Sandy Nathan's YOUR SHELF LIFE

If you sign up for Amazon’s KDP program, Amazon will sell your book for nothing for five days during the 90 day slot you’re required to enroll. Yes, they’ll sell your book for nothing, allowing you to do all sorts of marketing shenanigans, like this. What is the cost of the program? Nothing. That’s right, they’ll give your book away gratis.

Sounds like a whole lot of nothing going on. I’ll find out.

Tomorrow, July 21, is my first FREE DAY for my book The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy with Kindle’s KDP free book program. The day after that, Sunday, July 22, the second FREE DAY with the same book. I’m using my friend Cheryl Kaye Tardif’s How I Made Over $42,000 in One Month Selling my Kindle eBooks (Known at $42K hereafter). This is a really good guidebook outlining what Cheryl did to make a small fortune in eBooks. It’s all there, step by step.

I sat down this morning to write an article about how to obtain testimonials and endorsements and how they can help sell your book. That led me to think about what does sell your book. Are testimonials all that count? Not by a long shot. Here’s my list of things that sell your book, in order of importance: 12 fascinating points follow! Conclusion: Point 12. Your book. Notice where I place this on my list. That’s because I’ve seen books that would make the professor who ran my writing group vomit become major bestsellers. I’ve seen books that would make people in MFA in writing programs gag succeed like crazy. I’ve seen lots of books like this. It’s a mystery why people buy books about werewolves, zombies, vampires, mayhem, and mawkish drivel. But they do. A book needs to hook something in your buyers. It doesn’t have to be their higher Self or even a good part of their character. Alas. The subject needs a fast moving story around it and a very good editing and proofreading job. That’s all.

Talk to readers about self-published books or books produced by independent publishers and you’ll almost always hear the same thing: Their quality sucks. We’ve all bought them: abominable self-published books. We can complain about them forever. But how can we guard against them? I have two ideas that may separate the cream from the dreck: contest wins and star ratings on major review sites. It’s difficult to win book contests. I spell out how difficult. As a consumer, you should feel somewhat confident in buying prize winners. Reviews on major sites are a good guide. Believe it or not, not all good reviews come from friends and relatives. Here are a couple of sites where the requirement all books listed must have a minimum star rating of four stars on at least 10 reviews.