Pros, Cons, & Steps for Publishing Your Own Book on Amazon 

[Rachel Dearth]

Pros, Cons, & Steps for Publishing Your Own Book on Amazon

by Jodie Renner, editor & author
Follow Jodie on Twitter.

I get a lot of questions from newbie / aspiring authors interested in self-publishing their book. Many don't realize that it's free and relatively easy to publish your book on Amazon as a Kindle e-book. And fast! It takes about 12 hours to appear on amazon.com for sale, and you receive your 70% royalties every month!
 
I’ve published five books myself on Amazon since July 2012, as e-books for Kindle, and have also published three of them in trade paperback on CreateSpace and IngramSpark.
 
Here are some pros, cons, and tips, based on my experience:

ADVANTAGES TO SELF-PUBLISHING ON AMAZON:

- Amazon sells more books than all the other publishers combined.

- It’s free to publish on Amazon (and CreateSpace).
 
- You’re in control. You control the whole process from start to finish and retain all the rights to your book.

- It’s fast. You don’t have to wait around for agents to respond. You upload the book and it’s ready to sell in 12 hours or less. You can start earning money right away while you write the next one!

- More and more people are buying e-books. You can take a Kindle or other e-reader anywhere, with more than a thousand books inside it! And e-books are quick and easy to purchase from wherever you are – with one-click buying, the e-book appears on your Kindle within seconds.
 
- Readers can also read your e-books on their computer, tablet, or smartphone. Just download the free app from Amazon.

 - You get 70% of the list price of your book (if it’s priced between $2.99 and $9.99; otherwise 35%), as opposed to 10-15% from publishers – IF you can get an agent and publisher to accept your book!
 
- You don’t need to write a whole book. You can publish a short story or article and sell it for $0.99 (you get 35% if it’s under $2.99)

- You get to control the pricing, so you can raise or lower the price of your e-book whenever you want, to boost sales.

- It’s easy to upload your book to Amazon and you can revise it as frequently as you want and just keep replacing the one that’s there with a better version.

- You can check your sales stats daily (or hourly) and watch them rise. You can also view stats graphs over time (and geographically) to see what’s working and what isn’t to promote sales.

- You receive your royalty payments every month (one month’s delay), as opposed to annually or quarterly or whatever.

– Amazon helps promote your book, through your book’s Amazon page, emails they send out mentioning it, and their feature, “Customers who bought this item also bought…”

- If you enroll in KDP Select, you earn money when people borrow your book, you can offer it free for up to 5 days out of every 90 as a promotion, and you can take advantage of other great Kindle promo ideas, like their Kindle Countdown Deals, and their Matchbook program, where, if readers buy or have bought the print version of your book, they can buy the e-book for free.

DISADVANTAGES:

- You’re in charge of quality control! So you need to guard against publishing it prematurely. Make sure it’s polished and ready! The competition is fierce out there, and reviewers can be very critical if you publish a book full of typos or otherwise hasty or amateurish writing. Don't shoot yourself in the foot and damage your reputation by publishing a less-than-professional book.

- Although publishing it is free, you’ll still need to pay for editing, a cover design, and probably formatting. And you may decide to hire someone to promote it. You should have a budget of at least $1,000 to spend on all this.

- You’ll need to do most of your own marketing and promoting (although Amazon does a lot, too), or hire a publicist. But traditional publishers now expect their authors to do a lot of their own promoting, too. Mid-list published authors basically are expected to do all or most of their own promoting, including paying for it.

STEPS FOR SELF-PUBLISHING ON AMAZON: 

1. Write with wild abandon.

2. Revise. See my articles “Revising, Editing, and Polishing Your Novel,” “How to Save a Bundle on Editing Costs,” and “How to Slash Your Word Count by 20-50% – and tighten up your story without losing any of the good stuff!”

3. Run it past a critique group or “beta” (volunteer) readers (smart people who read in your genre – don’t need to be writers themselves).

4. Revise again, based on feedback you’ve received from your critique group or beta readers (using your own judgment on what advice to accept and what to ignore, of course).

