was acceptable to younger readers.

30-Day Campaign

Then the book started a 30-day campaign where it was featured on the Kindle Scout website. Here’s where a well-written blurb is important because that’s what appears along with the cover of the book and a short tag-line. People who visit the page can hit a button to “nominate” the book for publication.

Kindle provides daily reports showing how many people visit the book’s page and where they come from (Facebook, websites, etc.). One drawback is that you have to wait until the next day to see the previous day’s results. The data is general and really doesn’t give much in the way of knowing what your efforts are yielding.

The site is broken into major categories: romance, mystery, fantasy, etc. Each day, two or three books are added in each category. You get a good pop in visitors on the first and second day because the listings are chronological. When someone looks at the postings, they automatically see today’s releases first. Each day, your posting drops further down and requires more digging to be seen by visitors.

The book gets another big pop on the last couple days because it’s featured in the category, “Ending Soon.” The rest of the time, the writer is responsible for using social networking to drive readers to the book’s page. Each hour, the books getting the most traffic appear in the category, “Hot and Trending.

It’s essential to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to get traffic to a book.

How Are Books Chosen?

How does Kindle choose what books to publish? More mystery. I researched other writers who have and have not been published by Kindle Scout. One fellow’s book stayed in Hot and Trending every single day, in all days well over 12 hours, and in many days for 24 hours. His book was not selected.

My own perusal of other entries showed a wide variation of quality. My guess is that crowd-sourcing winnows down to the most popular entries, then somebody actually reads the entries.

What were my results? Kindle did not select TIME JUMPER. I posted numerous times to social media. (I have over 1,934 Twitter followers and over 600 friends on Facebook.) Did I see any correlation between postings and results? Only once. My biggest day followed a massive Facebook and Twitter campaign. I also paid for Google AdWords and I paid for Facebook boosts of postings. Other days, I saw no correlation between my efforts and the limited result information Kindle provided. Being in the category of Ending Soon seemed to show better results than almost anything else.

After the campaign, I immediately loaded TIME JUMPER to Amazon as a Kindle book and a paperback. I notified Kindle Scout and they sent out an email to all the people who nominated my book. This free marketing is a very beneficial feature of participating in Kindle Scout. For the next couple weeks, TIME JUMPER sold well on Amazon.

 Is This Worthwhile?

It doesn’t cost anything to participate. If you have a good online social presence, take a shot. But don’t invest a lot of money in marketing because even if you get traffic to your book, the selection process after that point is a mystery. I’ll discuss this further at the July meeting and answer your questions.
Have a great June meeting,
Matt

HSW 2017 WRITERS CONTEST

       POKER POT STYLE-WINNER TAKES ALL

High Sierra Writers is proud to announce the 2017 writing contest. Our chosen format this year is Short Story.  After much consideration, we thought this would allow more members to participate.

You may submit a maximum of 2 entries and the cost is $10.00 per entry. HSW is providing $100 seed money to start the pot, and ALL entry monies collected will be added to the pot. So, the more entries, the larger the pot will grow!