Coping with the Ups and Downs of Kindle Publishing

It is just over three weeks since I published The Creative Writing Workbook and just after that my book of Short Stories and Poems. They did well on the original free downloads, the workbook much better than the short stories, which surprised me. I have had a few sales since then, but looking around at similar titles, and what other authors are charging, I have changed the cost of the books from $2.99 to 99cents a copy that's around £1.50 and 77pence for UK readers. The books are quite short and the price drop feels right, although it won't show up as that for several hours yet because the Amazon publishing machine has to do its work.

Reviews and Changes

So far I have had a few good reviews on the first book and one or two for the second. I hope to have the first Lambeth Croak novel fully edited and up there in the next couple of weeks, and I will start that at $2.99 and see how it goes. I do not plan to offer it as a free download until it has been up for a few weeks, then I'll see whether that will work for me. Over the last three weeks I have altered the original books slightly, once where I caught a couple of missed typos, and again to play around with what categories worked best.

A Learning Process

Writing and publishing books on Kindle is a learning process, one in which I am still a beginner, but not too different from the norm, if the forums are anything to go by. I keep hearing that getting an author's page up on  Good Reads, and a separate author's page on Face book is the way to go, but have not done this so far. Kindle is still in the experimentation phase for me, I am continuing with the freelance writing because while it would be nice to make some money, I do not see this as purely a money making exercise.

If you are thinking about publishing your own work on Kindle, I would definitely say give it a go, but don't do it without Alexander Newnham's step by step guide to Create a Kindle Book, I hope he makes a fortune. I would not have got through the nightmare process of turning a word document into something okay for Kindle formatting without this book. If you do plan on publishing your own work to Kindle, then the £2.49 price tag is a gift that no Kindle newbie should be without.