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FingerbangMisfire posted:Hard to not take the advice of the writer. "The Hookie-Pookie Man" it is. Hope you enjoy it. I thought about your pricing question and decided to try them at $2.99. I made the changes, but I think it might be a day or two before they go into effect. If you (or anyone else here) bought one of my books at $3.99, let me know and I'll send you a free "e-copy" of another title of your choice. I think there might be some sort of sweet spot for pricing. Ebooks can be priced low enough for shoppers to buy them as a sort of impulse purchase. But I suspect if you go too low, at least for a book-length work, it might give the impression that the product is worthless. My books on Amazon. My web site.
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Apr 3, 2011 20:06
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This is a cool thread, my dad is getting a novel published through Createspace and it should be on Amazon in just a couple weeks! If he has any good tips for marketing or getting people to see it, I will post them here. For now, though, he made me make him a website and try to teach him to use twitter and stuff, so he may end up just using his old work contacts.
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Apr 3, 2011 21:47
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For those of you with books already out, I'd be interested in hearing what you've done to self promote  .Did anyone do blog tours, send free e-books to reviewers, etc? Are there any mistakes you'd made with your marketing plan that we new folk should be wary of?
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Apr 4, 2011 00:33
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Two Head Knight posted:For those of you with books already out, I'd be interested in hearing what you've done to self promote So far just a tumblr account and a twitter account to promote it. Lots of talking about writing and kind of casually steering people to my kindle page after a discussion about books or whatever. Makes me feel like a used car dealer, in a way. Anything to get people to the page, really. I'd like to know what else I can do, particularly about reviews. I'm a little wary of review places as it seems like shouting in a crowded room (of other people who are also shouting). By which I mean, it seems the only people who read them are other authors looking to sell their own stuff.
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Apr 4, 2011 01:53
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Two Head Knight posted:For those of you with books already out, I'd be interested in hearing what you've done to self promote As Myrddin said, I've got a Tumblr (http://vitka.tumblr.com/) and a Twitter (http://twitter.com/vitka) I'm on, as well as Goodreads.com -- which has moved a few sales. A few posts back, I listed the URLs of a couple sites that seem to have friendly, responsive people running them ( http://thefrugalereader.com/ and http://gracekrispy.blogspot.com/ ) There are more, but these are the folks I've talked to. Beyond that, there's 'real' advertising, which I haven't done yet. I'm tempted to buy a SA ad, because I'd be supporting the site while getting more eyes on my work. But at the same time, I don't want to spend too much money on things that should only be making me money. If I do buy ads (I might this week, actually), I'll put the results in the thread. Secret Agent X23 posted:Hope you enjoy it. Please do speak up if the price change has gotten more copies sold. I've heard that $2.99 is itself the sweet spot, but obviously I don't know for sure. FingerbangMisfire fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Apr 4, 2011 |
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Apr 4, 2011 06:25
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Not sure if this is cool or not, but I started a self publishing subreddit to talk about or promote your work on reddit. So far, there's no subscribers, but I literally just created it a short time ago. http://www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish
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Apr 4, 2011 20:18
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Myrddin Emrys posted:Not sure if this is cool or not, but I started a self publishing subreddit to talk about or promote your work on reddit. So far, there's no subscribers, but I literally just created it a short time ago. Definitely cool with me. (I'm not registered on reddit -- should I bother?)
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Apr 5, 2011 01:54
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Myrddin Emrys posted:So far just a tumblr account and a twitter account to promote it. Lots of talking about writing and kind of casually steering people to my kindle page after a discussion about books or whatever. Makes me feel like a used car dealer, in a way. I've been posting reviews of other writers' books on my web site, but only for those I can recommend. The way I see it, this does two things: First, it gives me a way to get new content on my site fairly regularly. Second, the authors I review might want to link to good reviews, thereby driving more legitimate traffic to my site (I hope). It occurs to me that if there are writers having some success selling short stories on Amazon, maybe I should publish a few that way. I have a lot of characters scattered through my books that would have some potential for this, so the stories could, in addition to being standalone products, serve as promos for the books: "If you liked this story you'll want to check out the further adventures of Gilbert Ragwater in the novel Open Stage." Or whatever.
