[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JeffOYB

So Amazon adds a tag when you used Fixed Layout but not for Reflowable?

Well...think of it this way: do you see the "reflowable" tag, all over Amazon, as that's how 99.99% of all eBooks are? No, it's the default, so it's assumed.

If they add a tag for one but not the other I can make my title deal w that: "TITLE -- Reflowable Edition."

Sure, you can try it. {shrug}. BTW, I find that the average person has absolutely ZERO idea what "reflowable" means. FWIW.

About selling on your own site...I'm confused. Everyone sells their stuff on their own site and on every other site they can, right? Obviously I wouldn't limit my selling to my site but I have all my books for sale on my site and ... everywhere else I can. Works. No reason to say no to any sales. Ppl buy from all sorts of places. Listings aren't exclusive. (Unless you sign away rights.)

Did you read the last section that I mentioned, in the linked article? Or did you not bother to read it? I'm pretty sure that if you had, you wouldn't be confused about what I was saying. (BTW, no...not "everybody" sells their own stuff on their own websites and every other website in the known universe. In terms of authors, 99.99% of them simply have LINKS to their own books on retail sites; they do not sell the books from their own websites. Most have zero desire to handle fulfilment.)

If your demographic is very tecchie, and you don't give two hoots about DRM, great. Knock yourself out.

If your demographic is not tecchie, (and you might be surprised) unless you're prepared to provide unpaid tech support, I think you'll find that selling from your own site is a whole other kettle of fish. (Why on earth does everyone think that's soooo easy? Sure, sell a PDF. Any moron can download a PDF. However, 99% of all eBook buyers get those files automagically delivered to their devices. Amazon magically delivers the mobis to their Kindles; B&N does the same for Nook, etc. They, the buyer, don't "download" them. They don't "sideload" them. They don't have to know how to find their own download folders or know how to download from a browser. You think everyone knows how to do that? You're in for a shock.)

The single biggest shock, to me, in my own business was finding out just how incredibly tech-illiterate people are. (My business formats print and eBooks for publishers.) I always knew that paying my bookmakers would be the single largest expense, in my line of work--what I did not anticipate is that unpaid tech support would be the second-largest, and I mean large when I say that. About 30K per year, in unpaid tech support, is what it costs me in real money. If you had asked me, before I started this biz in '09-10, "can the average person download from a browser," I'd have said yes. Or that the average person could figure out how to side-load to a device. Or understood that to open a specific computer file, they had to have a matching program.

Trust me, the normal person actually knows NONE OF THOSE THINGS.

What I said, in the article to which I'd linked you, was that of all the clients (out of 4,000+) of ours that decided that they were going to sell ebooks from their own website, (law firms, doctor's offices, other businesses amongst them), not one, NOT ONE, continued to do so after a few months. All of them, every single one, gave it up because of the brain-damage and personnel costs of tech support. People calling to complain that they couldn't get the ebooks on their devices, people calling because they couldn't find the downloads, people calling because, because, because. The ones that didn't have a phone number got email after email complaining about the same things.

Look, it's certainly no skin off my nose. I don't care, one way or the other, if you sell your book from your own website. It's your book and your time. I was simply trying to alert you to something that the average, reasonably-tecchie person never thinks about--just how technologically illiterate the normal person IS. This is something that I deal with every single day. If you've got an assistant or a support person that can handle all this for you, that's great, but I waste spend at least an hour a day, every single day, and sometimes quite a bit more, doing nothing but walking people through very, very fundamental things like downloading, saving files, etc. (Oh, yeah--another fave--finding out that people have NO IDEA what a file extension is or means, so they constantly corrupt their files when downloading by saving sans the extension.)

Hitch