Keith Graham

Amazon has 12 million books for sale for Kindle. I see pages suggesting that there are 30 million active kindle users.

My problem is how to turn my book, 1 in 12 million, into a 1 in 30 million, Kindle user.

The first solution is based on my Harmonica book. I receive two or three sales a month, making $50 or so a year. This is because I have a unique book on a topic that is interesting in a category that is not overly clogged with similar books. I have the only book that teaches a person how to play in the style of Sonny Boy Williamson, an interesting and important harmonica play from the 1950s.

So rule 1 is to write a unique book that appeals to an audience that is starved for this type of book.

I have three books of Science Fiction short stories. Amazon reports that there are at least 20,000 Science Fiction anthologies for sale on kindle. My best book is ranked at 2,770. I do not believe that this is high enough to generate any sales through organic Amazon searches. My other books are ranked 4 or 5 thousand.

My anthology is rated 2,770 because I recently put it up with for free using the KDP promotions options. You get 5 free days for every three months. The book was #1 in FREE kindle for all of last Sunday. The book got about 100 downloads. 100 free downloads results in 86th percentile for rank. If you consider that it is a log curve, without doing the math, I guess that it might take 1,000 or more free downloads to make it into the top 100.

Clearly, the way to make things work is to somehow connect a book with a subject that is in demand. My book claims to be hard Science Fiction, which seems to improve my odds, somewhat. My Cyberpunk book does poorly, about the same as my Weird tales book.

I will be releasing a novel, soon. I have given up trying to sell the novel to a publisher or an agent. It seems a stupid idea. I need to go over the book, making corrections, one more time. Everyone who reads the book comments that I have enough characters to write another volume in a series. I am thinking that series of books do better than single novels.

I still haven’t come up with a formula. Google gives me no answers that are useful. I will ask Bing chat to see what it says.

Bing’s answer:
There are several ways to sell more fiction books on Amazon Kindle. One way is to use targeted Amazon ads that capitalize on your keyword strategy 1. Another way is to build an author platform over the course of several years 1. You can also optimize your title and subtitle, choose the right Kindle keywords, and hire a cover designer 1.

Kindle keywords are the words a shopper types into Amazon when looking for a book or Kindle ebook. They help make it so that your book gets discovered without having to do major marketing . By selecting the right Kindle keywords, you can increase your book’s visibility and reach more readers .

In order to find profitable Kindle keywords, you need to find phrases or words that shoppers actually type into Amazon and are willing to pay money for. You also want to make sure that the competition for those keywords isn’t too hard. One way to find the most searched Amazon book keywords is to use Amazon’s autofill function in their search box. This function guesses what you are going to type into it based on the popularity of particular terms from other shoppers typing things into it .

To use the autofill function to find the most searched Amazon book keywords, you can follow these steps:

Ensure you are using Incognito mode on your browser so that your previous information doesn’t affect what Amazon shows you.
Go to Amazon.com and start typing a word or phrase related to your book into the search box.
As you type, Amazon will suggest popular search terms based on what other shoppers have typed into the search box.
By using this method, you can get an idea of what terms shoppers are using to search for books like yours on Amazon.

Step 1 – Write the book.
I write chapters (or stories in the case of my anthologies) and I keep it separated into word style .docx files. This is convenient because the small chunks can be run through the LanguageTool.org website. I signed up and magically, and for free, I get some really great grammar checking. I use LibreOffice Writer because I am too cheap to buy MS Word. I am also using LibreOffice because eventually I will want to export to PDF, and that is a no-brainer in LibreOffice.

Step 2 – Grammar check the contents. I use the built-in LibreOffice Writer spell checker. I have the LanguageTool extension in LibreOffice, which helps. Be aware that LibreOffice will freeze if you try to grammar check anything more than three or four thousand words at a time. I make a second check at the LibreOffice tool. Each version of the tool catches different kinds of errors, so you have to do both.
I write very fast and often leave out words. I leave out most commas, and I mess up things in unexpected ways.

Notes on Scanned documents. Recently, I scanned a typed novel for a friend using a scanner and OCR. I got all kinds of problems, including hard carriage returns where there shouldn’t be any, and many letters that the OCR messed up. Dirt on the paper frequently wound up as garbage in the text. Scanning a document is much more work than dealing with a word processing file. If I were doing it for money, I would charge at least double for converting a print document to a file.

Step 3 – Omit needless formatting. Your manuscript parts should all have minimal formatting. All paragraphs should be the default paragraph style. Remove all direct formatting and convert things like italics or special indenting to use a style. Try to limit things like bold or underline. Chapter titles should use the “Chapter Title” style. You can modify the style itself to change fonts, size and alignment.

Step 4 – Create the combined document. I had no luck with using Master Documents in LibreOffice Writer. Maybe MS Word works better. I have not researched other kinds of word processing tools. Google Documents did not have enough formatting features. I created the blank document and copied the individual files into it. Scan the document quickly, just to make sure that nothing is missing.

Step 5 – Download the manuscript templates from Amazon. These have a left page and a right page and basic styles for paragraphs, including one for chapter titles. Import the one you are using into Word or LibreOffice. Save it in your personal templates. Start with the paperback version. 6 by 9 is the most common and easiest to work with.

Step 6 – Add page styles for Left and Right pages without numbers. Add page numbers where you want them to the normal Left and Right page styles. You should have page styles for pages with and without numbers. The only difference is that the main body of the book has page numbers, but the front content, like the title and perhaps the preface, will use the styles that do not have numbers. Modify the default paragraph style to use a font less boring than the one in the template. Modify the chapter heading style so that there is a page-break before the style.

