Greetings and Salutations -

A reminder that Earth Day is coming up on Monday, April 22nd. This is a great day to feature any eco-geared content you might have! There's a way to tie every site topic into being green. We have a BellaOnline Green Team that watches over these types of activities and I'm about to brainstorm with them about plans for Monday. Please contact me if you'd like to join in! We're a quite low key group :). We try to do something every quarter or so.

You can see our public Green Statement, plus links to all our free green ebooks, here -

http://www.bellaonline.com/misc/green/

We like to revise our ebooks each quarter. If anyone has fifteen minutes to read through one (they're short) and provide some feedback, that would be awesome!


PAPERBACK SALES
I just wrote up some details on ideas for self-selling your paperback books through Amazon. I know several of us are working on books and I definitely recommend having paperback versions of them too if you don’t currently. There are really people out there who still prefer paper.

I have details about self-listing them here – you can often make more money by doing this –

http://www.lisashea.com/lisabase/writing/gettingyourbookpublished/amazonsales.html

I’ve always done this for my weddings & courtships books (the ones published by a third party printer) and I just listed my 10 medieval novels plus my Aspen Allegations murder mystery in this way as well. This way people can buy signed copies from me if they wish.

This next information is just for you :). It might wrap oddly if you're using a proportional font in your email. Try changing your font to "courier" or cut-pasting this into a text editor to get the columns to line up properly. This is the stats for my ten medieval novels plus my one murder mystery.

Book List $ Royalty Amazon $ My Cost Signed Pgs Words Kind-Only? Promo
Seeking the Truth 10.99 2.34 12.99 6.73 8.99 356 116000 - Y
Knowing Yourself 6.99 0.56 6.99 5.22 6.98 230 74000 Y Y
A Sense of Duty 10.99 2.34 10.99 5.84 7.99 282 88000 - Y
Creating Memories 10.99 2.34 14.99 6.34 7.99 286 88000 Y
Looking Back 6.99 0.46 6.99 5.32 5.99 234 73000 -
Badge of Honor 11.99 2.50 14.99 6.28 8.99 318 99000 Y Y
Lady in Red 6.49 0.26 6.49 5.22 5.99 232 68000 Y Y
Finding Peace 6.99 0.58 6.99 5.20 5.99 230 67000 Y Y
Believing your Eyes 12.99 2.65 16.43 6.73 8.99 350 110000 Y
Trusting in Faith 11.99 2.50 11.99 6.28 8.99 316 100000 -


Aspen Allegations 6.99 0.44 6.99 4.94 5.99 246 71000 Y



So here's what you're seeing. I have all 11 books as paperbacks in CreateSpace, which is Amazon's self-publishing arm. Those books are then listed on Amazon for sale. So you see first my list price I set. I usually set that price close above their "base printing price". I.e. if they say the cheapest the book can be listed for is $6.39, I'll round it up to $6.99.

Amazon then self-determines if they're going to sell the book at my list price or something higher. So you see the Amazon actual sale price and my royalty per book.

The "My Cost" column is what it costs me to buy the book including shipping it to me. I usually buy in sets of 3 to save on shipping costs. So even if I then list the book on Amazon in their Marketplace for cheaper than their new price, I still make more money.

So then the "signed" column is what I have set as the price for a user to buy a signed copy from me. They pay that plus $3.99 shipping.

The final two columns have to do with the ebook side. We were talking about this a few email messages ago. On the Kindle, you can either have your ebook be Kindle-exclusive or not. If you choose Kindle-exclusive, you get access to free promotions and other goodies. But you of course then "lose" potential sales from the Apple and Nook markets. So I currently have six of my medieval novels plus my murder mystery as kindle-only, to get those promotions. The other four medieval novels I am putting on the Apple and Nook systems as a way to gain attention there. My hope would be that people who come across one of those four like me enough to seek out the rest on the Kindle.

A special note about the promo column. Those are books I've run free promos on so far. You'll see that two of those had promos done even though they're currently not Kindle-only. That's because they USED to be Kindle-only, I ran a promo, and then I took them off Kindle-only. However you can only switch them like that once. If I make those books Kindle-only again they "stay on". So you can't just wildly go back and forth between Kindle-only and non-Kindle-only in order to occasionally get the benefits.

I know this is a lot to absorb :). Please let me know if you have any questions at all, I'm happy to help out!



Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

--------------------

Archive of Past Emails -
http://www.bellaonline.com/newsletter/editorassistance

Editor Assistance Site - full of helpful articles and tips!
http://editorassistance.bellaonline.com/

Editor Forum - for community help 24 hours a day
http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=10

All correspondence between BellaOnline editors is confidential and should not be forwarded or distributed.