How to help your favorite author

There are a LOT of books on Amazon. Millions. Literally. So getting your book in front of the people who want to read it is hard. Indie (independently published, aka self-published) authors like myself have to work to get the right eyes on our work. It’s hard to throw your book out into the world—it’s a piece of the author’s soul. (In a good way, not a Voldemort way.)

Plus, while publishing, itself, is free, there are a lot of costs associated with publishing a book. I’m a writer, not a graphic artist, so covers cost money. Editors catch all those pesky errors—and they want to be paid! Advertising, so people learn about your book costs money. Hosting a website. Even sending out a newsletter costs a few dollars.

If you have a favorite author, someone you’d like to see write more books (me, pick me!) Here are some ways you can help them get more visibility. Visibility -> sales -> positive reinforcement -> a desire to write more books.

Buy the book:

Obviously, the first way to help your favorite author is to purchase their novels. If a book is selling well, Amazon is more likely to recommend it to other readers. The same goes for other platforms, like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Scribd, Apple…the list goes on and on.

Kindle Unlimited:

• A lot of folks are reading on Kindle Unlimited these days. If you’re not familiar with it, KU is a subscription service through Amazon. You pay in the neighborhood of $10 per month for unlimited access to a huge array of books. (This is just information, not a plug for KU—I don’t get any kickbacks unless you read my book!) You can check out up to 10 books at a time, and read them whenever you want.

• If a book is in KU, it can’t be sold in e-book form anywhere else. Many authors choose to publish through KU because the benefits outweigh this major negative. All my books are currently in KU. I’ve had them “wide” for a few months, and sales were pretty low, so I came back to KU.

• How does an author get paid through KU? Since you aren’t buying the book, we don’t get a royalty. We get credited with a “borrow” when you check it out, but that doesn’t earn us any money. It does help with our overall author rank, which makes us more visible. But the dollars start to flow when you start turning the pages. Every KU author gets a little less than half a cent for every page you read. It fluctuates a bit month to month—all those KU subscriptions are put into a pot (after Amazon takes their cut) and that pot is divided up between authors based on total pages read. So more pages = more money. And more page reads = increase author rank, which means Amazon promotes it more.

• Authors can see how many pages are read every day, and those numbers provide a little warm-fuzzy feedback. “Look, people are reading my book!” And naturally, that leads to: “People like my books! I’ll write more!” We're a sensitive group. We thrive on readers' love.

I hope that gave you little insight into how you can help your favorites author (pick me!). Next time, I'll talk about reviews.