December 1st marked the end of my month long give away over at GoodReads which I discussed in my last post. 974 people entered the contest to win one of the 5 copies I was giving away.  And 159 people have added the book to their “to read” list.  After the contest ended, I even received an email through GoodReads from another reader who was sad she didn’t win, and asked politely if I could spare another copy.

I’ve sold two copies on my own to friends, with requests slowly trickling in from other friends and family members.  I also mailed complimentary copies to a few reviewers and colleagues a few weeks ago.  As of this post, I have  two reviews at Amazon.com which are both positive.

Speaking of Amazon, I’ve been enjoying the advanced features they added to their Author Central program this year. I especially like the Sale Rank feature, which allows you to see where your book (hard copy or Kindle) ranked for up to one month.  Here’s an example of my own book in paperback sales the week after its release:

You can sign up for an Author Central account here.  It’s free.  I highly recommend it, especially for CreateSpace/Kindle authors whose book may only be available at Amazon.  It’s a way for you to have your own space on Amazon, especially if you have more than one book.  You can connect with readers and they can connect with you.  You can even have your outside blog connect to your Author Central page if you wish.

Besides your blog, you can also list book signing events, upload photos of yourself, check out customer reviews of your book(s), and also edit the product details of your book and upload editorial reviews if you wish.  I’ve tested the waters on most of these features and they usually show up on Amazon the following day.

As of today, Author Central added two more features.  You can now track your book’s sales by week and by Geographic location.  Big brother, anyone?  Just kidding.  The feature is actually provided by Nielsen Bookscan, which collects point of sale date from thousands of retailers each week, both online and off. They claim to report about 75% of the nation’s bookstores, so not all sales might be reported, but it’ll be enough for you to be able to at least see where your book is selling. Amazon says the data will be concentrated around large cities and the areas will not overlap.  But this feature does NOT include Kindle sales. I especially like the quick look at the bottom that shows your book and if it’s gone up or down in sales rank. But what does this feature mean for indie authors?  Well, it’s a great way to see if your books are selling in and around an area that maybe you haven’t marketed to.  It’s another way to find out where your readers are!

When you sign into your Author Central account for the first time after the 10th and click on Sales Info, you’ll be asked to take a quick tour which explains everything about these new features. Afterwards, you can click on the Help link and give Amazon feedback.  If you like the new features, tell them!  As consumers, we are always quick to point out the bad stuff that happens and we often forget that the good stuff is just as important.  So, if you like utilizing Author Central, tell them!

In other news, I received the new 3G Kindle as an early Christmas gift this month.  I’ll let you guess what book I downloaded first!  Believe it or not, it wasn’t AYSD?.  It was my 2nd book, Stealing Wishes. I did this mainly to get the reading experience that any Kindle owner has had of my book.  SW continues to sell anywhere from 5 to 10 copies per month on the Kindle, so I wanted to experience it first hand for myself.  And I must say, I’m impressed – not just with the feel of my own Ebook, but with the Kindle in general.  Now that I’ve joined the Ereader world full force, I’ll post more about it next month.

Book plates were popular gifts years ago, particularly for young readers just starting their library.  They are a small playing card sized sticker which someone can put in the front of their book to show ownership.  Most book plates read “This book belongs to…” or “From the Library of…” or “Ex Libris” which is Latin for “from the books of.”  You often find them in rummage sales or on book swapping sites in older editions of books.  You don’t find them available in the gift section of your bookstore much these days because they actually decrease a book’s value, and they seem to have fallen out of popularity around the time stationary became a dying ar tform after email came along.

But think about it!  What a novel idea for self-published authors!  You might not be able to afford giving out signed copies of your book on your blogs or investing in them to sell through the Amazon.com Marketplace, but for as little as five bucks, you could invest in book plates and offer them to your readers for a buck each (enough to cover postage and then some).  There are a variety available at Amazon.com in packages of 12 including a Van Gogh set and also Monet. There are also butterflies,  Tulips (set of 20), Fruit (set of 20), and even Fairies.  For those of you who are DIY, there’s even a clipart book and CD for under $12. With the right size Avery blank sticker label, you could even customize your own book plate with a photo of your book’s cover.

