Publishing a Poetry Book: Publication and Distribution

As with all the posts in this series, this one comes with a disclaimer that I am by no means an expert when it comes to self-publishing. I put a lot of work into my books, but once they’re published, I move onto the next project and put almost no effort into promoting them. I tweeted a link to each of them once they were available and mentioned them a few times on my Instagram account, and that was it. Seriously. So, this post won’t tell you how to sell your books, but it will tell you how to make them available for people to buy them.

I once signed up for a virtual class on book marketing, but everything the guy suggested was an additional cost. You had to buy a subscription to another website that would show you the top keywords people searched for when shopping on Amazon. You had to pay for Facebook ads. You had to send copies of your books to people to get enough reviews online so you could pay for exposure in newsletters to reach readers. I got fed up with marketing, asked for a refund from the already overpriced class, and gave up on my quest to be a full-time writer. From then on, I was just going to write things I liked, publish them so I could finally call them done and stop working on them, and move onto the next project.

So, I’m not here to sell books (though I feel a little thrill whenever I see I’ve sold another copy). I’m here to create something beautiful, call it done, and move onto the next corner of my own little world that I want to explore.

Pricing

This is always going to be a tricky subject. Price your book too low, and people will think you’re undervaluing your work. Price your book too high, and people will think you’re asking too much. My 178-page book is $11.99 USD for the paperback and $2.99 for the e-book. Compared to many of the poetry books I’ve seen, I’m on the lower end of the price range. I do still struggle with the idea of asking people to spend their hard-earned money on the strange little fantasy I call my writing. If I’m just writing for my own enjoyment, why even bother charging anyone for it? Why not just put it all online for free? Well, maybe I have a bit more confidence in myself than I thought.

While I don’t live in one of the poorest areas of the US, I do live in an area with a lower cost of living than other parts. My job doesn’t pay that well, so I still measure my disposable spending as how many hours I would have to work to make up for that amount of money.

I also went toward the lower range of prices because I plan on publishing many more books. I don’t want people to add up how much they’ve spent on my work and decide not to purchase the next book because they’ve tossed so much money at me already.

However, I do think I could price my books higher. I probably will charge more for other books I will publish in the future. The more I write, the better my writing will be, so future books should be of a higher quality and therefore worth more, right? Look at comparable books that are already published to see what the average price is for books like yours and settle on a price that seems fair and that you’re comfortable with.

Printing costs will also have an effect on the price and the royalties you’ll receive from your book, with hardcover books and color interiors costing more to print than black-and-white paperbacks. Most print-on-demand publishers are very clear with how much you’ll receive from the sale of your book, and you can see how different retail prices will affect your royalties before you decide on a price and hit the Publish button.

Keywords and Categories

This is an area I do not know enough about. On KDP, you’re allowed up to seven keywords to describe your book, and I don’t think I even used all of them. Part of it is that I don’t have high enough expectations to think anyone’s randomly going to discover my books while scrolling through pages of search results on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. The people buying my books are most likely other poets whom I’ve connected with on social media. I sometimes feel that most indie authors are selling their books to friends, family, and other indie authors, not ordinary readers.

Kindle Unlimited vs. Wide

I have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and I love it. I like that I can read as much as I have time for, the authors whose books I read get paid (though not as much as if I had purchased their books), and instead of feeling like I’ve wasted my money on buying a book I don’t enjoy, I can simply return it and move onto the next.

I did not make my first book, Woodland Spirits, available in Kindle Unlimited. I’m originally a Nook customer. I got my first Nook in 2011. I didn’t get a Kindle until last year, when I signed up for the 2-month free trial of KU and was reading so much on my phone. And as a lifelong outcast, I didn’t like the idea of my book being available only to people who had a certain type of account.

That being said and considering my non-existent marketing, I will admit that despite my book being available as an e-book on Nook, Kobo, and a whole host of other sites through Draft2Digital, the only e-books I’ve sold have been on Kindle. For my second full-length book, Gothic Souls, I did enroll it in KU when it was first published, but I plan on taking it out after the first 90-day period. While I have had some page reads, it plays with my anxiety to look at my stats page and wonder why someone read only 15 pages and never continued. Is my book really that bad? Or did they just get busy and forget about it? (I’m guilty of this with books I read, so it shouldn’t bother me but I can’t help it.)

Being in Kindle Unlimited also allows you to make your book available as a free download for 5 days out of each 90 days the book is enrolled. I did this for my chapbook, The View From The Lunar Surface, because it was a book I was extremely proud of but knew it would have little appeal to entice people to pay for it. I wrote this based on my favorite album (Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino by Arctic Monkeys), and unless someone was interested in both my writing and that album, there was a slim chance anyone would want to buy it.

So I could use Amazon as a distribution service for the e-book, I made the book free as soon as I was able and used all 5 free days at once. However, I took the book out of KU once those 90 days were over, since it must remain exclusive to Amazon as long as it’s in KU. I wanted to be able either to publish it on other platforms or simply post it on my website. (I’m still thinking of doing this.)

Book Description

Like the author bio, this is one of the hardest things to write, especially if your book is simply a collection of your strongest work and not necessarily all written to a theme. Since I try to use vivid imagery in my poetry, I tried to do that in the descriptions of my books to give readers a sample of the world they would be stepping into.

Admittedly, I’m still not entirely pleased with the description of Gothic Souls, but changing the book description on a self-published book is simple. The only thing holding me back from doing it is that I would also have to update the cover file of the paperback book, since I printed the description on the back cover. But even changing the cover on a self-published book once it’s available is not hard, and I might get around to it one day. It’s what’s in the book that really matters, and as I said earlier, I doubt people are discovering my books through online retailers and making their purchasing decisions on those pages; they’re finding me through Instagram or Twitter instead. But with everything when publishing your book, you want to put your best foot forward, so take some time to think about the book description. Sit with it for a few days rather than typing something up just to hurry on with the publication process as I did.

Booklinker

Instagram and Twitter allow only one link in your profile, but I think most people are familiar with services like Link Tree that allow you to make a page to include all your links. What many people are not familiar with that I think is an awesome tool is Booklinker. Instead of having to have a separate link for the Amazon US store, UK store, AUS store, MX store, etc., Booklinker creates a universal Amazon link for your book or Amazon author page. This link will take the user directly to the Amazon store for their country. I think this is a huge time saver, so you don’t have to enter all the separate links yourself, as well as a great way of decluttering your list of links. This is probably the most helpful tip in those whole post of me going on about how I don’t know anything about marketing.

Wrap Up

This was the final post in my Publishing a Poetry Book series. If you want to read through the other posts, I have a page with links to the other parts for easy reference. I have been putting some thought into how I want to use this blog, since it sometimes sits for months without me adding anything to it. I plan to post more actual poetry on here to create a home for my work outside of my social media pages.

If you found this post or others in the series helpful, I would love for you to check out my full-length collections Woodland Spirits and Gothic Souls, or give me a follow on Instagram or Twitter. Thanks for reading!