作者：Maggie McVay Lynch
出版社：Windtree Press
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
Secrets to Pricing and Distribution: Ebook, Print and Direct Sales试读：
Secrets to Pricing and DistributionEbook, Print and Direct SalesMaggie McVay LynchOnce you have books to sell, you need to get them into readers’ hands. Uninitiated authors may simply follow the vendor’s prompts, load their book, and then hope for the best. However, the career author knows that each vendor has its own methods of promoting books and providing special author opportunities to gain readership. You want to take advantage of these nuances in order to maximize your profits and discoverability.This book helps prepares you to effectively tackle all the metadata required to load your books into any vendor's system.You will learn how to:● Maximize the use of metadata across multiple platforms to enhance discoverability.● Write compelling book blurbs for each title, focusing on "reader cookies" and marketing.● Identify appropriate categories for your books.● Select effective keywords based on search algorithms.● Load your book to the top ebook distribution vendors: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Apple.● Setup and use your author profile around the world to maximize discoverability according to each vendor’s rules and reach.● Evaluate aggregators and how they can help you with distribution to the big four vendors and/or to others beyond the big four.● Work with bookstores to help them sell both your e-book and print titles.● Set up an online and in-person direct sales mechanism for your e-booksCopyright © 2017 by Maggie McVay LynchAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.Windtree PressHillsboro, Oregonhttp://windtreepress.comCover Design by Christy Keerinshttps://coveredbyclkeerins.com/Secrets to Pricing and Distribution: Ebooks, Print, and Direct Sales / Maggie McVay Lynch. -- 1st ed.Print ISBN 978-19449738-0-3Ebook ISBN 978-19449738-1-0United States of AmericaCreated with Vellum To my husband, Jim, who has supported my writing career from the day we met 18 years ago. He has been my rock through crazy writing binges, through my complaints about the changing state of publishing, and through the many times I am away from home retreating at the beach, presenting workshops, attending conferences, or just talking on the phone with a writer who needs a little extra encouragement.1DefinitionsWhenever you are entering a new world, it is important that you understand what the typical words used (often called jargon) mean in that world. In this book we are talking about distribution in both print and ebook and how to get discovered among the millions of books out there. So let’s start with some definitions that we will be using throughout the chapters of the book.Discoverability – This is the “buzzword” of the past five years. It refers to how a book is found (discovered) by a reader. In 2016, according to Bowker, nearly a million new titles were published. And that is probably low, because Bowker can only track the books that have an associated ISBN. For authors who publish only in ebook, many do not have an ISBN because most ebook vendors don’t require them. This is your competition with each new book coming out. In addition, you are competing with all the books available that have come out before.Before becoming “visible,” however, as obvious as it might seem, a book has to be found. That is what “discoverability” tries to address. That process is one that both big NY publishers and small Indie publishers have not yet cracked. But you will learn some techniques for enhancing your books chance for being discovered.Distribution – The Distributor acts as the link between publisher and retailer or consumer in cases where the publisher does not want to be involved in shipping books and collecting money from readers. The distributor receives orders from retailers or consumers, ships books, and handles all the money. This is normally done on a commission basis. Amazon is a distributor. Amazon takes your self-published book (You are the publisher) and through an agreement with you makes it available via all of their outlets. For this service they charge you a percentage of your sales ranging from 30% to 65%. When you get a 70% royalty from Amazon, then Amazon is taking a 30% commission. When you get a 35% royalty from Amazon (because of pricing or not being in Select), then Amazon is taking a 65% commission. The same goes for other distributors: Kobo, Apple, B&N, Google, etc.For print books, the two big distributors for Indies are Createspace and Ingram. Again, each distributor takes a chunk of money from you. In the case of Createspace, their commission is 40% on your print-0n-demand (POD) book. In the case of Ingram, their commission is 35% on POD. Print-on-demand has been a life saver for Indies because you don’t have to put any money upfront to make sure your books are available in print. If you want to do print runs for mass market, like major publishers do, then you must pay a printer up front for your books and there is usually a minimum order required (e.g., 500 or 1,000 books).A distributor usually handles books from several publishers. Large national publishers may do their own distribution, or own a separate distribution company. The publisher (You) is still responsible for marketing the book, that is, creating a demand for it through advertising, promotion, author tours, etc. The distributor merely fills the orders.Metadata – The dictionary definition of this is “data about data.” For our purposes metadata is any piece of information about you, your book, your writing work. It begins with a collection of attributes—ISBN, title, author, copyright year, price, subject category, etc. This title-level metadata started with library catalogs. But beyond that it is your book description, your character descriptions, your blogs, your Facebook posts, your tweets—in other words every piece of information you make publicly available is now metadata.Producer (Book Producer) - A book producer handles any or all aspects of putting a book together and getting it printed (and some times distributed). This includes editing, cover design, typesetting, image preparation, digital page composition, obtaining printer quotes, and working with the printer. Some Book Producers also handle the uploading of your finished books to various distributors.Usually the publisher (You) performs these functions, but there are companies (Book Baby is one such legitimate company) that produce books for indie publishers on a contract basis. This may be small press publishers as well as self-publishers. The important thing to remember is that the producer is really a contractor. The producer does not