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A short while ago, I ran a post on Amazon Advantage — describing how you can set up a distribution-style arrangement with the online sales giant. And I’ve recently updated the information on this site being offered in regards to the Amazon Affiliate program. In the interest of maximizing your effectiveness on Amazon, there’s one more program that you should be aware of: Amazon Seller Central.
Through Seller Central, you can offer your self-published items for sale on Amazon, but unlike Advantage, you package and ship the merchandise when it’s sold.
Here’s a quick step-by-step tutorial on using Seller Central — and a simple strategy I use to try to get the most out of selling on Amazon.
The Seller Central Interface is very easy to manage. To add a product to your inventory, you can either choose from an item that has already been listed or you can create a new product.
If this is a self-published book, then you’ll probably be creating a new product.
As you can see, you’ll be entering a lot of information — including images — to help classify and search-enable your merchandise. You’ll also be able to enter in your own retail price.
Remember, in your description, you can offer extras that others who may offer your book (distributors, retail chains, etc.) can’t touch — such as copies of the book signed by the author (you).
And if you’re the only one who is carrying your book, it’s a good way to get your merchandise listed on Amazon. However, items listed through Seller Central are presented on Amazon’s Web site with a few slight differences.
This is the Amazon page for Evil Inc Annual Report Vol. 5. I released it through Amazon Seller Central.
Here’s the page for Evil Inc Annual Report Vol. 2. It was distributed by Diamond Books, and as a result, it was an official listing on Amazon.com.
There are some key differences. The official page offers One-click ordering and shipping/pricing through Amazon Prime. The Seller Central listing cannot offer either. That’s going to have an effect on sales. Speaking of which, only the official listing has this…
…and that’s going to affect sales as well. Note: All of the Evil Inc books that appear in that “Also Viewed” listing are books that are distributed by Diamond.
Whether you use Seller Central or Amazon Advantage, signing up for the Affiliate Program is a wise move. Remember, you get a percentage of the sale of anything a user buys when they arrive to Amazon through one of your Affiliate links. So, needless to say, any time I link to my merchandise, I use an Affiliate link. That way, I get a little extra reward if the user buys one of my books. And if they buy someone else’s merchandise instead, I still get a small kick-back on the sale.
It’s the best daily briefing in webcomics. If you’ve ever been curious about subscribing to Webcomics.com, this post is for you.
Here’s a wrap-up that highlights some of the best posts from last month.
Decreased ad revenue may change webcomics business model: The rise of ad blockers has had a pronounced effect on the bottom lines of many webcartoonists. Our business model is going to have to adapt — or fade away. We provided some suggestions on what those changes might look like.
Replacing blocked ads with house ads: After weeks of development, we release a simple code that will sense when ad blockers are active on your site and then replace the blocked ads with house ads you can use to promote your own projects and merchandise.
Social Media: “I don’t know what to say”: What to say on social media when you have nothing to say.
Greeting Card Hot Seat: We launched a new critique series for folks getting their holiday-card merchandise prepped for the season.
Webcomics.com Poll — Buffers: We found out that carrying a large buffer is somewhat rare among our members. Is this necessarily a bad thing, though?
Potential WordPress login exploit: We made you aware of one way that hackers were using to break into WordPress sites — and told you how to avoid it.
Square files for IPO: We alerted you that credit-card-transaction-provider Square had filed for an IPO… and explained why the notion should fill you with dread.
TransPacific Partnership: After a round of panic in the webcomics community, we took a closer look at the working of the TPP to find out if that panic was warranted.
Getting listed on Apple’s new News app: Apple has a new News app — an aggregator for iPhones. Here’s you to get your webcomic listed.
Patreon’s new apps: We alerted you to Patreon’s new apps — for iOS and Android — the moment they were available for download.
Setting Patreon links to expire: Many of us link to exclusive Patreon content on Dropbox (for the convenience of our users). Of course that opens the door to pirating. This simple method will help mitigate that risk. These links expire after thirty days.
Holiday shipping and merchandise primer: Getting ready for the holiday-shopping season.
If you’re curious about joining, we’ve made it easier than ever with a $5 trial membership. You’ll get full access to the site for thirty days so you can see what you’ve been missing. At the end of the trial, you can choose to re-subscribe ($30 for 12 months of access) or walk away with no strings attached. You will not be re-billed unless you choose to subscribe.