If you Google “author book plate,” you’ll discover this isn’t a new concept.  Authors have already been doing this for situations where a bookstore might have run out of their book before all customers were able to purchase one, or for extended marketing after a signing is over.  You could set up a Paypal account to collect the money from your blog readers for the postage/service or offer it as a free bonus for those who purchase your book and email you to tell you about it. Or collect SASE (self-addressed stamped envelopes) from your readers to mail bookplates to them.

Visit this blog, Signing Books by Bookplate, to learn more about the art of bookplates and to see some famous authors whose plates have popped up on Ebay.

Or visit eHow to learn more about Bookplate Etiquette.

Although a bit on the pricey side, Bookplate Ink is an awesome site for ordering customized bookplates!

Have you promoted or had success with a bookplate marketing campaign of your own?  If so, tell us about it by posted a comment.

As I mentioned before, I began the week with an email blast to friends, family, and colleagues. This resulted in an immediate sale of my book on Kindle, and one sale from my CreateSpace EStore, the first time I’ve ever sold a book to an outsider directly through CreateSpace, believe it or not.  The following day my book went live on Amazon, despite CreateSpace telling you to allow up to 15 days for this happen.

Due to time constraints, I needed to get a copy to a book reviewer in Arizona ASAP, and I had yet to receive my own copies from CreateSpace.  I decided to order a copy directly through Amazon – thus adding to my book’s sales rank.  Amazon came through and shipped the book via an expedited method just as I had chosen, so the reviewer will have his copy even before I receive my own. If you have the money to invest in paying list price for your book, I don’t advise against this…but tread lightly.  Yes, it affects your sales rank positively, but if you let others know you are doing this it could be seen in a negative light as cheating.  Remember back in the day when people were calling up bookstores and ordering copies of their book?  So, don’t beat me up over this.  It was one copy, and the reviewer had a deadline to make.

Now, despite the expedited shipping costs for this one copy, you might think I’m stupid for paying list price for my own book.  Well, I did the math just to see what the difference would be. My book has a list price of $10.95.  Let’s say I ordered just three copies. That’s a total of $32.95, and enough to get me free shipping through Amazon.com.

Because I signed up for ProPlan through CreateSpace, I’m only paying $4.09 per copy there.  That’s $12.27 total and you do have to pay shipping.  In this case, I have a choice of $4.47 for Economy and $9.99 for Standard.  Let’s go with standard which brings my CS total to $22.26.  That’s still a $10.69 difference, in CS’s favor.

But, don’t forget this!  When you order copies directly through Amazon, you will still earn your commission from those sales.  I earn $2.48 per copy for sales made through Amazon. So, I’d make a total of $7.44 back from the 3 copies I buy. Subtract that from the $10.69 difference and you get $3.25.  Divide $3.25 by the 3 copies and you get roughly $1.08 per copy.  So, I’d really only lose out by about a dollar per copy if I bought directly through Amazon. Yes I know, that’s $3 I could have save, and even more if I chose Economy shipping (which I did for my own CS order of copies last week).   And if you are shipping multiple copies to various addresses, you could save time, shipping expenses, and packaging expenses by dropshipping your book through Amazon.  And overall, affect your sales rank positively.

But as I said before, don’t do this unless you have the money to blow or you have special circumstances where you just can’t wait to get copies in yourself, or you don’t have time to pack and ship them yourself. And if you are like me, every penny counts, especially this time of year.

So enough number crunching, right?

