I'm not sure where to safely post this, but I'm seeing the subcategories I'm in just be over-run by what I think has to be AI slop/maybe heavily assisted AI writing. (I don't want to say which sub-categories because I don't want to feel like I'm making an accusation directly at "author x" since the witch hunts also feel real.)

As indie, I know there are a lot of trust issues already and I believe this has been hurting my discoverability (and, talking to marketing people... it sounds like effectiveness of ads that used to work has also maybe decreased and cost per click in Amazon/Meta ads is also going up)?

At a quick glance, at least two of the subcategories my books are in had books where ~50% of the top 50 titles on KDP looked AI-ish:

1. the covers are largely the same (like if I click on one and see the series, it looks like the covers are almost identical)
2. They're series with anywhere from 15-50+ books (sometimes 2-3 authors, sometimes 3-4 authors) but the books are 350-400 pages long and are publishing once a week (sometimes less than once a week).
3. The titles are largely the same (When [x] did [a] and [b] in one title and then the next title is When [x] did [b] and [a])
4. Many have translations (I had looked into translating one of my books once and realized it's well outside of my budget)

I know there are series and collaborations between real human authors, but this is... not that.

I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing kind of categories/sub-categories being a little overrun by suspiciously prolific authors who are new and suddenly publishing prolifically (and getting lots and lots of reviews which... I think at least some of those have to be real given the high ranking, right?)

If there are better discussions on this and I just didn't find them, please help redirect me. I am specifically curious if other indie authors feel more buried under the AI pile because I am kind of assuming if you're Rebecca Yarros people will still find and read Threshing Day (I mean, I did because I love her, and so I read and then reread all the short stories because again, I love her).

It might be a difficult question I'm asking because if we're newer and indie, we are by definition inexperienced and who knows if it's our cover, our writing, etc.

EDIT: also I should clarify, I know there are authors who are prolific. King. Sanderson. I loved this lady named Betty Neels who published over 100 Harlequins. I more meant there more suddenly seem to be a lot more authors who are very, very prolific and in varying categories in a way that feels a little off/ difficult to understand/compete against. So sorry, hoping to discuss and not offend.

I've been reading up on Amazon ads recently, and I've noticed a lot of threads & comments arguing that ads are only worth paying for if you have 5+ books you can funnel users towards. Otherwise, your marketing budget is best spent on lower-risk options like newsletter promos, ARC campaigns, etc.

What do you think? Assuming an indie author perfectly optimizes their listing (correct keywords, genre-appropriate cover, a strong blurb, etc.), would it be worth investing in Amazon ads? Or is their focus best spent elsewhere?

I'm really not sure where to begin to search for a line-editor. My book is long, so editing will be very expensive. I know my concerns are more relevant when it comes to dev editors, but I really don't want to waste my money on an editor that doesn't "get" my book.

I'm wondering if any of you have recommendations for editors that have experience in my genre-blend and who are open to a book that has a strong civilizational critique.

I only heard about this platform yesterday, and I'm wondering whether to try it out.

I spent about a decade trying to make self-publishing on Amazon work, to no results. I gave up, for the sake of my mental health, and because I just have better things to do than beat my head against the same wall forever in the hopes of breaking through. I'm not active on social media, and I don't have whatever marketing genius it takes to get noticed without it.

I've mostly just been sending the occasional query letter to agents, and releasing the occasional free story online, just for fun. But what about Scribl? Is putting a story there without a media blitz just more shouting into the void? Or is it worth trying?

I write fantasy and sci-fi, if that makes a difference.

I've noticed here that almost everyone here either has written a book series or is starting one. It usually comes up when someone notes that we most commonly won't make much money on our first book, but we'll make it up on the next ones in the series.
My books are not like that and I often feel left out in the discussions. My first book was a collection of southern-voiced short stories in first person. My second was an historical literary romance thriller. My next one will be about a man who finds he has a year to live and is struggling to make his last days meaningful. None of these are in a series. Until I joined this group, it never occurred to me that so many people wrote their books in succession.

