Question is, what do I do with it? Everybody and their grandma seems to advise building an email list, but is it really that different from “subscribe to blog via email” ? I mean, would anyone want to get a newsletter from me, considering that I already document every step and event along the way? Not to mention, I can’t even figure out how to add the sign up to my WP theme…
Does anyone have experience building an email list, and if so – was it worth it? And how do I get a signup form into a template?
Sorry for this completely uninformative and uninspiring post. I promise to make it up with the next one!
5 December – second chance for Bargain Booksy. They were nice enough to give me $25 credit for the disappointing YA audience promo, so I’m trying the chicklit audience. Cost – $70 (minus the $25 credit).
5-6 December – applied to Read Cheaply. Not sure if this will work, as they want a limited-time offer and Shizzle, Inc has been on sale for many weeks.
7-8 December – Read Free. Cost: free!
9 December – Free Kindle Books and Tips. Cost – $25.
11 December – Reading Deals. Cost: free!
12 December – BookHearts. Cost – $5.
14 December – eBook Lister. Cost – $25.
15 December – BookSends. Cost – $30.
17 December – Digital Book Today (Deal of the Day). Cost – $30.
Since the picture is worth a thousand words, here are the results at a glance:
And now, my opinions, in hopefully under a thousand words:
Bargain Booksy. Once again, a disappointing 15 copies sold, although there was a big jump in pages read the next day. AMAZINGLY, though – after I’d contacted them again, they’ve refunded BOTH of my purchases. So only a net gain to me, although I kinda have a feeling I may not be welcome to advertise with them again…will try again in a while, when I have a sequel and advertise the first installment for free.
Read Cheaply – I will have to test them again, as it appears I did not make it on the list – can’t find the confirmation email. proof you have to write everything down as it happens!
Read Free – several copies sold! Hey, it was free, so they go onto my “good list”.
Free Kindle Books and Tips – 18 sales on the day and 6 sales the day after. Not terribly impressive at the cost of $25, but I might try them again.
Reading Deals – did not happen as I wanted to add links to other platforms, they’d asked me to reapply, and then did not have a slot. To be tested again.
BookHearts – did not impress me, with 6 sales on the day at a cost of $5. I’m giving them another chance in January, to test if December was a bad month for eBooks.
eBook Lister – I have contacted them to complain that the $25 payment only got me 3 sales. Not sure what happened, good thing I’m writing this update, because the issue slipped under the radar for me. Will update as to their response.
BookSends – 22 sales on the day, but not enough at the cost of $30. Might give them another chance.
Digital Book Today (Deal of the Day) – pathetic 8 copies sold at a cost of $30. has anyone had a good result with them? I had high hopes for this one. I have emailed them and they responded promptly, refunding $15, but claiming that my 40-60 sales per day with eReader News were probably because of other promos I had at the same time. Nope – I’m a researcher, so I know how to control factors (when I remember to do that…).
Here is what’s planned for January (so far, I will update this post as I make further plans, and as usual – will tweet live scores on @spokeana):
9 January – another chance for BookHearts, a subsidiary of Choosy Bookworm. Guaranteed feature, cost (on sale): $5. Not confirmed yet, although the payment has been made – they confirm on Fridays only. UPDATE: only 2 sales, a complete disappointment. After two emails it did turn out that they did not feature me on 9 January after all.
16 January – Choosy Bookworm. Guaranteed feature, cost (on sale): $19. I tried to book it, but once I got to the paypal checkout, it reverted to $25. I’ve emailed them and was advised to “donate” $19, which I did. They confirmed the spot several days later.
18 January – BookHearts listed me in place of the earlier booking. I got only 5 sales.
19 January – I screwed up and did 2 giveaways. I will need to re-run and re-test Buck Books – the link is to their policies, but to apply to advertise you actually need to contact Jennifer directly on jennaputt@gmail.com. Claim to have 42,000 subscribers. Cost – $12. I also did eReader News Today again, at $30. Total sales were 44 on the day, plus about 2,000 pages read in the next few days.
Read Cheaply – TBD.
Reading Deals – TBD.
Read Free – TBD.
31 January – Betty Book Freak. Cost: $12.
2 February – eBook Soda. Cost: $15.
Kindle Nation Daily – sold out! Scheduled on 12 April.
In related news, the above graph makes me wish desperately to return to KU – I miss those pages! I will probably do this by the end of the month, so if you want to get Shizzle, Inc on Kobo, please do that now!
Looking forward to your comments and experiences. If you want to suggest an advertising site I have not yet tried, please do so!