Step 7 – Add the table of contents. You may have to tell it to use your chapter title style. Make sure that you uncheck the “protected” option when you create it. I find it annoying if I can’t fiddle with it.

Step 8 – Make sure the pages are on the correct side of the page. The title starts on a right page (without a number). The next page is a left page with copyright and some other notes. The next page is on the right, and it could have the preface, introduction, dedication or the first chapter.

Step 9 – The first chapter or the beginning of the book proper should start on page 1. This means inserting a special page break that will start the page numbering at zero. It took a lot of googling to figure this out. It is not trivial. I spend more time on this one part than any other part of the formatting.

Step 10 – Export to PDF.

Step 11 – Start your book on Amazon KDP. Fill in the details and load your PDF into the contents page.

Step 12 – Design the cover. You need to download a template from the KDP cover size generator. Do some magical artwork and save it. I create the cover art using Paint.net, because it is feature rich and free. I use LibreOffice Draw when I am done and modify the page properties, and insert the cover image. Then, I can export to PDF in a way that KDP will be able to use. Add your cover PDF to KDP content and then use their checker to see if you did it right. It usually takes a few times to get it right.

Step 13 – After KDP thinks that everything is good, you need to order a proof copy or two. Don’t go wild, because when you see the book, you notice all kinds of terrible things that need fixing.

Step 14 – Fix things several times. Try not to spend too much on proof copies. You will eventually reach a point you can publish your book.

Step 15 – Once the paperback version is done, make a copy of everything in another folder. Edit the document and change the page sizes, margins and gutters for a hard cover version. Stretch out the Cover document, if you can, otherwise fix it up for the larger size. Start the hardcover settings and print a proof copy when you get it right. Nobody buys the hardcover version, so you might want to skip this step.

Step 16 – Create a copy of the document and take out the table of contents. Use the Kindle Create program to make a Kindle version. This is so easy compared to the paperback version. Enroll in the Kindle select program. You actually make more money even though the royalties are less. Take my word for it.

Step 17 – Start next book. Go to step 1.

I submitted my novel to Baen Books last week. I am beginning to regret this, and I went back to the Baen site and re-read the guidelines. I found a line:
Reporting time: usually within 12 to 15 Months. (Sorry, we get lots of manuscripts.)
Well that sucks!
I am not capable of waiting 15 months for a likely rejection.
I also did a search on agents that might accept the book. I found www.fineprintlit.com and submitted to a person named Laura Wood. She is starting to handle Genre fiction, and she sounded nice and smart. I expected an email response, but I didn’t get one. I think that I would have set up an auto-respond email if I was doing this kind of thing, but, of course, she did not have the expertise to do that, and it makes me worry about her credibility.
So, I have to pick a date where I publish my book at Amazon.
My brother, Larry, is actually reading the book, and making notes. He is not a reader, but he is enjoying the book and is making many very good suggestions, many of which I had already thought about. When he finishes marking up the proof copy, I think I’ll check it out.
I finished the book on March 12th. Maybe I’ll pull the trigger on April 12th, that would make it four months from starting the book to publication.
I have to be clear about the time it took to write the book. I wrote the first two chapters in 2003, so technically it took 20 years to write, but I could not find the time back then to work on a novel, so I kept it in a Work In Progress folder for that whole time. Elapsed time was a few hours in 2003 and then three months in 2023 and now a month of hesitation.
I found another novel where I wrote the first two chapters. It is called “The Glass House”, It is even older than Murder in Luna City. I tried to pick it up, but it did not flow as easily as “Murder” (original name was All it Takes is Brains.) I think that I need to add some characters and let the characters pull it forward. Its other flaw is that it is about a Neural Net, which is actually the dead ringer for chatGPT. I think it may be too technical for most people. (I am also reluctant to mention chatGPT in a time when publishers are being inundated with LLM fakes.)
The other novel is “To Become A Dragon,” which meanders too much. I have chapters stretching over several years, and I don’t know how to tie them all together. 30K words, so it at least it has a good base to fill in the missing parts.

I have Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive installed on my computers. That’s a lot of shared drive space. I just added pCloud so that’s another 10 GB. I don’t need that much more shared space, but it is nice to experiment with. EVERYBODY needs Google Drive, and Dropbox has been around for many years. iCloud, goes with Apple, but I can do without. I have OneDrive, but don’t use it on this machine.

If you need some new slick, easy to use backup space, for free, try pCloud.com. The free account only gives you 10 GB, but that’s good for backing up some important stuff.

I finished “Murder in Luna City” yesterday. It is the first novel that I’ve ever written. It is 91,000 words long, 250 pages. It took three months to write, which is not that long a time.

I submitted it to Baen Books this morning. I will look around tonight for somewhere else to send it. I am all set to pull the Amazon Self-Publish trigger as soon as Baen says no. It is fully formatted for hard-cover. I have to reformat the MS for paperback and Kindle. I ordered two “Proof” copies just to see how it works out.

I found another Novel that I started, and I will use this recent experience to work on this new one.

I fell down the stairs backwards last Sunday. I am in intense pain. I don’t think that I broke anything, but if I don’t feel better I will go to the hospital.

In similar news, I broke a tooth biting into a stale bagel. The temporary tooth broke within two hours. My tooth hurts.

I am taking Tylenol and trying not to think about it.