Hi everyone! My memoir is enrolled in KDP Select, and I'm planning to use my 5 Free Promotion days soon. I'm trying to decide if it's worth paying for newsletter promos (like Bargain Booksy, Fussy Librarian, etc.) to boost downloads during a free run. If you've paid for promos for a free book, which service gave you the best results? Especially curious if anyone has experience with the memoir/non-fiction genre. Thanks!

I have always used my own ISBNs for ebooks and print. However, I have never used my own ISBNs for audiobooks. I publish audio on ACX and Voices by InAudio, or whatever Findaway Voices is going by these days.

I'm not looking to save money on my publishing. This is a business expense for me, and I have a package of 100 ISBNs. I'm rethinking my publishing strategy, and I want to know other people's thoughts on whether or not to use my own ISBN for audio.

Thanks!

How can you be sure now? I've been paying a guy a decent amount of money for my last covers and they look good but I still have that fear in the back of my head as always.

Long rant 😂 😭

So after about seven edits of my book, I went out and hired a person to proofread and format my book for print. The proofreading seems to go pretty well. The person I hired caught a lot of stuff, typos and punctuation errors, etc., etc..

When it came to formatting, it became a complete disaster. They kept on sending me the transcript without formatting it properly. The person told me that they had misplaced the final version and then would send me a new final version with the same issues as before. This was a 6 month process. Eventually, I realized I had to do it all myself. I did a ton of research on formatted for print on KDP. It all looked great. I figure out how to get it formatted for hardcover, paperback, and e-book. I read the whole thing again and found a decent amount of typos and other errors. Finally happy with it, I published the book.

So, I published the book. Now that it is out there, me a few friends are reading it and finding a bunch of mistakes. My proofreader missed them and I take blame as well because I missed them too. But I did pay somebody to do this which is annoying.

Light at the end of the tunnel is that I posted about my book on a Facebook group. And somebody who haven’t talked to in like 16 years, reached out to me. He now works as a proof reader for legal documents. He purchased the book and started finding issues and asked if he could proofread and edit it pro bono (I’m still going to pay him something because I think it’s only right).

I was really struggling with the thought of how to market the book so now I can put that all to the side and wait for this final final final version to come through.

Just a rant. Thanks for reading xx 😘

Hi everyone! Was wondering if any of you have advice for someone who wants to self publish a children's book one day? I love to draw in my free time and I've got a few ideas for a children's book, but I have no idea where to even begin. Are there any platforms you'd recommend checking out and publishing on? Or any software that you think is pretty good? (If you're reading this and you've published a children's book before, please share your insight, that'd be super helpful!!)

My book is a science fantasy and it just entered its third round of betas. It has issues, and every round is better than the previous one.

But two consistent “I, as a writer, am unable to fix that bro” feedback I’m getting is

1. Tenses mixup (some are actual faults, some are just memories popping up and people not realising. Easy fix by changing words)

2. Whiplash from humor followed by immediate horror (one POV is sarcastic and does it. I can’t see it unless betas mark it)

This is consistent and I think I need line edit, but I can NOT afford that. So I’m going for copy editing to fix tenses and other issues. My editor said she’ll do some Point 2 fixing for free (she’s a writer too), but that won’t be her job so I’ll be unsure if the whiplash will be gone since I’m not paying for that service.

And now I’m second guessing. A part of me says I should save money and spend it on editing when I earn back, which is… how do I professionally say stupid?

I’ve DNFed loads of self published books bcz they weren’t edited properly.

But then I go, “What if I spend so much on this and people DNF if bcz of the lack of line editing?”

It’s a complex book, so I NEED editing. I just can’t afford the line + copy.
Hell, I preferred line over copy, but copy is 2x my current salary and line is 5x. That’s the only reason I’m going for copy editing.