Please note: The links below will lead you to content that is “subscription-only” content. Why do I do this? Simple. If you see something that intrigues you and decide to subscribe, you can come back here and use this post to jump right to the post that caught your attention. And once you do that, use the other Best Of posts to drill even deeper into the site!
I created a worksheet / study guide for my Arts Entrepreneurship class at Hussian College, and I thought it might be helpful to post it here, as well. It talks about the simple math behind correctly determining the best price for your merchandise.
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As we’re slide in to the end of 2015, it’s time to start adjusting our budgets for the coming new year. For starters, it sounds like we’d better plan to spend more on shipping. That’s going to have an effect on the final price you charge your customers for merchandise, it’s going to affect your profits if you sell merchandise through a distributor, and it’s going to increase the cost of having that merchandise produced. Here’s a look at what’s in store from the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx and UPS:
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It’s time to get started on (*choke*) the penultimate month of 2015.
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You don’t need a subscription to read today’s post!
This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.
If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire. For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.
When webcomics started out, longform creators felt like the ugly ducklings in the crowd. Many of them expressed the same complaint when I’d talk to them. They just didn’t feel as if the Web was the right place to present their work to its full strength. However, I think the Web— and its users — have both improved and matured to a point that longform comics not only can survive — but thrive — on new platforms (such as eComics).
But it kills me — kills me — when I see longform-comics creators continually trying to present their work in the “traditional” webcomic set-up that was heavily geared towards strips and other short-form comic. It’s a classic square peg scenario.
I think longform comics are on the cusp of a real revolution, and the artists who are going to best position themselves to take advantage of this will be the ones who will adapt their publishing approach to a new way of thinking.
Here are a few thoughts on where I think that new way of thinking should go.
Pages are the units of a book. Updates are the units of a Web site. The two are not interchangeable.
If you’re posting the pages of your book on the Web, I think you may be making a mistake (unless you’re planning those pages very carefully).
Your Web site itself (and the reading experience on a Web site) is not conducive to book-reading. And if you want your Web site to flourish, you’re going to have to create the best-possible reading experience on that site — not a book-reading experience that you shoe-horn into a Web site.
Make sense.
UPDATE = HALF-PAGE
Now there are a lot of ways to do this. I’m particularly fond of Scott Kurtz’s approach at Table Titans, and I strongly urge you to give it some thought. Every update is a half-page of the book he will later release. And every update has a significant element to it — a punchline, a plot hook, a cliff-hanger, etc. He writes the comic with the site/book polarity in mind. He knows that every update has to be important for the site, and he knows exactly how those updates fit into the overall book (top of page, end of right-hand page, etc.).
And this guides his writing. If he needs another update to make a two-page spread work right in the book, for example, he’ll do that. And he’ll make sure it’s significant for the site — at the same time that it fits into the storytelling of the book.
Challenging? Absolutely.
Impossible? Absolutely not. It’s just a new way of thinking about storytelling.
SLIDING SCALE UPDATE
Here’s another option: You simply release your graphic novel in significant updates. And if that means releasing two panels today and a page-and-a-half on the next scheduled update day, then that’s what it means.
This approach takes less planning in the writing stage — and allows you to keep the storytelling in the book “pure.” But it’s going to put you in a tight spot sooner or later as you run out of finished, significant updates to post.
FILLERS, SKETCHES, GUEST ART, ETC.
This is poison to the Web-reading experience. You fool yourself into believing that you had a post up for your readers that day — and, to an extend you kinda do. But that crap lives forever in your archive, taking readers out of the spell that you’re trying to weave as a storyteller.
Please don’t settle for this in leiu of doing a little planning and time management. You’re hurting yourself.
I think a longform-comic creator should give seriosus consideration to instituting a landing page as the main page of their site. I go into this subject in greater detail here.
The Frequent/Consistent/Significant rule will always apply to a comic on the Web. There are no special dispensations for longform comics. Every update has to be updated as frequently as it possibly can be, while maintaining consistency (of quality and schedule) and significance of each, individual update.
That’s another challenge — to the writing for sure — and to the comics-creation process overall.
But here’s where I think the payoff is…
Digital tablets are so widespread as to make them almost an assumed possession among our readers.