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Apr 5, 2011 03:43
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I've been thinking about this for a couple days, but I'm going to experiment with the price plan -- in particular, I want to price things according to word length. Flash fiction (0-1,000 words): Free. Short stories (1,000-7,500 words): $.99 Novelette / Novellas (7,500-40,000 words): $1.99 Novels (50,000 and up): $2.99 Does that seem reasonable? Note: my definitions & words lengths are based on my own averages
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Apr 5, 2011 23:45
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FingerbangMisfire posted:I've been thinking about this for a couple days, but I'm going to experiment with the price plan -- in particular, I want to price things according to word length. Apparently, there's a pretty strong correlation of price-to-sales for indie writers. The "perfect price" seems to be $0.99 for a novel. I know it sounds weird and seems to suck, but hear me out. First of all, Amanda Hocking and John Locke and all those big name eBook superstars are selling their stuff for $0.99. They make a lot of money this way. Next case: http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2011/apr/03/WSMET09-teacher-is-part-of-a-self-publishing-revol-ar-914839/ It's the story of a teacher who wrote a book and put it on Kindle for $1.99 and sold few copies. Then she dropped it to $0.99 and sold 52k copies.
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Apr 6, 2011 02:03
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Myrddin Emrys posted:Next case: http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2011/apr/03/WSMET09-teacher-is-part-of-a-self-publishing-revol-ar-914839/ The price for that is back up to $2.99. Actually, all of her e-editions are $2.99, excepting the ludicrously priced "Why I Love Singlehood," which is $7.99 for Kindle. Maybe she got greedy? http://www.amazon.com/Elisa-Lorello/e/B0041TN02Q/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 EDIT: That's not to say $.99 is the wrong price for a novel. I may decide to do the same (in fact I probably will), I do want to price novels at $2.99 to start. FingerbangMisfire fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Apr 6, 2011 |
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Apr 6, 2011 02:56
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FingerbangMisfire posted:The price for that is back up to $2.99. Actually, all of her e-editions are $2.99, excepting the ludicrously priced "Why I Love Singlehood," which is $7.99 for Kindle. I would expect that once you start gaining some traction and make a name for yourself, you can charge more. It also seems possible that the mere fact that folks can see a book ranked at, say, 5,000 as opposed to 100,000, would give it more credibility regardless of price. FingerbangMisfire posted:EDIT: That's not to say $.99 is the wrong price for a novel. I may decide to do the same (in fact I probably will), I do want to price novels at $2.99 to start. I had not been aware of these success stories until I started reading this thread. My impression was that pricing a product too low would create the perception that it was worthless--the conventional wisdom, so to speak. But maybe that doesn't apply when there's no physical product. And now you've got me thinking of going down to $.99 with mine. From the POV of someone poking around on Amazon, it's easy to think a self-published book is going to suck... but then again, it's very easy to risk $.99 on the chance that it might be good. The odds that it'll pay off are far better than spending a buck on Powerball.
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Apr 6, 2011 04:00
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Secret Agent X23 posted:From the POV of someone poking around on Amazon, it's easy to think a self-published book is going to suck... but then again, it's very easy to risk $.99 on the chance that it might be good. The odds that it'll pay off are far better than spending a buck on Powerball. I think that is precisely the case. The risk-reward ratio is pretty good at a buck. Which reminds me: I got a bunch of Amazon gift cards for my birthday, and I plan to use them to buy the hell out of the authored books in this thread. 
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Apr 6, 2011 07:04
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FingerbangMisfire posted:The price for that is back up to $2.99. Actually, all of her e-editions are $2.99, excepting the ludicrously priced "Why I Love Singlehood," which is $7.99 for Kindle. I've heard from some people that the "right thing to do" is offer a low introductory price, and then sort of seesaw between low and "high" to keep sales traction going. FingerbangMisfire posted:I think that is precisely the case. The risk-reward ratio is pretty good at a buck. 
