Tag Archives: Reading

by | April 16, 2016 · 1:03 am

Give it away, give it away, give it away NOW!

How you guys doin’? I’m flying high – not only cause life on [read: near] the beach is sweet, but because my latest promo is doing even better than I expected. In my last post, I bemoaned the lack of sales, which was all my fault, anyway. All writing and no marketing makes Ana a poor-selling author. I didn’t moan for very long, though, before I decided to do something about it, namely stage a massive, promoted free giveaway.

The last time I made Shizzle, Inc (Isa Maxwell escapades Book 1) free was in September, about two weeks after it was released. I didn’t advertise it, other than on the blog and Twitter, as it was intended to be just a thanks to my followers. With no sequel in sight, giving it away made no sense. Over the two days, about 150 people downloaded it.

This time around, the sequel is so close, I can smell it. Okay, so it still smells a bit raw, but at half-edited 63K words, I’m very close to the finish line. In fact, the plan is to pre-release it in just about a week! So I’m now ready to do what a bunch of authors have done before me – give away the first book in the series for free. I will make it permafree as soon as Indiot is available, but for now, I tried a KDP 5-day free giveaway.

I didn’t know what to expect, so I made an arbitrary goal of giving away 3,000 books over the whole period and sneaking my way into top 100 Free in Kindle store. I advertised it as follows:

11 April: Reading Deals – $15.

12 April: Kindle Nation Daily – $99.

13 April: eBookasaurus – free; Manybooks – $25; AskDavid – free.

14 April: AskDavid – free (they tweet multiple times).

15 April: none.

So what did I get for my investment of $139?

Well, it’s not even finished yet, but I’ve already given away 3,100 copies!

Screenshot (43)

Of course, a lot of people just stuff their Kindles with freebies, so I’m gonna assume that most of these copies will never be read. Of those that will, some will probably not get it and hate it – that’s just the risk I have to take. But then! There will be others, who will get hooked on Isa’s escapades and will buy the next installment at the full price of, say, $2.99. If it’s 10% of the above, I would make my money back, and then some. Will it work? I will let you know, of course…

And how about the rankings? I have a new addiction, a tracker tool supplied for free by Kindle Nation Daily:

KND tracker

You can see that Shizzle, Inc (Isa Maxwell escapades Book 1) has come close, oh so close, but those thousands of free books were not enough. After this experiment and a lot of stalking of my competition, I am convinced that the only way to get onto the first page of Free Kindle Store is with BookBub. Trouble is, apparently everybody already knows that – the competition for promos with BookBub is fierce. So far I’ve applied twice and was rejected as many times, but from reading other people’s blogs, it seems that the ratio of applications to successful placements is close to 10:1. Those same people have reported anywhere between 20-100 THOUSAND giveaway copies as a result, so I just need to buckle up and keep trying. In the meantime, I’m thinking of printing this for my inspiration board:

Sales rank 108

I know that some of you are against giving your work away for free, and I completely understand why – common sense tells me not to give away something that cost me $3,000 and two years to make. But I slap it back down because the big picture demands that I do just that. Time will tell if it will pay off.

Hey, Ana Spoke from September 2016, what do you think? Have I made the right choice?

 

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by | April 8, 2016 · 12:01 am

New marketing plans, a magic hashtag, and a free giveaway

I’ve been  trying diligently to get the first draft of Indiot finished, which has been at the expense of blogging. I won’t lie, there have been long morning walks on the beach with the dog, a few massages, and more than few renovation shows in the mix. Maybe even an occasional Real Housewives of Whatever, but I consider that research – in the third instalment, which is currently under plotment, Isa gets into more filthy rich drama than she could ever imagine.

I’ve also done a presentation on self-publishing basics to my writer’s group – it was so successful, I’ve been asked to do it again in a couple of weeks. I was incredibly nervous, so much so that I forgot to tape it! Such a bummer, too, because I was on fire, with the show turning into a bit of stand up. People were laughing AND taking notes, what more could I ask for? I will be more composed and better prepared next time and hope to post a decent video on YouTube.

As a result of all this sidetracking, sales are down. Boo! I mean, boo-hoo, poor me:

Sales on 7 april

Of course, I’ve learned something from this experience, the most important lesson being is that you can’t go into a house flip without a proper plan and budget, or expecting to do all the work yourself when you don’t even know how to hold a hammer. Secondly, you can never stop marketing your book, because the snowball effect doesn’t happen unless you keep pushing it along. Thirdly, you can get a massage for cheap at you local massage school, and yes, two massages a week are okay – after all, you’re helping students learn. Good on you.

