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I'm actually amazed that they were still in business. I remember putting a few erotica books on there after KU 2.0 and making like $2 in a month. When I looked at their storefront and website, I couldn't actually imagine people actually buying books off that site instead of Amazon or BN etc.
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Dec 28, 2016 20:49
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Books tend to sell there pretty decently for a month or two after release, and then fall off a cliff. They don't owe me much, but there's no way I'm accepting that laughable 'offer'. I can't see how a site like this, that hasn't changed in forever, can be posting such huge losses that they suddenly need to close down without any warning. Like, their expenses must be pretty steady - so where has all the money gone? Either they are laughably incompetent, or there's some shady poo poo going on. They were sending out emails as recently as ten days ago encouraging authors to discount and promote their books there.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:26
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Escape Addict posted:This is a wonderfully informative thread! I'm curious about pen names and anonymity. Do you guys make Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for all your different pen names? Different websites for different pen names? Your pen name is like your brand, right? I treat my pen name as both streamlined marketing and an alter ego. (I mean, it's still me, just with a narrower focus.) I have a Twitter account that gets used regularly, and not just for book promotion; I exchange snark with some musicians I've listened to for a while and crack jokes at interesting tweets, which technically gets me more exposure. I had a joke about David Bowie get 45+ likes. I am a Twitter internet all-star and you are lucky to have me in the thread. this is sarcasm I've also gotten more political with it as of late, but so have a lot of artists and writers. I'm willing to sacrifice marketing to be able to look myself in the mirror. Most of my friends and coworkers know my pen name; it's more a firewall against weirdo strangers, plus "H.C. Cavall" sounds cool.  Even then, it's the internet. If someone wants to find out who you are that badly, they will. The question is whether or not you're worth the effort. In most cases, we are not.e: The problem with a pen name, though, is people eventually have to know you as a person if you continue to market/sell your books physically. Sometimes an intriguing pen name is way more interesting than Chokes McGee fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Dec 30, 2016 |
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Dec 30, 2016 19:39
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Thanks for the replies. I've been trying to follow Angel Opportunity's advice regarding the research of best sellers. You really weren't kidding about the "Girl Holding Magic In Her Hand Plus 'Magic' In The Title" Genre. I'm also seeing a bunch of Vampire Romance. I'd be interested in pinpointing some other popular formulae in the Paranormal/Fantasy genre. Are there any that you guys have been seeing a lot of lately, or subgenres that you yourselves prefer to write in? Are almost all of these protagonists 17 year old girls who discover they're special?
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Dec 30, 2016 21:23
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Escape Addict posted:I'm also seeing a bunch of Vampire Romance. Without actually checking I can almost certainly say that those are Bella Forrest who is a law unto herself and shouldn't be relied on for gauging trends.
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Dec 31, 2016 00:10
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Yeah...my big post I made about researching markets specifically mentioned Bella Forrest and said to ignore her completely for your research  Her book that's high up right now is actually a book that she had high up years ago. She has just gone back to it and crammed a bunch of extra random poo poo into the old book and put a new cover on it. Only she gets away with this!
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Dec 31, 2016 03:06
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angel opportunity posted:Yeah...my big post I made about researching markets specifically mentioned Bella Forrest and said to ignore her completely for your research Okay, thanks for the reminder. I am seeing vampires pop up in other works besides hers. There's something called the Black Dagger Legacy written by J. R. Ward which is vampire assassins apparently. One called Hex on the Beach which seems kitchen-sink supernatural, witch protagonist with vampire characters. Most of the books with girls on them are either magic-users or shapeshifters. Lots of shifter romance. Also Fae, angels, demons. Buff dudes who shapeshift into dragons also seems to be a theme, with an emphasis on slavery and breeding. Have you guys read many of these? It seems that the ones that aren't doing some kind of 50 Shades storyline are more like Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse books. Lot of the same supernatural tropes plus a young female protagonist with special powers. A lot of the blurbs seem to start with a death, either a family member of the protagonist, or in some cases, the protagonist herself. Dark Fantasy genre seems to include some boy books among the girl books. Badass male power fantasies with tough-talking snarky Harry Dresden-esque protagonists. I wish there was a way to filter out all the NYT best-selling authors so I could see the self-published content creators by themselves. I also wish I knew which was more popular: stories that take place in the real world with supernatural elements added, or fictional high fantasy settings. Both have their fans, but which sell more titles? There are a lot of subgenres to explore as well. I'm going to be researching for quite a while. Any insights from experienced people would be appreciated.
