Yes that's right my baby blog is all grown up and has reached it's 100th post milestone.

A milestone such as this is always an interesting time for reflection. 

When I decided to become and indie author and self-publish George and the Dragon it got to the stage where a suitable date came up and, after 7 years of writing, editing, chopping and changing I decided that was it I was going to put the book on sale.  Hindsight tells me I should have waited about a month longer and made sure it was slightly more polished, but that's not what I did.

There's a lot you learn that nobody talks about and nobody mentions, I wonder if this is in-part because some of these issues I've encountered are from the perspective of an author living in the UK.

For example Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk are largely two separate entities.    Although when you list your book via KDP it gets listed on both sites, and the European sites as well. there are other differences that are not apparent at first.

Tax is applied to the price you list at on KDP on other retailers it's part of the list price you choose.  This means you get a very strange GBP price when you set the price for your book in USD.  Not only do you have to contend with the exchange rate but then 3% tax is then added on to that to give you the list price.

I should make a big point of spelling out to all my author friends in the UK that this tax rate is changing in January to 20% so the price of your UK listings on Amazon will be hiked up quite considerably.  It will also hit your profit margins on other retailers as well.

So I spent a while playing with the GBP list price of my book on Amazon to find the £2.99/$4.99 combination I was after.

The next point is that there is an Amazon Author Central for both the UK and the US (.co.uk and .com)  and you have to fill in your author profile on both for it to show on both sides of the Atlantic.

The same is also true of the Amazon Affiliate program - not that this has yet generated much income for me.

It's worth mentioning again Georiot links at this stage.  So many times I encounter Amazon links on-line that take me to the Amazon.com from which I cannot buy Kindle books.  I have to click on a link to take me to the appropriate Amazon.co.uk page when I can click on the Buy it with 1 Click button.

Georiot links correct this one link take the user to the correct Amazon site for their geographic location.  The same is true for iTunes as well.

The other thing I've learnt is that I left it far too late to build my author platform.  I've done what I think is an amazing job of playing catch up but it does mean I spend far to much time attending to that rather than writing.

One of the things I've discovered more recently is the benefits of Google+.  For me Google+ is a little like the best of Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest all rolled into one.  I find it to be a great way to share images with like minded people and have been slowly building up my presence in the circles of others.  People like an importantly reshare a lot of what I choose to reshare.  Whereas on Facebook I've found it hard to get people to share the things I find interesting.

The communities are also a great idea, although I am not sure the book promotion communities work they are at least on a par with similar groups you can find on Facebook.

Just a few thoughts I could probably add more but I'll have nothing to write about tomorrow :)

Don't forget that until 7 June 2014 I've reduced the price of George and the Dragon to $1.99 on Kindle.


If you do choose to read my novel I hope you enjoy it.

Phil