I've been playing with Amazon's feature of setting your ebooks to "free" for up to five days every three months if you enter them in the lending library program.  The results have been interesting.

Free books go like hotcakes.  I'm sure you could guess that, but I just thought I'd mention it.  The ebook that I set to free during the Christmas Eve/Christmas period gave away over a thousand copies during the five day period.

Downloading slows after day two.  I suspect there are a lot of people who hang around on Amazon's free list and snap up anything remotely interesting during the first couple of days books are there.  After the second day, people were downloading fewer of my free ebooks, probably because the freebie snappers had already eaten their fill.  Perhaps it would have been better to divide up my free period into two day chunks?

When your book stops being free, it plummets in the rankings.  Amazon keeps separate lists for free and paid ebooks.  By having an ebook on the free list, their algorithm calculates that your ebook hasn't sold any copies for five days, so it ends the period with lower rankings than it started with.  This is a bit annoying, but seems to be a momentary problem.  On the other hand, since the launch period is so important for an ebook, my experiment (shown to the right) of launching with a free period is probably a mistake.  A better choice is to make a book free after it's been out for a while.

After a day or two of being paid, rankings rise to about the same spot where they'd been before the free period.  So, making your book free doesn't help, right?  Nope, see below.

Making one book in a series free can boost sales of all the other books.  This is the most widely reported reason to set ebooks free, and my preliminary data seems to back the hypothesis up.  On the other hand, my free book period was right smack in the middle of Christmas craziness, so I might not see such a major boost with later freebies.  I'll keep experimenting and will report back soon.

The bottom line:

• Don't expect making a book free to drive it up in the rankings.
• Only give away older books that have been lost in the shuffle for a while.
• Consider giving away one book in a series.

Finally, don't forget to check out my newest Weekend Homesteader volume, full of tips on easy berries, backyard chickens, buying in bulk, and informal apprenticeships.  Just 99 cents in Amazon's kindle store!

Remember Amazon's lending library?  I've finally got some data about how the program panned out for independent authors.

To refresh your memory, Amazon launched a lending library recently that allows Prime members to download one free book per month (then give it back when they want to borrow another.)  Big publishers balked, so Amazon agreed to pay them full price for each book Prime members download for free, but Amazon offered a different deal to independent authors.  The KDP select program promised to divide a pot of $500,000 evenly among all independent authors who enrolled based on how many of their books were downloaded.

I had several hypotheses about the program and enrolled two of my ebooks to test them out.  Here are the results:

Hypothesis: Prime members will only download expensive books --- after all, why waste your freebie on a 99 cent book?

Hypothesis: I'll make less money on borrowed than bought books.  I had a feeling that books by big publishers would net around least half of the possible 5 million downloads, which would make each download in the KDP program worth 20 cents.

Hypothesis: Making a book available to be borrowed will result in fewer people buying the book.

Wrong.  This is a tough hypothesis for me to analyze since my only data point for lending occurred during the Christmas rush, but I definitely didn't see any declines.  According to Amazon: "Results show that paid sales of titles participating in KDP Select are growing even faster than other KDP titles. On top of this growth in paid sales, KDP Select authors and publishers on average are receiving an incremental 26% in December as a result of their participation in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library."  I can see how that would be true --- as the picture shows, if your book is in the lending library, the price shows up as $0.00, which will probably trick some people into thinking that non-Prime members can download it for free.

Now that Christmas is over, I can experiment a bit more with the lending library.  I'll be sure to keep you posted on the additional two books I've enrolled, and about how the larger $700,000 pot in January impacts borrow royalties.

I've used books where the indexes drove me nuts.  My least favorite was a field guide that separated the common and scientific names into different indices --- I always seemed to flip to the wrong index when in a hurry and then wondered why my word wasn't present. 

Even worse is a non-fiction book without an index, or with an index less than a page long.  When I pick up a non-fiction book and notice it has no index, I generally put it back down in disgust.

At the other extreme, I've flipped through indexes that made the contents of the book not only easy to access but also clearer.  These indexes draw connections between sections I hadn't really considered, pointing out ideas that all fit within the same theme.