So, for editors or people who have had books edited, if someone came to you with this rant and confusion, what would you say?

I'm currently writing my book. However this is my first time writing a book and I find myself getting so engrossed in making Lore and backstories for characters that I simply cannot make any progress advancing, does anyone have any tips on how to manage character creation and story integration, i find that i spend 4 hours creating a character and everydetail that could possible be needed but then struggle to make all my information for together in a way that isn't to confusing and difficult

I've been feeling a bit low as sales and reviews for my dark fantasy novel have dried up. But last night, I got a review on Goodreads from a total stranger, and she completely got my book. The importance of the relationships between the characters, the dark humour, the power of individual choice. Keep writing! Believe in your work! Someone will appreciate it!

Hey all. I've been a full-time author for ~3 years now and have only done Facebook ads and my newsletter; I've given the latter less love than it deserved, but I'm changing that. They give me good returns, but when a friend and I were talking about promo stacking, I realized I'd never even tried it. And I got lucky.

I'm about to publish my 18th book next week, the second in my newest trilogy. I signed up for BargainBooksy, set a date, and threw my hat into the ring for BookBub. I've never applied before, but I figured, why not, and submitted my book for the US-only deal. I got accepted hours later and now have a Featured Deal and a BargainBooksy promo 3 days apart. ($0.99 Countdown Deal is set a day before BookBub and ends days after Booksy.) By the time the BookBub deal starts, I'll be roughly halfway through the third book in the trilogy, but I'll also be finished writing a novella spin-off from a previous series that did well, which I'll use as a reader magnet.

I'm on KU and plan to have both books in paperback before the deal is done, and I've been in talks with an interested narrator. I plan to refresh/ramp-up my back matter and ensure the links to my author page, newsletter, and backlist are hard to miss. So, on top of sales of book 1, I hope to get a bunch of newsletter subscribers. A few author friends have their own newsletters scheduled to promote my deal, and I have social media posts scheduled to go out.

Am I missing anything I should be doing? I want to milk these promotions for all they're worth. I'm pretty excited about this, too, because I've never done this before. TIA!

Three months since my KDP debut book launch. My last post seemed to be interesting to many of you so wanted to update you.

Important to note: I’m a designer so ad creative is free for me to do. (And even with that skill I still couldn’t turn a big profit!)

Genre: Middle-aged* Urban Fantasy

Here are the numbers:
$1 AUD = $0.70 £0.53

Royalties: A$2,524.76
Orders: 327
KENP read: 210,482
———
Ad spend: A$2,505.47
———
Net position: +A$19.29 (about $12USD)
———
Total readers (orders + KENP/512): 738.10
Profit per reader: A$0.03
———
Ratings: 113
Reviews: 21
Average: 4.6/5

My biggest win from all this is the page reads, 200,000 which blows my mind. Never expected that at all.

Ads:

Meta ads in the early days did really well but struggled in month three, so much so I stopped them as they were just wasting money. Meta seems to be great for getting kindle unlimited page reads. If they slow I push ads for a day or two and the page reads seem to pick up.

Amazon ads I just couldn’t do. I tried for two weeks with a decent budget but getting cheap clicks just didn’t work for me. The only way I could get clicks in my genre was to bid too high. I spent about $30 (I tried to spend more!) and got zero sales.

Since stopping the ads sales still arrive just far less, only 15 this month so far.

Reviews / Ratings

Still slow but surprised at how many ratings I have received. I heard it was about 1 in 100 but for me it’s more like 1/10 that rate the book.

I have had a couple of negative reviews but writing is like art. Sometimes it’s not for everyone and that’s okay.

Readers on goodreads are much more picky than on Amazon

Running ads on Meta also led me to several new reviews as when people would comment that they enjoyed my book, I’d reply asking for a review, 9/10 they’d follow my instructions and write a review.

Pre-Orders

Unlike book one, this time I’m doing preorders for book two. I edited the thank you page of my first book and included a link to the preorder, so far had 19 preorders which is pretty good. I didn’t expect any.

