#kindle publishing

[the960writers]

7 Kindle Keywords: Use All 50 Characters or Not?

Last updated on January 16th, 2024

Most self-publishers know that when it comes to showing up for certain searches, the keywords you choose play an important role. But after that, things start to get complicated.

Amazon presents us with seven boxes in which we can enter our desired target kindle keywords. In each box, we can use up to 50 characters, which allows us to either put in a particular target phrase we want to rank for, or fill up the box to include as many phrases as possible.

Some book marketing gurus argue that you should use up as many of the available characters as possible, while others believe you should only enter in a target phrase. This conflicting advice has left lots of authors scratching their heads, wondering how to actually approach their kindle keywords.

[morioh-killer]

THE BLOOD SERIES

Everyone knows that Werewolves and Vampires are blood enemies, everyone that is except Rory Dungarven, a Werewolf, and his beloved adopted daughter Angelique, a Vampire with extraordinary powers like no other Vampire before her. This series follows the rise of each character, detailing along the way the true origin of both species. It chronicles the challenges each face, both separately and together, as they become the most legendary immortals of their kind. This series also reveals the still very human desire of immortals to love and be loved by another. Moments of tenderness and desire draw you into the secret places of the heart where love burns more hotly than even the thirst for blood. Along the way, this series reveals the existence of other mythological and supernatural creatures. Some become valued allies to the Dungarvens, while still others watch and wait. Their immortality is challenged over and over by other preternatural beings that threaten their right to exist. This, even as they strive to unite the two species, and end a war that has secretly raged in the shadows of human society for longer than any can remember.

Find on Amazon

[tailiacprod]

The Fourth entry in the FRIGHTFUL RIDES horror anthology series, "THE MANY SHADES OF ME", releases tomorrow in Paperback and Kindle!

The Series -> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C157LYHP

[africanamericanreports]

The Blood is on Your Hands: Poems Against Gun Violence. Available for Kindle The Blood is on Your Hands: Poems Against Gun Violence - Kindle edition by Cook III, George L.. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

[averymorstan]

One of the things I get asked about from time to time is my decision to publish on Amazon Kindle. 

I get it, Amazon is the Bad Guys (and honestly, I don’t disagree with you), but they did streamline the process in a lot of ways that make self-publishing on Amazon very easy. 

My decision to self-publish actually started last year before NaNoWriMo. I had a job that I didn’t feel great about the longevity of, and I also live in a pretty stressful situation that I don’t make enough to move out of. My job was quiet, though, and I was able to listen to podcasts during the day. I started to devour so many writing podcasts - DIYMFA, I Wish I’d Know, Author Like a Boss, Spa Girls, Indie Fully Booked and so many others that I can’t even remember all of them. Just day after day, doing my little data entry, and listening to pods. I’d already been writing fanfic and listening to people who decided to take their publishing future into their own hands and really commit to writing their original stories was very inspiring. 

I will say, some of what I listened to was very reminiscent of Multi-Level Marketing jargon.

Do I think some people make a ton of money on Amazon? Yes. But I have my doubts about some of the advice floating around on social media and through these podcasts about the real money that can be (or can’t be) made on Amazon.

I also feel like some of the speakers can be a little bit... elitist? Classist? But that might be a different post kind of subject. 

What I DID take away, around Christmas or January of last year, was that some of these books that were being published were actually quite short. I don’t know if other autistic people struggle with this, but I know I need ‘permission’ or an example of how something is done before I realize I could have been doing it that way the whole time. Sometimes, my brain commits to rules that aren’t necessarily true. For instance, I thought all books had to be long - they had to be like, at least 50,000 to 150,000 words. This always felt like an insurmountable obstacle to me because I typically can’t stay committed to a story longer than like, 20k. I’m ready for a new part to the adventure by the time I get to that word count. 