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Dec 31, 2016 06:50
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I actually was trying to do what you are doing a month or so ago. I was trying to figure out a genre to write aside from romance "on the side" that would still make me money. This was going to be what I "wrote for fun" when I was done with my "romance work" for the day. I ended up burning out on that pretty fast, mostly because writing that many words per day kind of killed me. Anyway, I tried to follow my own advice for researching a market and found it PRETTY HARD. The "girl with magic in her hand" is really obviously there, and I didn't want to do that. I was trying to do something that would be very fun for me to write, and I didn't want to do magic in hand girl for whatever reason. If you are trying to break into self-pub and want a real shot at making some money, I really think that is a juicy genre that people are tending to sleep on. If I weren't already doing romance and wanted to try to make some money, I would honestly consider taking a shot at that genre. It's the clearest opening I can see after doing a lot of looking. Another thing I noticed in my research is how prevalent Amazon imprints are outside of romance. I think you'd need someone like Sean or someone who actually is signed by an imprint to weigh in, but from what I can tell, if you write the kind of stuff that the imprints are taking, and if you do it well, it's quite possible an imprint will approach you and take you on. Amazon imprints are kind of like hybrids of traditional and self publishing. They are basically "publishers" that are owned by Amazon. I believe they get some pretty sick benefits, for instance getting more than 33% on a $0.99 sale, and the occasional thing that Sean likes to bitch about, where Amazon just randomly pushes your book into top 100 and holds it there even though it didn't sell any copies. If you look at the list of "Amazon imprints": quote:Montlake Romance for romance novels. You'll see 47 North as a big one in all of the fantasy looking books. This can also help you figure out what is what when you are looking everything over. You want to categorize an imprint differently from trad pub. When I was doing research, the only thing I found that really hit the venn diagram between "Stuff I want to write for fun," and "Stuff that reasonably could make money," was found from looking through this book's ABs: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HVF7OL0/ This book itself is 47 North, as are many of the books on its AB list. I found this kind of middle ground between lovely doorstop Wheel of Time fantasy and "girl with magic in her hand." It feels kind of nebulous though, and there is no real easy trend or clear thing you should do. It looks more like, "Identify overarching tropes, cover quality/styles, and length of book," and then you have to just kind of have a good idea and write an actually good book. It seems way less easy bet that romance or girl with magic in her hand. This is one reason I kind of just fizzled out on the idea and doubled down on romance; I was maybe 10k words into this story and I was only around 30% sure it would make a profit. My general advice has been make way more certain you will turn a profit before you commit to an idea and spend hours of your life writing it, then thousands of your dollars promoting it and making it succeed. I do think there is some "good path" out there for getting an imprint to sign you. Self-pub right now is still amazingly good. This is my first "Kindlemas" where I have successful books out, and I'm earning a shitload of money--more than I've ever made since I started this. The thing is, in the back of my mind, I'm always very worried something could happen to bring it all crashing down. An ideal setup for me right now would to have romance as my main thing, and have something also going on the imprints. Any kind of Kindle Unlimited fuckery or lovely thing Amazon does to gently caress over indie publishers, the imprint people will likely be the winners of that. At worst they will just be insulated from the damage, but either way I'd love to have that extra level of security if I could get it. If you're just starting out, I think the way of getting on an imprint is just "Do really well self-pubbing certain kinds of books and get noticed," so it's not like you have to hard-commit toward courting an imprint. Keep in mind though I don't know that much about imprints and a lot of what I'm saying about them could be inaccurate. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Dec 31, 2016 |
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Dec 31, 2016 07:18
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You spend thousands of dollars promoting your material? I can't afford to do that yet. How can someone with no money succeed at this? Imagine you have a free internet connection, a bare minimum word processor, no money, but plenty of time. To make the thought experiment even more drastic, imagine you're locked in a prison, Count of Monte Cristo style, and they'll release you if you earn a certain high dollar amount. I imagine you'd start small, trying to earn a little, then reinvesting that money to create better covers and market your books better. You'd be trying to create a snowball effect, playing the long game. Book one wouldn't make much, but if you kept writing a series, each new book builds the reputation of the series as a whole. What if you're digging out of Shawshank one story at a time? It's like being a level one character in a brutally difficult RPG--a grueling grind at the start to earn even a single gold piece, to upgrade your rags to beginner rusty armor. Is this possible? I wish there were a budget guide for dirt poor beginners.
