Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

Omi no Kami posted:

I had been assuming that most of the short stories I was finding in romance were at last semi-rigorously following the same structure as novel-length romances, hence the confusion.
In terms of classic structure, they tend to get as far as 'girl meets boy' and it doesn't really need much more than that.

e: strayed too close to content discussion.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
One of my new books just hit #55 in a paid store subcategory, 30k overall ranking...I'm so excited :D

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


Am I correct that if I want to publish works in multiple genres (e.g. romance and scifi) I'm best off using multiple pen names, as the positive effect of name-as-brand ("I feel safe understanding that buying anything more from this author means more of the exact same thing I liked in this book") is more powerful than sales I'd lose by readers buying a violent starships troopers homage thinking they were getting a bodice ripper, and feeling less inclined to make impulse buys from that author in the future?

ArchangeI
Jul 15, 2010
Pretty much. Some genres are compatible, though, like Sci-Fi and fantasy.

Drone
Aug 22, 2003

Incredible machine
:smug:


ArchangeI posted:

Pretty much. Some genres are compatible, though, like Sci-Fi and fantasy.

You don't even have to vary them that much between those two genres, if at all. Iain M. Banks for sci-fi, Iain Banks for fantasy, etc.

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
If you want a way to link all your different works together, create a website with a minimalist, very clear interface and have all your pen names and genres there. Think of it as a portfolio rather than a content-based website - at the end of your book there's a link to the website and on that front page it has all your works separated by genre and pen name. But the exact pen names should differ between genre, even if it's as Drone said above, using an initial or not.

Omi no Kami
Feb 19, 2014


Ooh that's a really good idea, thank you... I know it's obvious, but I'm surprised at how much more involved successful marketing is compared to the actual writing process.

Hijinks Ensue
Jul 24, 2007
A slight bump in the road of my BookBub free promo. The price matching by Amazon didn't carry over to UK and Canada, so I'll have to leave those out. But everything else is good to go.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
I have an ExciteSpice spotlight promo lined up for tomorrow, and BKnights cancelled my order for my book being "too risque," so I guess I'll see how ExciteSpice alone compares to BKnights alone.

Jalumibnkrayal
Apr 16, 2008

Ramrod XTreme

angel opportunity posted:

I have an ExciteSpice spotlight promo lined up for tomorrow, and BKnights cancelled my order for my book being "too risque," so I guess I'll see how ExciteSpice alone compares to BKnights alone.

One of the problems with Bknights is that they don't split their mailing lists into genres. So it's just Free Books Yall, and so you have people signed up for diet books, mysteries, romances, self help, etc. I can imagine he gets complaints/unsubs from people who get offended by super-romance stuff.

Arguably it doesn't matter because they promote like 50 books a day.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
Yeah...I'm probably done with BKnights. It seems there's too much other stuff for the same price (or even free) that does a better job.

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

All I know is when I took up a promo with them, the site they said they put my link on was just a looong list of books in no order, mine being somewhere about 20 - 30 titles past the point I would have stopped scrolling. Maybe it's worth it for the Facebook post and mailing list, but the site looked pretty bad.

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
Woo! The BKnights gripes start just after I pay for them to handle my promo.

Does anyone know how to sell a Sweet Romance, so a story with nothing explicit at all in it. The constant feedback I'm getting from anyone reading parts of the work in progress is, "That's so sweet" and "this will sell as a sweet romance." A few of the non-Amazon sites have "Sweet Romance" categories that are distinct from "Inspirational" which seems to be predominantly Christian Romance. However most of my income so far has come from Kindle Unlimited. This is my first novella and I'm not sure I can justify selling it a rate that would match my KU royalty on those other stores, even if they're set up for the Sweet Romance category. Plus everyone says sales are small on them, even though Amazon doesn't have a built in category for sweet romance.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
Is it a contemporary romance, sweet or otherwise? Contemporary romance and put sweet romance into the keywords / blurb / model your cover after other sweet romances.

