When writing non-fiction you sometimes have to make a decision whether to revise a title or remove it. Or at least I do.
Case in point, Easy AMS Ads. When I first published that book it was current as of the date of publication but then Amazon made a lot of changes that made the material outdated. They removed an entire ad type, for example. So two years later I updated the book.
It ended up being an almost complete re-write by the time I was done because so much had changed in the two years since I’d published the original. And then within months of my publishing the updated version, Amazon made even more changes. They moved where billing info was located, they opened up additional stores, they changed where keywords were displayed, etc.
Which brings us to today. I had a decision to make with respect to that book (and the rest of the books in the Self-Publishing Essentials series.) I could try to update it again and hope that the pace of change had slowed enough for AMS that the book remained useful for a couple of years.
Or I could unpublish it and step aside from writing on that subject anymore. I’ve chosen to unpublish and step aside. Making money off of selling books about how to use AMS is not my focus as an author.
As of today my dashboard tells me I’ve sold over $113K worth of books using AMS ads, so I absolutely believe in the power of those ads. (That’s retail price, not what I actually was paid, FYI.) But I don’t want to have a product out there that isn’t up to date and I don’t want to have to keep updating that book every six months.
I’ve also unpublished the rest of that series which covered Excel for Self-Publishers, ACX for Beginners, and Print Books for Beginners. Excel for Self-Publishers had also become outdated. (It covered how to see your ad performance for a period of time but the AMS dashboard now lets you do that yourself.) And I haven’t done audio books recently enough to even know whether the ACX book is outdated. Print Books was probably fine, but without the rest of the books it didn’t make sense to continue to publish it.
I don’t expect that I’ll be publishing more books for self-publishers in the future. I’ve never directly had anyone say it to my face but I have most certainly noticed the number of times when authors make snide remarks about authors who publish books on self-publishing to “make a buck off of their fellow authors” especially when those authors don’t think that those publishing the books are successful enough by their standards to do so.
I published my books because self-publishing can be confusing and overwhelming and I saw misunderstandings and miscommunications in those particular areas over and over again. It was easier to put what I knew into a book format than to try to counter all the misinformation one forum post at a time. And because I’d put time and effort into creating those books, I felt I deserved to be paid for that time and effort and so sold those books instead of giving them away.
I hope those of you who bought the books found value in them. And I wish you all luck in the future. And, as always, I’m available via email if someone has a question or gets stuck. (Just have done your homework first or you’re likely to have me point you to one of the writers’ forums with instructions to read up a bit.)
M.L. Humphrey 