Checking Out The New eBookPlus Self-Publishing Platform

Published: February 24, 2013 2013

I found a curious email sent to my business email account, which is different from my author email account, about a new self-publishing ebook platform called eBookPlus. Their business model: Free ebooks with advertising at the start of every chapter.

My initial reaction was: FREE eBooks + Advertisements = SPAM!

The email, however, didn’t land in my spam filter, being sent out by a professional marketing company with a clear reputation to skate by any spam filter.

I started looking into eBookPlus and liked what I saw. This tag line in particular drew my attention:

Did you know that free ebooks are accessed a hundred times more often than ebooks priced at 99 cents?

My business model is SHORT ebooks (i.e., short stories and essays) aimed at the impulsive buyer looking for a short-term reading fix under a buck. From my sales numbers over the last six months, my FREE ebooks are flying off the virtual bookshelves. Not in the hundreds, but in the thousands.

Being a new ebook retailer, eBookPlus is looking for users and content to beta test their platform. The classic chicken-and-egg problem for startups: you can’t attract new users without content, or attract new content without users. You need both to avoid having an empty platform.

There are four account types when you sign up, each with a different focus.

  • The reader account doesn’t have much to read at the moment except for a one-page sample ebook that demonstrates the web interface, which looks like a lite version of the Amazon cloud reader.
  • The author account allows you to upload your ebook in various formats (i.e., EPUB, DocX, PDF and HTML).
  • The advertiser account is for those who want to advertise their stuff while readers are reading your ebooks.
  • The artist/book professional account are for illustrators, photographers, translators, audiobook narrator, editors and designers who want to offer their services to ebooks made available by authors.

When eBookPlus is ready to open the floodgates, readers will get a notification email that the FREE ebooks are available and where to download the mobile apps.

Being able to find a translator to translate my short stories into a foreign language might be the most useful part of eBookPlus. You hire a translator to translate the ebook and another translator to check the translation, splitting future ad revenues or paying a flat fee. I hope this service will allow the translated ebook for publication elsewhere besides eBookPlus.

I’m going to upload all my FREE ebooks to see how this works. I might upload my PAID ebooks later, which are available at an advertiser-supported discount or full price at a 70% royalty rate. When the ebooks are available on eBookPlus, I’ll be adding another sales link to the ebook pages on my author website.

This is becoming a new trend where I make my work available to help establish a new market for everyone else, like Plan B Magazine from a few weeks ago. The more choices readers and indie authors have, the more everyone benefits.

Plan B For The Plan B Magazine

Published: February 10, 2013 2013

While sending out some older short stories as reprints to face a cruel world of rejections in the slush piles, I sent “The Uninvited Spook” to the Plan B Magazine that Duotrope listed as a fledging market (i.e., less than six months). The premise for this new online magazine is to publish a mystery short story each week, pay semi-pro rates of one-cent per word and publish an anthology ebook every quarter. My spook-spying-on-spooks short story got accepted for publication—with a catch.

[vimeo 56865928 w=560&h=340]

The semi-pro rates are dependent on the crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo to raise $3,500 USD, which has less than 10% of the minimum amount raised and 11 days before the campaign ends. Unless contributors start pouring out of the woodwork in a hurry, there will be no funding for the semi-pro rates and all the accepted short stories will revert back to the writers.

Why anyone would need $3,500 USD to start an online magazine? A domain name and web hosting for a year doesn’t cost much these days. The amount was too small for the editor to live on. That number didn’t make sense until I re-read the writer guidelines on the payment structure, where the maximum payout is $50 USD for a 5,000-word short story each week. The funding goal represents a year or more of payments for short stories, depending on the word count of each short story.

Indiegogo is similar to Kickstarter that you can set up a project with a minimum-funding goal and offer various incentive levels for contributors. Indiegogo offers two interesting choices if the minimum-funding goal isn’t met: return the money or keep the money. Depending on your project, this offers some flexibility. Plan B Magazine will return the money if the minimum-funding goal isn’t met.

