So it’s been about a month since I listed my first eBook in the Kindle store. Although it wasn’t a complete failure, it wasn’t a major success either. Regardless I have learned a lot from publishing my first eBook, and in this blog post, I am going to share with you some of the things that I have learned.  I will also touch on some of the things that I didn’t do quite right, and how I will go about it differently with my next eBook.

I don’t plan on hiring a ghost writer for any of the Unnameable books. I plan on doing all the writing myself on topics that I am interested in or already know something about. This gets into the biggest thing I have learned from my first month of Kindle sales.

• Page Rank is Important

I didn’t quite understand how the page rank system worked when I first listed my book on amazon. I had heard other publishers talk about different things relating to page rank, but initially, I didn’t give it much thought.

My plan when I first listed the book on Amazon was to not enroll it in Kindle Select or any promotion programs until I had more books in the store. I wanted to build up a catalog of ten or so books, then run the promotion and Kindle select on all of the books at the same time. I was thinking that this would give me an extra opportunity to get rid of my books if I had other books on sale at the same time. This was a terrible plan, one that I didn’t follow at all.

I quickly realized it was going to take a longer amount of time than what I previously thought in order to write, edit, and post the books that I wanted to upload to the store. When I first listed the book onto the store I actually made a sale within the first couple days. After sales went stagnate, I decided to just enroll the book in Kindle Select and do a free week giveaway just to see if I could get rid of more copies of the book.

I started moving about 10 copies of the book a day during the time that I was running the free promotion. I got rid of a decent number copies considering I have never done anything like this before, I was fairly happy with the results that I was getting — everything was good.

I since have sold 1 more copy of the book since it was taken off the promotion. My book didn’t get any reviews. It’s been falling in the ranks now so I think is slowly dying. This gets back to the main problem I think I had with this book.

• I shouldn’t have rushed it.

It took less than a week from the initial inception of the idea until I was listing the book on the Amazon store. I’m sure that I missed some spelling mistaking, grammatical errors, and I didn’t take the time to learn how to correctly format an eBook specifically for Kindle.

It is for this reason I believe my book didn’t get any reviews, it was not of the quality that it needed to be for a person to come back and actually leave a positive review.

Besides rushing the book I think that the fact that the audience size for the book is rather small to begin with, so my next book will have to do with something that is slightly less niche.

I have changed the price from the book from 2.99 to .99 as an attempt to see if anyone else would buy it for a lower price, and I have since sold one copy since doing so.

The book will likely remain at .99 until I have some extra time to go back, revise the book, and release an updated edition.

Overall I only made about 5 dollars in my first month of Kindle Publishing. Not to bad considering most other attempts at making any sort of money online have been fruitless for me. I will take what I can get and hope for more to come.

Stay tuned for more site updates as I share my experience with publishing on Amazon.