Confessions of an Entrepreneur on Kindle Direct Publishing

Kong in Shillong sells #Kwai,
while reading on her Smartphone 

Key Point

The digital platform has changed the way we look at Media per se. If Newspapers are read online, then, why can’t books also be read online? And with a little investment, you are your own boss; you determine your working hours; you decided, to whom your book is targeted to and you can change your audience at any time. You are empowered. You don’t need a hand-holder. You, do-it-yourself (DIY) and you decide what you want to write about, what treatment you are going to give your book, who you will use as your cover designer, your editor, proofreader, beta reader…in short, you are master of your own product. The success is yours!

Graduating from editing School Magazines to the first published article in The Junior Statesman, edited by Desmond Doig, I was already overjoyed and strutting around with a swollen head when I came across my first job as a Copywriter in an agency.

Being in an environment where reading, writing and commercial art was the only thing I did – in those days, we copywriters, artists, visualizers and all, were a protected community) – I found my pen scribbling away at all times. Poems flowed like Coke and stories took birth in my head, faster than I had ever thought, they would. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote until I found a collection had come about. A few books of poems and stories, traveled from one city to another, as part of my belongings. Then, one day, the computer happened. Data operators sprung up from all quarters and I gave my books of stories to be neatly typed and systematically placed together. I always wanted to publish them.

But that too sat in CDs and in my Gmail account! Bless Gmail! Such a fabulous place to store your thoughts and writings, in a folder called MYWRITINGS!

Then, one day, someone asked me, do you have a blog? What’s that, I thought? And right enough, I was soon on one - Sulekha.com was the beginnings of my dreams come true. Whoever said, that you had to slog for your money?  The brilliant concept started by Satya Prabhakar and Sangeeta Kshettry, found content without paying for any. Pages upon pages of stories, poems, ideas, discussions on any and every subject under the sun, made Sulekha.com one of the most successful dot.com companies. All you needed to do was to open a blog and start to write. Needless to say, I was hooked immediately. I wrote as if there was no tomorrow and the feedback was enormous - I got instant high from the LIKE and comments and long discussions ensued between me and the readers. Why do we need the #JaipurLiteratureFestival? I was addicted. Here, I met awesome authors, whose books I would hold and review in days to come.

But that was way back in 2007! By 2009, I saw many authors of Sulekha.com, publish their books. But we are talking of 2009 – that is way, way back! Soon, we were going to see a sea change in publishing.

Vanity Publishing, or what was looked upon as a poor cousin of REAL PUBLISHING, like being published by Penguin and Bloomsbury, and the FAT OLD MEN of publishing, was going to see a sea change. As publishers rushed from UK, USA to the new country India, with a colonial past, hoping to get their share of the mullah, Amazon’s Direct Publishing Platform, Kindle Direct Publishing came and slowly started making their presence felt.

Then, success stories started to filter in. Rasana Atreye, a software engineer in the US, of Indian origin, had sent her story “Tell a Thousand Lies” to over 100 agents in the US and got no response. Finally, the story was shortlisted for the 2012 Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. Publishing houses began to chase her, but she chose to go it alone. She chose, KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing as her platform to publish her book, giving all the traditional publishers a rejection slip! She had 17,000 downloads on the day, her book went up for sale on KDP! And downloads continue, unabated.

Writing as a Profession

There are a few things every writer wants – readers, people who buy and read their books, people who review, comment, appreciate their work. And most of all, their book must generate revenue for them.

A writer spends hours of their day or night, invested in their book. They certainly are writing because they have a story to tell, but most of all, they are investing in terms of money and time on these books, which they then want to sell for a living. A book which has been written and put up for sale, with no readers and no downloads, may dry out funds put aside and make the fertile mind a dry desert.

Hence, to sum it up, if one has spent one year to write a book, then one must calculate what one has had to give up to keep writing. The ROI, return on investment must clearly, be enough to generate revenue that can go back as an investment into the next book series.

Bitten by the Entrepreneurial Bug

I look at my books as products of my mind. Hence, I have set aside money for publishing. While I may not follow all the Digital Marketing tools, I would certainly join Facebook and have 1 Page for all my book, have a LINKEDIN profile and join writers groups there, join TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, PINTEREST, and all other discussion forums, that talk of books, book publishing, and marketing. I would also be conscious of trends – more and more, people are reading nano-writes, #TerriblyTinyTales, short stories, and small titles that cost as good as a coffee at Café Coffee Day. So, if your book costs anything between Rs 35 to Rs 150 and can be read on a device like a Handset or Kindle, the better it is. It takes, 45 minutes to travel from HUDA City Centre Metro Station in Gurugram to Rajiv Chowk in Central Delhi – can you give your reader a 40 minutes complete story, point to point, which he has paid only Rs 50 for? That works!

Obsess! Obsess! Obsess!

Hot selling authors need to feel the pulse of the reader, all the time. So they must be obsessed with them. What are they doing? How do they engage? WhatsApp? Whatzup, with them? So, as authors, we need to keep our ears to the ground and remember content is king if you have spoken to that dude in his language (lingo). Last but not the least - size matters!

Click below to read about : 

Amazon KDP event in New Delhi, 30 Nov 2017

Julia Dutta is a digital marketing professional who writes on weekends.

Book Review: The Ray Synchronicity By Lata Sony

For someone, whose reading is limited to nonSci – Fi, Lata Sony’s debut novel, The Ray Synchronicity was a challenge to begin with, but within the first four chapters, I began to understand that I had something right up my street on my Kindle. The reason being, as I said elsewhere too, the book is designed to be read by people who have hope in a better future ahead, made possible by Science. I began to consume it like a hungry reader who cannot find time, even to eat, because, the book is so fulfilling.