I’m thinking about putting together a full-length collection of my speculative short stories as a print book. if I put together a print-on-demand (POD) book, I could take pre-orders on Indiegogo and keep the money to order the books without worrying if I set the minimum-funding goal too high. The difference between a successful and unsuccessful campaign is on whether or not you have an audience.

The alternative for Plan B Magazine—let’s call it Plan B—is to provide writers the option to have their short stories published online for FREE to help build up the new magazine so that it could semi-pro rates someday.

Although I would rather see the money (one-cent per word is better than my usual 1/4-cent per word), I’m more interested in seeing this new market establishing itself. Since “The Uninvited Spook” was first published in a print-only magazine in 2008, and published as a short story ebook in 2010, I don’t mind it being reprinted for FREE to help expand my reading audience and grow a new market at the same time.

UPDATED 02/23/2013: The editor announced that the funding campaign at Indiegogo has failed and she is switching to Plan B to pay out of her own pocket. Twelve short stories—including my own reprint, “The Uninvited Spook”—will be published bi-weekly for six months, collected into an anthology ebook for sale, and all the writers will get paid their one-cent per word rate. We will see if this online mystery magazine can fund itself after six months.

Get Amazon To Price Match Your FREE Smashwords eBooks

Published: November 4, 2012 2012

If you want your ebooks on both Amazon and Smashwords to reach the widest audience possible, you need to have FREE ebooks for readers to sample your work. Smashwords makes this easy by letting you set the price to FREE. Amazon, however, doesn’t allow you to set the price to FREE. The workaround is to get Amazon to price match your FREE Smashwords ebook.

THE PRICE MATCH

For Amazon price matching to work, your Smashwords ebooks are enrolled in the third-party premium catalog (i.e., Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and many others) and the price set to $0.00 (FREE). You will need to wait six to eight weeks or so before the newly published ebook or price update appears at least two prominent ebook retailers.

  1. Open in your web browser to two ebook retailers that has your FREE Smashwords ebook. Apple and Barnes & Noble are usually the first to update.
  2. Open the corresponding Amazon page.
  3. Click on the “tell us about a lower price” link underneath the product details on the Amazon page.
  4. A small pop-up box will ask for the URL and price for the lower-priced ebook.
  5. Copy and paste the URL from the first ebook retailer and set the price to $0.00.
  6. Do this for the second ebook retailer.

If you do this every day for a week, your Amazon ebook will be price-matched to FREE the following week. This may happen sooner (a few days) or later (two weeks). You need to be persistent until the price change takes effect.

Amazon has price-matched seven of my FREE Smashwords ebooks and given away 2,571 copies over the last three months, resulting in a slight increase in sales for PAID ebooks and reviews on the FREE ebook.

CAVEATS ABOUT AMAZON

Price matching works well if your Amazon ebooks are in the 35% royalty tier, which is about half the royalty rate from Smashwords and has fewest restrictions.

If your Amazon ebooks are in the 70% tier and/or the KDP Select program, you’re making money on Amazon’s dime and have to play by their rules. I’ve heard reports that Amazon have threaten authors with canceling their accounts if an ebook in the 70% tier are found for a lower price elsewhere. If you’re in the KDP Select program, you have to remove your ebooks from all other ebook retailers and can only promote your Amazon ebook for FREE only five times out of every 90-day period.

You will get some flak from the “professional” writers who publish their ebooks only through Amazon (especially in the KDP Select program), accusing you of breaking the rules and warning dire consequences when Amazon finds out. Relax. The “professionals” writers signed their souls over to Amazon are now chafing at the restrictions imposed on them and watching enviously as indie writers have greater success at all ebook retailers.

If Amazon does threaten to cancel my account for whatever reason, I’ll be happy to inform my readers that they can find my ebooks elsewhere. Although Amazon is “the world’s largest market” (a favorite mantra from the “professional” writers), my Amazon sales are 20% or less of my overall ebook sales. In short, I don’t need Amazon. As an indie writer, I’m not obligated to help Amazon sustain their ebook monopoly at my expense.