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Jan 1, 2017 07:28
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Man, look. When I started this in 2011 I was basically homeless and hadn't found steady work in two years, scraping by freelancing and living on people's couches. Temp agencies weren't calling me back, and I didn't really have a lot of other prospects. I just wrote stuff, published it, and then wrote more stuff. There wasn't even any decent advice because nobody knew why anything was working yet. But I had a lot of free time because I was unemployed. I'm still broke all the time but I'm not homeless and I don't have a day job. Just write a poo poo-ton, don't worry about marketing until you've got a catalog to market. The more stuff you've got out there, the more it benefits from every dollar or hour you spend marketing. Or maybe that advice is stale now, I don't know. If you don't have the money, spend time. If you don't have the time, spend money. If you don't have either, maybe you're not at a point where this is an economically viable option for you - start writing, start publishing, just to get some content out there and start brand-building for when you do have the resources available. Or get lucky. I hear that works wonders, too. psychopomp fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Jan 1, 2017 |
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Jan 1, 2017 09:44
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The only thing you need to "research" this poo poo is a $10 a month KU subscription. Don't let anyone tell you different.
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Jan 1, 2017 15:24
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Popular Human posted:The only thing you need to "research" this poo poo is a $10 a month KU subscription. Don't let anyone tell you different. That and free books, too. I said this before but I wrote a book on my phone during my lunch breaks at work, just emailing myself. My thumbs hurt but that book still pulls in money every month, years later. The sequels were written on a laptop bought with book money. It takes time tho.
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Jan 1, 2017 16:03
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No point worrying about marketing until you have something to market (and I mean way more than one book there). AO has a relatively enormous catalog now, so it's apples and oranges versus anyone starting up now. The super easy dirt-poor beginners' guide to self-publishing #1 - Figure out what genre you want to write. #2 - Start reading that genre if you don't already do so. #3 - Come up with your idea and apply the general genre identification questions from the OP to it. #4 - Write something for that genre. Finish the first complete draft. #5 - Do not publish it yet. #6 - Come back when you finish it and talk to the thread again about your newly-finished draft. Yes, there are more steps after #6. They don't matter right now. There is absolutely no reason to start getting concerned about marketing, publishing approaches, release schedules, etc, when you haven't written anything. quote:I imagine you'd start small, trying to earn a little, then reinvesting that money to create better covers and market your books better. You'd be trying to create a snowball effect, playing the long game. Book one wouldn't make much, but if you kept writing a series, each new book builds the reputation of the series as a whole. None of the answers to this matter until you've written something. No offense intended to you specifically, but people post a lot of questions in this thread and contact people over PM / e-mail asking for advice about publishing, and a lot of them have nothing written at all and never come back with a finished work even after people give tons of marketing advice. Write something, then come back and talk publishing. 
Sundae fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 1, 2017 |
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Jan 1, 2017 21:12
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Cool, thanks to everybody who responded. I've always been of the mentality that the creative work is what counts, so this thread was kind of an eye-opener when I saw the veterans using a very calculated approach to reverse-engineer best-sellers. It's struck me as backwards, almost the inverse of creativity, and yet quite brilliant in terms of technique. I was astounded that people wrote books that way, in contrast to the usual approach where a seed of an idea grows in unpredictable ways. This write-to-market approach is like bonsai for ideas. A very different kind of gardening, and apparently a profitable one. Anyway, I'll take that advice about writing my draft. I'm not one of those "idea people" that imagines some multi-part epic and never gets a word down. Writing's always been my idea of fun. I think I am going to do more research about girls who hold magic in their hands and what their typical storylines are like. Have you noticed a lot of these authors are Mormons? At least it seems that way to me.