You walk in and hand it to them. Well, not quite that easy, but close. I’m exhausted from jumping up and down over here – Shizzle, Inc is now available at Readings St Kilda (that’s in Melbourne, Australia). How’s this for starting 2016 with a bang:
I always wanted to get my book into a brick-and-mortar bookstore, but did not have a plan on how I was going to get this feat accomplished. My general feeling after reading online articles was that it’s very hard for self-published authors to do so. Perhaps it is, if you expect the bookstore buyers to order books from CreateSpace, but NOT if you are willing to be a supplier yourself, and to sell on consignment (this means you don’t get paid until the book is sold, and the store reserves the right to return the stock to you without payment, if it does not sell).
On Saturday, I was catching up with my sister for a coffee on the famous Acland street in St Kilda, when I’d decided to mix in some business and stop by Readings to enquire about selling books on consignment. I was told to come back on Monday to talk to the store manager, and that they “do it all the time”.
I could hardly wait till Monday, and showed up at the store with trepidation and a paperback in hand. The store manager turned out to be this gorgeous creature called Amy. She not only agreed to take the book (after a brief glance through, probably to check the print quality), she asked for three more copies to “give it some shelf presence”. Needless to say, I was back in a couple of hours with more books, an invoice, and signed agreement. Amy suggested that I should price the book “under $29” (all prices stated are in Australian dollars). I almost fainted and said I was thinking about $19.99 at most, and she seconded that motion. Readings take 40% on top of your “wholesale” price, which I set at $14.27 to get the overall $19.99. It costs me just about $8 per book, depending on the conversion rate, so my profit before tax is just over $6, which makes me happy indeed. Also, I just found out today that Lightning Source now prints B&W books in Victoria, so once I get that sorted, my per-copy price will come down to a mere $5.30!
The same process was a bit more difficult with the buyer for the Readings Carlton, who also happens to be the buyer for Readings in the State Library. He happily agreed to take a copy for review, but warned me that it will take him a week to get back to me. Fingers crossed.
I also have in my sights another Readings and two Dymocks buyers, which together cover about half-dozen stores. I’m not too thrilled to have to keep track of multiple venues, but that hardly marrs the excitement of having my actual, physical book in an actual, physical store, where people may discover it just by browsing.
Of course, I can’t do the same in the US stores, or at least I have not yet come up with a strategy. At this point I’m thinking of contacting a few stores, arranging for 4-5 copies at a time to be printed and sent to them directly (if they agree), and just taking the risk that the books will not sell. In the US, without the international shipping, a book will cost me about $6-7 AUD, so I could take that risk, unless anybody has a genius idea for me?
Would love to hear from any self-published authors with books in the US bookstores, and thank you, everyone, again for such beautiful comments and thanks on my previous post. You have no idea how motivational it is for me to continue going – in fact, it was what got me to punch out 2,000 words yesterday and 2,800 words today! Thank you all so very, very much 🙂
After a 20-hour trip and an 8-hour “nap”, I’m finally home. I was going to finish a draft post about Vietnam, but it’s just not happening. Maybe I’m simply not cut out to be a travel writer. I do have some interesting stuff in the draft, so I will finish it eventually, just not now.
Instead of uploading photos, I’m inspired to reflect on the year that just ended and maybe to daydream a bit about the year that just started. One of my favorite things to do, especially when I’m feeling a bit down, is to think where I was a decade or a year ago, and then project a trend a year or a decade into the future. It’s fun, because the trend is persistently upward, even with a few bumps along the road (if running away from an abusive ex-husband can be called a “bump”, that is). It kinda helps to start from a low base, say being born in a third-world country. Everything seems better and brighter since I’d managed to sneak out from under the Iron Curtain…
So, instead of uploading more photos, I found myself thinking where I was a year ago in the writing/publishing journey, and where I may be at the end of 2016, if everything goes according to the plan. I was actually surprised at the difference – it helps to look up from the grinding stone every now and then and get some perspective.
In terms of writing, at this time last year all I had was a final draft of Shizzle, Inc – with just one structural edit, done mostly out of desperation for someone to tell me it’s not a complete waste of time. Today, I am 20K words into a sequel, and at the end of the next year I plan to have two sequels polished and published.
In terms of publishing, last year I was persistently, some may even say obsessively, sending out query letters in hopes of getting a traditional publishing contract and then methodically crossing out those that bothered to send me a rejection letter. I gave up on that in May last year and have since self-published Shizzle, Inc in paperback and e-format. I take it for granted now, but a year ago I did not know anything about the self-publishing option. Over this coming year, I hope to create so much buzz for my three books that agents will be fighting over me. In fact, I will not deviate from the self-publishing route unless I’m offered enough to quit or put on hold my regular job. Can it be done in a year? There’s only one way to find out!