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Apr 6, 2011 16:07
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Myrddin Emrys posted:I've heard from some people that the "right thing to do" is offer a low introductory price, and then sort of seesaw between low and "high" to keep sales traction going. I downloaded a copy a couple days ago. Looking forward to getting into it. I've also gone ahead and lowered all mine to $.99. So anyone who's interested in getting one might want to wait a day or two so the new price can go into effect first.
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Apr 7, 2011 01:01
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Secret Agent X23 posted:I downloaded a copy a couple days ago. Looking forward to getting into it. I don't get why it takes Amazon up to 2 days to change the details of a book, say the description. I think it's because they tie everything together (title, author, details, etc) so changing one thing (like writing a new catchy description) takes a long time. Also, thanks for the purchase! edit: Also, a reader alerted me to a formatting problem. Nothing big (and thankfully not a lack of editing on my part) but it seems that for some reason the Kindle app is seeing blocks of dialog and indenting the whole thing. So instead of: code:code:Myrddin Emrys fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Apr 7, 2011 |
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Apr 7, 2011 16:36
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Since the Kindle sort of formats on the fly (if someone changes text size, say), it was recommended to me to remove any and all tab indentations and just set the paragraphs to indent the first line in word. This eliminated all the problems I was having. Could it be that?
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Apr 7, 2011 18:43
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FingerbangMisfire posted:Since the Kindle sort of formats on the fly (if someone changes text size, say), it was recommended to me to remove any and all tab indentations and just set the paragraphs to indent the first line in word. This eliminated all the problems I was having. Could it be that? No, I refuse to do tab indentations for precisely this reason, actually (formatting gets all weird a lot of the time). It was solely indent-first-line settings.
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Apr 7, 2011 21:10
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For a few years I've been working on novels, figuring when I turned into an old retired man I'd try shopping them out to publishers, but the recent news on that girl's terribly edited books churned out so often have got me thinking "Aw hell, just self publish". I've got three books already done (working on the fourth and final), each ranging from 150k-180k words and edited by several professional editors, and working on a marketing plan for relevant demographics in nearby retailers, online forums, etc. Yeah, it's a terrible demographic market (pulp fantasy), but I'm more interested in just getting it out to people through networking. I'm unemployed at the moment so it seems like the prime time to do the footwork and webwork. Would $4.99 seem like a decent price for those? My other idea is to pump out two small novellas at around 50k words as a taste of my writing style/setting, at maybe 99 cents a piece before putting out the rest of my books.
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Apr 8, 2011 07:52
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I think $4.99 is pretty reasonable. As one of my friends put it, "That's vending machine money." I have a 20k novelette that just finished rewrites. A previous version of the story got honorable mentioned in Writers of the Future. After it got rejected by the three major sci-fi mags that published novelettes, my brother suggested I ebook it. So I'm self-publishing. Probably going to use Smashwords, so I will definitely be following this thread for advice. If anyone's interested, I'm blogging about my process at http://highsongproject.wordpress.com/. I just got finished examining pitch lines and book covers, and now I'm talking about how to do a book trailer for your book. I'd love any feedback.
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Apr 8, 2011 16:03
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Titanium_Lass posted:I think $4.99 is pretty reasonable. As one of my friends put it, "That's vending machine money." Oh, you're the one doing this? I've been following you for a while. Just let me take the time to say you're pretty awesome and I'm considering doing something similar now because of you. Definitely going to keep up on your progress. Also like the writing advice you throw out on your dA, but that's neither here nor there.
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Apr 8, 2011 16:09
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I haven't delved into the agreements much but I'm assuming once one goes with Amazon/Smashwords, etc, you couldn't also self publish e-books through the others? That each has an exclusivity clause?
