Book Boffin

Print Book and eBook Self-Publishing for Creative Entrepreneurs

Book Publishing to an international market [A Guide For Australians]

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Getting paid within the shortest timeframe

If you decide to delve into the Amazon ecosystem, there is one massive challenge for Aussies (or anyone outside the US and UK). The one big problem publishing on Amazon, whether it be amazon.com or any other store besides amazon.com.au – is getting paid quickly and efficiently for your book and Kindle book sales.

Without a US or UK bank account, publishers in other countries have no choice but to get paid via cheque, delivered to you via snail mail. So after the very long wait to receive this international cheque (which is paid to you in USD), the local banks then charge a hefty fee to cash it into Aussie dollars (most of them are around $15, but worth shopping around for yourself).

Your account is automatically set at a threshold of USD 50.00 – which means your royalties need to accumulate to USD 50.00 until their system will issue the royalty cheque, effectively leaving you with approximately AUD 35.00 in your bank account, if the exchange rate is neutral (which happens… never), or even less if the exchange rate is going against you.

This, for me, started to become a problem.

The first thing I did was adjust the payment threshold on all my amazon accounts to USD 100,00, but really, we are not talking about the sort of money that will set us up for retirement here, and this did not fix the issue of the fees decaying the royalties.

In some forums I came across a service that overcomes this and I have set this up for myself with success, so if you find yourself in a similar position where you are wanting to maximize your royalty payments, this information might be useful to you.

There is a service in the United States called Payoneer and they allow people outside the US to set up an account with the Bank of America (a lot of financial companies use softbanks – banks which are virtual, allowing them to cut down on overheads (no physical location) and offer a better interest rate). For you as a publisher and non-US resident, Amazon can now EFT the royalties directly into your US bank account. Accessing the funds works in much the same way as a Paypal account.

Incidentally they also issue you with a debit MasterCard which can be convenient if you are an online shopper or frequent international traveller who likes to take advantage of fluctuating exchange rates by holding US Dollars.

Creative Destruction is not a bad thing

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Creative Destruction is a term popularised by Austrian American Economist, Joseph Schumpeter, to describe the process through which a new technology or innovation in an industry brings about the demise of something that existed before it.

In today’s terms, mp3 players, watches, gameboys and point and shoot cameras were all replaced by the smartphone in one fell swoop; CDs were replaced by streamed digital music.

The publishing industry has received a double whammy in recent years. First along came Amazon, removing borders and offering up every book in print (and backlisted) books with a few clicks, from anywhere in the world. No longer were people herded into their local bookseller to purchase whatever was on the shelves, or if you had your heart set on a particular title, order it and wait weeks for it to be delivered to the bookshop (and pay whatever retail price had been set for that title).

People now had choice – if they embraced the new era of online book publishing.

The second blow to the established model came when digital media went mainstream, removing any delay in the purchase process as books were instantly downloaded to your electronic device. Enter frictionless buying.

So as technology has become more advanced and the ability to read books digitally has become easier, cheaper, and sometimes necessary – the demand for heavy printed tomes has diminished.

According to James Daunt, the founder of London-based independent bookseller, Daunt Books these industry shake-ups have affected some genres much more than others, with fiction, and in particular romance and thrillers have seen the biggest change in how it is consumed.

For authors of these genres, this has been a complete game-changer. The easy reading categories that are favoured by travellers, commuters and enthusiasts being accessible on a device that weighs less than one single book in those categories, have created a user-driven growth in these categories and subsequent sub-categories like we’ve never seen before.

As James Daunt observes, “People seem to have reached the point in which they have digital devices and e-readers, which play an important part in their reading, but it’s not all of their reading. And some genres of bookselling have quite clearly gone significantly over to digital, fiction above all, but others have remained embedded and rooted in the physical world.“

I agree that there is an enduring appeal of physical books, particularly when they are beautiful and ‘keep sake-ish’ in some way. There are books I treasure and hold pride of place on my bookshelf. However, as new technologies overcome the idiosyncrasies created in illustrated and layouts of text-book centric issues (don’t get me started on embedded tables!) – it stands to reason that penetration of digital into non-fiction, history and children’s books will see a surge of their own. For some late-adopting categories, it’s only a matter of time. For others, they may never get there, and that’s a good thing too.

“If you’re one of those rare people who self-publishes successfully, you’re in a great position twice over because first of all, you’ve got the sales. Secondly, you’re peeling off all the profit.” James Daunt

Going Meta – Keyword Metadata

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When publishing books on Amazon, you are given the opportunity to include keywords or keyword phrases (7 to be exact).

Keywords are the extra juice your book can use to drive readers your way, as sometimes the title is not enough (or not at all) of an indication to your books subject matter, so keywords are important to ensure the Amazon search engine finds your book when people are punching in relevant words in the search bar.