As I mentioned in my last post, the biggest part of marketing I’ve done thus far is offering free copies on GoodReads, which I listed even before the book had published.  This is still running as of this post and doesn’t expire till December 1st.  This also stands to give me what could be my biggest return in readers yet.  As of this post, 565 people have signed up for the 5 copy giveaway and 94 people have added the book to their to-read list. Now it’s impossible to judge just how many of those 94 people will actually get to my book, but it’s nice to think that at least my book will remain in the attention of those readers for a while after the give away has expired.  If even half of those people bought my book, I’d be a happy man. And here’s one way to make sure those people don’t forget you:

Go to your book’s page on GoodReads and scroll to the bottom.  Here you will find a list called Community Reviews, and you’ll see every person who marked your book to read. You can click on each of these people if you want and add them as a friend.  And if they add you back, they’ll be able to see your updates.  What a great way to build your fan base!  You are probably wondering if I did this, right?  Well, yes and no.  I scrolled through the names and first only clicked on those who had an avatar.  If they didn’t, I assumed maybe they don’t use GoodReads that much.  So, it was a quick way to narrow them down.  For the ones I did click on, I took a quick look at their profile to see how active they are on GoodReads – how many friends do they have, how many books have they read, etc.  Sounds picky, but I wanted to make the best out of this as I possibly could.  By friending people on GoodReads (or any other social network for that matter), you should take a sincere interest in what they are doing out there as well, and not just use the service to selfishly try to build your own readership.

By the way, have I mentioned how much I love GoodReads?  I find myself using it more than I do Facebook.  If you are on GoodReads, feel free to find me and friend me!

And speaking of Facebook, despite having deactivated my account back in September, I chose to sign back in yesterday and post a few announcements about my book.  I posted a link to Amazon, Nook, and Kindle. And guess what happened?  8 paperback sales through Amazon yesterday alone, shooting my rank up to 15K in book sales.

And that was the end of Week 1.  What’s next for me?  Well, hopefully my own copies will arrive next week, which means a trip to the post office where I’ll pack and ship most of my copies to other reviewers and colleagues.  In my next post, I’m going to talk about Author Central, a service that Amazon offers free to authors.  I’ve talked about it before, but AC recently made some changes including a neat way to track sales.  More about that in December!

And here I am, almost a year and a half later finding myself with one foot back in the marketing boat again.  My 3rd book, Are You Sitting Down?  just became available in paperback as of 11/10/10. It’s been available on the Kindle since October 3rd, and has earned 3 sales prior to the official launch with little effort on my part. Yeah!

But now that ominous and forboding blank Amazon page is looking back at me.  The product details have loaded, but the blurbs and product description have yet to come on board (as of this article).  The search inside feature is not available just yet.  Createspace says to allow at least 15 days for all of this to come into fruition.  And we aren’t seeing stars yet since there are no reviews.  Very few people have even read the book, and those really only include a handful of friends and authors who wrote blurbs for the cover.

I began my official book marketing campaign just a few days ago with a give away of 5 copies over at GoodReads which ends on December 1st when the lucky winners will be drawn.  I didn’t know about this feature until this year despite previously giving away copies of my books in other ways like on my own personal blog, so I wanted to give it a try.  So far, 526 people have entered the give away and 82 people have added the book to their to-read list (as of this article). And with 18 days left to enter the raffel, I’d say the potential here for readership is amazing.

This week I also began a small email campaign.  I composed a quick email announcement and sent it out mostly to personal and author friends and some family members. I don’t have a huge network to take advantage of here, but I do think a “mailing” list is an excellent tool to utilize if you can. I awoke the next morning to discover I had gained 1 Kindle and 1 Paperback sale as the result of my email blast. Terrific!

Today, I’m hitting the forums, particularly those available on Amazon in the various communities, which can often be found at the bottom of product pages. There are tons of these that ask for authors to “come tell us about it” if you’ve written a book privy to a particular genre.  It’s hard to judge what response you’ll get, other than from other forum posters who might reply to you.  But there are lots of people who follow these forums so you never know who might be reading.

Along with Kindle, I also loaded my book to the B&N Nook last month, which also gained 1 quick sale right away. I plan to load the book to Smashwords this weekend.  I’ve had mild success with sales there of my other books, but I’ll take what I can get.