Is it a historical? Repeat above, in Historical.

Is it between college students, high school students, fresh-out-of-college students handling their first real romances/relationships/whatevers? Put it in New Adult romance, repeat above.


Edit: Using keywords, you can put it into like six different romance categories and not choose at all! :haw:

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012

Sundae posted:

Is it a contemporary romance, sweet or otherwise? Contemporary romance and put sweet romance into the keywords / blurb / model your cover after other sweet romances.

Is it a historical? Repeat above, in Historical.

Is it between college students, high school students, fresh-out-of-college students handling their first real romances/relationships/whatevers? Put it in New Adult romance, repeat above.


Edit: Using keywords, you can put it into like six different romance categories and not choose at all! :haw:

That's pretty much the advice I've gotten elsewhere, from sweet romance authors. They say there is a market for it and the market on Amazon know how to use their keywords without having a specific category. Thanks. :)

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
a novella? on a new pen name? no sex whatsoever? you can expect many sales.

Jalumibnkrayal
Apr 16, 2008

Ramrod XTreme
Not sure if it will affect anyone else, but Amazon is now cracking down on some of it's keyword policies. Specifically, it is requiring authors to remove the phrase "kindle unlimited" from the keyword field if it was there. Early on I'd heard that it would be a good idea to stick that in there, so I spent the early afternoon pulling it out of 111 published works.

Other folks are reporting that Amazon is deleting keywords, but this might just be a case of the chicken littles.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
that graph makes me a little horny

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
Wait till you see the sexy girl on my next cover, I plugged her into some software that detects her hotness and she scored an HB 8.6666 rating, also I mirrored her face in Photoshop to check for symmetry, and she's pretty drat symetrical

Jalumibnkrayal
Apr 16, 2008

Ramrod XTreme
I'll be interested in hearing how responsive those mailing list signups are.

Barracuda Bang!
Oct 21, 2008

The first rule of No Avatar Club is: you do not talk about No Avatar Club. The second rule of No Avatar Club is: you DO NOT talk about No Avatar Club
Grimey Drawer
systran -- what is your new pen name? I remember checking out the one you started with. I'm curious to see how you have everything looking in the store and how you targeted the niche you're doing. PM is fine, if you'd rather.

You'll probably get a couple unlimited borrows out of it

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
Actually if anybody wants to swap pen names (I write terrible super romance) for KDP borrow then PM me. Happy to throw some goons a few free bucks on their back catalogue, super romance or no, I don't make enough use of my unlimited account and I need to start reading up + researching more, so this'll be good incentive

Bobby Deluxe
May 9, 2004

Since we're on the subject, I have a smutty tumblr I was going to start using to promote stuff, nearly 2k monthly views. If anyone wants to PM me links to a book and when it's free / on offer, I'll add it to the stack so it's not just suspiciously me listing my own books every weekend.

Angel Opportunity I am jealous of your graphs and hope someday to have such impressive curves myself.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Jalumibnkrayal posted:

I'll be interested in hearing how responsive those mailing list signups are.



The last time I sent a blast (on Friday night) I only had 40 subscribers. I'm sending another tomorrow evening when I release two more stories, and I'll have over 90 at that point.

The main thing to look at on these is the click-through to books I'm selling:



All of those clicks = money

Trustworthy
Dec 28, 2004

with catte-like thread
upon our prey we steal

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

Actually if anybody wants to swap pen names (I write terrible super romance) for KDP borrow then PM me. Happy to throw some goons a few free bucks on their back catalogue, super romance or no, I don't make enough use of my unlimited account and I need to start reading up + researching more, so this'll be good incentive

Be careful with reciprocal borrowing, Amazon has been getting cranky about that lately.

kitten
Feb 6, 2003
I don't have anything on kindle yet. If you want to pm me pen names for my research stage I'd be happy to borrow on kindle unlimited.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

kitten posted:

I don't have anything on kindle yet. If you want to pm me pen names for my research stage I'd be happy to borrow on kindle unlimited.

