Publishing on the Kindle - Amazon DTP (part 3)

A quick recap : I've been investigating how easy it is to publish a work of fiction onto the Kindle. Partly out of technical interest and partly as an attempt to get up to speed with the world of e-readers, which I've so far ignored.

In Part 1 I explained that Amazon have recently opened up their Digital Text Platform (DTP) to the whole world, meaning that anyone can now publish their work for electronic delivery to the 1.5 million Kindle owners out there. In Part 2 I discovered that getting your work onto the Amazon site and thus onto the Kindle is actually very, very easy. An SF short story of mine, The Armageddon Machine, is up there now.

But wait a moment! Isn't this self-publishing? Run away!

Well, yes it is, and that's something I generally shun. I'm quite clear that, right now, the best approach to getting, say, a novel published is to find an agent who likes it enough to represent it to publishers. The Armageddon Machine, however, is a self-contained short story (technically a novelette) that has been previously published by an SF magazine, so I felt like it had already proved itself. I wasn't trying to find an agent for it. In effect, I saw publishing it on the Kindle as part of my attempts to platform-build - just as you could say writing stuff on a blog is. I'm not sure how far I'd go with this. If I'd written a novel that was looking for an agent it would clearly be madness to self-publish it. But what about a short story set in the same world or involving the same characters? Might that be a good candidate for e-publishing in an attempt to build up some interest in the novel? I'm not sure. What do you think?

Anyway, the story is out there, sitting alongside everything else that writers have chosen to publish. How do you go about getting people to actually pay to download it? Without the backing of a conventional publisher, what can you do to market the work?

As I said in my last post, and somewhat to my surprise, the story started selling without me doing anything. Not in vast numbers. Not enough for me to buy that beach-front property in the Bahamas quite yet, but some. Part of this, I'm sure, is to do with the way I posted the book onto DTP. I made sure I gave it an eye-catching cover and I also laboured long and hard over the blurb. I also had a good review of the story from it's previous incarnation in a magazine, so I quoted from that too.

You also get to categorize your story when you post it and I took great care over this. I imagine it was through this that some readers found my story. Anyone browsing through "SF short stories" available on the Kindle, for example, would find mine.

What you really need, though, is reviews. Hopefully good ones! The Amazon star system seems to me crucial in getting visibility on their site. So, if anyone wants a free copy of a "masterful, compelling" Golden Age SF story to review please do let me know. I was tempted to post the third-party review I already had of the story as an independent Amazon review, but that felt just a little close to cheating. In the end I settled for embedding a quote from the review in my description, properly attributed to the original reviewer.

I then looked into spreading the word about the story. There are forums on the Amazon site you can post to announce yourself and your work, which I did, although I have no way of knowing how useful this was. There is a lot of discussion on these boards and I dare so you could dive in and put a lot of work into engaging with the community and marketing yourself.

I also found quite a few third-party sites that deal with the Kindle, reviewing works and providing a place for Kindle users to find out about new stuff. Examples are Kindle News and Reviews, Red Adept's Kindle Book Review Blog and the Kindle Boards forums. I submitted or posted to each of these to see whether they had any effect. I'm sure you could use Google to find other, similar services. It seems to me you can put as much effort into all this as you feel like. The more you do, the more success you'll probably have, but there comes a point when it eats into that valuable writing time ...

So, after all this, how do I feel about self-publishing to the Kindle? If I had a new short story or a novel, would I take the traditional route of submitting it to magazines/agents/book publishers, or would I skip all that and just self-publish? I suppose everyone will have their own answer to this. For me, the traditional approach is certainly preferable. The kudos, encouragement and thrill of being published by someone with a discerning editorial policy far outweighs all the inevitable disappointments involved in taking this route. A great many self-published works are simply ignored - never bought, never read. A great many of them will be crap. But I am going to start paying more attention to the rights I'm selling/giving away with new works as I might want to have the option of e-publishing them myself at a later date. I think it's probably a good idea to try and keep your options open.

As a final note, I'm conscious that I've only covered the Kindle here and that there are other e-readers out there. All the Apple iWhatevers for a start. How easy is it to publish fiction for those? That, as they say, is a story for another time ...