Hard to Answer Questions About Publishing on Kindle

I have a few comments:

The best thing you can do is make sure the quality is top notch before you put a book up there. That means after you think you have finished it, you let it sit for a few days, then start at the beginning and go through it again. I recommend reading it out loud to see how it reads and you'll spot a ton of things that don't work.

Letting it sit for a few days allows you to see what doesn't work and then you can make changes.

Then do that again. Let it sit for a few days or a week or two and then go through it again. While it seems like a lot of work up front (which it is), if you do this, you'll catch the majority of the crap before someone points it out on a public review.

The worst thing you can do is put something up there that isn't ready to be seen. If you make sales, you'll get horrible reviews and no revision in the world will improve the odds of someone taking a chance on it again.

Give out review copies. Give out LOTS of review copies. Especially to people on the KDP forum. Ask for their honest feedback. Do this BEFORE you publish the book on Kindle. That will help you improve it and, once you've fixed all the problems, you can go back to them and ask them for their opinion now that you've taken their advice. Then, if they think it's good, ask them to post a review of the book.

Yes. It works great. But I also post 3 times a week, have a Twitter feed just for the topic to drive people to my blog, I post on Facebook, and do a lot of social bookmarking, participating in forums, etc. Plus, I post at least one article a week on article directories. All to drive traffic to my blog which then drives traffic to my book on Kindle and Smashwords. I also sell the book in PDF format on my site in case people want to buy it right then.

This is a huge time commitment, but if you're willing to do it, then it will reap huge rewards. For example, it took less than a month for people to start finding my blog site when I first started doing this. It then snowballs like crazy after about 5-6 months.

Final advice - looking at doing yet another round of revisions can get overwhelming. A lot of times I feel like saying, "this is good enough" and just publishing the darn thing. But I don't. Because the cost is too high - such as driving away buyers because I published too soon and got negative reviews.

So do the hard work of revising until you're getting good responses from your target audience and from peers (i.e., KDP). NOT your best buddy. Or your mom. They'll just say, "oh, this is great". And that doesn't do you any good. Get hard criticism that will help make your book better and then make the changes. It's worth it in the long run.

Marcia, thanks for posting this thread. I do have questions about review copies.

What format do you put your book in to send out a copy? I assume your method is to publish the book first and then request reviewers?

Do you need to send a copy as a gift through Amazon and pay for it? In this case, you might start your new book out as a special for a short period of time so it only costs about $0.70 to send it? In other words, someone has to buy the book as their gift before they can leave a review?

I would be afraid of sending out a document or pdf ahead of publication because unless you know the people very well, there are possibilities of what could happen to your work. I hesitate to even mention this, but when I was writing on another site, my articles were taken for other sites, and I'm sure we've all had that experience.