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Jan 2, 2017 02:35
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I 100% agree with Sundae that you have to actually write something. If you haven't finished writing anything this is all too hypothetical to you. Just know that you can definitely release without spending money and you can definitely make money. Here is my opinion though on how much money you can invest on a romance launch. Viable options: $100-$150 Launch: Spend money on a cover. Around $100 would be the ideal amount, as you can get really quality covers for just around $150. If you go lower, you can probably still get something solid that will give your book a fighting chance and HUGELY minimize the book just totally flopping and doing nothing at all. With this strategy, making less than $150 on your book would mean you completely and totally hosed up your: Blurb, title, subject matter, writing, and/or a combination of all of those. A decent cover should all but guarantee you will not lose money. You'll probably make money. If you do this, I would try to beg people to put you in their newsletter, and do whatever you can to weasel yourself some visibility. Spend the last few $10-30 you have here and do a "Facebook giveaway" in active romance Facebook groups, offering Amazon giftcards for a raffle that keeps bumping your post. This gets your Facebook page likes and gets people to see and buy your book. People will actually bother to do this for even a chance at winning one of two $5 gift cards. $300-$400 Launch: For me, this is the absolute ideal. If you believe in your book at all, and if you have this kind of money to spare, this is what I would do. If you are really tight on cash and/or you think your book might be really off market and you just don't want to "bet" on it, do the $100-$150 launch. You spend $100-$150 on a cover, and then $300 or so on a few ads that have very high ROI. There are only about $300 worth of super-high ROI ads, and this is what makes this the "sweet spot." Even if you wanted to spend $600, as soon as you pass above $300 spent, you start to see really badly diminishing ROI. $400-$500 launch: Throwing some semi-professional editing in might be worth it. There are a lot of lazy ways to get around this, the best one being asking your ARC readers to send you any errors they find. Doing your own editing passes is time consuming, but if you are good you can catch most of your own mistakes. If money is tight at all, I don't think hiring an editor is great value. If you're making money and want to make sure your catalog gets established as quality, and you dread those 3-star reviews complaining about typos, then it might be worth throwing down for editing. $1000+ Launch: I would never do this until you know what you are doing. The ROI gets really bad after around $400, and you quickly enter into the territory where you must use Facebook ads to even have the money you spend do anything. Learning to use Facebook ads is going to eat away hundreds of dollars, so don't even touch it until you are earning decent on books. Non-viable option: Launching with a garbage cover: You just spent 40-50 hours of your time sitting in a chair and writing a book. Do you really not have $100 to put a good cover on it? If you don't, then work minimum wage for a few more hours until you have the $100. Do not ask your friend who is good at Photoshop and knows nothing about romance covers to do a cover for you. You'll get something that looks nice and is wildly off market. It won't sell. I also wouldn't do your own cover. You will think it looks good, and 99% of the time it does not actually look good and is wildly off market. Over time, with a lot of practice, you COULD get good at doing your own covers. So once you have a book finished, probably your first release is going to be the $100 launch. A well executed $100 launch will almost always generate the $400 you need to try the more expensive launch on book two. For non-romance I'm guessing the numbers on this all go up. A good "girl holding magic" cover is probably going to cost at least $300, maybe even much higher. I don't really know. I do know that a cover that is up to that level of quality looks mandatory for the "girl holding magic" book to do well.
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Jan 2, 2017 03:20
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As always, what AO says is really good, especially the part about a cheap first launch giving you the money to re-invest in a better launch next time. However, obviously the numbers can't be the same if you launch multiple books at the same time, as some new indie authors do to gain visibility with a series. Then you take bigger risks to reap hopefully bigger rewards: $400-500 up front for decent covers at the minimum. It also gives you an "instant" back catalogue to drive sales toward if you spend money on advertising. BTW, I would never spend money on ads until I had at least two books out, preferably more. I did this, so I had 4 books available when I did a free run on the first book in my series and I spent $350 total on ads. A little over a month later, the sell-through has covered my publication costs for all 4 books and then some, which includes the dumb poo poo I would never spend money on again now that I know better. Since covering my expenses, I've made basically good fun money every day. Not day job money, but enough that I feel it's worth my time to keep at it. It also helps that I actually like writing romance, so even if I'm not making major bank I'm still having a good time. Which is lucky, because within a couple of weeks, my books will lose all visibility and I won't be making any more fun money from them until I put out another book. People have said it before but it bears repeating: it is really important to figure out what "success" means for you. I think it takes nerves of loving steel to write for a living. Know your own motivations, set your goals, and be ready to adjust constantly if you want to meet them. Either part time or full time, this is a business. I also want to point out that over half my income comes from Kindle Unlimited, so yeah, do that.