5. Find and hire a reputable freelance editor who specializes in fiction (if that’s what you write) and reads your genre.

6. Revise, based on the editor’s suggestions.

7. Hire a formatter (or do it yourself if you know a lot about formatting). See my article, “Basic Formatting of Your Manuscript (Formatting 101)”.

8. Hire someone to design an eye-catching, professional looking book cover. Be sure the title and author can be read at the small size posted on Amazon. Google “book cover designers.” or check the list of Resources on The Kill Zone blog.

9. Publish on Amazon.com, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

- Decide on two categories, add a great book description, think of 7 keyword phrases (search words), and write an interesting author bio, with links and a photo.

- Once it's been up for a while as an e-book and you've had a chance to tweak it if it needs it, consider publishing it in print on CreateSpace. That's basically free, too. It's Print on Demand, so the books aren't printed until people (or you) order some. But it's surprisingly quick when they/you do!

10. In the meantime, you’ll have already been building up a social network and platform:

- Facebook, Twitter, Google +, author website, blog, guest blog posts for others

- Writers’ groups and organizations, Goodreads – lists, giveaways

I suggest, as a minimum, a Facebook page and either a website or a blog. If you don’t have time to blog regularly, create an author website instead.

11. Start actively promoting your book – but don’t be annoying. By the way, Amazon does an excellent job of promoting your book for you, for free, especially if you enroll in KDP Select. See my article today over on Crime Fiction Collective, "Thanks, Amazon, for Promoting my Book for Free!"

12. Start writing the next one. Or publish a short story based on characters from your book and price it at $0.99. Your second book will help sell your first one.

Good luck with all this! I look forward to seeing your book on sale!



Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor and the award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides in her series An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: Captivate Your Readers, Fire up Your Fiction, and Writing a Killer Thriller. She has also published two clickable time-saving e-resources to date: Quick Clicks: Spelling List and Quick Clicks: Word Usage. You can find Jodie at www.JodieRenner.com, www.JodieRennerEditing.com, at The Kill Zone blog alternate Mondays, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

http://jodierennerediting.blogspot.com/2013/11/pros-cons-steps-for-publishing-your-own.html

[Rachel Dearth]

KINDLE SCOUT: THE PROS AND CONS OF AMAZON'S NEW CROWDSOURCED PUBLISHING PROGRAM
Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware
KINDLE SCOUT: THE PROS AND CONS OF AMAZON'S NEW CROWDSOURCED PUBLISHING PROGRAM


Yesterday, Amazon's brand-new crowdsourced publishing program, Kindle Scout, opened for voting by the public.The concept is pretty simple:
Kindle Scout is reader-powered publishing for new, never-before-published books. It’s a place where readers help decide if a book gets published. Selected books will be published by Kindle Press and receive 5-year renewable terms, a $1,500 advance, 50% eBook royalty rate, easy rights reversions and featured Amazon marketing.
Authors can submit their full manuscripts of 50,000 words or more (including cover art, various metadata items, and an author photo), about 5,000 words of which are posted on the Kindle Scout website for a 30-day "campaign". Readers can then browse books and nominate their favorites. If a manuscript they've voted for gets published, they receive a free ebook.

Things authors should note:
According to the guidelines, Amazon provides no editing, copy editing, proofreading, or cover art/illustration. Your book will be published exactly as you submit it. [See my update at the bottom of this post.]
Submissions are exclusive for 45 days from the date you submit your manuscript. No shopping your ms. elsewhere during that time.
Submitted manuscripts must meet content and eligiblity guidelines. Currently, only Romance, Mystery and Thriller, and SF/Fantasy are eligible.
Crowdsourcing? Not so much. Authors are encouraged to mobilize their networks for voting (which kind of undermines the notion that manuscripts will rise to the top on merit--a perennial problem of crowdsourced ventures, along with the potential for gaming the system). Mere vote numbers, however, don't determine what gets published. Per the FAQ, "Nominations give us an idea of which books readers think are great; the rest is up to the Kindle Scout team who then reviews books for potential publication."
If you're attracted by the promise of "featured Amazon marketing", here's what it actually consists of: "Kindle Press books will be enrolled and earn royalties for participation in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited as well as be eligible for targeted email campaigns and promotions." Key word here: "eligible." In other words, no promises.
If you're not selected for publication, you must request removal of your work from the Kindle Scout site. Otherwise, your campaign page will remain online.
By submitting, you agree in advance to the terms of the Kindle Press publishing agreement. These terms are not negotiable. So before you submit, be sure you're comfortable with them. (If Amazon chooses not to publish your ms., you're automatically released).