But a lot of these indie published authors were talking about rabid releasing, writing very short books, and managing to make content every few weeks. Because of this, they were saying it was possible to start making a steady income relatively quickly by cementing your work in the Amazon algorithms. 

I didn’t think it was possible. So, using my small town romance project from last year’s NaNo, I decided to test myself. I’m a fairly quick writer and I’d been writing fanfic for a while, so I knew I could bust out a pretty okay romance story within a short time frame. I built a little world based on my town/the towns I tend to hang around in and I created four books (plus a bonus story for Christmas) set in these towns. I would release one 15,000 word ‘book’ each month from August to December and see what happened. Each book had 7 chapters, had call backs to characters that you knew from previous books so you felt like you were checking in on old friends, and the stories themselves could only take place over the period of a few days - or, in the case of Falling for Apple, a few weeks. 

I started writing in March and worked all the way through until I started releasing them in August. In that time, I changed jobs to someplace I had less free time for writing, and I’ve done a few plays. I’ve also traveled out of town, continued documenting the process on my YouTube channel, and dealt with a very sick relative/family drama. I feel really, really good about what we’ve accomplished. 

I am also burnt out as F_CK.

All in all, if you don’t count my $12.00 a month subscription to PicMonkey, which I use to make my covers but I had already because of my history with blogging/making Insta content, I’ve spent about $25 on advertising. I’ve done a few boosted posts through Instagram and the rest has been talking about the books on my channel or on my Instagram/Facebook/Tiktok accounts. I was trying to use this method of mostly relying on the Amazon algorithms to do the work for me- that was directly out of one of the podcasts. 

I have made about $100. 

That’s it. That will not help me move out of my home and it is not the second income I was hoping it would be. HOWEVER, this is a marathon, not a sprint, and I’m very much due for a water break. 

Here is what I’ve learned throughout this process:

* Amazon makes it easy because they give you free ISBNs for your Kindle e-books. ISBN numbers can be Very Expensive, so this is a nice bit of accessibility for those of us living below the poverty line. 

* Amazon also has Kindle Create which basically formats your book for you/helps you format your books, so that’s pretty accessible as well.

* Amazon also pays you for page reads. So, yes, your book is free in Kindle Unlimited but you get paid per page read and that’s really nice.

If you have more asks about this process, please let me know because I do think knowledge should be shared and not kept where others (who don’t have the income) can reach it. 

[jf-trega]

EBOOK DISPONÍVEL NA AMAZON- ASAS GÊMEAS por J.F Trega

Asas Gêmeas é uma leitura rápida mas com um poder devastador em suas palavras. Um olhar sensível sob o medo, as inseguranças e diferenças sob quem somos e nosso propósito. Uma jornada emocionante sobre amor, aceitação e autodescoberta, sob a ótica de um pequeno inseto, tão cativante e consciente de si, que é impossível não se afeiçoar. Cirillo, um jovem gafanhoto em uma jornada eminente, ao lado de sua amada, enquanto tentam encontrar um lugar seguro em meio ao caos. Este livro nos mostra que amor nem sempre é onde, mas as vezes quem. E com um controle absurdo sobre as palavras, o autor nos transporta em um conto poderoso e transformador. Vale cada segundo investido!

https://www.amazon.com.br/Asas-g%C3%AAmeas-Joubert-ferreira-Trega-ebook/dp/B0BRQYXSKC/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2VGIFES7O4RTF&keywords=asas+g%C3%AAmeas&qid=1673038670&sprefix=asas+g%C3%AAmeas+%2Caps%2C293&sr=8-1

[jaideepkhanduja]

Of Amazon's Secrets and Scams: Unveiling the Dark Underbelly of the Self-Publishing Grift @Amazon @amazonIN #BlogchatterA2Z

Of Amazon's Secrets and Scams: Unveiling the Dark Underbelly of the Self-Publishing Grift @Amazon @amazonIN #BlogchatterA2Z #selfpublishing #ebookpublishing #Amazon #grift #garbageebooks #publishingindustry #AIcontent #literarystandards #MikkelsenTwins