What about social media? Twelve months ago I already had a year-old Twitter account, which I’d started without any plan. I was happy to just post jokes and loved the fact that my three thousand or so followers retweeted them. Today I am much more strategic, and (after lots and lots of daily grind) have 36,000 followers on Twitter. Hey, quite a few of them have actually bought my book! My spreadsheet tells me that I will have over 100,000 followers by next Christmas, and my spreadsheets never lie.
And those are very active followers, too! I couldn’t post a graph for the entire year, but here are the last 3 months of “impressions” – crazy numbers! The light gray columns at the bottom are the number of tweets – you can see that as I fell off the radar in December, so did my stats.
Not only that, the blog stats say that 1,710 visits to this blog last year came from Twitter, so it has helped me grow the blog following as well.
Speaking of the blog, it is bursting with activity now, but would you believe that it was dead in the water last year?
Almost 30K views! That’s more than 3000% increase in visitation in just one year! It was a lot of work – as you may know, I post at least 2-3 times a week, answer all comments, comment on other people’s blogs, etc. I don’t think I could (and frankly, shouldn’t) invest more time next year, but let’s just see what happens :-).
Ah, but what about sales? And reviews? Well, of course, a year ago there were no sales, as the dream of publishing seemed to be out of reach. Again, I can only post the last 90 days of sales, which are all over the place due to the various promotions I’d run:
I’ve learned a lot about sales and promotions, and I hope you have too, if you’ve been following my testing of promo sites, complete with posting live stats on Twitter. I have even bigger plans for the next year, as my first 50 paperbacks have arrived from the US, and I plan to take them to stores and radio stations in hopes of getting some exposure. I’ve tried emailing those same stores and radio stations, to no avail, so it’s time to just show up and win them over in person.
I hope you stick with me, and I would also like to pass a message to the free cover contest participants that currently have only few votes – get to work! Writing a great blurb (or a great book) is only half of the job. Unfortunately, you have to market your work, so that people find out that it exists, and hopefully like and buy it. View this contest as a practice in both aspects of self publishing: first you had to write the best possible blurb, now you have to get as many people as you can to vote for you. Use this as an “excuse” to grow your social media, to try every possible marketing gimmick to get people to vote for you. Your reward will be a free design and a confidence that you will be able to do the same when it comes to marketing the actual book.
Ok, that was it for the “Deep Thoughts with Ana Spoke”. Thank you all for my best year yet, and look forward to sharing 2016 with you!
Just a quick post to announce that the contest to win a free cover design has now closed – I have received nine submissions. Please review them carefully below or on the original post and cast your vote (it’s the same polldaddy poll on both pages):
Only one vote per person/computer is allowed. Voting will close on 24 January.
Life at the tail end of the 24th cee is fairly righteous. The advent of Stringtech mere centuries ago revolutionized the world. Hunger and disease are concepts of the past. Free energy is here for the taking of it and mankind enjoys an unprecedented period of largess, peace and growth.
While on vacation in 1927, Hollywood screenwriter Chet Koski and his wife Eveleen, both amateur sleuths, antagonize a divided small town, unravel a kidnapping, discover a timber scandal, and Chet fears his cousin may be a killer. These things happen when finding a head on a grave.
When fourteen-year-old Allen Foster is diagnosed with parasomnia, a sleep disorder evoking vivid nightmares, he begins journaling each haunting dream on the advice of his psychiatrist, keeping the notebook safely hidden in a floorboard — that is until a new family moves into the Maine house. When Rita, the daughter of the new owners, discovers the book and begins experiencing Allen’s old nightmares, she tracks him down in an effort to rid herself of the misery, only to find he has no memory of writing them.
An age old tradition. A few offline cameras. Shadows in the alley.
Lance works in a busy city, watching out for disturbances and things out of the ordinary. He has no idea just out strange things have gotten until he looks into a missing child case and discovers dark secrets in the shadows. Inhuman creatures seem to appear out of nowhere and are devouring the city. And the only way to stop them…is a tradition no one believes in anymore.
It knows your darkest thoughts, your deepest secrets, and your hidden desires. All you need to do; put the puzzle together. Richard and Vivian Cordova discover the puzzle when they move into their newly bought home. One thousand pieces wedge their way between the newlyweds putting their vows and their lives to the test.
