GUEST BLOGGER: Dawson Vosberg

Your "regularly scheduled book review" will be here a little later today. I'll post it after 3pm. But for now I hope you will check out this post from guest blogger, Dawson Vosberg about his book, Double Life, and about using the Amazon Kindle, either as a reader or as an author.

Thanks for having me on the blog, Jaymie.

First I would like to introduce my book. The title is Double Life, and it’s an exciting science-fiction young adult adventure that takes place in an imaginary secret government agency called the BLUE. It follows Josiah Jones on his mission to defeat the evil crime syndicate, the RED Agency. It’s available in print and on the Kindle on Amazon.

Print: http://www.amazon.com/Double-Life-Dawson-Vosburg/dp/1435724283/

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Double-Adventures-Josiah-Jones-ebook/dp/B002BH4H3Q/

Today I’d like to discuss with you Amazon’s ebook reading device, Kindle, and how that can help you get your book out there. Kindle is Amazon’s wireless reading device, and if you’re an author, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard of it. Kindle is currently the most popular ebook reader. Conveniently, they offer to you a free service to put your book on Kindle and have it selling in a few hours on Amazon.

If you want to do this, go to dtp.amazon.com and you can upload your file, front cover art, and whatever else they ask you for. If you’re uploading the PDF, you’re going to run into some problems because when you upload a PDF it translates it all wonky. I’d recommend going to Joshua Tallent at www.kindleformatting.com for this question. He’ll be able to guide you through the process.

Once you have it all uploaded, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND setting the price to $1. Not $.99, but $1. If you set it to $.99, it won’t discount the book, but if you set it to $1, it’ll discount 20 cents off of it and you still get the 35% royalty off the dollar, so Amazon’s taking the cut and not you. This is a HUGE selling point for a Kindle book.

It’ll take a while for Amazon to make a Kindle page for your book. Once it’s up, great. Now you have a book on Kindle. What do you do with it? I’d suggest going onto the Kindle community forums on Amazon. Just scroll down to the “Discussions” section on the book’s page and the top two should be in the Kindle forum. Click the word Kindle, and you’re ready to make a topic about your book.Make the post topic relevant to your book and state either that it’s 80 cents or under a dollar. People will be attracted to this. In the post, say who you are, give a brief description of the book, put the link there, and thank people for their time, signing your name at the end. You will probably be able to start selling books quite quickly and easily because it’s only 80 cents. That’s the benefit of having a really cheap book. When people respond to your topic, thank them and remind them to post a review. They most often will.

If you want to market further, go to www.kindleboards.com and make an account there. As a Kindle author, your home would be the Book Bazaar sub forum. There, there is a thread that I started called “Got an 80 cent book? Front it here.” There are plenty of authors who have posted for the reader’s convenience to shop around. Also I’d recommend making a similar post to the one on the Amazon forums separate of the 80 cent book thread. From there, people will read your book and often review it. There are plenty of Amazon Kindle users who read books and always review them, so keep that in mind!

It’s important to use the Kindle because people who use it are the ones who love books the most—they shelled out 400 bucks on a reader. They’re not your average Joe, read a book a year kind of people. They love to read and they are willing to read your book.

Good luck and may your Kindle sales go well!

Dawson

http://dawsonvosburg.blogspot.com

http://thepodjournal.wordpress.com