So, what about that publishing agreement?

Overall, it's decent. The grant of rights (for ebook and audio editions only--though see below) is exclusive and worldwide, and renews every five years--but you can request reversion at the end of any five-year term if you've earned less than $25,000 in royalties during the term, or at any time after your two-year publication anniversary if you've earned less than $500 in the previous 12 months. Royalties are 50% of net for ebooks and 25% of net for audiobooks, paid within 60 days of the end of the month. And of course, there's the $1,500 advance.

Things authors should note:
The grant of rights is a bit more sweeping than it appears:
The grant of rights includes translation rights. If these are exercised by Amazon, your royalty drops to 20% of net. (On the plus side, if Amazon has not exercised or licensed these rights within two years, you can request that they be reverted.)
Amazon can license to third parties any of the rights you've granted. You get 75% of net proceeds for foreign-language books licensed to third parties, and 50% of net proceeds for any other format.
The grant of rights allows Amazon not just to publish and/or license ebooks and audiobooks, but to "create condensed, adapted, abridged, interactive and enhanced editions of your Work, and include your Work in anthology or omnibus editions."
For "subscription or other blended fee programs" (for instance, Kindle Unlimited), net revenue "will be determined in accordance with the standard revenue allocation methods for that program." So be sure you're aware of what those are.
Amazon "may" register copyright for you, but is not required to do so.
As always, Amazon maintains complete discretion and control, and can make decisions and changes without telling you. "You acknowledge that we have no obligation to publish, market, distribute or offer for sale your Work, or continue publishing, marketing, distributing or selling your Work after we have started doing so. We may stop publishing your Work and cease further exploitation of the rights granted in this Agreement at any time in our sole discretion without notice to you." (my emphasis) These are not sentences you'll find in a typical publishing contract.

So should authors rush to submit their unpublished novels?

On the plus side, there's the advance (money up front is nice), the possibility of subrights sales, the promotional boost that published books will receive from the selection process--at least while the program is new--and whatever promotions Amazon may (not necessarily will--see above) undertake for individual books. Amazon's on-site promotions (as distinct from its email promotions, which can be spammy; you haven't lived until you've gotten an Amazon email promotion for your own book) are incredibly powerful, and can have a huge impact on sales numbers--though that effect doesn't necessarily last past the promotion itself. It's possible, also, that gaining a toehold in Amazon's publishing ecosystem could eventually open the door to one of Amazon Publishing's traditional imprints--for some authors, at least.

On the other hand, Kindle Scout seems to occupy an uneasy middle ground between publishing and self-publishing, embracing characteristics of both while offering the benefits of neither. As with a traditional publisher, you must agree to an exclusive contract that takes control of certain of your rights--but you don't get the editing, proofing, artwork, or any of the other financial investments that a traditional publisher would provide. As with self-publishing, your book is published exactly as you submit it, with no developmental input or support--but you don't have control of pricing and you receive a smaller percentage of sales proceeds than you would with KDP.

For Amazon, Kindle Scout is super-low risk publishing with the potential for substantial yield--not just from books that prove popular but from the influx of new users to its website. For authors, it's the usual dilemma: does what you may gain outweigh what you don't get, and what you must give up?

As always, don't rush in. Read and understand the Kindle Scout publishing agreement, and be sure you're comfortable with the other conditions to which you're agreeing by submitting your manuscript. Be realistic in your expectations--not just of the possibility of publication, but of what might result if you're selected.

And please--don't spam your entire social network with requests for votes.

UPDATE, 10/30/14: Amazon's right to ebooks and audiobooks is exclusive, but I've been asked whether the Kindle Scout publishing agreement would allow authors to self-publish in print. The answer would appear to be "yes". Here's the relevant language (my emphasis): "All rights not expressly granted to us in this Agreement (including the right to publish print editions) are reserved for your sole use and disposition."

Also, here's author Benjamin Sobieck's first impressions of his Kindle Scout campaign. He makes some interesting observations.

UPDATE, 12/3/14: Just four weeks after Kindle Scout officially launched, the first books have been selected for publication. That seems incredibly fast. I wish Amazon were more transparent about stats, so we could know how many books were submitted to the program and how many readers participated.

UPDATE 1/20/15: It's been confirmed to me that at least some Kindle Scout winners do receive editorial suggestions and cover assistance.

UPDATE 7/16/15: Still more on editing: according to author Victoria Pinder, whose book was chosen for the program, "The Kindle Scout winners all talk to each other, and we’ve all received edits. Some people received some heavy developmental editing. Truthfully, I didn’t....The team still found quite a few things I needed to do to polish and clean in the manuscript so I still had editing. I can also say more than one set of eyes read my manuscript from the Kindle Scout team. The editor comments were done on different dates with different names."
             
http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2014/10/kindle-scout-pros-and-cons-of-amazons.html

[Rachel Dearth]

Should You Sell Your eBook On Amazon? Pros And Cons
Rebecca Livermore

As an indie author, you have a lot of decisions to make. One of the biggest decisions is whether to sell your eBook on Amazon, on your own website, or both. Amazon, of course, is a top choice for most authors, but just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean this is what’s best for you.



There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but reading through these pros and cons of both of the options will help you determine what’s best for you.


Amazon

A Streamlined System

Amazon is very good at what they do, and their experience shows in how streamlined the whole process is for both authors, and readers.

A streamlined system is huge for authors because it makes publishing books easy, and a streamlined system is huge for buyers because with a single click, they can purchase books.

Needless to say, if it’s easy for people to buy your books, the chances of them doing so skyrockets. On many websites, cart abandonment is a big issue, but on Amazon, at least when it pertains to Kindle books, there is no cart to abandon.

Very Few Tech Issues

Related to the point above, when you publish your eBook on Amazon, tech issues are few and far between, and if there are issues such problems with the website, there’s a whole team of people to deal with the problem.

A Huge Customer Base

A huge customer base can be hugely helpful for a new author who doesn’t yet have their own customer base. No doubt many of the people who purchase your book on Amazon would have never found it if it was sold elsewhere.

The flip side of this is since the customers on Amazon aren’t really yours, you don’t even know who they are, and can’t market to them directly, unless you get them to opt in to your email list, interact with you on social media, etc.

Customers on Amazon aren’t yours, you don’t know who they are, and can’t market to them directly….
CLICK TO TWEET
Of course, there is a positive aspect to this and that is that you also don’t have to provide customer service, deal with returns, and so on since they aren’t your customer.

A Lot of Competition

While there are plenty of buyers on Amazon, there are also many authors competing for their piece of the pie.

Because of this, while Amazon has a lot of customers, without a solid platform of your own, you may find it very difficult to be noticed on Amazon.

Low Prices

Back in the days before Amazon, authors sold eBooks for a pretty penny, often ranging everywhere from $19.99 – $97 and perhaps even beyond.

In contrast, the price of Kindle books is typically around $2.99, even for a fairly lengthy book. There are exceptions, of course, with some books selling for as low as 99 cents, and others for much more than $2.99.

Amazon, has itself to a large degree dictated the price range of most Kindle books by offering a 70% royalty rate for books that are priced between $2.99 and $9.99.

(Kindle books outside of that price range bring in a paltry 35% of the sale price.)

Selling Books on Your Own Site

Now let’s take a look at the pros and cons of selling your books on your own website.

Higher Profit Margin

You stand to make a lot more per book on your own website for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that you can typically sell eBooks on your own site for much higher prices than you can on Amazon.

To a large degree, gone are the days when eBooks sold for $97, but it’s extremely unusual for people to sell eBooks on their own site for only $2.99, the going rate for Kindle books.

Nathan Barry typically sells his eBooks on his website for $39.00, and then packages the same eBooks with other types of media such as videos, and sells the packages for as much as $249.00.

When interviewed on The Smart Passive Income Podcast Nathan stated that when selling his books on his own site, he was able to price them based on the value he felt they offered, without being penalized by them being higher than the lower prices suggested by Amazon.

The Future of Ink’s very own Joan Stewart sells very short special reports for $7 and beyond on her own website. She realized that she could make a much higher level of income by selling short reports on her site rather than writing full-length books and selling them on sites such as Amazon.

In addition to the higher price point, if you sell eBooks on your own site, you don’t have to share the profits with anyone else. This beats the alternative of Amazon’s cut of anywhere from 30% – 65%.

Your Customers are All Yours

This was already addressed above, but it’s worth repeating here because it’s one of the major differences between selling eBooks on Amazon vs. selling them on your own site. For better or worse, your customers are all yours on your own site.

This means every little customer problem is one you have to deal with, but it also means you have the info on who buys your books, can develop a relationship with them, and potentially sell additional items to them.

You Have to Deal with Tech Issues

There are a lot of technical hurdles to selling your ebooks on your own site. You have to deal with everything from setting up sales pages, shopping carts, and delivery of the products.

Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to help you manage the technical waters, but you may need to hire someone to set everything up for you, and to fix things when they break, or invest a lot of your time dealing with technology rather than writing.

Your Online Store May Be Like a Ghost Town

If you don’t have much traffic to your site, and you have a small email list and social media following, you may find it near impossible to sell books on your own website.

Now it’s true that having your own platform helps regardless of where you sell your books, but it’s absolutely imperative if you sell your books exclusively on your website.

Exclusivity

That brings me to my next and final point, and that is one of exclusivity. Unless you enroll your Kindle book in KDP Select you’re free to also sell it on your own site.

You may also choose to sell some of your books exclusively on Amazon and others exclusively on your own website.

Many authors find it helpful to experiment to see what works best for them, which is something you may want to try.

Your Turn

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Do you sell your eBooks on Amazon, on your own website, or a mix of the two?

This article was originally published on The Future of Ink and is reprinted here in its entirety for our Magnolia Media Network readers.

Related Posts:
The Pros and Cons of Free vs. Paid Press Release Distribution Services
Sell More Books on Amazon – Understanding Keywords, Categories and Amazon’s Algorithms
The Pros and Cons of DRM
How To Write Fascinating Amazon Book Listings To Sell More Books


http://www.magnoliamedianetwork.com/sell-your-ebook-on-amazon/

[Rachel Dearth]

The Pros And Cons Of Exclusivity

August 30, 2014 by Joanna Penn 80 Comments


Should you self-publish exclusively on Amazon? That is the question many authors consider whenever they put a book out.


Which side of the fence are you on?
Which side of the fence are you on?

The benefits of exclusivity
Here are my thoughts as to why you should consider exclusivity with Amazon, which basically means that you cannot publish a particular work anywhere else BUT Amazon for a 90 day period when you opt in with the checkbox on the KDP publishing page.

KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited

The KDP Select help page describes the benefits to opting in as:

Earn your share of the KDP Select Global Fund amount when readers choose and read more than 10% of your book from Kindle Unlimited, or borrow your book from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Plus, earn 70% royalty for sales to customers in Japan, India, Brazil and Mexico.
Choose between two great promotional tools: Kindle Countdown Deals, time-bound promotional discounting for your book while earning royalties; or scheduled Free Book Promotion where readers worldwide can get your book free for a limited time. [Note: you can still make your book permafree if you publish on multiple platforms, pricing free and then reporting the cheaper price to Amazon.]
Help readers discover your books by making them available through Kindle Unlimited in the U.S. and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) in the U.S, U.K., Germany, France, and Japan. Kindle Unlimited is a subscription program for readers that allows them to read as many books as they want. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a collection of books that Amazon Prime members who own a Kindle can choose one book from each month with no due dates. When you enroll in KDP Select, your books are automatically included in both programs.
Ease of changes

One of the big pains when you go direct to all platforms is the timing of price changes for sales. You can schedule a price change on Kobo and iBooks, but Nook can take a few days and Amazon’s speed of change vary between 4 – 72 hours. Similarly, if you want to change back matter or fix a typo, you have to do it multiple times. Of course, you can use services like Smashwords, BookBaby or Draft2Digital and update once for all platforms, but I prefer to publish directly for the extra metadata fields I get on the various platforms.