There’s another small but pretty amazing discovery I’ve made last week, which I’m happy to share with you. Have a look at the above graph – do you notice anything? Specifically in the blue “Normalised Pages Read” part? Over the last four weeks both graphs were pretty much dead, with just a few sales and pages read thanks to my regular tweets of quotes with links. It was especially slow over the last two weeks, when I became so destructed, I forgot to top my Buffer account on most days. Then, a few days ago, I made one small change which resulted in a big spike on the blue graph.

Hands up – who wants to know what it is?

Believe it or not, I just changed a Twitter hashtag. Instead of a useless #humor and #kindle and fairly useless #amwriting and #IndieBooksBeSeen, I now make sure each tweet is accompanied by this little beauty:

#KindleUnlimited

That’s it. Honestly, I have no idea why I have not targeted subscribers to Kindle Unlimited before – Shizzle, Inc (Isa Maxwell escapades Book 1) is as good as free to them, but I get about $2 each time someone reads the whole thing, as compared to the $0.35 royalty I get with each $0.99 sale. I’m so excited about this discovery! I’d love to figure out how to target and find more Kindle Unlimited customers – if anyone has experience or ideas, I’d love to hear them.

So back to the lack of marketing action. Not only did it result in lack of sales, but the old enemy doubt has started creeping in and whispering various ugly thoughts. I know they are not true and that Isa will one day hit the big screen, but it’s demotivating. So it’s time I kill them dead with the next big marketing effort.

For this new experiment, I chose to do a solid 5-day free giveaway of Shizzle on Kindle. It will be on 11-15 April, inclusive and I have the following promos planned, some with companies I have not tested before. I will update the list below as confirmations come in, and, as usual, I will update the Super Duper List with the actual numbers, once the promos are completed.

11 April: Reading Deals – $15.

12 April: Kindle Nation Daily – $99.

13 April: eBookasaurus – free; Manybooks – $25; AskDavid – free.

14 April: AskDavid – free (they tweet multiple times).

15 April: none.

Submitted, awaiting confirmation:

  • AskDavid
  • eBooks Habit
  • eReader News – sold out.
  • Free Kindle Books and Tips
  • Ignite your book – not sure if my submission was successful
  • Readcheaply
  • Zwoodle books

Fingers crossed – I hope to get to #1 in Free Bestseller List in one of the categories. Will let you know what happens!

 

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by | March 12, 2016 · 1:57 am

Out of writing shape

Is happiness a good enough excuse for not writing as much as you thought you should or could? I was kind of depressed a couple of weeks ago, and then really happy last week. The end result is still the same – falling behind the plan. The bad news is that my tracking spreadsheet looks like this:

Tracking Indiot 11 March 2016

The good news? After two weeks of editing and cutting frustration, procrastination, relaxation, and a whole bunch of other flatlining activities, I finally wrote 3,000 words today. I feel both exhausted and hopeful because something occurred to me.

I’m just unfit.

Not physically, although that one also needs work – I’m out of writing shape. After finally lifting 3,000 words off the ground, I know that I can do it again. I have the vision of what it might feel like to be “writing fit” – to have the discipline and confidence of sitting down and writing a few thousand words without feeling out of breath or close to a stroke. It’s just like exercise – you have to start somewhere, and then do a little more every day, until it comes naturally.

I know I can do it because I had a similar epiphany with physical fitness.  I used to be all soft and pudgy when I moved to Australia from the US almost eight years ago, your typical office worker. I frequented all you can eat buffets and worked out by reading while pedalling on the stationary bike. It was not until I started lifting weights that things began to change. I remember the first time I noticed muscle definition in my arm one morning while brushing my teeth. The first time I ran after a tram and caught it, and the first time I felt the “corset” of the core muscles working even as I walked. Then there was a huge mental leap, too – to accept that I was not genetically fated to be pudgy, that the body I had was the result of my choices, and that I could be an “antelope” as I liked to think of myself.

A lot of people don’t know what it feels like to be fit, and I now accept that I simply don’t know what it feels like to be able to write two or three thousand words every day without fail. All I can say is that I had one hell of a writing workout today.

