The August Ebook Confusion

 

For the free ebook I was going to release this month, it was supposed to be a novelette. (I had prepared a list of the books when I decided to do this challenge. I have another list I am in the process of refiguring for next year’s ebooks as well.) Unfortunately, I no longer had a fiction editor on board for this project – or any editor, really. So, as August drew near, I was on the hunt for a new editor.

 

Fortunately, I did find a new editor, and she has agreed to edit my other novelettes as well. (Yay!)

 

Still, I was without an ebook for this month! Or, so I thought.

 

In order to find a book to release, I perused my collection of titles I have already finished writing. Unfortunately, none of them appealed at this point in time. They just didn’t seem like a good fit for a “summer” release.

 

Then I pulled up my list of free ebooks for 2023. I selected one which I felt readers of my newsletter would benefit from.

 

The problem is that I had not anticipated the issue of this ebook’s topic! Specifically, that it was too broad of a topic.

 

When I got started working on this ebook, I discovered that there was way too many different kinds of material out there associated with this topic. It was like a little bit of everything for different kinds of audiences.

 

This wasn’t going to work. Was this ebook for parents? Entrepreneurs? Small business owners? At-home moms? Writers? Booklovers? WHAT??

 

While most nonfiction books try to cater to a brad audience, a nonfiction book that promises “everything for everyone” is a little confusion. Who, exactly, is everyone? Who, exactly, would enjoy this book or benefit from reading this book?

 

With nonfiction, you pick up a type of book you want to read with the expectation that it will meet your needs or satisfy your curiosity about a topic. If this ebook was going to have a ton of material for parents, business owners, students and kids being homeschooled, how was that going to help someone reading it who wasn’t in that group?

 

No, it wasn’t going to work. I just had to narrow the book’s topic down.

 

In order to do this, I had to ask myself a few questions:

 

1. Who is my audience?

2. What would they like to read?

3. What kind of benefits do I want them to gain from this particular ebook?

 

The answers to these questions helped me to figure out exactly how to tailor this ebook to the specific audience it is meant for – namely, writers.

 

With this in mind, I changed what type of material the free ebook will contain, as well as giving it a more focused and specific title. This way, anybody who sees that ebook as a free download would know exactly what to expect from it when they start reading it.

 

After I accomplished this goal, I got to work gathering material according to what should go into this ebook. As for the material I had gathered for the original ebook, I don’t know what I will do with it at this point. Maybe I will give it a revamp as well and save it for a summer ebook for next year.

 

For now, though, I have been busy gathering material for this new ebook, and that job has been a lot easier now that I know what kind of material I need to find for it.

The Self-Publishing Problem

 Towards the end of last year, when I decided to take on the challenge of writing and self-publishing an ebook for every month of the year, I automatically decided to use Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. A writer friend had done the same when she did this challenge some time ago, and since I was already using KDP to self-publish poetry and children’s books, it was an easy choice. I went about this business as the months of 2022 went by.

 

Then, in June, I discovered that Amazon was refusing to remove books which promoted transphobic, homophobic and hateful material targeting the LGBTQ+ community. As the parent of two kids who are a part of this community, I was concerned. I felt that I had to do something.

 

That “something” ended up being the decision to look elsewhere to self-publish my ebooks. I just didn’t feel right doing business with a company that was okay with selling homophobic and transphobic material.

 

I chose another service for this challenge. The first ebook I self-pubbed with them went through without a hitch. The bonus was that, unlike Amazon’s KDP ebooks, the ebooks I published through them were also distributed through other online retailers, such as Apple Books, Kobo and ScribD. An even better thing that I liked was that the ebooks were available in various formats: PDF, Mobi and EPUB. (Not everyone likes reading ebooks as a PDF!)

 

But now, with the ebook I self-published last month, I ran into a problem.

 

As a self-publisher, I always take advantage of any opportunity to promote my other books, and not just those which are self-published. That said, if I have relevant titles which are only available on Amazon, then I will include them at the back of the ebooks.

 

Unfortunately, the service I was using doesn’t like that.

 

Shortly after I released the free ebook for July, I got an email from them saying they could not list my book in their Premium Catalog. When I asked why, the response was that this ebook contained links to books on Amazon. As they put it in their email to me, I was not allowed to include any links to competing retailers “of any sort.” Not only did this mean Amazon but also other retailers such as Barnes & Noble, etc.

 

Well, that sucks!

 

The reality is that there are a lot of self-publishers out there who aren’t exactly making a huge profit off of this venture. I am one of them. I have yet to earn what’s known as a “full-time living” as a self-publisher. This is WHY I use free self-publishing services for ebooks such as Amazon’s KDP or this other one. (I create my own covers but I do pay for editing.) 

 

Also, as a person who RELIES on sales of books in order to actually earn anything as a self-publisher, promotion of other books listed at the back of the book is important.

 

Especially the books that are ONLY listed on Amazon!

 

Now, I know that a lot of people don’t like Amazon. I know some people who refuse to shop through Amazon as a matter of principle. But, you know, Amazon is a business. And, they are just one of the many online retailers out there which sell books. (When I made the decision to stop using Amazon to self-publish ebooks, I debated asking my publishers to remove my books from Amazon as well. However, I decided not to, because even though there is a lot of controversy surrounding the company, there are A LOT of people who still use it to buy books AND ebooks for their Kindle. So, that would mean a huge loss of sales for them, which was not a good thing for me to suggest to a business that relies on sales of the books they publish in order to stay in business.)

 

When I self-published ebooks through KDP, I didn’t come across this problem. I included books with links to Barnes & Noble, Kobo and even Walmart, and Amazon didn’t give me any problems over that. However, it seems that this other self-publishing service I have used does have a problem with that.

 

And I have a problem with their having a problem with that!

 

So, I am trying to figure out where to go from here. I DO need to use a self-publishing service that will not charge me, but I need to be able to have the freedom to include whatever links I’d like to include anywhere in the book. Period. I also need a service that will allow me to make the ebooks available as a free download. (Some of them will be used for promotion of other books.)

 

I just might end up going back to using KDP for the free ebooks. I talked it over with my oldest and he told me to just do what I had to do. I may not feel comfortable with this arrangement, but given that being able to have the freedom to put whatever content and links I want to in my book is super important to me (and part of the appeal of self-publishing itself), I will choose a service that enables me to do so.