Month: October 2017

Kindle Select Progress

/ ginny200 / 2 Comments

Two months ago, I decided to take my books into Kindle Select. Since that time, my sales have continued, although somewhat lower than my best month. However, the pages read in Kindle Unlimited have made up for the lack of sales and extended my readership, so I am pleased with the result.

The Jewelled Egg Murders is on track for release on December 1. I haven’t decided about taking it into Kindle Select, although doing so would give me more options for sales and promotions. My current chore is proofreading.

Steps in Editing and Proofreading.

  1. I reviewed the manuscript in Autocrit, correcting as I went.

2.  I ran it through Grammarly.

3.  I submitted it to Books Go Social for their Quality Mark programme. The manuscript received a Gold Mark, but the reviewer noted that it needed further proofreading. As well, she found a mix of British and American spellings, i.e. Canadian. She suggested I choose one, but I prefer to write in Canadian English.

4.  I used Word for Mac 2016 to identify spelling and grammatical errors. Word does allow one to choose Canadian English as the default.

5.  Now, I shall upload to Vellum and use its proofreading tool.

Why not engage a professional proofreader? Cost.

I shall rely on Books Go Social for most of my marketing efforts and turn my attention to the next book.

I have a collection of short stories in mind, five of which are Anne McPhail adventures and the remainder Dangerous Journeys of other kinds. Taking a page from Agatha Christie, I could expand one of them into a novel as she did with her short story, Yellow Iris.

That’s all for today from the beautiful Kawartha Lakes.

Kindle Select, first month

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

Sixteen days ago, I pulled my books from all other sites and enrolled them in Kindle Select. A few observations:

My sales have plummeted. I hadn’t had a day with 0 sales since I took over the publishing of my books, but since enrolling in Kindle Select, no sales on four days.

Pages read have replaced some of those lost sales. My readers are strong users of Kindle Unlimited, but unless the earned per page royalty is higher than July’s .00402, it won’t replace those sales.

In fairness, I haven’t used the promotional tools yet, although I have a promotion on Murderous Roots scheduled for October and will use the available promotions for the other books, including the boxed set of Dangerous Journeys, in November as part of the launch of The Jewelled Egg Murders.

Sixteen days don’t make a trend, but those 0 days were a shock. The question now is what to do about The Jewelled Egg Murders. In Select or out?