Hope to see some definition in my writing arm tomorrow!

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by | March 5, 2016 · 2:00 am

How many words a day should you write, and other things I’ve learned in my first week as a full-time writer

It’s Friday night here, In Australia, and Week 1 of this full-time writing experiment is drawing to a close. If you’ve seen my work plan, I was supposed to have written 20,000 words. So, how did I go?

Well, I’ve had five leisurely breakfasts on my balcony.

IMG_2806 (1)

Oh, you want to know about the word count? Well, that’s complicated…

I estimate that I’ve written 15 to 20 thousand words over the last five days. The reason I can’t report the number with my usual precision is that I’ve deleted so much of the already-written text, I’m only 2,739 words ahead. That’s less than my planned daily quota. In fact, today I’ve worked for eight hours and ended up with about 500 words less than I had last night. Blin!

I am, however, very pleased with my current efforts. To start with, I overcame a major writer’s block – Monday was hard, as I went into some kind of shock of “this is it, sit down and produce a masterpiece.” I did sit down at my new desk, but managed to push out only 1K of words, and I could tell they were not gold.

Tuesday morning was a bit better, but my afternoon and evening were taken up by babysitting my niece and a writer’s group. I managed another 1K of pedestrian dribble.

It was Wednesday when I decided to stop forcing myself and to get reacquainted with my own work. I started writing in September, and it’s been so long that the manuscript read as if a stranger wrote it. A dull, tired stranger with a dayjob that sucks all of her creative energy, living nothing for character development, leave alone comedy.

Conventional writing wisdom dictates that you’re not supposed to edit your first draft until it’s finished, but I had no choice. There was every writing faux pas imaginable – from telling instead of showing, to boring filler fluff, to characters that reacted inappropriately and/or inconsistently, to finally (gasp!) a Deus ex Machina.

A magical thing happened on Wednesday, as I mercilessly slashed paragraph after paragraph. I started falling in love with the story again. I finally knew I was on the right path when, after I cleaned up and rearranged a major scene, I had goosebumps reading it. I could not stop working that day, finally forcing myself to go to bed around midnight. I then got up at least twice to turn on the light and write ideas on a huge whiteboard I have in my bedroom, so that I can finally go to sleep. It didn’t work very well – I woke up at 4.30, tried the whiteboard trick again, but had to admit defeat and make coffee instead.

The week is technically not over, so I should be able to add to the pile in the next two days, but currently I’m at 36K words. Entertaining, quality words that I would not be ashamed to send to a structural editor or beta-reader. Considering that Shizzle, Inc ended up being only 79K words, I’m almost half-way through Indiot.

I’m not only happy with the current progress, I’m very hopeful that I might have learned something about how I work. Forget all the rules – if editing helps you avoid writer’s block, then edit. If it paralyses you, then don’t even look at the first pages. How many words should you write every day? Well, that’s also up to you. I could not help but google this and found a pretty interesting article detailing average daily word output of famous authors. The morale of the article is that you should find your own pace.

The only thing I can add to that is that you should have fun, too.

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by | February 21, 2016 · 3:38 am

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Ted Cruz have endorsed my book!

That, of course, is an outrageous lie. What’s true, is that I have come up with the craziest marketing idea to-date. See for yourself:



What do you think? So far these videos are responsible for exactly one confirmed sale – funny enough, from someone who was initially upset over my Twitter post of Donald Trump, but then got the joke, and the book!

I did it with a phone app called Face Swap Live. Youngsters at work were having a blast one day swapping faces, and once I saw it, I had to have it. I was on the couch that night, making myself look like Beyonce (that hair!), when it occurred to me that I could use it for business as well as for procrastination. Long story short, I made the videos above. I’ve played with lighting and makeup, so while it may look “slapped together”, each one took quite a bit of work. More will be coming, since you can literally import any photo you like. If you want to see what I come up with next, subscribe to my brand new YouTube channel.

Speaking of “any photo you like”, how about animating your book cover?

The possibilities are truly endless!

Have fun!

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by | February 12, 2016 · 2:19 am

Guys! Guys! I MADE A BOOK TRAILER!!

UPDATE: I revised it as best as I could, given my still too-limited skills:

Ok, just look at it! I’ll tell you all about how I did it and how much it cost (in terms of time and lost hair) right after, I promise!