Here is a list of 3 things to consider when choosing your keywords for your book:

  1. Don’t waste your keywords – Amazon is a search engine. All the metadata available for your book is what makes your book discoverable, but adding the same metadata twice is only wasting the valuable keystrokes you are given. The metadata taken is the author and other contributors; the title; the subtitle; keywords and categories. Therefore, no need to include the title and author in the keywords you have been allocated – use words that will help build relevance for readers so Amazon know to show your book when readers use the search bar.
  2.  Superjuicing your keywords to increase your categories – have you ever gone looking through Amazon for the categories your book would fit into, be very pleased with yourself to find some very neat and specific categories – then be in a state of utter befuddlement when those categories are just not there to choose in the backend when uploading your book? David Gaughran calls these phantom categories in his fantabulous book ‘Let’s Get Visible’ – and they are the key to opening up more categories for your book. The categories can be found on the kdp page here https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A200PDGPEIQX41 and they show the extra categories available on the Amazon store, and provide you with the keywords to include if you would like to appear in that category.
  3.  Don’t think Google, it’s not Google – people go to Google to find answers to questions, like, ‘How do I herd cats?’, or ‘Do single women find athlete’s foot an endearing feature?’. In the Amazon ecosystem, it’s important to think of your keywords in a different context – it’s not the same as targeted SEO for Google. People generally go to the Amazon bookstore with a more specific purpose. They are looking for an answer to their problem, or inspiration to get them to the next step, or some material to zone out with on their next holiday. They are going there ready to make a purchase on an item they are willing to invest time into, since reading takes time. They are a more qualified lead than garden-variety Googlers looking for free advice delivered to them in ‘wiki’ speak. Gearing keywords towards the intention of the reader will allow your book to be found by so many more readers, than if you had adopted a Google SEO approach to your keywords.

Beyond Amazon, some bookstores will allow more than 7 keywords so be sure to use them if given the chance. Here is a quick rundown of the keyword allowance on other platforms:

Createspace Keywords: 5 phrases, 25 character limit per phrase

Kindle Keywords, 7 phrases, 25 character limit per phrase

Lulu Keywords: no limit on phrases, 3 word limit per phrase

Smashwords: as of July 2014, Smashwords have now limited their tags to 10

 

 

 

 

As a self-published author, how do I get my book into bookstores?

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Book distribution, how get bookstores to sell your book.

More and more bricks and mortar bookstores are getting behind self-published authors every year. If you are really set on having your book available in bookstores, it would help you greatly if you played in their sandpit, rather than asked them to bring their bucket and spade into yours.

Confused? Then let’s get out of the sandpit, it’s time for a story.

Imagine you are a major bookworm of epic proportions. One day, disaster strikes and your step-cousin’s great aunt Milly’s brother-in-law has a fatal accident. Sad.

You learn of this tragedy because this nasty piece of work had denounced all family and the next in line for the dosh falls to you. Nice.

With the windfall you decide to open a bookstore, something you’ve always wanted to do. But what books to order? There are hundreds of millions of books available globally, what do you sell? If you order a book here, a book there, how much time, effort and admin is that going to take? Take delivery of the books, enter the book into your inventory, process the invoices for each book… Books are, at most, $30, how much is going to be left for me to keep running this place?

A major pain point for bookstores is the linear distribution methods they must rely on in order to make a return on the sale of each book.

Rationalisation of their suppliers is a smart choice for them to make.

They can do this through book distributors.

A book distributor sells books to retailers at a reasonable margin, and will ship those books to them for free if they reach a certain dollar threshold on each order, or if they maintain a certain annual spend with them. So book retailers need to ensure they order as many books as they think they can sell and keep their suppliers to a minimum, in order to maintain good terms with distributors. If they have too many suppliers, this will dilute their spend and this will cost them by either having to pay for the shipping of the books to them, or not receive as high a discount on the books they are buying. Both of these scenarios will result in lower margins with every sale of the book.

There is limited opportunity to recover increasing costs in the bookselling market. If bookstores were to mark up the individual books to cover extra costs they may have incurred, what buyer is going to buy a book for an extra few dollars when they can buy the same one down the road for less?

So, bookstores have a handful (if that) of preferred book distributors they consistently use to maintain their supply, and it is simply not worth their while to purchase individual books sold direct through an author, unless the author can adequately demonstrate they will have a lot of sales of the title to justify the extra administrative burden associated with that title.

So to sell your books to bookstores is going to be a hard slog unless you get a distribution partner on board.

That is the retailers perspective. Let’s consider your perspective.

Getting your title into a distributors catalogue is far more scalable solution for you too.

If your dream is to walk into bookstores and see your bounded beloved on a shelf, it pays to set yourself up for scale, right from the outset.

Schlepping yourself around to individual bookstores with a pile of books under your arm, trying to convince them your book will be a bestseller, if only they would shelve it in their store, is not a good use of your time or profitability (unless you are staging a strategic local campaign). It’s exhausting, and probably taking you away from more leveraged activities.

There is no getting away from the fact that you will have to do some selling, somewhere along the way. Your book is not going to sell itself. So better to concentrate your efforts on selling your book to one distributor who has access to many bookstores.

It is a much easier sell as you are only liaising with one person to get your title listed, which then frees up your time to market your book in order to leverage that relationship through increased sales volume.

The first step in finding a distributor is to find the RIGHT distributor for your title. Here is a 5 step checklist to get you on the way:

  1. Make a shortlist of the bookstores you would like to have stock your book.
  2. Call or email them and ask them which distributors do they order their books from.
  3. As you work through the bookstores, 2-3 distributors will keep coming up on the list.
  4. Research the listing requirements for those 2-3 distributors and take action to ensure you meet their eligibility requirements.
  5. Contact them with your title information and start the conversation.

And most importantly, once you successfully have your title listed with a distributor, go back to the bookstore and let them know where they can get your book.