I'm not going to talk about the nuts and bolts of actually creating an index because that's program specific and seems to be pretty simple.  What I'm having a harder time working my head around is --- what factors will make my index easy to use?  How can I create an eye-opening instead of an eye-rolling index?

Here are a few tips I've stumbled across:

Decide on basic formatting first.  For example, most indexes make all words lower case unless they're proper nouns, but some indexes will capitalize main entries.  The entry should be a plural noun, so if you wanted to index "red cats", you'd list it as "cats, red."  And unless they're absolutely essential to parsing the entry, prepositions just use up space and can be deleted.

Think like a reader and use synonyms.  A great index will allow a reader to find a paragraph they vaguely remember...even if they can't bring any of your terminology to mind.  So, in my section about the benefits of no-till gardens, I should keep in mind that readers might not be as familiar with the term "no-till" as I am.  I might add in some index entries for terms like "tilling, problems with", "rototillers", and "plows."  In addition, it's helpful to index key terms in several different ways --- a reader might look up any of the following terms when searching for my kill mulch section, so I'll include them all: "kill mulch", "lasagna garden", "sheet mulch."  In fact, "kill mulch" is an odd term since a reader might not be entirely sure whether the "kill" is just an adjective or an essential part of the phrase, so I'd probably index it both under "kill mulch" and "mulch, kill." 

Decide whether to cross-reference.  There are two options for dealing with all of these synonyms.  You can either say "see kill mulch" under both "lasagna garden" and "sheet mulch", or can simply insert the relative page references for each synonym.  If "kill mulch" is a main heading with several entries under it, you'd probably want to cross-reference to save space.  But also be aware that readers have limited attention spans and would vastly prefer to see what they're looking for immediately without being sent to another entry.

Figure out how deeply you want to index.  Do you want a reader to be able to find that one paragraph on Swiss chard, or do you think they'd be just as well off if they can easily find the section on summer vegetables?  An in-depth index will often take up 5% to 10% of the length of your book, including two to three columns of terms per page.  If your index is clocking in a lot longer or shorter than that, it's probably either too detailed or too light to be handy.

Think of your metatopic.  Your book should have one main thesis that the whole text revolves around.  This metatopic isn't actually included in the index --- I won't want to have an entry for "homesteading" in the Weekend Homesteader index because I'd have to put every section in the book underneath that main heading.  However, knowing what your metatopic is will help you conceptualize your entire index as subheadings, giving you an idea of what main headings you want to emphasize.  For my book, primary headings under the metatopic "homesteading" would include terms like "gardening", "emergency preparedness", and "cooking."

Choosing main headings.  Every indexer has a different method of actually creating the index, but I really liked the idea of simply tagging all of the terms I found important during the first run through the book, ignoring the fact that some of them will end up as entries under other headings.  Next, I can print the index rough draft (or open it in another file) and spend some time thinking about what sorts of headings could lump terms together and make them easier to find. 

Adding subheadings.  As a rule of thumb, you need some subheadings if you have more than three or four pages listed for a heading.  Think of how annoying it would be if I summed up the sections of my book about heat during power outages, backup lighting, and storing drinking water as "Emergency preparedness...5, 34, 71, 85, 103, 150."  Isn't it more handy to see:

Don't include too many subheadings.  If you've got more than about 15 subheadings under a certain entry, you're probably trying to fit too much into that topic.  For example, I could list a hundred subheadings under "gardening" if I felt like it, but who wants to skim through two columns worth of entries looking for their keyword?  There are two ways to deal with headings that feel too large.  You can either completely delete that heading and make the biggest subheadings into main headings --- for example, remove "gardening" and instead have entries for "vegetables", "no-till", and so forth.  Or you can leave some entries under that main heading, but include a note to "see also mulch" and "see also soil testing."

Have you run across any other tips for making indexes user friendly?  Do you have horror stories about the world's worst index?  I'm getting ready to whip out an index on my Weekend Homesteader book and could use any advice you have.

Last month, I wrote about how important it was to read a book contract carefully before signing.  This month, I want to talk a bit about haggling over the terms.

My most important stumbling block was that I wasn't willing to sign a book contract that would stifle too much of my future creativity, but I also asked for a few changes in the contract that essentially meant more money in my pocket.  Basically, this comes down to the royalties and advance, and every author seems to have a different take on which they prefer to focus on.