The thing that’s encouraging is that is shows demand. Now it’s all about scale.

It’s frustrating that paperbacks aren’t available to preorder on Amazon.

Followers

Surprisingly I have 70 followers on Amazon now. I have no clue whether it’s of value or not, will have to see when the next book arrives BUT it proves that people do have a desire to follow new authors.

Summary

I’m still unsure if it was the meta ads, amazons own recommendation system that led to any sales. A mix of both I assume.

Someone said selling 1000 books is a place where momentum takes over, so a long way to go.

Anyway. I hope this is interesting. If I think of anything else I’ll edit this post.

I probably won’t post numbers again as don’t want to be “that guy”

*I made up the genre, do you think it will stick?

Keep writing!
Mike

Author of MY FRIEND ARK

Hi all!

So, my first book is out today and it's a collection of comics I had previously posted on social media and my website a few years back, plus some new bonus material.

The print version was fine when it went through review in August and scheduled for release today, but I figured I should also offer an eBook for the 10% of comics/graphic novel readers that want an eBook version, which I hit publish on last night. This morning I woke to an email alert from KDP asking me to confirm I am the rights holder and to provide more information about the project, my publishing history, how many books I plan to put out, etc.

I thought that was odd as I could have sworn I affirmed I am the rights holder in the process of uploading and publishing it last night, but I replied with the confirmation exactly as they asked for it and wrote them a nice long email with a bunch of info about the project and my history, links (including to livestreams where I was inking some of the bonus material cartoons), planned future books, etc.

After that I got to Googling and found this might be an issue because of the comics having been previously posted online. I'd already removed them from the comic's website because of course I want people to buy the book but hadn't bothered with removing them from social media because it's such a PITA to scroll back to posts from 2022/2023 where this book's comics were originally posted that I figured most people won't bother.

I'm assuming it's just an automatic thing and hopefully my explanation and links will suffice to get it all straightened out. And it kinda makes no sense to me since newspaper comics have been publishing collections of comics that already ran in the newspaper for decades, so that's an established practise in the comics world... of course, they're put out by major companies so I guess it's handled a bit differently.

However, this got me wondering: obviously I need to wait and hear back from KDP and go from there, but after that, should I go back and expunge all those old comic strips from all of my social media sites to avoid this problem going forward?

More generally, does this mean that things like teasing out chunks of a story on a Substack or blog to try to build up an audience is a bad idea if that story will eventually be published? Or do you just delete them a couple months before the book gets published so the KDP bots don't find that things have already been posted?

Just trying to figure out how to avoid problems with future releases as I have a few more comics collections to put out of stuff that had once been posted online. I've also got some entirely new graphic novels in the pipeline, but even there: I've inked some of the pages on livestreams or in reels/shorts.

Do all of our promotional sneak peeks and tidbits need to be parallel to our book's content, not in it?

(Or am I just overthinking this? LOL)

Anyway, thanks in advance!

Por fin termine mi libro, ya lo registre y ya lo publique, lo tengo en Amazon para tapa blanda y en kindle ademas tambien lo publique en una pagina que se llama Lulu.

Ahora no se que hacer para darle publicidad o que estilo de publicidad usar para conseguir que la gente se interese por el.

La verdad siempre he tenido mala suerte para hacer que mis proyectos sean visibles y siempre termino dejandolos porque me deprimo al no tener la respuesta que espero(aclaro que varias veces he pagado por publicidad en otros proyectos pero mi suerte no me ha servido para darles visibilidad).

Asi que quisera algun consejo o ayuda para saber que hacer respecto a este que tanto tiempo( 7 años) le dedique para terminarlo, se que no puedo publicar el link para que puedan revisarlo y darme su opinion, asi que me encantaria saber que deberia hacer ahora ya que estoy seguro que ene esta comunidad hay gente con mucha experiencia en el tema, asi que soy todo oidos.

