Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Annie's Book Submission Services: a Tool to Help Authors!


I recently purchased a program called KDROI. Once installed, it makes it easy for you to submit a Kindle book to as many as 16 sites that promote ebooks, with just a few clicks and a few words to type. (Of course there are no guarantees that every site will agree to feature the book; it just submits the book to them quickly and easily.) Once I purchased it, I decided to use it to help out other authors, as well as to submit my own books.

I'm not trying to make lots of money off of this service (though I certainly won't complain if I can make back the purchase price! :-) ). Mainly, I'm just trying to bless some fellow authors as so many people have blessed and helped me along my publishing journey. So, I've chosen not to charge as much as some of my author friends suggested. I want this service to be accessible to those on even the lowest budgets. Hence, the prices that I hope you'll consider very reasonable: $1.99 or $2.99, depending on the details (more information below).

For those who are curious, the following screenshots show how the program actually works, using my book The Collar and the Cavvarach as an example.

To begin with, I go to the book's page on Amazon, then I activate the program. This is the first screen I see (it fills in most of the details automatically, so I just have to check that they're correct then fill in a couple of blanks):


The next screen looks like this (below). The book description, author bio, and cover image are all filled in automatically from the info on Amazon. (I discovered while helping someone else that if you don't have a bio on your Amazon US author page, or if your book isn't actually connected to your author page, the program will get stuck at this point. So if you'd like to use my book submission services, please make sure all of that is in order first.)


Since I'm doing a 99 cent promo, not all the possible sites are available to me. (Some of them only feature free books.) The ones checked in blue below are the ones I can submit to. That's why I decided to make this service cheaper for those who are submitting 99 cent books: it will cost $1.99 instead of $2.99 for a free book. (Permafree books will also cost $1.99, since there's a similar number of sites that will feature those.)


After that, the program takes me to a screen where I enter the dates of my 99-cent promotion. You can pick a date range of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 days. The first day has to be at least a week away. (If you're using my book submission services, please pick a starting date at least 8 days from now, just in case I can't get to it right away. I live in a different time zone than most of you and might not be awake when you want to submit your book!)


After that, it's a simple matter to click "Submit Promotion" and wait a few seconds while the form is sent out. For the last step, the program shows a log report of how many sites the book information was successfully sent to, and how many sites "failed". (Failure can be due to a number of issues; I list some of them in my form at the bottom.) There's a pretty high success rate, though, as you see in this record of 4 different books I submitted for other authors. (The Collar and the Cavvarach isn't listed here because I didn't finish submitting it. I actually had already scheduled a promo for a couple weeks from now and had sent requests to many of the same sites manually before I bought KDROI. So I just used it as an example in the first part of the program's form.)

When I click on the blue links, it tells me which sites experienced the "failure". After I submitted Heartsick for a free promo and saw that it didn't work with two sites, I tried the form again, selecting only those two this time. I thought it was worth trying to see if it would go through to them the second time, but as you can see, it didn't. Oh, well. 30 out of 32* isn't bad! (The other books in the list were all 99 cent promos, so there were only 18 possible sites they could be sent to.)

Update: I've heard back from a couple authors whose books I've submitted, and they've said that some of the sites where the submission "failed" actually confirmed receiving their book information. So, apparently book submissions that have supposedly failed actually do go through, at least some of the time.

*Since I first created this post, KDROI changed the list of book promo sites they can submit to, since some have terminated their service, and others are no longer free. So there are no longer 32 sites on the list, though the KDROI's creators have said they are actively looking at new promo site options to include.

If I submit your book through this service, I'll send you a confirmation email to let you know when I've done it. In addition, you will receive confirmation emails from a number of the sites, some of which contain links you'll need to click on to finalize your book submission.


Anyway, that's how KDROI works. Fairly quick and simple for me to use, which is why I can afford to offer book submission services at such a low rate! Any questions? Feel free to mention them in the comments below this post, or email me at AnnieDouglassLima (at) gmail (dot) com.

Final Clarification: 
For $2.99, tell me the next set of dates in which your book will temporarily be free, and I will submit it to all 16 book promotion sites on the list. The sites may or may not all decide to feature the book, but it will be submitted to them.

Or, for $1.99, tell me the next set of dates in which your book will temporarily be 99 cents (if it's permanently 99 cents, that's fine too; just pick some dates when you want it featured) and I will submit it to the 9 sites that accept 99 cent books. They may or may not all decide to feature the book, but it will be submitted to them.

Or, for $1.99, tell me the next set of dates in which you would like your permafree book to be featured, and I will submit it to the 10 sites that accept permafree books. They may or may not all decide to feature the book, but it will be submitted to them.

Another option: instead of paying the fees mentioned above through PayPal, you could buy one of my books instead. :-) Most of the ebooks are $2.99 or less; feel free to pick any one of them at any price (as long as it's not free at the time) and either download it for yourself or "gift" it to a friend. (I emailed Amazon to make sure this doesn't violate their terms of service, and they assured me it's fine.) If you choose this option, simply send me a screenshot that shows what you bought, or forward me the confirmation email from Amazon, and ignore the PayPal link on my form.

Sorry, but I won't submit erotica or books promoting religions other than Christianity. Don't take it personally if that's what you write. We can still be friends! :-) But I can't in good conscience help to promote those books.

So. Are you interested? You could spend nearly $50 and buy the program yourself (you should definitely do that if it's worth it to you), or you could fill out the form below and let me submit your book to those sites for you for about the cost of a cup of coffee.

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