The Dirty Business of Garbage Ebooks: Unraveling the Scammy Underbelly of Online Publishing If you cast your mind back to the late 2000s, a time when streaming video technology was just coming into its own, you might recall the struggle of finding legitimate platforms to watch your favorite shows. In those days, students without TVs would navigate through websites cluttered with banner ads and…

[sincerelyxserotonin]

My brain is moving at a hundred miles a minute in excitement. I’m hoping to actually start my Kindle Vella journey this coming Thursday if at all possible. It may or may not happen but the fact I’m so close to publishing something again has me so stinking happy.

[stonecrazy89]

The Photo Book That Almost Didn't Happen

Last week, I submitted my photo book Costume Nights to Amazon’s Kindle Publishing. The book centers on costumed patrons I photographed at Manikins Lounge in Sanford, Florida. Most times, patrons dressed up during theme nights, Yet, some wore costumes during non-theme nights. Plus, of course, they wore costumes during Halloween. A few days after my submission, Kindle e-mails me saying they…

[swkrullimaging]

Big Kindle Pricing Error

Big Kindle Pricing Error to Avoid When Publishing With the advent of the new year I was noticing that my Guide to Rocky Mountain National Park eBook was getting a lot of attention. I have Kindle ad campaigns going for most of the books on my Kindle Site it which show me what my potential customers search terms are, plus a small fee for any clicks my ad might to the book. What I noticed in…

[romvnova]

Love like Fire dropped today ( well, technically yesterday ). 🔥

[jayne-hecate-writer]

Holy ****... I've only gone and done a sequel!

A long time ago, in a lifetime very different to that which I have now, I wrote a novel. An actual, proper-ish novel (this is open to debate obviously, given the reception it received.) in which I sent a character I had created on a road trip into her past and that of her family. It was a violent, unpleasant and politically insensitive story, based on corrupt politics, vampires and murder for hire. I entitled this novel 'Leticia, Sunset Hunter' and was genuinely proud of what I had written.

My partner and I desperately tried to find a publisher or an agent to release the novel, but being the weird neuro-atypical freak that I am, I was barely able to believe in myself, let alone the power of my words. So after three hundred letters, with only one positive reply who never write back again, I called it a day and retreated into my shell, like a sad little snail, scared of the big wide world. The rejection felt like a cricket bat to the stomach, I had been judged harshly by the world of publishing and I did not take that judgement well.

Time went by and I remembered the words of my dear friend and mentor Mr Smith... “Have you looked into modern electronic publishing?” As an early adopter of the Apple Mac, Mr Smith was way ahead of me in terms of modern gadgets. He had iPods before anyone else had ePods! (sorry for the poor alphabetical pun!). He read his morning paper on the first generation iPad and knowing him, he was probably on first name terms with Steve Jobs. Sadly both of these men are now dead and in truth I greatly loved one of them and miss him to this day.

My first attempt at publishing was with a book of short stories. This was also my first attempt at editing a piece of my writing and I was abysmal at it. The short stories contained spelling mistakes, missed letters, lost words, changes in font and variable font size. It was a beautiful disaster, but I still loved it. This went up on Amazon Kindle and I sold at least three to well meaning friends, who let me down gently as to the quality of what they had paid for. As you would expect for such a service, Amazon took seventy percent of the profit and I received a few pence for each copy sold, which after a few months added up to the grand total of fifty three... Pence.

So releasing Leticia on Kindle was probably my best bet. I worked for months, preparing the story, working on the edits and slowly going insane. My therapist helped me deal with the feelings of failure with some kind words. “By publishing on Kindle, you are staying true to the purity of your own voice.” So publish her I did and the feelings of shame and self doubt grew like a tumour in my belly. Leticia was far from perfect and in truth I would write a very different book now, but I have to be true to the purity of my voice. The me of then who wrote Leticia, was desperate to be loved. So when I recently edited Leticia, I made sure that I was kind to the me of then and all I changed was the formatting mistakes and a couple of blindingly awful spelling or grammatical errors. I also gave Leticia a new cover, ready to be joined by her sequel, David.