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Apr 8, 2011 20:36
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Fenarisk posted:I haven't delved into the agreements much but I'm assuming once one goes with Amazon/Smashwords, etc, you couldn't also self publish e-books through the others? That each has an exclusivity clause? From what I've read in this thread, it seems you can go with all of them at once as long as you keep the same price point across every platform? Someone definitely correct me if I'm wrong on this.
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Apr 8, 2011 20:45
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Longbaugh01 posted:From what I've read in this thread, it seems you can go with all of them at once as long as you keep the same price point across every platform? [this is wrong, check responses below] If you upload to Smashwords, you have the option to allow them to handle distribution to B&N, Amazon, Apple, etc. Personally, I like to handle my Amazon stuff myself, because Amazon gives you an author page and is overall a friendly experience. The important part is that YOU maintain all the rights to YOUR work. And you can do whatever the hell you want with it. FingerbangMisfire fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Apr 9, 2011 |
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Apr 8, 2011 21:05
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Titanium_Lass posted:I think $4.99 is pretty reasonable. As one of my friends put it, "That's vending machine money." $4.99 for a novelette or $4.99 in general? In either case, I happen to think that's too high.  On the other hand, what I think is pretty irrelevant because self-publishing allows you to manage all your own poo poo.Also, thanks for the link. I'll definitely be following your progress.
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Apr 8, 2011 21:08
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This is such an awesome thread . Starting low to gain momentum on Amazon, and then raising the price back up to something like $2.99 later on makes a lot of sense to me. I'm very hesitant to buy anything off Amazon if it's above the $2 mark, and regularly impulse buy random books for $0.99. From a buyer's perspective, it makes total sense. I usually don't shell out $2.99 or above unless the author has at least a handful of good reviews. Keeping the price low at first attracts buyers = reviews = can charge more later and still make sales.
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Apr 8, 2011 23:47
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Two Head Knight posted:This is such an awesome thread  And with regards to changing the price, it does definitely seem like you can initiate a snowball effect. (Jesus Pissgums, I really need to stop using smilies.)
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Apr 9, 2011 00:00
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FingerbangMisfire posted:
That's what I'm hoping for. Mine are down to $.99 now.
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Apr 9, 2011 01:37
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FingerbangMisfire posted:You actually don't even need to keep the same price. Granted, I don't have a clue why you'd have different prices, but yeah. That's not exactly true, most of the eBook publishers (iBooks, Amazon, and I am pretty sure B&N too) have a clause in the contract that says their eBook will always be the "lowest price". Amazon even has a "report a lower price" button for users to keep the authors honest. So you can't offer it for three platforms with different prices in that case. As they all have to be "the lowest" they all have to be the same. FingerbangMisfire posted:And with regards to changing the price, it does definitely seem like you can initiate a snowball effect.
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Apr 9, 2011 02:08
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Myrddin Emrys posted:So you can't offer it for three platforms with different prices in that case. As they all have to be "the lowest" they all have to be the same. Learn somethin' new every day.
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Apr 9, 2011 04:16
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Just tried to upload a free flash story though Amazon, but it's demanding a price and now I appear to be stuck (it wants me to place the price at least at $.99) I'm going the Smashwords free route in lieu of an immediate Amazon option, but if anyone has any ideas, do please let me know.
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Apr 10, 2011 07:43
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FingerbangMisfire posted:Just tried to upload a free flash story though Amazon, but it's demanding a price and now I appear to be stuck (it wants me to place the price at least at $.99) I've heard that Amazon only allow publishers to offer free stories on their store. Independent authors have to charge. I guess the reason is that otherwise the whole race to the bottom thing would see all first books offered out free with authors trying to charge for second books and onwards. As a result, Amazon would probably lose out overall. What you could do is collect several flash stories into a collection, then publish that for $0.99 Maybe even contact a few of the self published "superstars" asking for a quick flash piece from each, promising all funds to a charity. Purchasers feel good about donating to charity, you get your name next to high ranking self published authors, other high ranking self published authors get to cross-pollinate their fan bases.
