Tag Archives: novel

by | November 19, 2015 · 4:12 pm

No, thank you, I will do my own marketing research

Why is book marketing so hard? There are many reasons why – too many books being published, authors giving away books for free, social media noise, you name it. I won’t go into all of them, but I do want to dissect one:

Bad advice.

Again, this could be interpreted in a variety ways – and I would not claim to know what is good and what is bad. Things that have worked for someone with a romance novel may not work for an author of horror. Things change all the time, so for example it’s known fact now that if you give your book away for free and climb to the top of Top 100 Free Bestseller list on Amazon, once you switch to Paid, your rankings will fall dismally, because you have sold exactly zero paid copies during your free promotion days. Oh, you didn’t know that? Well, this post has been a winner already!

There’s lots of other advice I find questionable, such as:

  1. “Just write a good book and it will find an audience.” When? When I’m dead?
  2. “Set your price high and don’t budge.” I did that. Readers did not budge, either.
  3. “Grow your social media presence.” I did that, too – 30K + followers resulted in just a handful of sales.

So far I’ve been able to prove that one sure way to increase exposure is with paid marketing. I hope to test the theory that writing a series is a way to success very soon. Meanwhile, I would advise everyone to do their own research. Test me on my assumptions – please! And certainly, check that if you are taking advice from someone else, that they know what they are doing.

This brings me to the controversial part of this particular post. I have been following a number of author blogs, and was especially impressed by an author who has published a number of fiction books as well as a number of self-help books on the writing business. I was about to buy one, on how to market your book, when I’d decided to have a look at how the fiction books by the same author were performing, specifically the overall Amazon rankings. The answer?

150K-plus to 7-million-plus.

I was in shock. This author wrote not one, but several series of fiction books, with awesome flashy covers, lots of reviews, you name it. I would imagine a book ranking at 7 million on Amazon has not sold a copy in what, months? Years? How could someone with such dismal fiction sales record sell a book on book marketing? Oh, and what was the ranking of the marketing book?

Top 100 in it’s category.

I’m not going to reveal who it was, as I’m afraid to get eaten alive, so let me just leave you with this message: once again, do your own research, find your own way, and if some bad advice is not working for you, be brave and throw it away.

 

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by | November 18, 2015 · 3:11 am

You’re on your own. Sorry.

Let me start yet another controversy by saying:

Winning a writing competition or landing a traditional publisher is not a guarantee of author success.

Ok, ok, stop shooting! I know, those were my goals not long ago, and they are traditionally equated to striking gold and really “making it” as an author. And yes, winning a Pulitzer, perhaps, can make a difference. Or, you know, landing a million-dollar deal which gets you a ton of publicity. However, I now know the simple fact that publishers would invest very little into promoting your book, unless you are Stephen King.

Before we get into the argy-bargy of traditional vs self-publishing, let me illustrate my point with some evidence.

Exhibit A: Pitch Week

I just found out about this competition and I was actually going to write this post about it and encourage everyone to apply. Then I’d decided to check the current sales ratings of past winners. See for yourself:

Death by Roses by Vivian Probst is currently hovering around one million overall ranking on Amazon.

Stony Kill by Marie White Small is around 300,000 with the best category ranking at 13,000-plus.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar: A Memoir by Lisa Smith is getting published in another six months.

The winner announced in July of this year is yet to be published.

“But this is probably some small potatoes award,” I hear you say. “Surely, something like Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award means publicity and big bucks?” Lemme check…

Exhibit B: Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award

Remember, winners of this award got a traditional publishing contract and a hefty advance, plus ongoing publicity through the Amazon listing of past winners. This was a HUGE competition, even though it has now been discontinued. So how did the winners fare? Yeah, ok, some of them became bestsellers, but lets examine the less fortunate ones:

Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda – current rank #173,062 Paid in Kindle Store. Worse than my self-published debut.

Catcher, Caught by Sarah Collins Honenberger   current rank #233,775 Paid in Kindle Store. Much worse than mine.

Stalina by Emily Rubin  – current rank #245,024 Paid in Kindle Store. Ditto.

Fresh Kills (Berkley Prime Crime Mysteries) by Bill Loehfelm current rank #1,058,230 Paid in Kindle Store. Whaaat???

Fully Involved: A Firefighter Story by Jackson Harris current rank  #1,144,996 Paid in Kindle Store. OH. MY. GOD!

I didn’t have the strength to continue. Have a look for yourself at the long list of Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award past winners. But before you go and start slashing your wrists, let me say this:

You can be a successful author.