It would be helpful to know genre but there's a no erotica rule in this thread so if that's what genre you'd like to publish, I won't be able to recommend any.

Hijinks Ensue
Jul 24, 2007
OK, my free BookBub ran last week, and while I don't have all the figures in yet (still waiting for Kobo and BN), I had over 40,000 downloads. I've made enough off paid sales resulting from this promo so that I've already paid for the promo cost (even though I had to eat the cost of the UK and Canada promo because I screwed up the price matching). And I've gotten a few new reviews for the promo book on Amazon most of which have been four and five star (did have a one-star because of my cliffhanger ending but I'm used to those).

I am quite amazed.

Now my question is, is a free promo worth doing for a stand-alone? I realize I won't see the immediate sales of the next book in the series (which is what a lot of my sales now are) but I'm guessing there would be sales, I'd just have to wait longer for them.

The Fuzzy Hulk
Nov 22, 2007

ASK ME ABOUT CROSSING THE STREAMS


Trustworthy posted:

Be careful with reciprocal borrowing, Amazon has been getting cranky about that lately.

I agree completely.

I know an author who had every book unpublished, amazon account blocked, and the $6000+ earned in previous months but not remitted canceled. The reason given from Amazon was "reciprocal borrows". Be very, very careful in any genre trading borrow for borrow with another author. Amazon is very intuitive in detecting when it happens even months after the fact.

It also skews your data meaning the organic sales that you want would be muddled with the ones you traded for.

I'm not going to tell someone how to do their thing but if you want to make $$$ of this, please don't jeopardize a a big source of revenue for a few quick dollars.

Or go ahead and do it, I'm not your mother.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Hijinks Ensue posted:

Now my question is, is a free promo worth doing for a stand-alone? I realize I won't see the immediate sales of the next book in the series (which is what a lot of my sales now are) but I'm guessing there would be sales, I'd just have to wait longer for them.

It is less good but I think you'll find that when that book you just promo'd goes back to a paid status, you'll find yourself getting a lot more paid sales on it than before because of increased visibility. That's the kind of boost that you'd expect from a standalone.

Pinky Artichoke
Apr 10, 2011

Dinner has blossomed.
Geez, that reciprocal borrows thing is lovely. Heaven forbid people who admire each other's work actually, y'know, read it.

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
Thank you for the warnings re: author collusion, didn't know they would be cracking down on it for small fry. I've heard about book trading rings but figured you'd be talking about people doing it in gangs of 10+ people doing hundreds of books a month

Mr. Belding
May 19, 2006
^
|
<- IS LAME-O PHOBE ->
|
V

Pinky Artichoke posted:

Geez, that reciprocal borrows thing is lovely. Heaven forbid people who admire each other's work actually, y'know, read it.

I would imagine their algorithms are pretty good at differentiating organized collusion and people who just happen to read each other's work.

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005
May Borrows are in at $1.348 each.

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

Sundae posted:

May Borrows are in at $1.348 each.

is this good or bad, dunno if i should hate kindle today or not

Sundae
Dec 1, 2005

EngineerSean posted:

is this good or bad, dunno if i should hate kindle today or not

It's clearly a sign of how Amazon plans to crush all self-publishing beneath their world-dominating boot'o'pain.

Either that or it's a good $13,000+ in my bank account. :iiam:

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot
There's a horrible change to Kindle Unlimited borrows, I hate Amazon again now obviously.

angel opportunity
Sep 7, 2004

Total Eclipse of the Heart
What was the rate last month?

Am I misunderstanding this email that I just got which makes it sound like payment will be based on number of pages read rather than a flat payment for reading 10% of a book?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

EngineerSean
Feb 9, 2004

by zen death robot

angel opportunity posted:

Am I misunderstanding this email that I just got which makes it sound like payment will be based on number of pages read rather than a flat payment for reading 10% of a book?

That's my understanding too.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply