A Book in You?

Part One: Self-Publishing on Amazon — A Six Month Review

Perhaps like me you walk around with a loop of recurring observations. Your life is not an endless joyride or constant struggle so much as a classroom for matching patterns, testing theories, and stepping back in alternate states of affirmation and surprise. Some of these insights lead to inescapable conclusions. Others to nagging questions that persist in the face of mounting evidence.

Some of those quandaries just won’t quit. For them it’s off to the lightning round of interpretive hedging. Each of these rationales touch on the themes and examples that we prep for our best laid lesson plans. The purpose to our learning becomes the unwritten book we carry around. Private musings seeking refuge in an open dialog.

In this two part series on self-publishing, we explore the heights we can scale and the walls we can crash in the act of merchandising our better cover-bound mousetraps. In this case, how to rethink the smell test we all take when weighing the evidence we gather in independent investigations.

As we’ll see, the author’s side of this story is as much an act of discovery as the sharing of their subject matter. The experiences of channeling these inspirations through a faceless global platform like Amazon are largely as unwritten as our collective works, prior to publication.

Some people carry around imaginings that form into characters and stories. I carry around actual and invented questions best addressed by research into facts, evidence, and the histories entrusted with their collection. Six months post publication I can attest to you this: There is no great American novel equivalent waiting to answer the pent-up demand for conducting independent web-based research investigations.

Picking a universal theme (boosting one’s research acumen) doesn’t ensure that curious readers are moved to rally their investigation skills. The entrance barriers are non-existent. The costs for getting it wrong are at best … interpretive. Some would argue non-existent in a world of false equivalencies and the self-selecting nature of filter bubbles. But even if most of my would-be readers are reluctant to embrace a book on research, the ideas, use cases, and frameworks enjoy a longer-term shelf life that eclipses any sputtering sales trends for research primers.

It’s the ideas that live beyond the gratification cycles of the well-read and independent-minded that my book dropped (and fell from sight) last fall. This ticket to the land of the published is punched by our own pride. After all, this form of self-expression went by the name of Vanity Publishing — before there was social media. Before there was Amazon. Even before bookstores were qualified as hardcovers and paperbacks, not bricks and mortar.

Self-Publishing on Amazon: A Six Month Review

Like its football fields of warehouses, writing about Amazon is inexhaustible. Like its labyrinth of supply chains, Amazon itself forms a limitless source of crossed signals — a self-contained mesh of stoked appetites, phantom caterers, and limited time Prime discounts in a swirl of circling delivery vans.

… Before it was the cloud’s data center, it was the world’s strip mall.

… Before the department store, it was a portal within a winning search navigation schema.

… And before that, there was the beginning. There was the written word for sale … the book store.

The ubiquity is so prevailing that one can define life on western commerce earth by a single set of conditions: A love / hate relationship with the placidly sinister Amazon. Queue Kevin Spacey voice-over.

My modest topic of Amazon as self-publishing platform seems feeble, even quaint, given the gravity of Amazon’s impact on the transactional footprints of our debits and credits — a verifiable consumer-level GPS of the travels of commerce. But there it is. As if I’m fixated on the “phone” piece of “smart” and the former refers to a synchronous exchange of voices between two paired microphones and speakers.

So I did promise you a six month review. Let’s consider what’s reasonable and what’s out-of-bounds for leveraging Amazon…

• • • On a modest marketing budget,
      
    • An overwhelming number of marketing options, and
    • A limited interest in learning, let alone executing a manageable number of them.

Alexa … How Do I Survive Your Ecosystem?

So there’s the grind-you-down until you abandon the idea you’re exchanging free time and real capital for actual goods and services. Then there was last week’s revelation that even non U.S.-based customers can’t read the digital version of the book. This despite they’re owning Amazon hardware (Kindle) to consumer digital products (books) that I (me) produced on their software (Kindle Create) for the expressed purpose of streamlining the distribution process by relenting to the hermetic Amazon ecosystem.

It was never my expressed goal to become a subject matter expert of e-book publishing. I checked my modest goals at the Amazon door and thought: Here’s a way to stay in touch with former colleagues, students, and potentially other teachers and learners who want to absorb, reject, augment, and ultimately add to the canon of curriculum. Scroll down to …

Education & Reference > Education > Research

That’s me where you address how humans can train themselves to be digitally literate in a world of anonymous sources, surveillance capitalism, and unblinking chatbots.

I didn’t learn of the ecosystem’s failings by adding e-publisher to my badging credentials. I learned by posting my issue to a discussion list of e-publishing experts; a forum hosted on … Amazon, of course! My question about the incompatibilities of Amazon software working on Amazon devices was addressed rapidly and thoughtfully by five digital publishing experts that apparently patrol the board to compare wits, cultivate contacts, and mine for new prospects. I expressed my appreciation for their instant recognition of a known issue. Privately, I’m thinking: why does Amazon deliver such a poor customer experience?

The simple answer is … because they can. The longer, more unsettling answer is that the self-published digital literacy expert should not conflate Amazon’s share price with a free piggy-back ride to my own success. It’s easy to take for granted the efficiencies of printing-on-demand, centralized author pages, and production-ready templates for would-be publishers. But the appeal of the well-honed profit machine is not a default win-win setting for Amazon and its content-providing supply chain.

Not having an idle inventory of unsold books in your attic is a welcome reality that Amazon brought to the publishing masses. But there is no magic keyword match to raise your profile or expose that end of the virtual warehouse where your books lie in wait. The idleness has shifted from dormant inventories to D-I-Y publishers who would naturally shy away from self-promotion and merchandising.

A Community of Publishers

Then again, the vanity barkers don’t have a lock on the pride of authorship. Many self-respecting self-publishers embrace the notion that it’s about the ideas they’re surfacing, not their mugs and tee-shirts. A community of learners doesn’t require a market for books. Authors are experts of their trades and the book is entrée into those peer groups that are forums for bringing thoughtful and challenging dialog to the author’s voice.

Six months into the great upload of one serious decades-long obsession, the lessons are these:

1. Figure out your brand: This sounds menial, even insulting if one could tread boldly on their lack of confidence. But my reluctance to engage on social media means playing the cards that lend meaning to the substance behind the marketing. For me it’s plugging the work through podcasts, instructional videos, and any venues where local researchers may flock.

2. Gift the book: In my case there are 5 bite-sized versions of the full volume. These do well as courtesy copies, tutorials, and learning aids broken down by specific lessons. The hope is to stoke an appetite for the complete work, or even better, a full review of the trial run.

3. Find your self-promo comfort zone: Most of all, resist the temptation to believe that one’s work will speak for itself or that the strength of Amazon’s gravitation will pull your book up the marketing hill. It won’t.

The last lesson anyone should draw? That the distribution of your publications bears any relationship to the books in you.