I truly believe in the above statement, qualified by “if you are willing to work hard enough for long enough.” In a way, I felt liberated by my findings – they made me realize what I already knew – there’s no point in hoping to win an “author lottery” and spend years chasing a traditional publishing contract. I’d spent a year sending query letters to over 70 publishers and agents, and the best response I got was “it’s funny, but we don’t know if there’s a market for it.”

So don’t give your power away by believing that someone else has to judge your book worthy. Do your own research. Become a better writer. Become your own publisher, marketing guru, PR rep, and cheerleader. You are the best suited person to mange your business. Yeah, that’s right, I said it – treat it as your business, work on it, invest in it, and grow it.

Like, now would be a good time!

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by | November 15, 2015 · 3:31 am

Another (designer) bites the dust…

Oh, the angst of book cover design! I have previously posted several times about my first experience with a designer, such as I need your help! and When does it pay to pay a pro? After a couple of attempts, we’d parted amicably and I then proceeded to design the cover myself, blogging about the continued angst in Do you prefer the apple or the orange? and The never-ending cover story. The final result is now on Amazon Kindle. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback on it, including from The Book Designer’s ebook cover awards!

Then, for whatever reason, when the time came to turn the ebook cover into a paperbook cover, I lost my cool. I decided to pay someone to make it better. What kind of pills do doctors prescribe for perfectionism combined with self-doubt?

Anywho, I’d contacted several designers and asked them to turn the existing design into a wrap. They all promptly turned me down, as they would prefer to do one from scratch and ram their ideas down my throat, but then one agreed. I was so excited! I thought it would be easy, too – I had the exact idea in mind, just wanted someone with excellent Photoshop skills, experience, and a keep eye to polish it.

The designer had one go and sent me a jpeg to review. I very politely explained that I wanted the rip to look realistic and that I wanted some kind of a cool treatment to the title. The designer had another go, slapping a stock-standard title font on and making a complete mess of my photo and bio. She finished the email with “let me know if this is good to go”.

I again politely explained that no, it wasn’t “good to go” and made a dot point list of what I wanted changed, attached photos of examples, and even a link to creating a realistic paper rip.

I got back an invoice with a link to download the final file upon payment. I replied that I was not going to pay, unless I had a look at what I was getting. I got a jpeg. Still a mess.

There were a couple more emails back and forth, rapidly decreasing in politeness, and I think we have now parted ways, albeit not so amicably. I have not paid, so I won’t reveal the designer’s name (unless we continue to battle over this). Instead of battling, I did the wrap myself today, in about three hours. Turns out, CreateSpace have a template creator which automatically makes a pdf with exact dimensions for you. Then it’s a matter of dropping in your existing cover layers, extending the background, and adding the blurb and bio. I’ve even bought a new paper rip photo from Shutterstock. What do you think?

Shizzle, Inc paperback cover 14 November

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by | November 13, 2015 · 3:29 am

Don’t hate me cause I’m marketing!

My previous post on pricing a first self-published book at $0.99 generated quite a discussion! Once again it shows just how many opinions are out there – some support my strategy, other authors are unhappy with having to give the work away practically for free. My personal view is “this is just what it is” – a free market, where prices are set by the laws of supply and demand. I do think my 2.5 years of hard work are worth more than $0.99, but I will just concentrate on promoting it so hard that before you know, it will be a series and a movie, and I will buy a pair of Manolos, just to see what all the fuss is about. My goal is to get the book into hands of as many readers as possible, with the hope that one of them knows Coen brothers. Seriously, does anyone here know even one of those guys?

Back to the argument of $0.99 vs $X.99. My limited research of two or so months shows that you will get not only better sales, but also better royalties with the $0.99 pricing. How can I prove it? With the power of screenshots and basic math.

Here is the snapshot of my sales and pages read for the last month:

12 Nov sales

For simplicity, let’s concentrate on sales alone (it looks like “pages read” was pretty even over time). During the first half of the month, my price was at $2.99, and it was $0.99 in the second half. I sold 1 copy at $2.99 and 27 copies at $0.99. The royalties were $2.04 and $0.35, respectively. The math, ladies and gentlemen!

1 x $2.04 = $2.04

27 x $0.35 = 9.45

During the second half of the month I did run a disappointing BargainBooksy promo, which resulted in 10 sales. Let’s take them out of equation:

17 x $0.35 = $5.95

I’m depressed now, because the numbers are so dismally small, but that’s besides the point. The point is that I had 17-27 times more sales and about 3-5 times more royalties when I’d dropped the price. The hope is that some of those people will talk about it to their friends. The goal is to get a snowball rolling, so that I (eventually) get a million of these tiny sales.

I guess the time will show if this is overall a winning strategy. The only concern is the inability to advertise with some of the websites that require the book to be discounted by at least 50%, but I hope that by zig-zagging the price, I will comply with that requirement.

Oh, and I have a very exciting update about Bargain Booksy! I’ve emailed them, asking if 10 copies is what I should expect from a promo, and they responded! Not only that, they apologized, said it was too low for the quality of my novel, and offered a $25 credit towards another promo! I was speechless and promptly scheduled a promo for 5 December with a different audience, this time with Chick lit/Romance readers, at a cost of $70. I’ve updated my post on The Most Super-Duper, Exhaustive, Comprehensive, and Current Listing of Free and Paid Book Advertising Websites and Ideas accordingly.

Once again, only time will tell if that was a good decision 🙂

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by | November 9, 2015 · 11:34 am

The Price Is Right – right at $0.99

This is a question that tortured me in the days prior to release of Shizzle, Inc – how to price it? I’ve read numerous blogs on the subject and shifted through the bestseller lists – prices were all over the place. Several blogs insisted that pricing your ebook too low would devalue it in the eyes of readers. Surely, that made sense, considering how expensive are all the famous authors’ Kindle editions – often just a few dollars cheaper than paper copies.

One blog in particular stuck with me, with the author insisting that pricing his (now bestselling) novel at $3.99 was the best idea he’d ever had. It stuck with me so much, that I’d released Shizzle, Inc at $3.99. I sold about a dozen copies, enough to get me on a Top 100 list in Humor. I was so ecstatic about it that I made it free for a weekend. Well over a hundred downloads. How exciting!

Then the sales dried up.

I then decided to lower the price to $2.99. No impact on the sales whatsoever.

I did a paid promo with eReader News at $0.99. Over 60 downloads! Woo-hoo! When I put it back at $2.99, there were a couple of purchases on that day.

Then – silence. Like, dead silence, with a week at a time with NO SALES.

I then did another promo, the disappointing one with Bargain Booksy, and in my malaise, sorta didn’t get to put it back to $2.99. It’s like I just could not face the Amazon page.

To my surprise, the sales did not stop, like all the previous times after giveaways. They kept on drip-drip-dripping in at a rate of 1-2 books per day. When you look at the “Units ordered” chart, the impact of the lower price is quite obvious:

Units ordered

On the left you can see the peak after the eReader News promo. You can then see that I had one sale (at $2.99) in the two weeks that followed. The bump up of 10 sales on 31 October is due to Bargain Booksy promo, and the slow but steady sales after that are due to my usual social media promos (I am now twitting 3 quotes per day), this blog, and the price being $0.99.

Of, course, the royalties of 35% on the $0.99 sales are nothing to write home about, but at this point it’s all about getting readers and getting motivation to keep on writing. So what that I came to this realization via the procrastination path? It’s still research…Therefore, here is my very strong opinion, based on a sample of one published book:

First-time self-published authors should price their ebooks at $0.99.

Feel free to rip into this with your own strong opinions 🙂

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by | November 6, 2015 · 11:27 am

I’m gonna beg you like you’ve never been begged before…

If you’ve read Shizzle, Inc, you’ve probably recognised the above as an almost direct quote…and if so, you’re the one I’m gonna beg – could you please, please post a review on Amazon, Goodreads or both?

I already have 13 reviews on Amazon, all positive, so it’s not about that scary initial silence, where you’re not sure that publishing your book was a good or even decent idea. It’s just that there has not been a new one posted for several weeks, I’m tired, it’s raining, and to be honest – just feeling a bit blah about everything. I need your help pushing along with my writing plan and you have no idea what a boost of energy it is to wake up in the morning to find out that a new review has been posted.

So if you’ve read Shizzle, Inc and liked it, could you pretty please write a few words about it? Of course, on other hand, if you’ve absolutely hated it, then I’m sure you have better things to do. I bet there’s dust behind that fridge and your sweaters need re-folding.

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by | November 3, 2015 · 2:04 pm

Bargain Booksy ain’t no bargain

Happy Melbourne Cup Day! And if you’re anywhere else in the world – sorry for rubbing in that here we have a public holiday in honor of a horse race. Only in Australia can everything stop in the middle of the week, so that everyone can get wasted and bet on horses without taking a sickie. Not only that – this year Australian government introduced another public holiday – Grand Final Day, so that everyone can get wasted and watch football without…you get the idea.

I’m however, completely sober. I’m actually at work, trying to put finishing touches on a presentation, which is proving extremely hard. Not only that my heart is no longer in systems, data, and risk management – I’m really disappointed with the results of the latest promo and just can’t get excited about presenting to a room full of senior bureaucrats.

As you may recall, I’m going through my Most Super-Duper, Exhaustive, Comprehensive, and Current Listing of Free and Paid Book Advertising Websites and Ideas. This past weekend I’ve run just one promo, to test how well Bargain Booksy performs on its own. This is because previously I’ve made a mistake to run two promos on the same day and can’t be perfectly sure whether eReader News Today was responsible for the 63 sales, or if some of it was due to Awesome Gang.

I had big, delicious hopes for this promo – after all Free Booksy and Bargain Booksy seem to be very popular and have a great reputation. They got crushed, big time. How many sales did I get?

12.

Yep, that’s all. Not only that, two of them appear to be due to social media marketing, so the grand total made from the promo is about $3. I’ve paid $25, so I’m $22 in the hole. Not that it’s a lot of money, but I guess my expectations were not met, and it seems that all the unhappiness in the whole entire world stems from crushed expectations.

Anywho, I’m not giving up – still huge hopes for the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, with multiple promos over four days. I guess this latest experiment did exactly what I’d set out to do – separate the “worth it” promo sites from “nah” ones. I have to say that the audience may have been wrong – I chose the YA sub-group. I may still try Romance/Chicklit one, at a separate date, to really test this service. It’s $70, though –  more than Book Gorilla.

So there you go – Bargain Booksy for now goes to the “nah” pile. Of course, the results may have been different with a different novel or even on a different day – I don’t yet know if a major weekend is a good or a bad idea. I’m here to share my very personal experience – you get to make your own decision. Now I have to go work on this presentation. Anyone knows how to make risk mitigation “sexy”?

 

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by | November 1, 2015 · 3:18 am

Another experiment with marketing, a $0.99 sale, and alcohol-induced pledging.

Happy Haloween!

I hope you’re looking forward to tonight’s festivities, but a word of warning from Australia, where we’d already been there and done that – try not to drink too much! You’ll just end up where I am now, and where you’ve probably been yourself – regretting that last glass and swearing off the alcohol forever. For once, I’m dead serious. Here’s my new pledge:

During the six months I plan to spend as a full-time writer, I will not drink at all.

I have not been drinking much since I’ve met Josh, who (unlike most Australians) doesn’t really drink. We have a glass of wine with dinner probably once or twice a month. So you can imagine how three glasses of wine from last night have ruined my day today. I’d still made it to the gym, but that was the only thing I’d managed all day – no writing yet. Needless to say, incompatible with what I am setting out to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fun! My sister managed to take a long enough break from her two little kids so that we could talk about our writing dreams. Yes, she’s a writer too, almost finished with the first draft of her YA novel. We kept drinking, talking, and laughing till just after midnight. We talked about why it feels so wrong to take half a year off work, and why it feels so absurd to attempt yet another career switch, this time to a profession where the odds of “making it” are about as good as they are in the lottery jackpot.

Then we started going through our memories and remembering when we’d “won the lottery” before. Like when I’ve announced back in Ukraine that I was going to win a scholarship to study abroad and was ridiculed by everyone for a year, until I left on a full scholarship to the US. Or when my sister said that she was going to move to Australia and even I did not believe her, until she got into the second selection round. We came up with a long list and they all had something in common – a vision, a plan, and a lot of hard work. There was also something else – not giving up, no matter how hopeless things looked. It’s all too easy to swear off dating, once you’ve been on about fifty first dates, but I got my prize, and he still makes me breakfast in bed almost every day, even after all these fifteen months…

Anyway, I still have a lot of work to do in terms of arranging such a long leave – I’ve already talked to my immediate manager, but now I have to convince his boss, who can be a tough nut. He’s back next week and I’m going to bring it up on Friday, after he’s had a chance to settle in and is less likely to shoot from the hip. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, there’s some excitement on the marketing front – Shizzle, Inc is on sale again this weekend, and I have a Bargain Booksy promo scheduled – will update in a few days on the sales numbers. The paper version formatting is almost finished, the first draft of the paper cover is done, and I have even purchased a bar code! There will be Goodreads promotions and bugging all the local bookshops with free review copies. Also, I’m up to 14,000 words on the sequel draft.

Enjoy your candy. I’m off to add another thousand to my word pile.

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by | October 28, 2015 · 10:45 am

Why dream about tomorrow, when you can live it today?

I’m about to do something completely insane. I can’t believe it, but here it is:

I’m going to take six months off work.

It’s only seems insane, of course, because of my Soviet childhood (constant poverty) and American young adulthood (poverty during student years, replaced with “work like hell till retirement” mentality). Australians actually tend to take a gap year almost as a rite of passage into adulthood – travel the world and all that.

