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Sundae posted:Just a reminder: You can talk about the biz side of things if it relates to other genres as well, but please no content talk in this thread re: Super-Romance. I'm not a mod but I think this can be used as a general rule of thumb: Good talk: quote:My sales in Super-Romance are doing really well right now, but I'm looking to expand. Anyone have any suggestions about optimizing tags and blurbs? Bad talk: quote:Should my gay tentacle super-romance feature double or triple penetration? Also, are first cousins technically related?
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Feb 24, 2015 15:25
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quote:e: ^^^ more details on your new book! It's a 3-4 part serial, about 25K words per piece, with full novelization release intended at the end. To give a lovely short-hand of it: Billionaire (hundred-millionaire just doesn't sound as good) romance with a NA woman just about to graduate college (art school), political suspense / drug cartels as the plot driver. Guy hires her as a personal assistant / photographer initially out of intrigue/interest, but then realizes how strong an intuition she has for when people are lying to her, putting on a show, etc. He's trying to weed out drug cartel influence in the city, propping up and supporting the right candidates to overhaul the general government and fight the city's corruption, and she becomes invaluable to him in figuring out who he can trust and who he can't. Relationship grows over time, clash of employer/employee vs lovers, wealth and poverty backgrounds, etc. As the relationship grows, she realizes that he's hiding something from her, too. It ends up being that the drug cartel he's fighting against is his own father's cartel. He's on bad terms with his father now because the guy was supposed to go into the family biz but refused after it got his mother assassinated when he was 19. His father built his little empire from the ground up, beating the odds as a low-level grunt, killing anyone who stood in his way, slowly consolidating territories until he had the whole city under his influence, and now his son wants to destroy his legacy. The girl's parents died when she was five and her grandmother raised her. Grandmother never told her what her parents did for a living--that they were in the drug business themselves or that they were murdered by a former biz partner who wanted their territory for himself. That person was, of course, the billionaire's father. That's the make or break point for the relationship, and girl leaves the guy high and dry over it. He has to regain her trust and prove he's not like his father, and that means toppling the entire family biz once and for all. Blah blah, set up a grand finale with his father, etc etc. Girl walks in on the fight between father and son, father turns and instinctively shoots her. Then as he realizes what he's done, that he's just shot the little girl he let live 17 years ago after he murdered her parents, he shoots himself. Billionaire rushes her to hospital, she gets better, blah blah, onward to the HEA. I haven't exactly written up a decent blurb yet.  quote:I don't want to name and shame because she seems like a genuinely nice (if slightly confused) person, but I got a bunch of 1 star reviews on Amazon from someone saying I was using their 'real, legal name' as my pen name.  Was this the LDS lady? Or am I thinking of someone else?
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Feb 24, 2015 16:59
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Sundae posted:
You mean of course http://www.tarynataylor.com/2014/02/say-goodbye-to-author-taryn-taylor-say.html
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Feb 24, 2015 17:11
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Sundae posted:
Either way she doesn't seem to understand that more than one person can have the same name.
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Feb 24, 2015 17:19
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EngineerSean posted:You mean of course brb, changing my pen name to Taylor Hart
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Feb 24, 2015 17:21
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EngineerSean posted:You mean of course Hahaha yeah, that's who I was thinking of.
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Feb 24, 2015 17:27
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Holy cow. There are, no joke, about 500 people in the United States with my firstname-lastname combination including a couple of public figures. I can't even imagine taking it personally if someone was using it as a pen name.
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Feb 24, 2015 19:02
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My real name is Dirk Diggler so it's hard to get upset about these things. You just gotta take it as it comes
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Feb 24, 2015 19:30
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For anyone else that's interested, D2D did resolve its reporting issues with B&N. Not that they contacted anyone about it like they said they would, but hey.
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Feb 25, 2015 07:53
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had my best day of sales yesterday. broke even on my promotions and shot my rank up under 2k. still haven't made up any of my investment, but i'm starting to feel a lot more confident, like maybe this thing is possible.
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Feb 25, 2015 16:32
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the brotherly phl posted:had my best day of sales yesterday. broke even on my promotions and shot my rank up under 2k. still haven't made up any of my investment, but i'm starting to feel a lot more confident, like maybe this thing is possible. Congrats! If you don't mind my asking, what did you invest in? Covers, editing, formatting?
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Feb 26, 2015 22:59
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Blue Scream posted:Congrats! If you don't mind my asking, what did you invest in? Covers, editing, formatting? Cover, mainly. I'm a professional copyeditor, so I did my own editing on the first book, though I paid for proofing for the second one. I don't really have much to spend at this point, but I'll basically take whatever I've made and dump it back into covers/editing/some promotions. Sales are back down to normal now, though. I'm still a long way from making a profit / being successful.
