Alex

I followed the Amazon link and noticed two things definitely not in your favour.

They're selling at a price higher than the RRP, and the despatch time is 4 - 6 weeks.

They need to sell at no more than the RRP and if possible at a discount (as that's expected now), and I doubt if anyone will wait 4 - 6 weeks for despatch, especially for a book by an unknown.

If the attendant blurb excites a surfer, they'll want it now, especially if it's a present, so try and get Amazon some books they can send out within 24 - 48 hours.

I've run a bookshop and I know that with very few exceptions, if the book isn't in when the customer wants it, you lose the sale.

Hope that's helpful

Alex, Alison Baverstock is compiling a book at the moment, on the author's experience of being published. I know she was collecting comments about this earlier in the year. All contributions are being credited, along with contact details (website, mainly I think). She might be specifically excluding self-publishing, but if not, your experience would be interestingly different from the run-of-the-mill. Good publicity, I would say, if it's not too late to get yourself in there.

Emma

BD, thanks for the feedback. I spotted those points, too, so I added a comment to my website (the page with the link to Amazon) to say that I could supply more quickly and without adding on the £1.99 "sourcing fee". Amazon also charge a lot for delivery, and I know I can post a single copy of the book for £1.07.

In fact, why don't I be generous: if anyone on WriteWords wants one, I'm prepared to give away a free copy to the first 5 people who ask. I'm more interested in readers' feedback than in the money. (Like my maths teacher at school used to say, you learn from your mistakes; and an important part of that is to know when you've made them.)

Emma, thanks for the pointer. I'll see if I can find her contact details.


Alex

Alex, I'd love a copy of your novel but don’t send me a free one because I don’t have time to read it this side of Easter, and you need the feedback before then. Why don’t you sell them yourself via Amazon? It works in the same way as selling used books… customer places order and pays Amazon, they pass on details and money to you, you dispatch book. I know Nell does this. I ordered a copy of hers from her via Amazon and it arrived within a few days. She had signed it and included a lovely postcard to use as a bookmark.

I don’t know how much of the cover price Amazon take for the service, but I'm sure Nell will be happy to give you the details.

Dee

Thanks for the suggestion, Dee (and for vote of confidence, of course). Now you mention it, I had noticed the Amazon Marketplace some time ago, but I hadn't really thought of it as a way to sell the book. I'll have a look into it.

By the way, I was looking into using a PayPal "Buy Now" button on my website, instead of the Amazon link. It's easy enough, but there's one detail about it that I need PayPal to clarify before I can put the change live. I'll post an update here, once I've made the change.


Alex

Now available from me on Amazon Marketplace, thanks to Dee's suggestion. In fact, when you follow the link, I'm shown in direct competition with Amazon themselves, at a "Low price!" I'm also required to despatch the goods within 1-2 days of an order, which is interesting considering Amazon are giving themselves 4-6 weeks and charging £1.99 extra into the bargain.

By the way, Amazon have the page count completely wrong. I corrected it last Friday, as soon as I saw it was wrong and found out how to make corrections, but apparently it can take up to 2 weeks for corrections to appear. There are actually 133 pages, not 239 (and it wasn't me who told them the wrong count).

Still no cover image, yet, though. Which is a shame, because I think the designer did a fantastic job in creating such an eye-catching cover.


Alex

Yes, the cover's great. Good luck with the Marketplace; I'll be very interested to see how it goes.

Emma

I also took a deep breath and paid for online advertising on the This is Hampshire website (run by Newsquest, who publish a number of the local newspapers). I've done this in the past with my software company, and it attracted quite a number of hits on the website.


Alex

I'm starting to get fascinated by self publishing - it's more about self publicising. Having run an IT business for six years, I've had to learn about promotion as part of a marketing mix by having to get on and do it.

If you can get some page view traffic together on your web site, you could try to capture the people visiting by getting them to sign up to a newsletter. From experience, the more professional this appears the better. The "newsletter" can be anything that is relevant to the book, the theme of the book, similar books etc. If you can start even a small "viral" swell of people forwarding details of your book around - it's more than you had before.

I can't recommend Constant Contact enough. Free trial and at worst costs peanuts. Allows you to create template based emails, track who's read them, caters for "Forward this to a friend", etc. and it's simple to use. (No, I'm not making anything out of this!)

Of course you need page view traffic in the first place - but that can be driven in a number of ways.

Out of interest - which Self Publishing service did you use? I looked at lulu.com once and loved the way it's all so automatic.

The Internet - it'll catch on.

I used DreamStar Books, who also run the Books4Publishing website. They organised the cover design, formatting, typesetting, ISBN and barcode, and registration with the British Library, Whitakers, Nielson Bookdata, Amazon and WH Smith. They also, apparently, register books with Gardners, who are the wholesalers you have to sell through to get into a lot of bookshops in the UK (including Waterstone's - and even Amazon order through them).

I looked at Lulu, but the fact that they are based in the US (at least, their name is Lulu, Inc.) meant that I wasn't sure what this meant in terms of copyright protection. I would much rather deal with a company based in the UK, where I have a better idea what legal protection I have.

DreamStar give a very personal service, and Mark Oliver, who runs it, is very approachable. He told me about their self publishing service when I first put a novel on Books4Publishing, long before I was sure I wanted to go down the self-publishing route, but he never once tried to press me into using the service. It was I who approached him about doing it that way.

There have been a few hiccups along the way, but Mark has always been very helpful in sorting things out. (For example, the printers mis-aligned the pages of all 60 copies, on the first attempt, and didn't notice until they had glued all the covers on, thus meaning that they had to re-print the covers as well as the pages. Mark managed to badger them enough that the delivery was still only 2 days late arriving.) If this novel sells well, I may decide I like doing my own marketing enough to try the same approach again. If I do, I will use DreamStar again without a moment's hesitation. They cost more than some of the other similar services you see advertised, but I feel they've been worth what I've paid.


Alex

That sounds a good commendation.
Good luck with the selling.