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Apr 10, 2011 14:42
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Masonity posted:What you could do is collect several flash stories into a collection, then publish that for $0.99 I recently bought a short story for $0.99 off Amazon. It was super short, but enjoyable, and I have no issues having paid for it. So it's possible to sell them too.
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Apr 10, 2011 14:45
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Smashwords allows distribution to Amazon, B&N, etc -- I wonder what will happen with this freebie flash.
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Apr 10, 2011 18:52
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I decided to start self-publishing through https://www.branchrock.com. I enjoy writing and people enjoy reading what I've written, so why not make some money off of it? I'm primarily going to be targeting the impulse buy market at around 99 cents. Anything I write will never run out of stock, so I can't really justify charging much more for it. There are a lot of different stances on that, but that's mine. The event that started me down this road was the earthquake in Sendai; so many people were asking me what it was like to be in Japan at the time that I decided to just sit down and write something for them. Almost everyone who's read it, whether they know me personally or not, has enjoyed it. I'm planning on writing much more. Right now, work has gotten busy and I haven't been able to do much, but I'm laying out and editing a book about working as an English teacher in Japanese schools. What I really want to do is show the good and bad sides without a lot of the "exploitative exotic other" that seems to have taken over. I imagine there are people who just want to read an honest, interesting account!
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Apr 11, 2011 02:36
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Tarepanda; First off, thanks for adding your experience to the thread. That sounds pretty interesting, and of course, the more voices we have, the better. A few questions though: do you have a link to your book? Does Branchrock provide publishing distribution? Do you blog/twitter about everything? Details, man! We must know!
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Apr 11, 2011 06:04
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Branchrock is just my name for my personal publishing business. Some people I know have expressed interest in writing ebooks, so I would also be open to formatting/managing those if they're up to the level I want to keep. If you check out the site, the book is featured with three buttons for the three markets I'm targeting: Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble. I decided to model the site design after the usual startup design since the purpose is essentially the same: hook people with a big feature and make them click. I have a blog on the site as well and a twitter account, but there hasn't been much to talk about lately; I've also been without internet at home for the last two weeks and will not have internet for another 18 days or so. tarepanda fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Apr 11, 2011 |
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Apr 11, 2011 06:50
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All right, I just bought an e-edition of every book in the thread (finally, sorry, I know I mentioned this a while ago. Took me a couple days). If you didn't see at LEAST one sale on your Amazon account around 2:30am EST, let me know, because that means somehow I missed you. Soissons, I don't know if you've uploaded anything yet... Tarepanda, bought yours too. I am checking out the site, but I'm also a bit harried at the moment, so I'll give it a more thorough look tomorrow. You need to gets you some internet.
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Apr 11, 2011 08:00
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Yeah, I've been without internet for about two weeks now... so I definitely know how much I need it! A lot of NTT's technicians are still tied up fixing things from the earthquake(s), from what I understand, so... I'm lucky it's only a month's wait for me. Thanks for buying the book! tarepanda fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Apr 11, 2011 |
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Apr 11, 2011 08:08
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tarepanda posted:Yeah, I've been without internet for about two weeks now... so I definitely know how much I need it! A lot of NTT's technicians are still tied up fixing things from the earthquake(s), from what I understand, so... I'm lucky it's only a month's wait for me. Boy, as a reporter, I'm actually feeling fairly stupid at the moment. The earthquake didn't even enter my mind, and I covered it exclusively for weeks. I just wanted to say I'm sorry about overlooking it (and impressed that Japan is already trying to get the networks back in order). All the same, it certainly speaks volumes about how US media works. If the editor doesn't have us covering it, it goes out of our heads fairly quickly. Back to Charlie Sheen and NYC's corrupt, whore-having pols... Regardless, I certainly hope you and yours are OK. And you're quite welcome. If nothing else, I want this thread to serve as one way for people to support Goon writers.
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Apr 11, 2011 08:19
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