If you are exclusive to Amazon, you only have to manage one site and one set of changes.

The drawbacks to exclusivity
There are several reasons why you shouldn’t be exclusive to Amazon.

Global growth of digital markets. Don’t miss out!


My Kobo sales in 58 countries
Amazon may be the biggest player in the US and the UK, but there are other retail stores and devices that dominate in other countries.

Germany, for example, is possibly the next big market for ebooks, and Amazon has 40% of the market. Apple iBooks and Tolino, an ebook reader and associated stores that are run by a group of German publishers, have the rest. I have found that my sales on the other German platforms match Amazon almost exactly.

My sales in Canada primarily come from Kobo, and both Kobo and iBooks break sales down into 50+ countries. We haven’t even got started in the massive Asian markets yet!

The Compound Effect

I’ve found that by going direct to iBooks, Kobo and Nook, I have started to grow an audience there, and my income ticks up every month as their ecosystems discover my books. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy is a fantastic book that describes how little actions taken every day can add up over time to massive change, or massive impact over years. You can’t expect to load your books up on Kobo and expect them to sell straight away, you need time in that market.

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, says in his post on exclusivity that,

“It can take years to build readership at a retailer.  Authors who cycle their books in and out of KDP Select will have a more difficult time building readership at Amazon’s competitors.”

I have seen the Compound Effect on my blog, my online platform and my book sales over the last six years. I know things take time to build, and a few hundred dollars a month now may grow if I stay my course.

Independence and possibility of disruption

I’m an independent author, so I don’t want to be dependent on any single income stream.

I love Amazon as much as the next indie author, as much as the next Amazon Prime junkie and happy customer, but in early 2008, I was laid off, along with 400 other people in one day from my department.

My one source of income disappeared very fast.

Few people saw the Global Financial Crisis coming, and we all had to adapt. Change is inevitable, so I choose to spread my bets amongst the retailers as well as selling directly from my own site.

In Jeff Bezos’ interview with Charlie Rose in Dec 2013, Jeff said that at some point, Amazon itself would be disrupted. He just hopes it happens after he is dead!

I think about the future of this business a lot.

I’m 39, and I am not just building for the next year, I’m building for the rest of my life and hopefully leaving something for my family when I’m gone. As Amazon continues to rise and rise, we see the push back of many different industries against their domination. Who knows what the next 5 years will hold?

Conclusion: My personal choices around exclusivity
One of the best things about being an indie is personal choice, but of course, this can make it harder as well. I can’t tell you what to do with your books, I can only say what I do myself.

For anyone with one book and no platform, exclusivity seems to be the best way to get your book moving, at least in the initial period. I helped my Dad self-publish his historical thriller, Nada, last year, and put that in KDP Select. There was no point in going with the other platforms when the majority of his sales would be Amazon, and he had no intention of doing any ongoing marketing for the book. Free books allowed us to get the sales started and get some reviews.
For translations, in a new market, with little ability to do other forms of marketing, exclusivity is also a good idea. I’m using KDP Select for my Spanish and Italian books, and the free promo days have enabled us to get the algorithms moving and get some reviews.
For an established series that you are building over time, using more than one site is my personal choice. The compound effect will mean that over time, as I add books onto the platforms, and reach readers one by one, my sales will grow on the other sites. I also like spreading my income streams so I am not dependent on one platform for my livelihood. That’s why the vast majority of my English language fiction and non-fiction is on all the major platforms.
Trying new things is important! For this year’s NaNoWriMo, I’ll be writing a stand-alone novella that I will put on KDP Select in order to try out Kindle Unlimited. As a reader, I love the idea of KU. I already utilize borrows on Prime and I consume a lot of books. I also love to play with the available options we have.
So basically, when you have multiple books, you can adopt multiple strategies. Fantastic!