As an author, you'll get two types of income.  Your publisher will give you a certain cut on sales of your books --- your royalties, which can vary widely depending on what sort of book you're publishing.  My publisher initially offered me 8% of the publisher's net receipts (which is a bit complicated, but halving a "net receipts" royalty rate will tell you about how much money you'll actually get.)

Meanwhile, your publisher will also offer you an advance, which is often about what they think your first year's royalties will amount to.  (For me, that was $1,500, half to be given to me within 90 days of signing the contract and half when the manuscript is complete.)  Since the publisher has paid you your royalties in advance, you probably won't get any more money from the book for at least two years after publication --- a year to outsell your advance (bring back in the money they "loaned" you), six months to rack up another round of royalties, and then another six months for them to do the paperwork and mail you your check.  (Yes, most publishers do wait that extra six months.)

If you want to haggle over the financial terms of your book contract, you can choose whether to argue about the royalties, advance, or both.  Most agents will tell you to get as large of an advance as possible, and that idea does make sense if you're going to need any cash flow for the next two years.  At the same time, you have to think ahead and understand that a publisher will consider you a loss if you you don't outsell your advance within a relatively short time period, so you might not be able to get another book published if your haggling skills win you too large of an advance and then you don't sell enough books.

I tend to take a long term view of monetary matters, so I chose to try to increase my royalty rate instead.  One way to do this (the technique I chose) was to suggest an escalator clause, settling on "eight (8%) percent of the Publisher’s net receipts on up to 5,000 copies sold, 10% of net receipts up to 12,000 copies sold, and 12% thereafter."  As you can see, an escalator clause is a relatively easy sell since you're basically asking the publisher to gamble with you on selling lots of books.  If sales go very well (presumably because the author pushed the book more), you'll get a bigger cut.  If the book bombs, your publisher can stick to the low royalty rate.

By the way, Weekend Homesteader: January is now available on Amazon, free from December 19 - 23 and 99 cents thereafter.  The book will also remain free to Amazon Prime members for the foreseeable future.  Enjoy!

Those of you who publish ebooks on Amazon may have heard about the KDP select program.  From the reader's perspective, the program allows you to sign up for Amazon Prime ($79/year) and then get one ebook a month from the Kindle Lending Library.  For authors, the program is a bit more complex.

If you choose to sign up for the program, you'll be given a percentage of the monthly pot of money Amazon allocates to lending authors.  For December, that's $500,000, which will be divided up based on how many books are downloaded.  Here's what Amazon says:

That sounds nice, but let's be realistic --- no way is an independent author's book going to make up 1.5% of the lending library's downloads.  I suspect I'd be lucky to make a hundred dollars per book with the lending library.

Money aside, many bloggers are upset with the monopolistic element of the program.  In order to put your book in Amazon's lending library, you have to agree not to sell it anywhere else in electronic format.  I can see these bloggers' point, but at the same time, I suspect that many (most?) independent authors are in the same boat I'm in --- we make nearly all of our ebook money from Amazon anyway since Amazon has such a large customer base and promotes our ebooks well as long as they sell.

Leaving aside the big picture --- whether Amazon is taking over the world --- authors also have to consider how putting a book in the lending library will impact sales of other books. Will people borrow your book instead of buying it?  Or will they take a chance and borrow a book they wouldn't otherwise have bought, then buy other books in the series?

I've decided to take a low risk gamble and include Weekend Homesteader: June in the KDP select program.  I don't currently have my Weekend Homesteader ebooks for sale anywhere other than Amazon, so the forced monopoly won't  make a difference.  It's a semi-controlled experiment since June and September tend to tie each month for sales --- if one increases and the other declines in December, I'll assume the change is due to the lending library program.  I'll let you know how the experiment fares in a month or two.

Most of you probably read my long-winded explanation of how and why I ended up signing a contract with Skyhorse Publishing to turn Weekend Homesteader into a full color paperback, due out in fall 2012.  Part of the reason I chose to try print publishing is because I'm feeling more steady on my feet with ebook publishing and I like to stay challenged.  And I've learned a lot already!