Diana, a lonely and neglected, middle age, wife and mother decides to end her loveless marriage of thirty years. On her own for the first time in decades, she struggles to adjust to her new single life, dating and overcoming a devastating diagnosis of mental illness. Can she learn to love herself so she will be ready to find love with the right man or will she continue to get the thrills her illness demands by engaging in increasingly risky behavior? Will she get the help she needs to live a more fulfilling life before her mental illness wins and she decides to commits suicide?
7. The Hiding Place – By J.K.Tevis
The bugs were unmerciful in their quest for food. The ants were the most vicious. Her hiding place was their home and she was an intruder. The dried blood on her feet seemed to have driven them into a feeding frenzy making it look as though she wore a pair of black boots. Even though the earth under her was cool the sun had turned the fallen stones over her into an oven. As she drifted in and out of consciousness she kept remembering her mother’s last words…. “RUN,THEY’RE HERE !”
Joyel is a weapon, a genetically engineered ten year old. When the ruthless faction leader Anson kidnaps Joyel she must fight to save her soul. Anson spends ten years brainwashing her, demanding that she view him as father, embrace a new identity as Joy, and to kill for him. But Joy is determined to be subject to no man.
Cutting is how Joy copes with the years of abuse, etching her hatred of Anson into her skin until the time to mete out revenge has come. Despite her rage, now twenty-year-old Joy struggles to strike out against the man she calls father. Discovering Anson’s plans to restart the genetic program she was spawned from in order to raise an army forces Joy to act. To no longer be a pawn, she must kill Anson and destroy the monster she has become. If she doesn’t, she will never be free.
CHRYSALIS asks which is more important: to know who you are, or to whom you belong?
For Ember Rehksskari, a hated dragon and last princess of a fallen kingdom, there are two kinds of place in the world: those where the people will try to kill her, and those where they’ll try harder. Yet, fleeing from the second to the first, she may just find a third.
The kingdom of Salshira has no interest in hosting a dragon, any dragon, especially not one pursued by the Vohrskrain, but Ean Tavarin, crown prince and engineer extraordinaire, has a plan to make a home for this one…if he can deal with a best friend who wants all dragons dead, a father looking out for the rest of the kingdom, and a romantic interest he didn’t know he had.
It really shouldn’t be this hard to make one damsel safe!
But if Emperor Vohrskrain has anything to say, none of them will be until Ember is dead.
This one popped up on Goodreads – thank god it’s not on Amazon, which would potentially mean fewer sales…I’m feeling pretty philosophical about it – I guess you can’t expect everyone to love a book, any book, it’s a matter of personal preference. Wish I could make sense of it, though – the main complaint from someone who loves screwball comedy seems to be that it’s “improbable” and has “too many screwballs”. The most disappointing thing is actually that I can’t use this particular critique to improve my writing. Anywho, I’m off to enjoy life 🙂
Have you noticed a new button on my sidebar? Right there, at the top? Click on it, or enter here for your chance to win a free paperback copy of my book! I’m only announcing this giveaway now because there have been too many other exciting going-ons, what with a bestselling author stopping by, and Shizzle, Inc being available on every platform imaginable…
The giveaway has been live for less than 15 hours at the time of this writing, and already 131 people have requested it!
Wait, it’s now 135! Blink, and it’s 137! And over 80 of them have added it to their “to read” shelf! How exciting!
Truth is, I’ve been excited about this giveaway for months, after reading various author’s testimonials on how effective they are to promote new books. So I can’t believe that I’ve posted it without doing all that much research or even reading the giveaway guidelines. (I know! So out of character!)
Better later than never, so I’ve done some research now and have learned this:
There are claims that it doesn’t matter how many books you give away, you would get the same result with 1 or 10. I’m going to experiment with this – already got a spreadsheet going…
Supposedly it is better to give away autographed books, rather than just free copies, even if you’re a nobody. This will be tested in future experiments. For now I have just done copies, which I will order and ship directly from Smashwords – doesn’t make sense to ship them from US to Australia and then back…
Open giveaways to all countries. For now I’ve just done US, GB, and Canada – as it will be cheaper and easier to just order a book and have it shipped to the winner directly. Next one will be open to all, I promise!
You may be able to create a special image for the giveaway. I don’t know how to upload it, from memory (which is not very good), it automatically takes the image of your paperback cover. But I will try next time.
Schedule them ahead of time! It takes several days for Goodreads to review and approve your ad.
Make your ad exciting – add quotes, awards, whatever. Add a link to a newsletter sign up, your website, etc. Market all the ways you can hook them up on your blog, series, whatever.