Me encantaria leer sus comentarios, criticas y demas para poder saber que paso sigue o que deberia hacer. Muchas gracias.

I have been writing my first novel, a folkloric Caribbean horror novel, for about a year now and as a painter, I am also working on pieces for my cover and some illustrations. I decided it's going to be in my best interest to self-publish. When it comes to copyright and declarations for writers publishing book with their own artwork as cover/illustrations/ect, are there specifics I should include? Also, are there any considerations I should keep in mind when publishing art pieces of my own novel? Any general suggestions or thoughts on this are helpful!

I am a South Asian Indie Author living in Europe. I had started writing on Wattpad 11 years ago. I started a series on Wattpad and regularly updated and completed 3 books. But then life happened and I couldn't continue writing.

The books were on Wattpad, I got millions of reads, comments and likes.

Then 2024 summer I decided to self publish my books. I took down my books from Wattpad, edited and published them on Amazon last year.

There is a South Asian TV series that has become very popular in last few weeks. The episodes go on air every week. I have been watching it too. Around episode 15 mark when the story comes to climax I started realising the story has so many similarities to my first book. And is last few episodes I could identify so many similarities either scenes/dilogues.

The tv series isn't completed yet. I dont know what the ending would be. But the similarities in last few episodes had me questioning how could this many similarities be coincidence. I also had readers come to me saying they have seen similarities.

Now this tv series scriptwriter is a big writer and the production company is huge. I dont have the money to go legal. I am an indie author that is part time writing. I am still struggling to market my own books.

And most importantly, when its not 100% plagiarism how can you prove the storyline theme, some dialogues, scenes and characters backgrounds have been taken. It almost feels to me as if part of the book were taken tailored to the shows audience preferences and then presented.

I did post on Reddit sharing the similarities, of course I was trolled for it. This is now affecting my mental health.

Has anyone else been through something like this?

I have 40+ days to go until release and have 37 arc readers, but at my current pace i may end up around 250-300+ arc readers by the end. Any downside to letting it grow to that point?

I've seen this advice again and again in self-publishing, but my question is... is this advice about the books, or the writer?

I've released a coming-of-age novel about pro wrestlers, and pro wrestling fans have asked for more, which I'm thrilled about! While 'pro wrestling' isn't a fiction genre, it's got a lot of specific aspects that would lend itself to a series.

I'm sure if I wrote a sequel, it might help the original sell more, as the advice often states. I've always felt that advice applied more to genre writers, like those writing fantasy, romance, crime etc.

So, is that what people mean by "write book two to sell book one"? Do they mean people want to get invested in a series, or do they mean it just adds to your credibility as a writer?

So, I launched my debut literary fiction on 1st October. When it comes to KENP, I have 237 KENP page reads (Novel is 226 pages). I understand that literary fiction takes time to market and convert, but I back calculated that 2 people downloaded the book, 1 read 11 pages while the other read almost full. How should I be pushing this?

I noted this excerpt from a reputable website among the writing community, whose reputation is respectable across the board:

Self-publishing can cost between $2,940 and $5,660, while authors using traditional publishing generally face no direct publication fees.

Me. I may need to redo a blurb for one of my titles which is quoted to cost $50 USD. To me, the current blurb has either worked or not worked for nearly three full years. If I knew it would generate sales, then yes, I would be more motivated. Altogether, I spent close to $900 on publishing this book in '23 and similarly for another this year. What do you do to keep self-pub costs under the above $2940 figure?

What do you consider changing as time goes by within a given book title?

Just released my first novel. Before I released it I googled, and saw limited results with a similar title, and somehow missed someone with the same name, or pen name. This person has the same name as me, but rights prolifically in a more spicy genre. When I uploaded to Amazon, I realized there were actually several other books with the same or similar titles, which make my book look more Christianity-oriented than it is.

I'm now wondering if I should just stop now, before my marketing pays off, and choose a pen name and a new title and republish?