I’ve done the calculations – I can afford the bills, because I have a month of vacation and two months of “long service leave” accumulated. (Again, apologies to my hard-working American friends – I never knew of the long service leave concept until I moved down under). The plan is to turn three months of paid leave into six months of half-pay. There will be just a bit of travel, with already booked pre-honeymoon in December and a “proper” honeymoon in May, but otherwise it will be a 40-hour a week writing dream. The plan is to “try out” this writing gig full-time – write two sequels to Shizzle, Inc and really see what it would be like to work as an author.

I don’t know what will happen at the end – maybe I’d find that I miss the office and will come back with a vengeance, ready to climb the corporate ladder. Or I’d learn to appreciate the financial peace of mind my current job provides. Of course, I secretly hope that with two more books under the belt I might get the fuel necessary to make the dream I committed to on 16 October actually possible. Regardless, it will be the longest ever break from office and an adventure into a parallel reality all of my own making.

My mind is made up. Now I just have to convince my manager that it’s a good idea…

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by | October 27, 2015 · 3:22 am

Grammarly is not that grammar-worthy

Ok, so it’s not entirely true. I don’t regret buying a subscription, but I’m not perfectly happy either. It is better than Word’s  built-in grammar checker, but it won’t replace the proofreader. What can I say, it’s complicated.

It started during the last-minute jitters of finishing endless editing rounds of Shizzle, Inc. I was oscillating between the highs of being happy with my copyeditor to the lows of stressing over the proofread.  Thanks to one of you, who suggested trying Grammarly, I decided to have one last go at proofread myself.

Originally, I was going to get a year-long subscription, but when the time came to pay up, I got second thoughts. What if I tried it and it turned out to be worthless? Grammarly warns you everywhere that charges are not refundable. In the end, I’d decided to do a $29 trial month, and I’m glad I did. Short story is that I won’t subscribe for a whole year, although I will probably do another “trial month” to check my second manuscript. Here’s why:

The good:

  1. I downloaded it as an add-in to my Word, so I could do all editing without the need to upload the file to Internet. This means you can use Grammarly as you write and not get confused with multiple versions. Just watch out – autosave is disabled when Grammarly is enabled, so you have to remember and save manually. Good thing I’m paranoid and do it every five minutes anyway.
  2. Grammarly caught a few embarrassing misspellings (did I mention I’ve had three independent, highly qualified editors look at this thing?). It’s “cozy homes”, not cosy. Isa avoided going outside altogether, not “all together.”
  3. It agreed with me that a comma is not necessary  before “and” in sentences such as “she said and asked for my license”. Of course, you may hate it for that same reason.
  4. It caught British spellings in what was supposed to be an American text (I would kiss it for that alone). Again, after a bazillion rewrites, there were “spiralling”, “dialled”, and “wolly” with two “l”s, as well as monologue, criticising, realising, and moustaches.
  5. It’s consistent. Human editors missed the same bits that they previously highlighted elsewhere in the document. Grammarly was often wrong, but at least it was 100% consistent in doing so.
  6. It gives you explanations for all its decisions. That helps making the final call on whether or not to accept a change.

The bad:

  1. Grammarly is not a writer. It constantly complains that my sentences are too long and that I use a passive voice.
  2. It doesn’t have a sense of humor and therefore doesn’t get that redundant and inappropriate words are part of the comedy.
  3. It is annoyingly politically correct. I mean, it suggests “undocumented migrants” instead of illegal aliens. Really, Grammarly? Wait, Grammarly hates every occurrence of “really”, too.
  4. It highlighted about 1,200 potential errors in my manuscript. About a thousand of them were dead wrong, and it took me a whole day to get through all of them.
  5. It needs an Internet connection at all times, otherwise it falls out.
  6. It did not pick on that many verb tenses, even though I suspect I have a few errors here and there. This was the main drive behind buying the subscription, because I find verb tenses so difficult.
  7. It constantly thinks that I’m addressing people and demands more commas. For example, in “we need a grinder guard” it thinks someone is asking Guard for a grinder.
  8. Some of the comma suggestions just did not make any sense and would have changed the meaning of the sentences. In the end, I’ve ended up going with my gut on the comma suggestions – if it felt right, I put one in, and if it didn’t, well – don’t judge me too hard on it!

I was going to have “The ugly” section, but I’m feeling a lot more accepting and zen about it all now. If you are interested in a second opinion, here’s a much more thorough and almost scientific post from Grammarist.

The bottom line is that I think $29 was worth catching a few embarrassments and giving me a bit more assurance in comma placement.  So there you go – although we’re taking a break now, I have a feeling I will be getting back together with Grammarly for the next book. Even if it’s just a one-month stand.

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