What are your feelings around exclusivity? Do you keep all your books on Amazon only, or do you spread your books on multiple sites? Have you started selling direct, and why? Please leave a comment and join the conversation below.

Top image: Flickr Creative Commons fence by John Curley, solving the GFC by Cathrin Idsoe


http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2014/08/30/exclusivity/

[Rachel Dearth]

Why do so many advise to stay away from KDP Select?

You can be in KDP without being in "Select," which is a relatively new version of KDP. As already noted, the big drawback of Select is that you have to promise exclusivity for 90 days (and unless you watch what box you check, you'll find yourself rolling into a second 90-day commitment, etc.). This means that people who have a Nook, Kobo reader etc. can't access your book.

The supposed advantage is that "Amazon Prime" members, those who pay $50-$80 a year for free shipping, can "borrow" your book, and you get $2 a borrow (roughly). This supposedly increases revenue, though most of us don't see a big rush of borrows.

The other supposed advantage is that you can "promote" your book by giving it away for free (netting nothing), for up to a total of 5 days during your 90 day Select commitment. This kind of giveaway was supposed to generate buzz, word of mouth, and reviews. At the beginning it may have. Lately there's so much free stuff available that any effect is muted. Many (including me) feel the free giveaways are only useful if you have a several book series, and if you give away the first book you may (emphasis on may) generate interest in the rest of the series


The main gripe against KDP select are the freebies. You're allowed to give away freebies for 5 days per enrolled book.
The thinking is that it over saturates the market making readers not purchase books. (This point is arguable).
I have sold many books and had many borrows from kdp select by using only 1 of the freebie days to introduce the book to potential buyers and only for a series.
It has not worked for my other stand alone books.
Perhaps the best advice is for you to try it on the first book in a series and see how it goes from there.

[Rachel Dearth]

The main gripe against KDP select are the freebies. You're allowed to give away freebies for 5 days per enrolled book.
The thinking is that it over saturates the market making readers not purchase books. (This point is arguable).
I have sold many books and had many borrows from kdp select by using only 1 of the freebie days to introduce the book to potential buyers and only for a series.
It has not worked for my other stand alone books.
Perhaps the best advice is for you to try it on the first book in a series and see how it goes from there.

[Rachel Dearth]

As I continue my research into Kindle Direct Publishing, I keep coming across sources that advise one to stay away from the KDP Select program. The reasons for avoiding the program seem to be vague and unclear. I'm hoping that some seasoned Kindle Publishers can help point out any specific pros and cons to participation in the KDP Select program. Thanks.

I will give you some Pro's first:
You can adjust the price while you are experimenting with pricing your book. If you have kdp select you may make more money than you would if you had it listed for 99cents because you would get about $2. for a borrow.

You might get more people to read your book because they will get it free and possibly write a review that you might not otherwise get. I said might but have not seen it actually work. I think a lot of people download it and never read it. You can give your kindle away for 5 days out of 90 days

during the time you give your Ebook away for free you might get 150 borrows and then when you take it off you might not get any sales on it. So it is not easy to figure out.

The cons or negatives:

You are not making any sales during the time it is on KDP but then if you had your kindle on for 99cents you would make more if someone did borrow

The worst thing is that when you have your kindle on KDP select you cannot also list it on other places like Barnes and Noble or anywhere else you could have it to sell.

I do not plan to get on KDP again but then someone else might like it and want to be on it.

https://kdp.amazon.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=378246

[Rachel Dearth]

http://www.stockfreeimages.com/p1/island.html

http://www.stockfreeimages.com/p1/tropical-island-beach.html

[Rachel Dearth]

http://www.fotosearch.com/photos-images/island.html

http://www.canstockphoto.com/images-photos/island.html

[A Flock of Seagulls]

some more, better ones:

http://restaurantcoverings.com/free-stock-photos/

http://sourcedigit.com/2773-top-5-places-to-find-100-free-high-quality-images-for-commercial-use/