And it’s so freaking easy to sell digital downloads — either independently, through sites like SendOwl and Gumroad, or through online distributors such as ComiXology and DriveThruComics — that you literally don’t have an excuse to avoid it any longer.
A longform-comic Web site, therefore, should be set up in such a way that readers (even new ones) instantly understand the following:
That’s the user experience you have to set up — in the first screen view of your site.
Again, that’s going to take some planning — and some excellent time-management skills. But I think there’s a way that longform creators can make this work.
What I see as a possibility is a publishing cycle that (a) identifies the time-constraint placed on the callenges I laid out above, and actually (b) builds in the extra time needed to make this happen. Here’s the cycle:
PLANNING
The book is planned, plotted, and outlined. You know where the story is going conceptually, but more importantly, you know how many updates you have (and, on the other side of the coin, how many pages you’ll have for your impending book/digital download). You don’t have to have every last word written, and there’s a little room for wiggle, but you have a strong outline against which you can plan your approach.
And since you have a plan, you can now determine:
LAUNCH
Once you’re ready, you now launch your longform comic. You make an announcement. You hit inbound social media* as hard as you can. You send preview comics and press-releases out to sites that cover comics news. And you have reader-grabbing updates in place to… well… grab those readers your driving to your site.
* Your Twitter feed, your Facebook page, etc… all sending traffic “inbound” to your Web site.
PUBLISHING
This looks more like “traditional” webcomics publishing. You have ads on the site to generate income. You’re facilitating social-media evangelists through outbound social-media buttons (ones that allow users to share your work with their friends). You’re facilitating comments and other Community Building aspects of webcomics. You’re running a webcomic, except…
PUSH THE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
…where a traditional webcomic would encourage readers to dive through the archives, you’re making sure they know they can read previous chapters (or even previous books, issues or volumes) by purchasing digital downloads. These links are prominent, and your “message” on the site, social media, etc. reinforces this fact.
CONSIDER THE PRE-RELEASE
Of course, if you’re updating on the fly, you’re getting updates finished just in time for publication on your Web site. But if you’ve planned ahead, you can offer interested readers the entire chapter (or book) as a digital download — which includes the stuff that’s already appeared on the site as well as the rest of the content they haven’t seen online, all the way to the end of the chapter/book/etc.
THE FINALE
At the grand finale, we have the completed piece (chapter/book/etc.) available as a digital download. If a printed version of the comic is in your plans, this is when you launch the Kickstarter. You have a product in hand, a dedicated reader base, and a clear path to your product. These are all important ingredients to a successful crowd-sourcing campaign.
DORMANCY
And now you go dormant. Well, not completely dormant, but the activity on your site slows down. You convert it from an active webcomic to a storefront for your digital download(s). Make sure there’s a message explaining when the next live content will begin appearing on the site. And you can even post teasers for the next round with sketches, etc — as long as they’re not included in your comic’s archive.
During the “dormancy” period, you go back to “PLANNING” and start the entire process over again.
You won’t be getting as much ad revenue, but as you’re doing the planning, you should also be focused on selling that chapter/book that you’ve created, and that’s going to be the revenue stream that sustains you during “dormancy.” You’ll be pushing the content out through all of the channels you can, too — ComiXology, DriveThruComics, apps, etc. And, of course, the Kickstarter money for the book — and the subsequent sales of that book. All of this is your revenue during “dormancy.”
Then you do the whole thing over again.
Now, obviously, there is a wide range of longform comics, and this probably won’t apply to some. However, I think there are elements there that could apply to all of them. And there are creative people who will take that framework and run with it.
But that’s my thoughts on running a longform comic on the Web. What are yours?
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It’s hard to believe it, but we’re sliding right into the holiday-shipping season again. For some of us, that means positioning our merchandise as gift ideas and shipping according to holiday deadlines.
Here’s a quick primer to get you off on the right foot.
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Here’s a handy pro tip for people running Patreon campaigns. If you’re like many of us, you love Patreon, but many aspects of navigating the Creator Feed are… lacking. And you want better for your backers. So — once their payments have processed — you send out a link to a Dropbox folder so your backers can access the exclusive content outside of Patreon’s clunky interface.
Of course, once that link is out there, anyone could use it to access that content. And that’s a little troubling.
This pro tip is for you.
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Patreon has released new apps — for iOS and for Android — and it has features for both creators and backers. Here’s a quick primer.
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