I always assumed that an agent was only helpful for finding a publisher, but I'd now recommend that anyone thinking of signing a book contract find someone knowledgeable to read it over first.  I was very lucky to get a free read from the husband of a friend, and he caught several problematic parts of the boilerplate contract that I never would have noticed.  For example, take a look at the two clauses below, from different parts of the original contract:

Since my publisher plans to make an ebook version of the compiled Weekend Homesteader book, the two clauses above combine to mean that all they'd have to do to keep the book in print is to leave an ebook for sale on Amazon (no cost to them.)  Combined with the first sentence, that means that I couldn't publish any other homesteading-related book with anyone else for the rest of my life.  I could even see a lawyer arguing that I didn't have the right to sell our chicken waterers or put ads on our homesteading blog either.

We haggled over this for a while and then settled on a combination of clauses we could both live with.  (I've bolded the changes to make them easier to pick out.)

Author agrees not to create for anyone or any entity other than the Publisher a Work that is substantially similar to the Work or covering essentially the same subject matter, or likely to compete for sales with this Work for six months after publication of the Work. Publisher agrees the Author maintains rights to the twelve monthly Weekend Homesteader ebooks for sale on her website and elsewhere in ebook form and to the pre-existing but related brands Walden Effect and Avian Aqua Miser.

If the Work shall be declared out-of-print or the Publisher shall have stopped selling the Work in all formats, including reprints or editions licensed to other publishers in the United States or if the copies sold in a calendar year total less than 500 copies, and if, within six months of a request by the Author the Publisher fails to inform the Author in writing of a plan to reprint, repackage, do a new edition, or license an edition to another Publisher in the United States, then this agreement can be terminated by the Author in writing.

Now that sounds more like it!  The non-compete clause is only 6 months long and the publisher can lose control of Weekend Homesteader if they're not putting in the effort to sell more than 500 copies per year.  Now I was ready to sign on the dotted line.

More on other contract tips in a separate post, but for now, be sure to pick up a copy of Weekend Homesteader: December.  Learn to choose and plant your first fruit tree, stay warm during winter power outages, figure out which tools your homestead really needs, and find free and cheap supplies.  Just 99 cents in Amazon's kindle store!

Deciding on a pricing scheme is one of the toughest puzzles when starting to sell ebooks on Amazon.  Do you sell your book for 99 cents, making it an impulse purchase, but getting only 35% royalty, or do you choose the lowest possible price ($2.99) in the 75% royalty scheme?

Amazon does take out a certain amount of extra cash from the sale price in the 75% royalty structure depending on how big your book file is, but you'll still come out significantly ahead per book.  For example, when selling Microbusiness Independence at 99 cents, I get only 35 cents per book sold.  When I use the 75% royalty scheme with a $2.99 sale price, I get $2.00.  That means I could sell a fifth as many $2.99 books and still come out ahead of selling at 99 cents.

I decided to run an experiment and see how many books I could expect to sell at each price.  For the first four months, I sold Microbusiness Independence for 99 cents, and in September I raised the price to $2.99.  The chart above shows the result (with October sales being an estimate since the month isn't quite over.)  As you can see, sales did plummet, but I still came out ahead financially with three times as much profit in September as in August.

However, you also have to consider broader effects of raising your ebook price.  The chart above shows how Microbusiness Independence's Amazon rank rose steadily until the price increase, then dropped down considerably before rebounding most of the way.  Since many readers of Microbusiness Independence go on to buy my other ebooks, losing sales through pricing the ebook higher can have ripple effects of lower sales elsewhere. 

It's tough to tell whether increasing the price of one of my ebooks decreased sales of the others, but I've decided to lower Microbusiness Independence's price back down to 99 cents.  I figure higher sales now are an investment in my future, even if I'm only bringing in 35 cents per book.

Speaking of which, Weekend Homesteader: November is now available on Amazon.  Learn to rotate garden beds to keep diseases at bay, to store drinking for use during power outages, to put an entire chicken to use in the kitchen, and to bring in cash without going to the office.  Enjoy!

I was shocked to see that one of the buyers of my ebooks returned it to Amazon last month.  Then I had four returns this month and dissolved into a little heap of wounded feelings.  They hate me!  My ebooks are awful!  The world is coming to an end!

Okay, time to step back and take a look at returns more rationally.  First of all, I checked on Amazon's return policy.  You can return a kindle ebook within 7 days for a variety of reasons, including the item not matching the product description, the quality being poor, or the simple fact that you didn't mean to order it.  There are some safeguards in place to make sure that readers don't just buy the ebook, read it, and return it --- if you return too many ebooks too quickly, Amazon will cut you off.

A perusal of the internet turns up reports from several folks who mention that soon after getting their kindle, they accidentally bought a few ebooks just because they didn't know how to use the device.  Authors of Amazon ebooks who sell more than a few copies all note that they have return rates ranging from 0.5% to 6%, with more generally coming in around Christmas (when people are given Kindles and don't know how to use them) and with higher return rates for fiction than for non-fiction.  When I crunched the numbers, I discovered that my four returns so far this month only amounted to 0.6% of my sales --- I guess the sky isn't falling after all.

Honestly, a little perspective suggested that the reason I'm starting to see returns now is because my ebooks are finally reaching out beyond my loyal followers.  When my most beloved fans buy my ebooks, I'm sure they wouldn't return the ebooks even if they decided the quality was crap, but a stranger on the other side of the world would have no compunction.  Since the whole point of experimenting with Amazon ebooks was to stop preaching solely to the choir, I guess returns mean I've arrived.

Speaking of arrived, so has Weekend Homesteader: October.  Read it...but don't return it!

Time for your monthly ebook plug and tip!

I've written in the past about how important it is to publicize your ebook as soon as it launches.  You should have two goals when you contact all of your loyal readers on day 1:

• Get as many people as possible to buy your ebook immediately.  Early sales sweeten the pot by boosting your book's rankings so that strangers will find it.
• Hunt down a few good reviews.  Once those strangers show up on your ebook's Amazon page, they have to decide whether to shell out cash for a book by an unknown author.  Just one good review can make or break early sales, but if you can swing it, two or more reviews look even better.

If you're waiting for your loyal readers to leave reviews, you will probably be disappointed.  I was surprised to be contacted by an author whose book had just been published by a well-known publishing house and who wanted me to review her book on Amazon.  I was even more surprised to see that, a week after publication, my review was one of only two reviews for a mainstream print book.

The moral of the story is --- you have to ask if you want people to review your book.  Include the ask in your blog posts, emails, and other methods of publicizing your new book, but also keep a mental tally of people who owe you a favor and might post a review if no one else comes through.  Giving away free copies for the first few weeks is another way to help the reviews flow in.

What do you do if you get bad reviews?  If you deserve them, unfortunately, you're stuck with bad reviews --- learn from your mistakes and make your next ebook better.  However, as Microbusiness Independence rose in the rankings, I received two negative reviews from people who clearly hadn't read my ebook and who seemed to have been paid to downgrade ebooks in the E-commerce category in order to allow other ebooks to rise to the top.  All I had to do was email Community-Help@amazon.com and state my case about why the allegations in the reviews were false, and the bad reviews disappeared.

Which brings me to my final review-related tip --- keep an eye on the reviews for your ebook.  The watched ebook rises in the rankings and makes more sales!

And. of course, this is a not-so-subtle way of asking you to leave a review on any of my ebooks that you feel passionately about.  Thanks in advance!

Time for your monthly ebook plug and tip!

Meanwhile, previous ebooks have taught me a valuable lesson about categories.  When you upload an ebook to Amazon's kindle store, you chose between hundreds of categories --- a daunting proposal since "homesteading" isn't one of the choices.  Choosing the best categories, though, is a valuable method of helping your ebook reach new eyes.

When you're trying to decide on a category for your ebook, look up several books you've already read with similar subject matter and jot down the categories they've been placed in.  For example, there's no obvious category for backyard chickens, so authors of relevant books have been divided about whether to put their book in the pet bird category or in the animal husbandry category.  The pet bird category seemed to fit our readership better, so that's where I put my Working Chicken ebook.  To my surprise, without pushing the ebook at all, Working Chicken has been bringing in a slow but steady stream of sales, presumably from people searching for an ebook about pet chickens.