I also have a few reviewers eagerly awaiting hard copies, and a few coworkers wishing to buy copies directly from me. So the next biggest investment will be in copies.  I’ll probably also use a few as handouts in exchange for reviews on Amazon.com. Amazon reviews and their 5 star rating system have been a great debate recently as to how successful or useful they are, but for me, as an author, I still like seeing them and outside of indie blogs, it’s the most relevant spot you are going to get reviewed.

What else?  There’s Twitter.  Yes, I tweet.  I should also probably reactivate my Facebook account, if for nothing but to shout out to all those people I went to high school with that my book is now available. 

Over the next few months I’ll dive back in the depths of my POD Diary.  Rather than concentrating on sales and $$$ like I did last time, I’m going to focus on readership this time.  My biggest investment last time was in a book cover program which quickly paid off from sales.  This time I have the book cover itself to earn back as I paid for the rights to a photographer’s artwork for this cover.  So, while behind the scenes I’ll be crunching numbers, I wanted my revisit to the POD Diary to be more about marketing this time…something that would be more useful to other indie authors out there rather than how to balance your checkbook.

So here we go…turn the page….Dear Diary,

True, some people can probably invest very little money in their book and get just as much exposure.  The internet provides us with limitless possibilities when it comes to free marketing. But we shouldn’t depend upon the world wide web solely for those opportunities.  Take advantage of them?  Absolutely!  But you should still invest in physical copies of you own book (That is, if you are publishing it at all in hard copy…the reason for my post) so that you can be armed with the best marketing material there is: a copy of your book.

It’s odd to consider these days that an author can publish completely online and have their book only available as a download and make money.  Chances are, if you are like me or at least half of the POD community, you’ll make more money from E-sales than physical copies.  But if you are like me, you also still like to hold a physical book in your hand.  You like the crisp smell of its pages.  You like the feel of it, of words on paper. Nothing beats a physical book in my hands!  I still buy them.  I still read them.  And I still prefer to review them that way.

I see author blogs or Facebook posts all the time with random pics of your books stacked on your desk or shelved neatly on your book shelf.  Looks good, doesn’t it?  Feels good too.  I have a stack of my own like that.  They are signs of our hard work and we should be proud of them. They make good conversation pieces when company comes over.  Visitors always stop and wonder why you have so many copies of one book on your shelf.  So, good for you for having more than one copy!  But now it’s time to put a few of those copies to work for you.  Chances are not every copy will have a return as far as the investment goes, but in no random order, here’s a list of ways to put those copies to good use when it comes to marketing your book:

1. Donate one copy to your local library.
2. Did you write a children’s or teen interest book?  Donate a copy to a local school library or to the school you went to.
3. Send a copy to your local newspaper along with a press release.  Be sure to send it to the attention of the arts and variety editor or local interest section.
4. Send a copy to at least one national newspaper along with a press release.  Again, to the attention of the review editor.
5. Send a copy to a literary magazine or journal.
6. Send a copy to a review site or book review blog (www.llbookreview.com is a good one).
7. Send a copy to a local book club.
8. Send a copy to your local independent bookstore as part of a marketing kit or press release.  Bookstores love to receive advanced free copies and often give them  to their employees to read and suggest to customers.
9. Send a copy to your local chain bookstore.  Most of the time they won’t invest in stock of your book if it is sold non-returnable, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
10. Find a top reviewer of books in your genre on Amazon.com and contact them, asking if they’d like a copy of your book.  I’ve had several authors contact me through Amazon this way because of my previous reviews.
11. Sell copies of your book on Amazon.com or on sites like abebooks.com. Advertise them as “signed by the author.”  This is an excellent way to get a fast return financially!
12. Offer free copies on your blog, on Facebook, or on Twitter as a raffle.  Create fun contests for your readers!
13. Give away free copies on bookmooch.com.  I’m currently doing this, asking readers to only mooch my book if they are willing to review it for me on Amazon.com.  I’m trying to gain more reviews of my book there, and so far I’ve had two people request my book.
14. Give advanced copies away on goodreads.com.  GoodReads will keep track of the entries and let you set your own deadline.  They will also draw random winners for you at the end of the raffle and let you know who they are.  All you have to do is ship the book.  GoodReads also encourages readers to post a review of the book on their site.  Include a nice thank you card with the book and ask them to review it on Amazon for you too.
15. In your car, book bag, or purse.  You never know who you are going to run into and strike up a conversation with.  It could be an excellent bragging opportunity and you could let your book be your business card.
16. In a waiting room.  If you find books in your doctor’s office, dentist office, at the hospital, or any other waiting room you’ve frequented, why not conveniently leave one of your own books there in the mix?  You never know who will pick it up.  This is an excellent opportunity for anyone who wrote a book specific to the field:  nursing biographies, doctor advice, dental, self-help, etc.
17. Hospital Giftshops.  Most hospital gift shops have a small selection of eclectic books.  This is a great chance to get your book front and center.
18. At a literary festival. Check your state for any local book festivals that might be taking place.  Sign up to attend or join a group that might be attending.  Or just go to the festival as a visitor and pass out copies of your book to people you strike up a conversation with.  Our own LK Gardner-Griffie has connected with many readers at festivals in her area.
19. Story-Time!  There’s always a book being read to kids on a Saturday at a bookstore, at a preschool or in a kindergarten class, or at your local library.  If you wrote a kid’s book, why not talk to the director about being a special guest and featuring your book.
20. College Campuses!  Don’t forget your campus bookstore, campus library, campus clubs, writing groups, historical societies, etc.
21. Places frequented by your target audience.  This place plays off #16 a bit, but think about it.  The people who you want to read your book, who you wrote the book for, might not frequent bookstores.  Did you write a story about a coupon clipping queen?  Sell your book on a card table outside the grocery store (Move over girl scouts!) or talk to your grocery manager about an event.  Did you write the next Friday Night Lights?  Peddle your book at the high school concession stand. Are you penning your biography about being a Karate teacher?  Go talk to karate schools and classes one night!  A how-to book on growing rare vegetables?  Stop by the local farmer’s market. The point is go find your audience! Don’t wait for them to find you.
22. Community Centers.  Find out if your local center has a free lending library.  This is also a nice way to connect with grown-ups who loiter around while the kids are in the pool, and a nice way to let your neighbors kindly know there’s an author living next door.
23. Internet Cafes and Coffee Shops.  Again, most have a lending library.  Or stop by on Open Mic night and get up and read from your book.  I once bought a local cookbook that was being promoted next to the cash register in a coffee shop.  The point is most people who frequent these places appreciate local work and artists.
24. Flea markets, rummage sales, and garage sales.  Most people are looking for cheap books here, but if you signed your book and talked them up as “signed limited first editions,” you’re sure to draw some interest.
25. Airports, bus stations, and train stations.  Most of these have a literature kiosk or reading rack.
26. Visitor centers or tourist attractions.  Add a “local author” sticker to the front of your book and display it next to the other local interest books.

So there you have it!  Twenty-six places where you could market your book and put that overstock on your coffee table to some good use.  Take into account that if you are mailing copies of your book to various places there’s postage and packing materials to consider.  Always pack them sufficiently so the book arrives in perfect condition.  Also, don’t approach these places with a chip on your shoulder and don’t lie.  You’re not a bestselling author (yet).  Your a local author whose looking for readers. Don’t expect payment up front either.  You should be willing to donate copies of your book to most local places or work out a deal to sell on consignment. Or if you are dealing with a bookstore or coffee shop, take down their billing information and send them an invoice.

Do you have other odd places where you successfully sold your book?  If so, we want to hear about it.  Post them here as a comment or shoot us an email and we’ll include them in a future post.

Happy marketing!

It took several months for the book to become available on Amazon. Six months in fact.  Having emailed Lulu support several times during that wait period and after getting no help, I decided to give up on the project and I retired the book immediately.  It loaded to Amazon anyway though and while I have never promoted it, I did go ahead and load it to the Kindle where it has been downloaded enough to gain a sales rank in genres such as Writing Skills and Authorship.