What do you think? I really wanted to make BDSM appear first and the explanation later, but to tell you the truth, this was so difficult that I will need a week to recuperate before I’m ready to try again…

So, how did I do that? How much did it cost? Did it make any impact on sales?

I made the clip myself, at a total cost of $0 and about 10-12 hours of customising, watching tutorials and searching self-help forums. The clip was created with Adobe After Effects CC, and I started the process with a free template from After Effects Templates and added  “Playing to Win” soundtrack from Free Stock Music.

Easy-peasy, right? If you don’t mind, I’m just gonna whine a bit now. If you’d rather focus on the positive stuff, just skip the following paragraph.

(Oh, my God, it hurt! I’m all for “you can do it!”, but in this particular case I have to warn you – it was hard! If you are pretty good with Photoshop, then definitely go ahead and try – just please don’t brag about how easy it is (like the kids in tutorials, seriously!). If, however, you don’t understand Photoshop layers, then save yourself from this stress. Not only the software is hard to understand, it was a nightmare to try and upload the clip directly to Twitter. After hours of trying, it turned out that while Twitter technically allows MP4 and MOV files, you can’t upload MOV from the desktop, only from mobile. What? And  for whatever reason, my After Effects does not have the option of saving the file as MP4 (perhaps because it’s a trial version). Then if you think you’re so clever, and you email the MOV file to yourself with the intention of saving it to your phone and uploading to the app, the phone refuses to save the file, as it is apparently unsupported. What? I’ve managed to start a YouTube channel and posted a YouTube link to Twitter, but it just looks like a boring link on the phone, and no matter how hard I’ve tried to figure out how to embed a YouTube link, I couldn’t. If anyone knows, really knows how – please help!)

Ok, back to the positive. I HAVE A BOOK TRAILER!! Yay! I have uploaded it to my Goodreads author page (easy YouTube link and instant upload) and Amazon author page (direct upload and up to 24 hours of processing). I don’t know if I could ever tell if this makes an impact on sales, but it sure gives Shizzle, Inc an aura of a professionally published book…

Once my nerves settle, I may try it again – in fact, I was thinking of perhaps running one of the free giveaways with the option of either a book cover or a book trailer. Again, if this interests you, make sure to sign up for the Don’t Miss It! email list (see the floating banner on the right).

Gotta go look at the trailer one more time…nope, it does not get old!

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by | February 10, 2016 · 2:08 am

What do you meme?

If you know how to pronounce “meme”, you should get the jokey title. And if you don’t, don’t worry – you’re not alone! I kept calling them “me-me” up until the last week, and why not? Please, somebody, explain, why is it that a new word gets invented in this day and age, which is hard enough as it is, and for some reason it has to be pronounced exactly counterintuitively? I’ve made my peace with “choir” and “sixth”, and “knife”, because they were invented by your ancestors back when there was no electricity or canalisation. (My ancestors invented Russian, and yeah, it’s not for beginners either).

But why now? Why do you have to remember that a word spelled “meme” is actually pronounced “meem”? Is it to separate those “in the know” from late adaptors? Anyway, enough ranting, let’s get to what I actually was very excited to tell you – despite my pronunciation shortcomings, I now meme with the best of them.

Oh, and if you have not come across the term before – meme is basically something that goes viral, like a funny picture with an even funnier caption. Basically, every LOL CAT ever made. Here is my favorite one of all time:

raccoon meme

I was posting quotes from Shizzle, Inc to my Buffer account, which feeds my Twitter, when it occurred to me that I could easily turn some of those quotes into memes. I was so excited with visions of the Internet exploding with all the sharing of Isa’s dubious wisdom, that I made a few of them right away:

Meme1

Meme2

Meme3

Meme4

I was so excited, that I even made a few with Mr. Hue:

Meme #5A - smaller Mr HueMeme #9 Mr HueMeme #6 Mr HueMeme #7 Mr Hue

So, have they gone viral? Well, not exactly (yet), but I’ve had a lot more “engagements” with these memes instead of the same quotes, which I’ve twitted before with links to Shizzle, Inc Amazon sale page. My average engagement rate with quotes was 1-2%, but the memes got 3-8% engagement.