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Feb 27, 2015 16:41
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A good cover can make all the difference. I've had two Bookbub ads for one of my books, and the second one, with the awesome cover I paid for (rather than the semi-lame one I did myself) got me substantially more sales.
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Feb 27, 2015 17:35
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So I've been getting like 10+ borrows a day since my promo ended, but 0 sales. Is this pretty common for people in Select?
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Mar 1, 2015 15:38
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the brotherly phl posted:So I've been getting like 10+ borrows a day since my promo ended, but 0 sales. Is this pretty common for people in Select? Depends on the genre and the price. Super-romance (and to a lesser extent, romance like your book) is a very disposable product like porn (watch once, get your rocks off, never look at it again). Additional, many of the consumers of romance go through a large quantity of books per month, and so it makes more sense for them to buy a $10 subscription than buy individual books and then only buy the ones that they intend to read again. edit: I ran a ton of 99 cent Countdown Deals in February on my romance name and still my ratio of borrows:sales was over 1:1. EngineerSean fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 15:50
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EngineerSean posted:Depends on the genre and the price. Super-romance (and to a lesser extent, romance like your book) is a very disposable product like porn (watch once, get your rocks off, never look at it again). Additional, many of the consumers of romance go through a large quantity of books per month, and so it makes more sense for them to buy a $10 subscription than buy individual books and then only buy the ones that they intend to read again. Thanks Sean, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'd rather get borrows than nothing, since it's keeping my rank under 8k. And it's more money per borrow than I'd get if they were buying at 99cents, assuming they read beyond 10%. I've been really amazed at the romance community in general since I started all this. I mean, they're pretty nice people. And they read. A lot. Like, I used to think I read a lot. But no, I read a medium amount. Romance fans read a loving megaload shitton. It's pretty amazing. I come from the land of poetry, where nobody reads anything and selling a few hundred copies is like a huge deal. I sold almost a hundred copies in my best day. I think my biggest mistake was making my first book too porn-y. Too close to super-genre. My next books still have those elements, but they're way toned back, more in line with the genre as a whole.
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Mar 1, 2015 18:04
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Fingers crossed for the KU payout on March 15. I estimated my combined sales and borrows at $1.50 each, and if that ends up being accurate, I'm looking at about $8,500 for February.  That being said: March is a month for doom and gloom, so pretend that the rest of this post is me screaming in anguish as I watch my sales and freebies plummet for no apparent reason. (Though seriously, what the gently caress is with all my free drives performing so poorly in the last week? I blame the logarithms.)
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Mar 2, 2015 15:34
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I've got an ENT spot today, so at least March will start off decently.
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Mar 2, 2015 15:43
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Hijinks Ensue posted:I've got an ENT spot today, so at least March will start off decently. Good luck!
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Mar 2, 2015 20:44
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Sundae posted:I blame the logarithms. hmmm yes *strokes chin like a scientist*
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Mar 2, 2015 23:35
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Sundae posted:Fingers crossed for the KU payout on March 15. I estimated my combined sales and borrows at $1.50 each, and if that ends up being accurate, I'm looking at about $8,500 for February. Oh no! Is March a bad month? I just finished the first draft of my first super romance short and was planning to have it polished and posted to Amazon by the weekend. Should I wait? Also, is there any day of the week that you would recommend for releasing new material? What days you see sales go up or does it not really matter?
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Mar 3, 2015 00:11
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No, you shouldn't wait. Publish now and keep writing because your first X titles are going to suck and probably won't sell anyway. If you have to start at scratch and learn everything along the way, why would you want to delay starting that process? Plus you make more money on products you have for sale than on products that don't exist.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:24
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:No, you shouldn't wait. Publish now and keep writing because your first X titles are going to suck and probably won't sell anyway. If you have to start at scratch and learn everything along the way, why would you want to delay starting that process? I was going to post almost exactly this. Also, if the book pushes boundaries (and I'm not going to elaborate on that), it is better to publish on a weekday rather than a weekend.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:25
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There you have it. If your readers are looking to lose themselves in the territorial disputes of the South China sea then you should publish during weekdays in particular, before all the diplomats get too drunk on cheap rice wine to remember how to use their private VPN to access Amazon internationally.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:50
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I publish as soon as I'm done, but I tend to link it on the goodreads / facebook / reddit groups on a Friday so it's relatively near the top of the list when people are looking. Although bear in mind I'm terrible at this so you should probably not listen to me.
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Mar 3, 2015 02:20
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Thanks for the advice! I just bought a cover from GoOnWrite and I think I'll publish Friday as long as the cover is finished by then. I've been lurking for a while and so excited to finally be on the edge of making this happen!
