Kindle Scout Take 2

Saturday, June 24, 2017

Michelle McBeth Although "The Sphere" wasn't selected for publication by Kindle Scout, I am not discouraged by the idea of trying again. For one thing, my writing has improved greatly. For another, I now have three books in my series. Even if "The Lunar Conspiracy" isn't chosen either, I expect I'll see an uptick in sales from people who read the excerpt and are intrigued enough to go look at the first two books. And if I'm not chosen, I can still publish on my own. Seems like a win-win.

A number of things have changed since my first try at Kindle Scout. For one thing, Amazon now provides you with daily page hits, so you can see how your book is doing. On day one, 326 people looked at my book. Unfortunately, they don't tell you how many of those people nominated your book. Bear in mind though, I haven't even started my social media push. Those are overwhelmingly people who were already on Kindle Scout, saw my book and decided to take a look at it.

This is one of the reasons why a good cover is so important. It's shallow, but the adage is true: People judge a book by its cover. So those books on Scout that are very obviously some clip art and basic fonts thrown onto a picture the author took themselves? I admit, I don't bother looking at them. I might be missing out on an awesome book, but it shows a lack of effort I just can't get past. Same thing if there are typos on the campaign page; of which I pray I don't have any.

As a scouter, there is also an advantage to waiting to nominate a book until it is close to ending. I'd guess on average amazon adds five books a day, which means every day an average of five books are removed and weighed for publication. Every day you could nominate three out of those five books and possibly get three free books a day out of it! I haven't tested this theory, but it seems possible.

And this is all free publicity for Amazon. They're making out big time with increased traffic to their websites and books they publish, or even books that end up self-publishing later. Amazon will now send an email to everyone who nominated your book when you publish it (if outside of Scout). It seems like a really sweet thing of them to do, until you realize that the majority of the proceeds from those sales goes directly to them. It's a pretty brilliant if shallow business model.

Judging from the books that tend to end up on the "hot and trending" list, it's clear my next book needs to be about a hot teenage vampire that falls in love with a hot teenage werewolf and has a love child that turns into a hot sorceress who travels through time seducing really hot young versions of famous men. The cover needs to feature at least two of these hot people showing lots of skin and contemplative faces.