Tag: indie author basics

Preparing Your Self-Published Book for Bookstores (Part 1)

Contrary to popular belief, self-published books can get into brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Ask me how I know…

Here Are Three Easy Ways to Prepare Your Self-Published / Indie Book for a Store:

1. Have a professionally designed cover with your name and title on the spine.

Usually, I will tell you to ensure it’s edited first (do that, please), but I want to highlight book covers here because they become even more important offline.

Imagine you are in Barnes and Noble (or anywhere) looking for your next read. The cover is going to attract you first.

Also, because you see it from that point of view, the book becomes easier to notice if the name and title are on the spine.

Some bookstores also take your book through a review process, where their team has to vote on the book. If the cover is poor and the editing is not up to standard, they’ll reject stocking your book.

2. Buy Your ISBN from Bowker

You can get your book into Independent stores with a free ISBN on consignment. However, having your book registered under your or your company’s name is a plus if your target is larger chains.

It’s a plus because bookstores hate Amazon’s guts. As soon as they see you are published with Amazon, they are judging you and already trying to come up with a way to let you down easy. It’s almost an instant no.

There are also tons of benefits to having your own ISBN. I go into depth about that here.

3. Use both Amazon and Ingram Spark.

Publish with Kindle Direct Publishing for Amazon only. Do not choose the expanded distribution. This option puts your book into Ingram Spark’s system but under Amazon.

Instead, you will opt out of this and create your own Ingram account.

Then, you are going to publish your book there as well.

This will allow bookstores to order your book directly from Ingram Spark through you instead of Amazon should they decide to carry your title. It also prevents you from bringing copies in yourself, which you would do under consignment.

More on this in part two…

Check out more Indie Author Basics articles here.

One Way Indie Authors Leave Money On the Table

Due to how the royalties are structured, an author with a 99cent ebook on Amazon will only get about 35 cents per sale. For books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, there is a delivery cost for the ebook file (based on the size) for each book sold.

You also pay Amazon a sales commission based on your royalty rate.

  • 35% royalty: the Amazon sales commission is 65% for books priced below $2.99 and above $9.99

  • 70% royalty: the Amazon sales commission is 30% for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99

What about taxes? 

You pay that too. 

These are just a few reasons why it can benefit you to sell your book directly to readers from your website.

While I have only made a few dollars in ebook sales from my new book, my print book preorder sales from my website are doing far better, and I am close to making money back from the cover art. By the time the book releases next month, I expect to make back what I paid for editing.

I am going to make this post real short because it’s real simple.

The hard truth is that if you are not selling books through your website or worse, you don’t have an author website, you are leaving money on the table.

While some authors have chosen not to deal with Amazon at all, it’s smart to make sure your book is on Amazon for a few reasons.

To start, Amazon is a giant. To have your book available there is just good sense. People trust Amazon, so some people will look for your book there before they look anywhere else. And with the pandemic, people use Amazon regularly. It’s all about making it easy for your readers, and being able to tell them to go to Amazon isn’t only super cool, but it’s also super easy.

But while Amazon is easily accessible to your readers, the relationship between Amazon and you as the author is a bit different.

There are tons of authors making good money from Amazon, but they are not the majority.

Here is an example from an author about his Amazon royalties:

“One month, I sold 5 paperbacks at a list of 13.99 each. The report stated the manufacturing cost was 5.33 (I assume each), and I’m on the 70% royalty. I got a total of 1.30 cents. That’s 26 cents a book. The next month I sold 1 paperback at 13.99, and I got a 3.13 royalty on it.”

The 2021 Guide to Amazon Fees and Royalties for Kindle eBooks and KDP Print, 2019, Comment Section

This is where your author website comes in to pick up the slack.

What if he had sold five paperback copies of this book from his author website? Since he would have to calculate shipping, let’s just round it up to a cool fifteen dollars per book. That’s $75 in his pocket. If he sells 20 books, that’s $300.

It might not sound like much, but it adds up if he sells books at this rate daily.

Even with website transaction fees, authors can still add more to their bank accounts by having their books on their websites alongside Amazon.

In closing, if you are a Self-Publisher, you can buy your books in bulk and sell them in bulk to companies and corporations like schools and independent bookstores.

Heck, you can sell the books out of the trunk of your car if you want.

The sky is not the limit of what you can do when you control the distribution of your own work.

Considering you are not signed to a publisher or are not restricted to any outside contracts that may otherwise prohibit you, you don’t have to be exclusive to Amazon. Instead, you use Amazon as one of many options.

For digital, you can set your book up on Draft2Digital to distribute it to several digital platforms outside of Amazon. For print, you can set your book up on Amazon KDP but also Ingram Spark for distribution to bookstores and libraries.

Ready to publish that book? I can assist with that. Click here.

Enjoyed this post? Check out more Indie Author Basics Here but hurry. I am changing things up soon. Details to come.

Don’t Forget to Preorder Your Copy of The Women with Blue Eyes: Rise of the Fallen! June is right around the corner.

About.

When Tina’s nephew, Ronnie is killed, she is left to care for his siblings and to solve a series of mysterious murders involving only black men. Investigating each murder thrusts her and her team into a world of deities, demons, and fallen angels, leading Tina to battle a serial killer beyond this realm.

Preorder Now