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Jan 2, 2017 06:07
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Escape Addict posted:It's struck me as backwards, almost the inverse of creativity, and yet quite brilliant in terms of technique. I was astounded that people wrote books that way, in contrast to the usual approach where a seed of an idea grows in unpredictable ways. You need to ask yourself what your goals are. If you're writing to feel good about yourself and explore some artistic spark, then just do what makes you happy. If you're writing something that you want other people to read, you have to take the readers into account (why they read, what they read, and how they read) and understand the craft (the ways those factors interact with the medium and how to approach this). If you want people who aren't your family and close friends to read it, you need to understand how to market it. If you want people to PAY for it, you need to understand salesmanship and quality control. If you want to live off it, then... you see where this is going. People who think that 'true' literary masterpieces get shat out in a single day, hurried along by the muses' divine inspiration and unconscious to questions of structure, technique, editing, or viable markets, either have never written or have never written anything good. Everything in this thread is super good advice for anybody mature enough to appreciate how much their ego can get in the way of being a successful writer -- even if you don't want to make any money off it. Hell, if the only lesson you learn is "leave your ego at the door", that's probably the most valuable one. Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 13:18
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Well, I've gone and done published part 1 of what will hopefully be a moderately successful zombie apocalypse series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N4JX2M1/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483357102&sr=8-1&keywords=end+times+rise+of+the+undead I've got a scant mailing list set up comprising the fans I have from when I originally serialised this online yonks ago, and have given them all ARCs with requests of reviews. I've got a Twitter account with a handful of followers in will begin regularly tweeting about it. What else am I supposed to be doing in what I understand are a very important first 30 days? edit - and is there any consensus on Amazon Marketing Services i.e. advertise your book on Amazon itself?
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Jan 2, 2017 13:36
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freebooter posted:Well, I've gone and done published part 1 of what will hopefully be a moderately successful zombie apocalypse series: Congrats on publishing If you read the previous few posts, you can see that a few people (me, and a few writers way more successful than me) recommend not blowing a lot of money on advertising until you have more than one book out. Maybe the rules are different for sci-fi and thrillers since there's not quite as much competition for visibility? IDK, but I wouldn't sink a ton of cash into ads until you have the potential for more sell-through. I'd say this is especially true since your book is priced at 0.99 and you're only getting about 0.35 per copy. Think about how many copies/page reads you'd need to recoup your costs. That said, you might be okay with losing money if your goal is to get more mailing list signups and grow your fan base instead of making a profit right away. It depends on your situation and your goals. How soon can you get the next book out? I couldn't quite figure it out from your post, but did you give your ARC readers their copies a week or two before publishing, or did you wait until you'd already published? The first option is better, since it means you will get reviews faster. If they already have their copies and have had a decent amount of time to read them, release week is a good time to send them a reminder email with a link to the review page. Blue Scream fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 18:11
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Oh I did read the previous posts - I'd hate people to think I'm just drive-by asking for advice, this thread is a goldmine. So much of it is slated towards romance specifically though that I always wonder how much of it will apply to me. If I were to do ads - exactly where would you put them? What kind of places are you advertising in? Next book is slated for March 1 and the ARCS went out about a week ago, although it is the holiday period. edit - sorry if this is a dumb question, but I can't see this anywhere on the author dashboard. How can you tell what rank your book is in any given category? freebooter fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 23:01
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freebooter posted:Oh I did read the previous posts - I'd hate people to think I'm just drive-by asking for advice, this thread is a goldmine. So much of it is slated towards romance specifically though that I always wonder how much of it will apply to me. Just go to the page on Amazon for the book and scroll down a bit. It will show your overall rank and a few categories that it is the highest in (not all categories it is in, though) I honestly don't know where I would book ads for non-romance. https://www.bargainbooksy.com/ <-- This is one of my go-to sites for romance. I don't know how good they are for other genres, but they do offer other genres. For romance, the $80 ad usually gets me around 100 sales on the day of release at $0.99, and I'm guessing a lot of KU borrows (though Amazon will never let you know how many you get...) You can see their Horror list is half the size of their romance list, but it's also only $25 to book it. I have NO CLUE how good that list is compared to their romance list. When you book with them you get your book listed on their website under the chosen genre, and you get them to put your book in an email that goes out to everyone on the list. They cap the number of books per day, so you won't be the 200th book on a list of 300 like with some other really lovely ad services. There are probably other ad sites that I am unaware of that are pretty strong for non-romance, but you'd probably want to find authors who write what you do to see what they use.