When people have pets, they give them cute, lovable names (except for poor black kittens who often end up being named after something demonic), my cat for example has an adorable name. He is a sixteen year old ginger tabby called Jasper Doodahs and as I write this, he is curled up fast asleep between my ankles. Naming books is just as difficult as naming pets, if not more so. I can only imagine how many modern pets have been named Grogu or other Star Wars names, I know of at least one Ahsoka, who is a beautiful little silver tabby queen. The problem with books is that you cannot use names from films, it gets very confusing if you do and can be problematic when Lawyers are called in to ask you to stop. So I use human names for my books and here I present David : Dark Walker.

What is David about? Well, it picks up hours after the end of Leticia, with David on his way to meet Rosalind, Leticia's mother, when a woman from his long forgotten past reaches out to him. From there we have yet more travel, through this world and into others with violent and unpleasant outcomes and then right at the end, we lead into a final sequel. I wish that I could tell you more about the sequel, but as we speak, the plan is in its most basic form and nothing has been written other than a few introductory lines of text.

David is finally available now and is book two in the Vampyrican trilogy. At just over one hundred and twenty thousand words, you get around ten thousand words for roughly each pound you spend on my book. I started writing David in 2017 and since then we have had Brexit, a global pandemic, financial collapse, war in Europe and an awful lot of unnecessary deaths caused by the piss poor performance of politicians globally. None of this appears in David, well none of the real stuff anyway, but there is plenty of technocratic theocracy and maybe hints of cyber punk, with maybe a lot of love for and influence from my favourite movie of all time, Bladerunner.

What this means is that with my greater experience of being a writer now, I asked someone else to pass their eye across my final manuscript and they corrected a number of irritating mistakes for me. I still do not have the money to be able to pay an editor what they are worth to professionally work on my book, but this is hopefully a better step forwards with the reading experience for my readers. So I implore you, go and read my new novel, buy it on Kindle and/or paperback. If you live local to me, I can even sign a paperback for you. What I can tell you, should you wish to read my Vampyrican trilogy, you will be getting the purity of my voice, albeit a voice that has changed and matured over the years. I still love Leticia, but David is better and who knows, the final in the series might well be better again, when she lands on your kindle reader or bookshelf. Actually, there is a hint, book three has a girl's name and she is a character all of her own.

[tailiacprod]

“The Making of Tailia”

-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLtQYUPrdxU

Big Video all about the making of the first book in the Indie Novel Franchise “Tailia”, along with the rest of the series and some details on its future.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

2600’s amazing Hackers on Planet Earth con may go down under enshittification

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

It's been 40 years since Emmanuel Goldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

2600 has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:

https://www.2600.com/meetings

And they've hosted a weekly radio show on NYC's WBAI, Off the Hook:

https://wbai.org/program.php?program=76

When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:

https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

But best of all, 2600 gave us HOPE – both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual Hackers On Planet Earth con:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_on_Planet_Earth

For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D7APjmVbk

But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that – after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.

But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University – a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.

Good thing, too. 2600 is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell 2600 when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of 2600 on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).

Thankfully for 2600, their audience is (unsurprisingly) a tech-savvy one, so they were able to substitute digital subscriptions for physical ones:

https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions

Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.

But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the Kindle Unlimited system:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?deviceType=A1FG5NAKX0MRJL

Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat program for Kindle, which pays publishers and writers based on a system that is both opaque and easily gamed, with the lion's share of the money going to "publishers" who focus on figuring out how to cheat the algorithm. Revenues for 2600 – and all the other magazines that Amazon had sucked in and sucked dry – fell off a cliff.