Best one! Schedule the giveaway BEFORE the paperback release! Create the buzz for the launch day! I will schedule the next one as soon as I have the first draft and cover ready.
Longer is better – mine will be for just over three weeks, but you could do it for three months, or even longer – there will be bigger numbers of people requesting, which will make your book look very appealing indeed. I’ve looked at the “top requested” giveaways, and they all run for three months or so.
You can only do it in the six months after the paperback release…I only saw it on a blog, and can’t find any reference to this rule on Goodreads. In fact, Goodreads state that you can give away “new copies of an older book”, whatever that means.
If you have any other tried and true (and recent!) advice – please share! I’m gonna go check the stats…oh, look, 141 requests!
Shizzle, Inc has been enrolled in Kindle Select almost since the day it was published on 4 September. My 90-day commitment is up and I have not renewed, thinking that I’m no longer interested in Countdown Deals or Free Days, since Shizzle, Inc is now pretty much permanently at $0.99.
I immediately published with a variety with other platforms – Shizzle, Inc is now available on:
I was so excited! Yet another sales graph to obsess over…too bad (thank God!) it’s just one more – on Smashwords. Oh, and look, five people have downloaded free 20% samples! Oh, and look, I can set up coupons, which will let me do sales or giveaways!
Awesome, right?
That’s what I thought until I’d noticed that there was no longer a “get it free with Kindle Unlimited” button under the title. After some Googling and face-palming, I realized what I seriously should have known by now – that Kindle Unlimited is the main bait to keep authors exclusively with Amazon Kindle, not the promo options.
If you’d asked me what I thought about KU and KENP a month ago, I would have probably said “eh”. However, thanks to the recent promo blasts, the KENP graph (below) looks like the world’s awesomest mountain chain. In fact, I’ve made about $22 in the last couple of weeks just from people reading their “free” copies:
That’s equivalent to about 63 copies sold for $0.99! And at the very least 18 copies read (assuming about 240 pages per copy – I never get the “normalized” part of KENP). I don’t (yet) care about the royalties – I want as many copies sold as possible, so I would need to sell about 2 copies per day from other sources…wait, that’s not so bad, right? So, was it a good idea to part with KU?
After a bit more over-analyzing and face-palming, I’d calmed down and decided to give the other platforms a go – maybe a month? Maybe two? Advertise and see what kind of numbers I get, do some more calculations, then regroup and decide if I go back to Kindle Select.
So if you hate Amazon, but are interested in finding out what it might be like to work for the seventh richest man in the Southeastern United States – get Shizzle, Inc now from any of the sources above! I’m prone to changing my mind…
Thanks again for all your warm wishes this week, when I’ve posted my big news – that a paperback version of Shizzle, Inc is finally available on Amazon.
I have mentioned in that post how happy I was with its quality, and a few of you have asked for the photos of the actual book. I’m not a great photographer, so this is the best I can do:
This is only one variation of the finishes you can have – glossy cover (you can choose matte) with cream pages (you can choose white). I don’t have another version to compare, but I’ve found another blog which compares glossy and matte covers.
It feels great – solid, well-made, the same quality you would expect from any bookstore. I really like the paper – it feels great to flip a page or to hold it open, and I’m once again happy with my layout. I was worried that the margins are too small, but it looks fine, again sort of industry-standard.
I’ve ordered 50 copies to gift to my family and to start pushing onto the local bookstores. It will take a month to get here, and yet the shipping cost is still more than $100! My next step is to try and get it into US brick-an-mortar bookstores, if anyone has any advice on how to do that via emails, please let me know!
You would not believe it, but after many an eye roll, back-an-forth negotiations, and general pouting, management approved my long service leave! Five months! Yay! (At half pay…Okay…I can deal with that…).
Five months to write and publish two sequels to Shizzle, Inc. Five months to give this writing career one hell of a try. Can I do it?
Only Microsoft Project can tell! Well, based on the following assumptions:
That I can write 20K words per week (not all of the time will be spent writing).
That I will have 40K words written by Feb.
That I will have the first cover designed by 29 Feb.
That I will do proofreading myself (and rely on “early readers” to suggest structural changes). This way I hope to reduce costs, compared to the fortune I’ve spent on Shizzle, Inc.
I tried staggering writing of both sequels, to allow for other (many!) tasks. This is what I came up with:
Book #2:
Book #3:
Microsoft project says I can do it!
Let me know what you think of my assumptions and timelines 🙂
Ana Spoke, author 