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Jan 2, 2017 23:20
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freebooter posted:ARCS went out about a week ago, although it is the holiday period. Then it's a good time to contact the people with ARCs with that link to the review page. "Hi there! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season I'm just sending this email as a quick reminder that you received a free copy of my book because you volunteered to leave an honest review on Amazon, etc." You're not bothering them (unless you send out a reminder email every day or something). They made an agreement with you. If anybody bitches about it, don't send them a free copy of your next book. My ad sites are pretty much romance specific as well, so yeah, sorry I have no suggestions there. When you're a bestseller with a gazillion Goodreads ratings, try for a BookBub. Blue Scream fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 2, 2017 |
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Jan 2, 2017 23:35
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It never hurts to try for a BookBub anyway, though it's been quite some time since I've gotten a spot.
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Jan 3, 2017 03:10
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Sweet, thanks guys - I did send out an ARC reminder to my mailing list the day it launched and I'm checking out BargainBooksy now. So far I've sold 2 copies, have 276 KU pages read and I'm sitting at #1018 in the post-apocalyptic category. 
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Jan 3, 2017 08:35
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Bought an ad on BargainBooksy, horror was $25 which is chump change. (Or $35 really, I sure hope I make a lot of American sales because the exchange rate is killing me in setting up promo stuff for this.) I definitely need to stay in the mindset of "this is less than I spend on beer a week" and not "I need to sell x copies to get back in the black on the cost/benefit ratio."
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Jan 3, 2017 08:57
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 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MRZA23Y I've been following the advice from this thread when launching EBB TIDE and its worked brilliantly. Everything worthwhile I learned about KDP I've got from this thread (big shoutouts to Sundae and AO) so I thought I might weigh in on the advertising talk and share my experience. Although I have two books already on Amazon, these were not launched properly and did the old sink-without-a-trace. So, effectively EBB TIDE was launching as a first novel. I wrote EBB TIDE during Nanowrimo and wanted to launch on Christmas Day. Its a post apoc zombie with a female protag, marketing it towards women sailors. I was posting daily chapters on a blog while writing it as a way of drumming up interest, which worked nicely to build a mailing list and getting ARCs lined up. I've spent $350 on advertising and launch, using a combo of broad scifi mailing lists and targeted Facebook ads. I pubbed on 20th and emailed my ARC mailing list a reminder to post reviews. My advertising was due to kick off on 25 Dec. I had emailed a bunch of mailing lists asking if I could book an ad before the book was published - I booked ads in booksends.com ($25), bargainbooksy.com ($35) & manybooks.net ($25). I also bought an author profile interview on manybooks - it cost $49, pricey but I wanted to have a third-party interview up for anyone googling about the story, as way of making myself seem more legit. Between 20-25 Dec (ie before any ads went live) it sold 90 copies. Why? I don't know - maybe it was a knock on effect from the blog promo... or I smashed the keywords or something. Booksends and Manybooks went off on 25th of Dec. I sold 89 copies that day. Bargainbooksy went off on 26th - sold 69. Booksends and Manybooks newsletters only featured a few books and I felt they worked well, whereas I felt my book got lost in a long list on Bargainbooksy. After wasting about $100 on Facebook ads, I settled down to a two ads, targeting Australian and US women sailors, budgeting at $15 a day. Per click cost worked out to be between 15-30c. No idea how many click throughs get converted to sales though... ereadernewstoday.com wouldn't let me book an ad unless I had 10 4+star reviews... when I got them, I booked an ad for $30. That one went off on NYE, when I sold 110 copies - so pretty happy with that. All in all, I've sold over 500 copies since 20Dec, which I'm totally stoked about. Highest sales rank was #1750 and its been hanging around #2-3000, putting it at #5-7 on Sea Stories and around the #40s in Post Apoc. I'm keeping the price at 99c as I just want sales - as I'm now working on the 2nd in the series and hope I can play the long game here! But even at 0.99c, and including KENP, I've recouped the money I spent on ads, so it was definitely worth the effort to launch properly. So thanks once again guys - there's no way this could have happened without the advice and experience on display in this thread.
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Jan 3, 2017 11:57
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jazzyjay posted:
That's a good post and a good way to start the new year. You've got another sale from me. Bravo! Rock on boat goon. I sold mine a few years ago, still miss it and the dream.
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Jan 3, 2017 13:30
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That's pretty awesome. You may want to seriously consider switching the price to something like $3.99 or $4.99 though depending on the length of your book. It looks like pretty high quality, and $2.99+ is pretty standard for non-romance. Even in romance I only use $0.99 as "introductory price" while my rank is super good. If you're getting really solid KU reads that is making you money it may be worth keeping the price at $0.99. Also, if you think you can have book 2 out FAST, $0.99 is also very much worth considering. Another thing to consider with expenses on your launches. Spending money on your launch usually is going to make you money back. It might not, but there's a good chance it will. It's an investment. Then consider all the nerd poo poo people like to say they are "investing" in. "I am considering investing in a new star citizen ship..." or "I am considering investing in a new Nintendo DS," etc. etc. Those are time "investments" that will never make you any money back, and people easily justify insane amounts of spending on stuff like that knowing it's just money spent.
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Jan 3, 2017 16:26
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A couple days in and my book's already being pirated on some forum, how flattering (I assume it's automated). https://forum.mobilism.org/viewtopic.php?f=1293&t=1877630
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Jan 3, 2017 23:05
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jazzyjay posted:I pubbed on 20th and emailed my ARC mailing list a reminder to post reviews. My advertising was due to kick off on 25 Dec. I had emailed a bunch of mailing lists asking if I could book an ad before the book was published - I booked ads in booksends.com ($25), bargainbooksy.com ($35) & manybooks.net ($25). I also bought an author profile interview on manybooks - it cost $49, pricey but I wanted to have a third-party interview up for anyone googling about the story, as way of making myself seem more legit. Checking out booksends.com and manybooks.net, they both list as requirements that your book be on sale. Does Amazon even let you go below 99c?
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Jan 3, 2017 23:45
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quote:Checking out booksends.com and manybooks.net, they both list as requirements that your book be on sale. Does Amazon even let you go below 99c? True story: Every bargain-hunting website has plenty of excess staffing and free time to check back on every deal they post to make sure that the initial $0.99 release point was in fact reverted to full price later on, after your promotion was finished. Make certain you don't dare list that it's on new-release sale for $0.99 and put the normal price at something higher (which you may someday revert to once you no longer care, at an undetermined point in the future), because everyone involved catches it instantly and will ban you forever from using their services.  Exception: Do not gently caress with Bookbub.
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Jan 4, 2017 03:37
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Yooper posted:You've got another sale from me. Bravo! Rock on boat goon. I sold mine a few years ago, still miss it and the dream. Awesome, hope you enjoy it. And keep the dream alive, man! angel opportunity posted:That's pretty awesome. You may want to seriously consider switching the price to something like $3.99 or $4.99 though depending on the length of your book. Cheers, I'm stoked! I've been wondering about raising the price. I'm a bit nervous about upping it as I'm still getting 20-40 sales a day and want to keep the rank and visibility up. Current KU reads are about average 3500 a day, which is fine. I'm primarily interested in gaining readers and exposure for now. My current working theory is that I have had data from two weeks of ad-driven sales. Now I'll keep at .99 for a week to get data for sales with no promo, then put it back up to its initial launch price of $2.99 and then see how that affects sales. Either way, I'm working on the 2nd book in the series now and hope to have it out in about 6 weeks - and then keep punching them out every 2 months.