Since the project was retired, but live on Amazon, I also expected never to collect any royalties from the sale of hard copies.  My fault for letting my anger get the best of me. But that’s where good ole Lulu didn’t fail me…at least I hope they didn’t fail.  To date, I’ve collected royalties for a total of just 5 copies: 3 in the US and 2 in the UK!

After much inner debate, I’ve decided to “unretire” the book.  With that decision, I’ve lowered the list price of the paperback to just $9.50 on Lulu and the E-Book to just $4.50, cutting most of my royalties. This may or may not affect the current list price at Amazon where the book is $12.50, but can be purchased starting at $9.50 from third party marketplace sellers. I don’t care.  More than anything, I want the book to be available to those who need it most…indie authors who may not have a lot of money to invest in their work, but have a lot of heart already invested in it. And may just need some help in the right direction.

The information presented in this book has not been changed.  In fact, I have reviewed it against Amazon and the information is still as current today as it was a year ago when I compiled it.  While I’m sure I could build upon the material, the purpose of the book was always to be a “quick” reference for indie authors.  I do not feel the need to broaden it, and I believe it can be a very important “go to” book for authors who are out of money and looking for quick ways to market their own book on Amazon.com, the world’s largest online book seller.

So, to kick off the “rebirth” of my POD Pocket Guide, I’m offering ten free copies!  That’s right!  Ten free copies!  To be eligible, just leave a comment with your email address on this post. On June 30th, I’ll pick ten winners at random. Yes, there’s a catch.  First, you must live in the United States.  Second, you must commit to leaving a review of the POD Pocket Guide on Amazon.com once you’ve read or used it.  If you can meet these two requirements, then leave a comment on this post to enter the raffle.

Can’t wait till June 30th for a free copy?  Buy or download it right now at Lulu.com!

Dan’s book, Briefs for the Reading Room, made the list of top books with the most views in Full Screen Mode with 228 hits in the month of August.

LK’s book, Misfit McCabe, made the list of top books with the most views in Widget Mode with 4693 hits.

While I myself have not taken advantage of using the BookBuzzr marketing feature, we here at LLBR are big supporters of it and often use the widget in our reviews when posting book previews.

Click here to get started with fReado and BookBuzzr today!

We’ve talked about using Facebook to promote your book before.  I created a Facebook page to promote my own book, Stealing Wishes, a while back.  Since I was already on Facebook at the end of the day, I took the time to make a few updates to my book’s page and last week I came across an interesting ad in the right sidebar.  The ad said GET MORE FANS. “Advertise your page and pay only for new fans and clicks. Preview below.” (see image to the right)

Always looking for a new marketing opp, I decided to click on it to see what this was all about.  I was immediately redirected to a simplistic screen wanting me to design my own ad.  This consisted of choosing a title (the title of your book’s page) and writing a brief description, then uploading a new image if you want.  I chose to leave the image as it is, but changed the body of text to say, “Love and Good Coffee.  Why can’t we have both?”

After clicking Continue, Step 2 opened up where I basically had to fill out information about my target audience:

• Location
• Age
• Sex
• Keywords
• Education
• Relationship Status
• Sexual Preference
• Languages
• Connections
• Workplaces

I spent a good 30 minutes selecting different options and playing around with this feature because as you make changes Facebook gives you an estimate of how big your target audience is based on the number of users and the preferences they have set in their profiles.  For instance, not making any changes gave me a target audience of over 74 million, but changing the Relationship Status to Single immediately dropped the estimate to 14 million.

I also noticed you should be very aware of the keywords you choose (if any).  I entered several keywords related to my book from “comedy” to “romance” to even “gay” and “coffee,” but all of them decreased my target audience considerably. I decided to not list any keywords for this reason.

Another interesting fact is that since the main character of my book is gay, I decided to try targeting only men who were interested in men.  This dropped my target estimate to only 264,000.  So, the lesson learned here is to definitely NOT limit your audience.

My final target audience estimate after all my selections? 19,868,760.  Not bad.