It is not as if, there is a sermon on the Kindle waiting there for the reader to embrace, but clearly, the insights into human nature and the creation of people whom you meet on a daily basis now, on planet transformed into beings you will want to embrace, The Ray Synchronicity, is all about realizing your potential, herenow, if you want to, although the book is placed in 2039. Events are even taking place in 2550! So for the reader, it is a jump into the future even as they read today.

What I liked about the book is its flirtation with spirituality and making the ‘other-worldly’ a very worldly phenomenon. Especially in Chapter 4, I almost hoped I was a scientist myself.

I would easily put this book among the vast million books available for man’s hunger for a better world, although there is no great self-search to do, only awesome Bio-Ray guns to adopt, which convert negative to positive energy, right away! The book is replete with suspense and conflict that adds to the speed of a racy read.

In her interview with Techgoss.com, the author reiterated that she thought that India needs more spiritual sci-fi, because India’s urban and rural are in that point of time, where the traditional and the modern are coming together.

Perhaps the solutions are deeply embedded in The Ray Synchronicity. 

Go for It!

Buy HERE

Interview with the author, Lata Sony

Q 1. Thank you for speaking to me, Ms Sony. My first question to you is, how do you think the world will change/transform spiritually, going by the ideas you put forth in your book?

‘Transforming the world’ sounds very grand and ambitious and I don’t think any book can do that by itself. What a book may do is give words to a reader’s personal experiences and feelings, provide an explanation or confirmation and that may click for someone who is ripe for transformation.

However, to the question if there was a spiritual motive behind the story, then yes there was. Several, in fact. The first objective was to let readers know that there are energies beyond our knowledge and imagination and our physical vision. Like me many have experienced these energies. Some who have had near-death-experiences have even seen their entire physical body (and other bodies) as an energy matrix.

The second objective was to help readers imagine how cosmic energies might work to shape your life. I have put this in a very simplified form by personifying energies and Time. The logic being that the powers that control human emotions and traits could very well be just as good and bad as humans. Our creations reflect us after all.

The third objective was to help readers see how the essence of any religion may be interpreted in terms of energies. This is the common platform where the foundation for real unity between religions, between tradition and modernity, and between spirituality and science can be built.

Q2: Do you think your book has the potential to affect change in human thought and behaviour?

Yes I think so. As the title suggests, the book is about a synchronicity created by higher powers. A couple of readers told me that they had begun to see a pattern in their life after reading the book. Once a person is aware of the patterns in their life, they can realize their full potential by finding answers to: Why do these things happen to me? What were the external factors that made me what I am? What internal changes should I make to counter those external influences? Do I take my limitations too seriously? How can I solve problems through love and intelligence? What should I feel grateful about? Who are the people I should forgive? What do I do to love myself more?

In its core, the book is really about the struggle between the internal you and the external you made from worldly circumstances. And the transformation is about going back to what you were meant to be, and what you really are rather than what the world makes you.

Q3: In which case, who is your target audience?

Honestly, that’s something I haven’t figured out. Just as the book defies categorization as it has elements of spiritualism, sci-fi, romance and thriller, the ideal audience for this book defies classification. Originally, I started with Young Adult as the target audience as I felt that youngsters may be more open to something new. But it turned out that people across all age groups liked it. At the same time, those who expected Dan Brown like science-fiction were disappointed with the first few pages. Some continued till the end and discovered that this was something new and fresh. I think the people who were most enthusiastic about the book were either spiritually-inclined or with some idea of metaphysics. On the other hand, this book is not at all for people who have dogmatic and rigid views about their religion.

Q4: How are you marketing your book to reach your audience?

As of now, I am more interested in reviews and have put my best efforts during free promos. I search for sites that promote free ebooks and request each site to feature my book. This is quite a painstaking process. In the future, I’ll consider paid marketing to make the book more visible when I have two more books ready. Investing in three books brings the best ROI per the pundits of book marketing.

Thank you, Ms Sony! Wish your book finds wings across the globe and may your keyboard keep clicking!

Book Review - The Guest by Suneetha Balakrishnan

Such a pretty story is the first thing I said to myself as soon as I put my Kindle down, having finished Suneetha Balakrishnan’s story The Guest on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

Set in an unknown destination, the story is about three people, Saraswathi, who is the widowed mother of the single child, Sameer, who is married to Kavitha and their story together.

Saraswathi is happy to have Kavitha enter her family as her son’s wife, as she feels Kavitha has a deeper connection in her personal life, which is over and above what she has with her son. Sameer on the other hand is a loving and caring man, but like many single children is lost in his own world. Kavitha adjusts and even enjoys her little family, even as she is a working woman with all the stresses of being one. 

The story takes the reader to the family and its day to day happenings, until, one day, just one single day, everything seems to go wary. An otherwise smooth running family is caught in misunderstandings created by an act, which then races the reader through quite a nail-biting journey, when really the reader joins the family, running helter-skelter to resolve the problem. But finally, when the reader does come to the end of the story, h/she is delighted with what there is to discover. And that becomes the reason for the entire book to have been written – The Guest. Who is this guest? Wherefrom has he come from? The delightful and happy ending tells it all bringing joy to the reader and smiles that sit comfortably on the lips, for a long time, thereafter.

Suneetha Balakrishnan, is a Journalist, author, and writes stories and poems in Malyalam and English. Her writings mix the traditional with the modern. Her characters reflect the same personality; they are at heart traditional and yet use a modern life with its paraphernalia of electronic gadgets and all. 

The characters in this book are well cut out, but the only thing I really missed was some juicy romance between the two protagonists, Sameer and Kavitha. Indeed, I am sure this will follow after The Guest has arrived!

Would you care to find out too?

Find out Here