Which brings me to the present moment. After 40 years, 2600 is still at it, having survived the bookstorepocalypse, the lunacy of public radio management, the literal demolition of their physical home by an evil real-estate developer, and Amazon's crooked accounting.

This is 2600, circa 2024, and 2024 a HOPE year:

https://www.hope.net/

Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-ticket-sales-update

It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them. The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

For Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of 2600 and tireless toiler for this community, the deafening silence following from that initial email volley was terrifying: "like some kind of a "Twilight Zone" episode where everyone has disappeared."

The enshittification that keeps 2600's emails from being delivered to the people who asked to receive them is even worse on social media. Social media companies routinely defraud their users by letting them subscribe to feeds, then turning around to the people and organizations that run those feeds and saying, "You've got x thousand subscribers on this platform, but we won't put your posts in their feeds unless you pay us to 'boost' your content":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Enshittification has been coming at 2600 for decades. Like other forms of oddball media dedicated to challenging corporate power and government oppression, 2600 has always been a ten-years-ahead preview of the way the noose was gonna tighten on all of us. And now, they're on the ropes. HOPE can't sell tickets unless people know about HOPE, and neither email providers nor social media platforms have any interest in making that happen.

A handful of giant corporations now get to decide what we read, who we hear from, and whether and how we can get together in person to make friends, forge community, rabble-rouse and change the world. The idea that "it's not censorship unless the government does it" has always been wrong (not all censorship violates the First Amendment, and censorship can be real without being unconstitutional):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

What can you do about it? Well, for one thing, you can sign up for HOPE. It's gonna be great. They've got sub-$100 hotel rooms! In New York City!

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv

If you can't make it to HOPE, you can sign up for a virtual membership:

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv-virtual-attendee

You can submit a talk to HOPE:

https://www.hope.net/cfp.html

You can subscribe to 2600, in print or electronically (I signed up for the lifetime print subscription and it was a bargain – I devour every issue the day it arrives):

https://store.2600.com/collections/subscriptions-renewals

2600 is living a decade in the future of every other community you care about, weird hobby you enjoy, con you live for, and publication you read from cover to cover. If we can all pull together to save it, it'll be a beacon of hope (and HOPE).

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/19/hope-less/#hack-the-planet

[tryingtowritestuff24]

I've just released my first novel and the first in a trilogy! The Bonds That Bind Us is a story of trauma, healing, found family, and growth. It is a literary fiction with a gay romance plot, and is currently FREE ON KINDLE FOR EVERYONE!

[succulentsiren]

Interview with Succulent Siren♠️

Where did the idea for the book ‘Powerful Secrets of the Divine Feminine’ come from?

The idea for this book began with my journey of discovering and exploring my spirituality.

Spirituality for me was like entering a wonderland where all the dogma no longer held value.

I was, and still am learning liberating and empowering knowledge about myself.

Once I began to apply this knowledge, I began to attract more money, I became more confident, I manifested a successful blog, I found my voice, I had more successful outcomes in my personal life and so much more.

What teachings advanced your life the most?

I gained the most treasures by learning to apply what I learned about Feminine Energy.

Many women are disconnected from their Feminine Energy but if they we’re connected, they’d be able to attract so much more abundance.

So I want to share this knowledge to enlighten other people, especially women and girls, of their true power.

What message do you have for girls and women?

Like the majority of girls, I was also taught to be a ‘nice girl’ but I learned as I got older, that the ‘nice girl’ path didn’t have my best interests at heart. It was a setup for me to get walked all over by others and I refuse to live a life of misery or submission.

So instead of teaching girls to shrink, I want to remind them of their power.

I had to learn how to release my mind from shame and take my power back and there’s no better feeling than owning who you are and living free.

I know i’m meant to get what I want and live my dream life and I know that there’s so much more abundance to come.

I am totally obsessed with bettering myself and living in my highest potential and I strive to influence others to do the same.

Grab A Copy of the Book Here