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Why Amazon Just Doesn’t Play Fair With Formatting

Self-published author Catherine Tosko on why Amazon should write a story of their own before publishing other people’s.

Someone I know has just published their second book on Amazon and due to formatting issues has completely given up on selling any more books due to bad reviews, not about the book but about the formatting.

Then the same day, a friend, a well known self-publisher had the exact same problem with Kindle Fire formatting that I had six months ago when I published my book and is probably tearing his hair out as I write.

Why? Because you can’t even […]

2013-02-10T10:01:59+02:00February 9th, 2013|Categories: Features, Member Blog|Tags: |
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Free Books: Just Give it Away?

 

I have a Free Book Promotion coming up and I keep hearing the George Strait song ‘Give it Away’ playing in my ears. (Now you know where I get some of the inspirations for  my posts). It was time for me to do some research and talk to several  successful authors on how to do this and what their experiences were in giving their books away.

Free books have been a custom  in traditional paper books for as long as book reviews have been written. They  came with the territory. They were sent directly to a person or an […]

2019-02-18T12:10:40+02:00December 20th, 2012|Categories: Lead Story, Resources|Tags: |
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Amazon Remains Mum on Authors Fears of Book Sales Skimming

A canned reply is all that Amazon brass is handing the literary community on why thousands of high-performing authors book-sales dashboards have frozen. In the past month over 22,000 Amazon.com eBook authors have scrambled to the giant online retailer’s kdp Amazon Community Board to complain to the global Goliath about the appearance of lost book sales.

Visit Are Your Sales Figures Updating Normally Now? for details. https://kdp.amazon.com/community/forum.jspa?forumID=7  for more.

“My sales figures screen has frozen,” has become a common complaint among thousands of independent authors who have flocked to Amazon’s book distribution platform in search of an explanation of sudden, […]

2020-02-21T05:52:35+02:00October 19th, 2012|Categories: Features|Tags: |
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Self-Publishing News: Ebook Sales and Resales, Losing the Plot, Fighting for Libraries

In this round-up: the Smashwords July sale for either hemisphere, GalleyCat’s weekly lists of eBook sales ranks, new legal ruling in Europe on eBook resale, a lengthy opinion piece deconstructing why The Authors Guild among other things attempts to invoke sympathy for PublishAmerica, and a save-the-libraries campaign from The Bookseller.

Enroll Your Books in the 2012 Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale (July 1 – 31):

Here in the Northern hemisphere, it’s mid-summer. Readers everywhere are loading up their e-reading devices for summer beach reading and vacations. But what about the good people South of the equator, who are now in the middle

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2012-12-20T11:41:43+02:00July 3rd, 2012|Categories: News|Tags: , , |
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eBook Industry: Does Amazon Have a Winning Hand or a Dead Man’s Hand?

Does Amazon have a winning hand or do they need to draw more cards to stay ahead in the game? Amazon is the dominate player in the ebook industry, hands down. In fact, they are so strong that they can sell some products at a loss and still win the hand.

They can do this because ebooks have a very high profit margin. Check this hand out. I can buy an ebook from Amazon and it’s never touched by human hands. No shipping. No warehousing unless you want to count their file servers. The first physical action is when I […]

2020-02-21T03:31:03+02:00February 28th, 2012|Categories: Features|Tags: |
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Did that Bad Review Come with a Side of Ulterior Motives?

I recently discovered that my book was victim to an act of sabotage through bad reviews and wrote a blog post for the Huffington Post. Here it is:

How much can you trust book reviews on the web? Turns out, very little.

My journey in self-publishing started at the end of this past October. I had a young adult book, no prospective agents and a life-long dream to fulfill, so I decided to go it my own. In the first three weeks, I sold a meager 35 copies. But, by mid-December, I’d sold nearly 800 copies and had racked

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2011-12-21T16:48:31+02:00December 21st, 2011|Categories: Features|Tags: , |
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Library eBooks: Is the eBook Ecosystem Affected by the Amazon Library Lending Process?


My usual blogging direction is toward the ebook author and the self-publishing world. With this blog I take a left turn and explore the Amazon Library Lending Process and how it affects the ebook ecosystem.

The Jungle

The Inhabitants
In the ebook jungle, the traditional publishers are indeed the king of beasts. They control the prices and the access to the ebooks. Even the authors who create the content have little say. If publishers don’t want you to borrow one of their titles, you can’t. If they want you to wait for a title, you wait.

The next level of […]

2019-02-18T12:17:54+02:00October 28th, 2011|Categories: Features, Member Blog|Tags: , |
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eBook Authors: Is the Kindle Library Lending Program a New Opportunity for Self-Publishers?

As new ebook authors and self-publishers continue to try to get exposure in the digital world, several new events could present an expanded opportunity to reach the ebook reader.

1. Amazon’s new generation of Kindles plus the IPad rival ‘Kindle Fire’ will definitely expand the reading audience.
2. Amazon allowing Kindle ebooks to be included in the public library lending process will also expand the audience.

The problem is the same old players and the same old obstacles seem to be in the way.

Process Controlled by the Usual Suspects +

With the first review, it appears that the library […]

2019-02-18T12:18:35+02:00October 10th, 2011|Categories: Features, Lead Story|Tags: , |
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