The price of e-books is on many people’s minds, including the Federal Department of Justice, which recently sued Apple and three leading publishing houses. At least as much as consumers care about getting the lowest price, however, authors and publishers care about getting a fair price for their works. But when you’re the author and the publisher at the same time, how do you know you’re getting the best deal and the most sales?
“What we’ve learned is that a volume of titles makes such a difference. For those of you out there who are self-published authors or for those of you out there who are small to independent publishers, I’m going to just tell you, what makes the most difference in Amazon is not doing just one e-book,” Vook VP Matthew Cavnar tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “You have to do multiple e-books.
“If I’m looking at an Amazon product page, you’ll see the recommendation engine right underneath the book title,” Cavnar explains. “That recommendation engine is really the one thing in Amazon’s very complicated and excellent algorithms that they use that you can control. And how can you control that? Well, almost always, they recommend other books by the same authors or other books in the same series. So if you want the recommended titles to be similar to your own content, you need to have, one, a series, two, consistent branding, and three, probably chunks, episodic content.”
Earlier this year, Vook launched a cloud-based e-book publishing platform for authors and independent publishers. The company has also published a free guide to e-book creation, including advice on pricing and marketing.
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