Step 3, the final step in the ad process involves how much money you are willing to invest in your ad.  The first important selection is your daily budget and how much you are willing to spend per day. The minimum is one dollar, so that’s what I decided on since this is a test run for me. Then, you have to choose a schedule.  Do you want your ad to run continuously or for a set amount of time?  I decided on 30 days.  If I reach my maximum daily budget each day then that’s only 30 dollars. And yes, you can even choose a specific live date and end date for your ad. Then, you have to choose how much you are willing to pay per click.  The minimum is a penny, but Facebook estimates that you will only receive 2 clicks per day if you choose the minimum.

It is important to note that you will never pay more than your daily budget, but that you may actually pay less depending on how much traffic you get per day.  You can also choose to pay per click or pay per impression.  So, you can choose to pay each time someone actually clicks on your ad or you can pay for how many times your ad actually just appears on someone’s Facebook session.  Obviously, the impressions get your ad seen more, but can become much more costly. And it appears that those willing to pay more are the ads that get more Facetime on Facebook.

After making selections to my budget, I got to review my information and enter my credit card number.

After entering my payment information, I was redirected to a screen called My Ads where I’ll actually be able to track the progress of the ad on a daily basis.

So, will the ad work?  Who knows??  That’s the joy of advertising!  I like the fact that I’ll be able to track the clicks per day to see if my investment was worth it.  Obviously, if I had a budget of say $100 it would probably be much more worthwhile to invest more money in this, but we’ll see how it goes at first.  I’m more interested in seeing if people actually become fans of the page.  To me, that’s my true way of attracting an audience.

Some interesting figures…

• If the ad only costs me $30 in the end, I will need to sell at least 47 hard copies of the book to pay for the ad because I only make 64 cents per sale through Lulu.  64 cents X 47 = $30.08
• The book lists for $14.00 and is on sale on Amazon for $12.60.  That’s $562.12 profit for Amazon and/or Lulu after my royalty.
• I make $1.05 per sale of the book on the Amazon Kindle.  It would take only 29 Kindle sales to make back the $30 dollar investment. $1.05 x 29 = $30.45
• Earning at least 30 fans from this experiment on my book’s page, 1 per day?  Priceless.

So, if you see my ad out there over the next 30 days or if you decide to give it a try yourself, tell us about it by posting a comment here.

However, the only way to access the Author Central page was by searching for the author’s name, or the author could access and update it directly from a special link.  The new Author Central page highlighted all of you books, a bibliography, a picture of the author, and blog posts.

Amazon has now given the Author Central feature its own highlighted space directly below the Product details.  Here’s an example from my own book…

The email also announced more changes are to come!  Let’s cross our fingers they are as good as this recent change.

For more information about the Amazon Central program, click here.

I’m sorry for the delay in getting back to you about this.

Thank you for contacting us. Author blogs that previously showed up on book detail pages have been moved to Author Pages, which we believe are the best place for customers to read author posts.

The blogging feature is now available exclusively through Author Central (https://authorcentral.amazon.com), a new destination that offers one central location for you to claim and verify your titles, update RSS feeds, and revise your bibliography, in addition to managing your blog.

All of your blog content will now post directly to the Author Page, and we’ve automatically transferred all of your account information so you can log into Author Central with the same user name and password you set up for Amazon Connect.

Customers can find Author Pages by searching on an author’s name. In our search results, if more than one author has the same name, we display the author with the most sales first.

Author Pages are a brand new part of our store, and we appreciate your feedback as we continue to invent new ways to help customers discover authors and their work.

If you have any additional questions or comments, please send us an e-mail at ac-general@amazon.com

Thank you for contacting Author Central.

So the blog has been moved to the Author Central page.  And it seems the only way readers will now find your Author page and your blog is if they search for your name. Once again, Amazon has a great idea but they bury it in the shopping trenches rather than giving it proper exposure and easier access for everyone to find.  How disappointing!

Still haven’t signed up for Author Central and updated your own page?  Click here.