The only issue was, memes did not get retwitted as much, so the number of impressions was lower. Still, where my quotes got 2-3K impressions and 20-30 “engagements” each, memes got anywhere from 1k to 2K impressions, but 30-80 engagements each. Not only that, my average sales per day (without any other promos) went from an average of 0.5 books per day to 1.5 books per day during last week. Not huge numbers, but enough to have me excited about making more of these…maybe introducing other characters as well?

Of course, I have to share lessons learned, the major one being the size and orientation of the photo. The very first meme I made looked like this:
Meme #3

I thought it was pretty good at the time, but the problem was that when it got uploaded to Twitter, it ended up looking like this in the feed:

FullSizeRender (2)

That was a lesson in “don’t do anything without research”. I had a look at the suggested photo proportions and found that 1:2 was recommended, or 512×1024 pixels. I reformatted my meme. Close, but no cigar:

FullSizeRender (3)Finally, after a few trials, I figured out a perfect size: 512 pixels high by 908 pixels wide. The 1:2 ratio may have been true once, or maybe it’s a simplified version of 512:908, but I do believe my ratio is better:

FullSizeRender (4).jpg

I am using Photoshop to create my memes, but you can also use free online software – just google “free meme maker”. I can’t recommend any, unfortunately, because I have not tried them. If you do try a meme or two of your own, please let us all know how it has worked for you.

Have fun!

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by | February 6, 2016 · 2:30 am

This is how to get your book into a bookstore’s front window

If you walk past St. Kilda Readings today, you may notice a familiar cover in its window:

Book in front shop window sideways

No, not The Martian! Right next to it, look!

Book in front shop window close up

Yep, there she is, looking a little freaked out to be in such distinguished company. How did she get there, you ask?

Turns out that all you have to do is ask.

This has gone a long way to power up my batteries – I’ve been feeling a little down lately and ended up reading a few ugly articles thrashing self-publishing, one going so far as to declare that self-published authors are “neither published, nor authors”. Well – up yours, dear critic. If it looks like a book, and it reads like a book, and, gosh darn it, people like it and are willing to display it on the top shelf next to a bestseller – well, that means I’m a published author. And the fact that I did it all myself makes it that much more special.

Aaaaahhh…Isn’t life grand?

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by | January 29, 2016 · 1:51 am

Sequel to Shizzle, Inc – title and cover mock up reveal!

I was working on mock-ups for Amir, the winner of the free cover design contest, when it occurred to me that I should go ahead and create a cover for my sequel, even before it’s finished. That way I can do the same thing that Amir is planning on doing – pin the cover over my desk and use it as the motivation to finish the draft. Also, you guys were amazing in helping me develop the cover for the first book, so I feel comfortable revealing the rough draft and asking you for comments.

So here it is, the mock up for the second installment in Isa Maxwell’s escapades:

Indiot Mock up 1

This is very rough, with images I have not yet bought, so that’s why the resolution is bad and there are some remnants of Shutterstock watermark – that will improve once I buy and download full-size images. I would love for you to comment on:

  1. Title of the book. Isa continues to be…let’s say “naive” in India, hence the “Indiot”.
  2. The overall concept for the cover.
  3. Using “diamonds” for title.
  4. Making “N” in the title different. I will make it look like empty settings, from which diamonds have been stolen.
  5. Should I put “Isa Maxwell’s escapades” on the title? I kinda like the minimalistic look and that the covers are not too matchy, but everyone seems to love series covers that look like versions of the same and tell you exactly which book in the series it is…
  6. Anything else!

Thank you, as always 🙂

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by | January 27, 2016 · 4:11 pm

New Rafflecopter giveaway – win one of 25 digital copies of Shizzle, Inc!

Thank you to whomever mentioned this idea in comments! I’ve decided to take a plunge, although a free one at first, and created my very first giveaway on Rafflecopter. It was ridiculously easy to set up and the giveaway is free of cost to everyone – I am on the free plan with Rafflecopter, and giving away ebooks, so it will be just a matter of time to send files to the winners. The giveaway will run for 10 days and, as always, I will update you on the stats. I will also post my thoughts on whether or not I will upgrade to a monthly plan.

This time, in addition to more reviews, I hope for an impact on social media – in order to win, one would have to either follow me on Twitter, or tweet a message (or both, if they want to increase their odds of winning). I think multiple entries are allowed, so lets see what happens – currently I have 38, 705 followers.

Have you done one of these yourself? Was it worth it?

I will also test Amazon giveaways shortly, and will write a comprehensive comparison of all three soon.

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