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Jan 4, 2017 10:24
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Congratulations, jazzyjay! Your posts have been very educational, a great case study and success story. I looked inside the book and was impressed by the abundance of nautical lingo. That kind of verisimilitude really sets it apart from from other post-apoc novels. I had a question about length. How many words is a 203 page e-book? I try to write at least 1000 words a day, and I don't know what that translates to in terms of a formatted e-book, and how many pages of progress I'm making. I'm impressed you can punch out a book every two months or so. That's really fast. In theory, I should be able to write 60k words in 60 days, but the daily word count can be a lot higher, or I can get stuck completely. I don't think I can write a novel every two months.
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Jan 5, 2017 22:59
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Escape Addict posted:
Ebb tide is 69 400 words; that 203 pages includes a couple of front and end matter. As for speed of writing, its taken me a long time to get to a decent rate. I used to be happy if I got down 500 in a session - and those sessions were few and infrequent. Now I write 6 days a week (if my other work allows), and do it until I hit 2000 words, whether I feel it or not.
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Jan 7, 2017 11:22
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Thanks for the reply. I guess I should aim for an even higher word count since I'm writing fantasy and readers tend to want a 300 page or higher story. How much did the cover for Ebb Tide cost? Who did you go to to make it? And was your $350 marketing budget Australian or American dollars?
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Jan 8, 2017 02:20
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does anyone here have any experience with self-publishing poetry collections or chapbooks? I'm curious about any resources specific to publishing it, how it sells and where it does best, and what amount of content you need before something like poetry becomes viable. I've sadly gotten too few opportunities to talk to well-known/successful self-publishing poets like Steve Roggenbuck to really get any substantial advice. I'm kinda just looking to be pointed in the right direction, I guess.
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Jan 8, 2017 08:19
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For the purpose of this response, I'm going to assume that you are not a famous author, songwriter or poet posting on SomethingAwful under an alias.  Unless you are already famous, poetry collections are literally never, ever viable sales products in self-published form (or honestly, in industry-published form either) through the standard book or e-book means. If you want to publish it as a personal project, go hog wild. If you want to publish it for monetary gain, you will never even recoup the $100 spent purchasing an acceptable cover, let alone compensation for the hours you spent writing it. You may have better (still horrible) odds of doing the 'free reads and become my patron to get stuff sooner / videos' thing Steve R seems to be doing based on a quick google search (I'd never heard of him and he's not selling anything on Amazon or B&N), but that's so far outside of my expertise that I can't really comment.
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Jan 8, 2017 08:46
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Sundae posted:For the purpose of this response, I'm going to assume that you are not a famous author, songwriter or poet posting on SomethingAwful under an alias. It's definitely something that has gains in ways other than purely from book sales. He makes most of his money doing poetry reading tours / selling his books through his own press I think. It's something that, thinking about it, you definitely do for reasons other than making money from the book itself. It's more of an exposure thing I guess.
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Jan 8, 2017 10:30
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Escape Addict posted:How much did the cover for Ebb Tide cost? Who did you go to to make it? And was your $350 marketing budget Australian or American dollars? I did the cover myself as I've got a background in graphic design. And $350 was USD - I set my budget an arbritary $500 AUD and $350 is how many presidents my kangaroo bucks get these days. Thankfully, it will work the other way as well; I'm looking forward to those fat yankee $$ amazon paydays.
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Jan 8, 2017 11:41
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ibts posted:It's definitely something that has gains in ways other than purely from book sales. He makes most of his money doing poetry reading tours / selling his books through his own press I think. It's something that, thinking about it, you definitely do for reasons other than making money from the book itself. It's more of an exposure thing I guess. Yeah, if you're going to do this, it's almost certainly going to be through channels other than what this thread thinks of as standard sales channels (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Google) with different tactics as well. I just don't know enough about other approaches to offer any advice with them, I'm afraid. Sorry. 
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Jan 8, 2017 21:17
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