Self-Publishing on Amazon: Learn from My Mistakes

I don't know how many of you are interesting in self-publishing, but I thought I'd share some of my experiences. I am far from being an expert. Frankly, I'm just stumbling through it and learning as I go, but if I can keep you from repeating my mistakes so you can make some of your own, then I did my best.

I self-published my first e-book, 1-800-Henchmen: First Shot (originally titled It Begins) just short of two years ago. I was so excited that I finished the book, I threw it up on Amazon before it, or I , was ready.

And it showed.

My first review that wasn't from a friend or family member was a 3-star from somebody who liked it but said there were a bunch of grammatical errors.

Photo from Getty ImagesOh, the horror!

So, my editor and I went through it again more diligently this time, and put the new version online. Then, I got another review from somebody who liked it but didn't like my title. Well, surprise for that guy, I didn't like my original title either, but I couldn't come up with anything better. As soon as I finally did, I changed it immediately.

That is when I noticed why it is so important to truly be ready to publish before you publish.

If you make any changes to your book on amazon, all books that were purchased before the changes don't update.

This means there are a bunch of books out there titled It Begins with a lot of grammatical mistakes.

Photo from Getty ImagesStill terrible.

I had to chalk that one up to a learning opportunity and move on or I never would have put out another e-book, but take my advice: much like print books, don't put an e-book out there with errors.

Now for Amazon's e-book portal. It is very self-explanatory, free (they just take a cut of the royalties), and easy to use. They have a searchable message board for questions and lots of helpful hints scattered around the page that answered most of my questions. I don't quite remember how the initial set-up went (2 years ago, remember?) but I do recall just kind of muddling through it (tax stuff tends to make my brain flip to the static channel).

What about cover art?

I was a little unprepared for this aspect of self-publishing when I started. Thankfully, Amazon was looking out for me. They have a bunch of different, free cover options you can choose from and modify slightly to suit your needs. They're not the greatest, nor the most diverse options, but they work for somebody just starting out who doesn't want to pay for original work or doesn't have the ability to make their own.

If you're like me, you like keeping track of sales numbers. It took me a bit to figure out how to do this other than to just write down each book sale as it came up on my sales dashboard. At first, I was only watching my Monthly Sales Report but that stopped being helpful when I realized that it only tracked two months at a time. Then I discovered the Prior Months' Royalties Report.

If a blessing could show up as a spreadsheet, this little dear would be it.

It shows every book you sold for a month's time in every country that it is available in and how much you earned for each book. It also shows pages read if your book is part of the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select Program. Amazon only keeps them for 12 months, but I've been saving them on my computer and transferring numbers to my own spreadsheet so I can track each book's sales numbers for the whole year.

I also check the Payments Report but that's just so I know exactly how much my last royalty payment from Amazon was (usually around $1.37. I'm totally rolling in it).

Now for the tough part.

My most recent e-book, Love Drunk and Dragon Tears, was a rather large disaster to publish (all of my own making).

Here's why:

I didn't realize that I still had the track changes option turned on on the word document that I uploaded to Amazon for publishing. By the time I realized it, two copies had been sold (thankfully one was to me and the other was to a friend). The resulting email exchange with Amazon makes me want a drink just thinking about it.

Photo from Nosferatu's Coffin
If an email exchange was a person.

They were super helpful considering it was my stupid mistake that was causing the mess. After many emails and giving examples of extreme errors in the book, they said they would send out corrected copies, I just had to upload a good one. Well, stupid me uploaded yet another messed up one. A couple more emails and we got the correct one loaded into the portal. A couple of weeks later I got an email saying all sold versions should be updated and good to go. Well, mine never updated and neither did my friends. I should probably look into that again. *shudder*

It wasn't until after this whole shitstorm did I discover a handy little option on the main portal before you finish uploading your book to Amazon's site.

It's called "Preview Your Book".

I am never not using this ever again.