own the books or the copyright. You, as the publisher, are paying for a contracted producer to provide this service for you. After your book is produced, printed or loaded to distributors, it is still up to the publisher (YOU) to handle the marketing and receive all income from sales.Book producers work in two different payment schemes: 1) You pay for everything up front (this usually ranges from $500-$1,500 per book; or 2) You pay some fee up front and, if the producer loaded the book to distributors for you, the producer then takes a commission from every sale. This means that if that producer loads your book to Amazon for you, and that book would normally get a 70% royalty. Then you will likely only get 55% because the producer will take their 15% out before paying you what is owed.Publisher - The publisher is the person, organization, or company that finances the book and controls the editing, designing, printing, and marketing of it. The publisher is the risk taker and owns the physical and digital books. When you self-publish YOU are the publisher—not Amazon, Not Kobo, Not B&N or Apple. They are all distributors. You are the publisher.If you are paying for the production and printing of your book, you are the publisher. Anyone else involved, regardless of what they refer to themselves as, is merely a contractor. Cover designers, editors, formatters, etc. are all contractors.Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your book, your brand, your name more visible whenever someone does an organic search. Every business wants to be in the top rankings. They want their website or product to turn up on the first page of search results on Google or other search engines.SEO involves a number of adjustments to the HTML of individual Web pages to achieve a high search ranking. First, the title of the page must include relevant information about the page. Then there are ways to enhance that description with what is called META tags. These are special HTML codes that can really distinguish your site or product from the rest of the pile. The META tags that most search engines read for books are the description, keywords, and categories. You don’t have to know HTML to create metadata. Every time you fill out a form at a distributor or create a blog or post something to the web, you are creating metadata and HTML coding is being done behind the scenes. Even if you don’t know how to do this HTML tagging yourself, you need to understand the purpose of it. Every distributor uses these tags in order to best feature all products on their site and to get higher in search rankings.Keywords – Keywords are words or phrases that describe content. They can be used as metadata to describe images, text documents, and Web pages. A user may "tag" pictures or text files with keywords that are relevant to their content. Later on, these files may be searched using keywords, which can make finding files much easier.The role of keywords in searches has been greatly reduced, though they are still important. Search engines could crawl sites and, if the keywords were accurate, serve those sites up as search results. However, people began abusing the keyword metadata in an attempt to show up higher in searches, and even to rank in completely unrelated searches. For this reason, keywords are no longer a primary factor in SEO. There is a combination of factors that make a difference in rankings in order to try to keep out the “marketing” abusers.2The Importance of Pricing Competitively Within Your Distribution NetworkI struggled with whether to begin with Pricing or Distribution. I decided that Pricing would go first because you will need to have established your price when you load your book to any distributor. A good understanding of pricing strategies is critical to the indie author in order to be competitive in todays market.The first thing to realize about pricing is that there is absolutely no way you can price your book at the real value you perceive it is worth. If you took a year to write your book—even at minimum wage—it may mean that you’ve invested the equivalent of about $8,000 of your time (this is assuming you worked on it 20 hours per week at $8.00 per hour). Then if you add to that costs of getting a professional cover, paying for editing, or other contracted services, it can easily be $10,000. How do you come up with a price that reflects all that work?The answer is, you can’t. Whatever price you might think your book is worth (e.g., maybe $9-$10 per copy), it is likely no one will pay for it. Pricing is one of the important pieces that can draw people to give you a chance or immediately turn them away.A mistake that many authors make—both with print and ebook pricing—is trying to match the pricing that big, traditional publishers are using. The reality is you can’t afford to compete with big publishers. First, is you can’t afford the upfront costs. Second, you can’t afford the potential losses if you price too high or too low.On the print size, publishers are doing print runs in the thousands in order to keep the cost down and still make a good profit. Big publishers can afford to price a mass market book at $5.99 because they did a print run of 25,000 books that cost them $50,000. It is likely that the typical POD novel costs between $3.00 and $4.00 to the indie author. That is before any commissions taken by distributors (e.g., Create Space taking 40% of retail). You simply can’t get your book to that price.On the ebook side, publishers often price ebooks at a rate equivalent to mass market ($5.99-$9.99) depending on the popularity of the author. They do this because they prefer that readers buy print books. They are trying to dissuade readers from choosing ebooks. Again, most authors can’t afford to price their books like this because they are not popular enough to command that pricing. They are competing with average prices of $2.99-$4.99.For most authors, print pricing tends to be dictated by the cost of the book to the author and the distribution fees and commissions. Using the calclators provided by both Amazon and Ingram, you can quickly see that to make even a modest profit, requires most indie novels to be sold in the $12-$18 range. It may be possible to get a novella down to the $8-$9 range.The price for ebooks, on the other hand, is significantly more varied. Unlike printing costs, delivering a digital file is close to free for distributors. So, the indie author only needs to take into consideration the commissions charged by the distributor.The one exception to this is Amazon. Amazon does charge a “delivery fee” for every book based on the size of the file. The minimum charge is one cent. Though it varies from country to country, the charge is approximately 