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Mar 3, 2015 03:37
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SquirrelFace posted:Oh no! Is March a bad month? I just finished the first draft of my first super romance short and was planning to have it polished and posted to Amazon by the weekend. Should I wait? No, I was just flailing and getting out my momentary panic. Get your poo poo out there.  Sean posted:hmmm yes *strokes chin like a scientist* Why aren't you F5ing your books, Sean? You should be upping your sales ranks right now, not chin-stroking!  (For anyone else not in on the logarithm joke... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brooke-warner/the-top-10-things-all-aut_b_6744386.html . There is almost nothing right in this article whatsoever.)
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Mar 3, 2015 15:23
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Sundae posted:(For anyone else not in on the logarithm joke... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brooke-warner/the-top-10-things-all-aut_b_6744386.html . There is almost nothing right in this article whatsoever.) Awesome, refreshing my page, I'm going to crack the best sellers soon!
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Mar 3, 2015 17:45
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I got my first short all shined-up and readyy to publish, but Amazon is not cooperating... Its been stuck on "converting book file to kindle format" for about 20 minutes now. Is this a normal or did my terrible writing crash the conversion engine?
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Mar 4, 2015 04:20
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That process should take about a minute or two at most. Something hosed up with your file format probably.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:12
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Had another go at a blurb, but it's still ploppy. "In the kingdom of Ordegron, the vulgar Princess Spendalot has been kidnapped by an incompetent warlord known only (for some reason) as Chubs, and the malodorous antagonist, Ulcerman, is plotting similarly nefarious deeds. Unfortunately, the only man for the job is the narcissistic Prince of Ordegron, Bon’Jellar BonWinkle. What begins as a routine princess-rescue soon becomes a bewildering adventure into the unknown."
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Mar 4, 2015 23:11
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Ploppy is an understatement.
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Mar 4, 2015 23:20
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I have a question about super-genre bundling. Business-side discussion is okay, right? Ignore this if not. I have 3 shorts out, and a 4th on the way. What's the best idea for bundling? Does a bundle need a 3D cover or does it not matter? Does a 4 story bundle at 5-6k each for 4.99 sound about right? Or do you guys not even bother bundling?
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Mar 5, 2015 16:55
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Sefiros posted:Had another go at a blurb, but it's still ploppy. I'm still new at this but I'm going to throw my thoughts out there for you. In the kingdom of Ordegron, the vulgar Princess Spendalot has been kidnapped by an incompetent warlord known only (for some reason) as Chubs. why does this matter? i feel like this needs a line, something like, 'this throws the kingdom into chaos because of xyx' or something like that. Meanwhile, the malodorous antagonist, Ulcerman, is plotting similarly nefarious deeds what deeds? be more specific here. so far, the character names are interesting, but i have no sense of the plot. it's pretty boring for a blurb. Unfortunately, the only man for the job is the narcissistic Prince of Ordegron, Bon’Jellar BonWinkle. okay, cool. give me more. how does he relate? why is he the only man for the job? be a little more specific. What begins as a routine princess-rescue soon becomes a bewildering adventure into the unknown. i like this as a final line. "routine princess-rescue" is funny.
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Mar 5, 2015 17:00
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I've stopped bundling because Kindle Unlimited makes up the majority of my sales now, regardless of genre. I get the same $$$ per copy whether someone buys Part I or a Boxed Complete Series, so why not just leave it as individual parts? I make more money that way and the readers get charged no extra.
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Mar 5, 2015 17:01
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Sundae posted:I've stopped bundling because Kindle Unlimited makes up the majority of my sales now, regardless of genre. I get the same $$$ per copy whether someone buys Part I or a Boxed Complete Series, so why not just leave it as individual parts? I make more money that way and the readers get charged no extra. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Out of curiosity, on average, what % of your borrows turn into payouts?
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Mar 5, 2015 18:20
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If it shows up on your board, it's already real. (So in other words, 100% because I can't see the ones that don't. )
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Mar 5, 2015 18:55
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Sundae posted:If it shows up on your board, it's already real. Oh poo poo awesome, I thought it was like, the borrow shows up but you only get paid if they go passed 10%. But this changes everything! ha thanks.
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Mar 5, 2015 19:26
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Anyone know what kind of CYOA stories are possible with the Kindle? Is it basically HTML, or does it support other formats with more complex structures? Or maybe avoid Amazon and just put out mobile apps, I don't know.
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Mar 6, 2015 15:45
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midnightclimax posted:Anyone know what kind of CYOA stories are possible with the Kindle? Is it basically HTML, or does it support other formats with more complex structures? Or maybe avoid Amazon and just put out mobile apps, I don't know. http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/ InkleWriter allows you to create complex CYOA stories with state tracking and compile them into Kindle e-books. However, it does that by generating every possible path through the story, so there is a limit to how complex the story can be.
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Mar 6, 2015 15:59
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