15 cents per megabyte. The typical novel, all words with no images except the cover, costs about five cents. If you use images (logos, header images, special divider images) then costs go up and can typically average around 15 cents per book.However, nonfiction books—particularly if they have a lot of images, charts, tables—can cost as much as $1.00 depending on the size of the file. Some of this can be alleviated with better formatting and compressing image files.Assuming the delivery costs are minimal across multiple vendors, how does an author decide what is a fair price for an ebook? Some authors set prices based on the length of the book. For example, a 10,000 word title might be 99 cents, a novella (15K-40K) might be $2.99, and novels are from $3.99 to $6.99. The problem with this is that it is not the value YOU perceive is correct. Instead it is the value your READER believes is accurate.Readers tend to value books based on certain factors:1. Do they already know and love you? If they are already hooked on your books or a series, they are likely to pay more for the next book. If they don’t know you, they are unlikely to even give you a try unless they perceive your book as a bargain.2. How does your price compare to the majority of books similar to yours? There are certain genres that average higher in price than others. For example, romance books tend to be in the $2.99 to $3.99 range unless the author is a bestseller. This means, even if you have a 90K book, you probably can’t compete above $3.99. On the other hand a thriller may be able to command $4.99 just because thriller readers see that value. Even with $4.99 being the average, there are still a lot of bestselling thriller authors who price their books at $3.99.3. Is the book a bestseller and everyone is talking about it? If you are fortunate enough to have a book that already has a lot of buzz, then you can command higher prices. Most indie authors—particularly those with only a couple of books out—are not in this fortunate circumstance yet.Strategies for Determining PriceFirst, you have to determine your goal with a particular title. Are you looking to get more readers or more sales? If you are like me you want both. However, the pricing strategies differ depending on your answer and on where you are in your career.If you want more sales, you have to evaluate if you can sell six times more books at 99 cents than at $6.99. Certainly, priced at $6.99 each book yields you more profit. However, if very few readers choose to pay that price, it doesn’t get you more money in the end. On the other hand, a lot more people MAY take a chance at a new author whose book is only 99 cents. But, to make the some money you need to sell a lot more books—engage a lot more readers. For new or unknown authors, a lower price may help draw in new readers.If you determined that your goal was to focus on getting more readers, and not worrying as much about making money, then the priority should be getting the price as low as possible. Remember, whatever the price it is not set in stone. One of the techniques used by indie authors is to change price (or have discounts) from time to time in order to get more exposure. If you can get a burst of sales at the lower price, it ups your sales rank for the category. That automatically means it is getting shown to potential customers more often. Then you can return to the “normal” price again and ride that sales rank for a while.What is a good middle ground? Where to start experimenting with price.Initial book pricing is discussed in a good amount of detail in the Secrets Every Author Should Know: Indie Publishing Basics book. So, I’m going to summarize the key points in this section.The best place to start is to evaluate the competition. What genre is your book? How many readers are in that genre? Where is the book being sold—country, store/vendor, time of year your book is released.When it comes to determining a price, you really need to think of your book as a widget. For example, a house in New York City costs more than the same house in Gary, Indiana. That house is also listed for more in the spring and summer when more people want to move than it is in the winter. A little black, shift dress by Chanel (a name brand designer) costs significantly more than a dress that looks exactly the same made by Susie’s Home Sewing. How does your book compare to top sellers? What is the same and different?Too often authors look at the top sellers in their genre and think: “My book is just as good, if not better, than that one.” It may be true; but that doesn’t mean a reader will pay you the same price for your book that they pay for the name brand author. A brand name author comes with a known experience expectation. An unknown author has no guarantees and, in fact, is often compared to any other unknown author the reader tried in the past. If the reader has tried unknown authors and had a good experience, she may be more likely to give you a try. If the experience was bad, she is more likely to pass up your book unless something (like price) makes the attempt less costly. This is why free and 99 cents are so popular. A reader thinks: “It’s only 99 cents. If it’s a bad book, I’m not out much money.”When a reader sees your book, her first concern is what will be the experience of reading that book. If it is a fiction book, will the experience match my reader cookies—expectations for characters, emotion, adventure, fright or feel good moments? If it is a nonfiction book, will I learn something I don’t already know that makes my time worthwhile?Go to a few vendor sites (Amazon is one of the easiest to navigate) and search for bestsellers in your genre. Make a list of what is alike and different between those books and your own. If you have books already out there, you can make the assumption that your new book will do as well as past books. If this is your first book, assume that your book will do as well as the average one book author. Here is an example of one of my lists for a recent fiction book release.Taking into account all of the above, I doubt I can price at $4.99 and pull in enough money. The question is whether I should price at $2.99 or $3.99. I decide to do $3.99 because my book is longer, it is further along in a series that has a decent following, and the majority of authors in the genre price full length novels at either $2.99 or $3.99 if they aren’t bestsellers.The good news is the price is not set in stone. You can change it at any time. Just make sure that when you change your price, you have good reason to do so (e.g., special marketing) or data gathered over a significant period of time suggests a different price.试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]