|
Still tinkering with a blurb, this is honestly so much loving harder than actually writing a book:quote:New Year's resolution: keep a journal.
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2016 12:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:50 |
|
|
TheForgotton posted:How is the survival for the King twins going to be different from any of the hundred thousand zombie books, movies, and comics out now? It's not, I'm sort of banking on the idea that people want pretty much more of the same. From wading through all the stuff on Amazon I'd say the difference is that it is (or is an attempt at) a more "realistic" survival situation which relies on a lot of luck rather than the protagonists being ex-Army survivalists with a fully stocked stronghold in Montana. But I find it difficult to emphasise that in a blurb. Actually I find it difficult to doa blurb full stop - I was quite surprised by how hard it is to distil everything into a couple of paragraphs. TheForgotton posted:Also, your title is about as bland as it gets. Is bland not good, though, for genre novels? I picked RISE OF THE UNDEAD literally because it does what it says on the tin and hadn't been used by anything before (except a straight to video movie from 2005). I could definitely try to come up with something more imaginative but I feel like it's important to emphasise that it's a zombie book, especially getting either the word "zombie" or "undead" in there. That's just an assumption though - is SEO particularly important for Amazon or not?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2016 10:56
|
|
|
AbrahamLincolnLog posted:For what it's worth, I'm very interested in this. I read a lot of post-apocalypse fiction and "true" survival stories are rare. It's always something ridiculous like a heavily trained/armed squad of super soliders, or someone with special powers who is able to survive things that a normal person would die from, or someone who due to a circumstance is immune to the virus/infection/bad thing, or is conveniently somewhere that's heavily fortified and supplied when things get bad... you get the idea. Cool, I'll send you an ARC if you like... once I figure out exactly how to do all that stuff!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2016 00:11
|
|
|
What does everyone use for mailing lists? I signed up for Mailchimp but apparently if you're sending from a free email address (I use gmail) it can have issues.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2016 12:21
|
|
|
Mailerlite doesn't appear to want to let you sign up unless you have your own website. edit - All I'm using this at the moment for is to send out an email to the dozen odd people who gave me their email addresses back when I was serialising online what I'm now about to publish, so I suppose I can just send them a normal joint email now. But in the long run is it basically necessary to have a website if you're trying to build up a reader base?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2016 02:36
|
|
|
I've spent the last two hours wading through ebook cover design sites and... arghhhh. Actually spending money on this is what makes it "real" and I guess that's why I keep putting it off. Is goonwrite.com still okay? Another poster a while back knocked up a quick cover of my book just as an example and I'm tempted to just use it, but I've also been lurking in this thread long enough to feel like that's cheating, or something, to not pay good money for a cover since it's the most important part.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2016 12:06
|
|
|
OK goonwrite wasn't available until January so I found somebody else to do one who was also cheaper (although nothing is bloody cheap with the Australian dollar plummeting, sigh). What do you reckon? It looks fine to me but I get revisions which I may as well use.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2016 01:42
|
|
|
Sundae posted:I'm going to guess there's a colon in there somewhere. End Times: Rise of the Undead Yeah. Also I'm not sure if I should actually make it Vol I: or Part I: or something like that to make it overly clear it's the first part of a series.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2016 11:53
|
|
|
Blue Scream posted:Is the series name End Times or Rise of the Undead? Either way, recommend: Take two: 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 03:52
|
|
|
This is possibly a dumb question but in what format do you send out advance reading copies? I assumed Amazon would let me, as the author, download an epub or mobi version or whatever it is they use, but I'm sitting here on the publishing dashboard and it doesn't seem like it's going to do that before I hit "publish" (which I obviously don't want to do yet). edit - and correct me if I'm wrong (I've never used Amazon as a customer because they've never deigned to operate in Australia) but don't people have to purchase your book before they review it? So how do ARC readers leave reviews? Also what's the consensus on KDP Select? freebooter fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Dec 24, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2016 00:08
|
|
|
angel opportunity posted:I don't want to be one of those obnoxious people who is like "This was answered twenty pages ago you loving idiot!!!" But the discussion on Select will be found mostly as "Kindle Unlimited," so if you look through some of the big posts I have done where I mention Kindle Unlimited, you'll see that it's more or less non-negotiable as something you should do if you want to make money. There are a lot of downsides to it in general, but NOTHING will make you more money as of right now and as of the past two years. Ahhh I thought it was weird that "KDP Select" wasn't turning anything up jazzyjay posted:I just used Bookfunnel to distribute ARCs and its totally worth the $20. Streamlines the whole process and even techphobic old aunts were able to load it easily. Now I'm reading their FAQ and they say technically Amazon doesn't want you to distribute any copies at all? Wtf? Also I'm grappling with Mailchimp again and when I tested the sign-up sheet, it gives the applicant my home address... presumably because I put that as my business address, but what the hell, I don't want everyone on the internet knowing where I live.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2016 01:04
|
|
|
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?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2017 13:36
|
|
|
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 |
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2017 23:01
|
|
|
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. 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 08:35
|
|
|
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."
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 08:57
|
|
|
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
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 23:05
|
|
|
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?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2017 23:45
|
|
|
One of the people on my ARC list says Amazon won't let him leave a review because he's spent less than $50 with them, which I've never heard of before? My best friend made an account from scratch just to give me a review and had no problems at all.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2017 12:31
|
|
|
Anyone else finding Amazon's been down for about 24 hours now? Or is that just in Australia?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2017 22:40
|
|
|
First 30 days after launch - not exactly sinking like a stone, but nor was it enough to come anywhere near recouping the cost of cover & ads: (OK I don't know why Tinypic isn't working but basically I sold 15 on January 6, 17 on January 29 and averaged around 3 or 4 a day the rest of the time.) I only paid for four promotional email newsletters - Readfreely, AskDavid, Freebooksy and AwesomeGang - because I wanted to see if this thing had legs at all before spending too much money. The Jan 6 spike is Freebooksy; I don't think the others had any noticeable effect. I have no idea what caused the spike on January 29; I did come back from holiday and start scheduling the AskDavid tweets that are sent out through @book_tribe but I'm sceptical as to how effective that is. Anyway, it's a six part series and my plan is to make Book 1 free for a couple weeks every time I release a new book. Book 2 is scheduled for March 1. So this time I think I'll go much harder on the email newsletter promotion spending (especially since so many of them want your book to be free, which it now will be). freebooter fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Feb 1, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2017 00:21
|
|
|
oliveoil posted:How much do those paid email newsletters charge and how many people do they message? Depends. Freebooksy /Bargainbooksy - the only one I noticed a bump from - charges $25 for horror and up to $125 for romance, but their subscriber list varies accordingly. The horror list had 58,000 subscribers. https://www.bargainbooksy.com/sell-more-books/ I also found this list of book promotion sites/newsletters/mailing lists, and since a bunch of them are free I suppose you don't stand to lose anything except time: http://www.readersintheknow.com/list-of-book-promotion-sites When somebody does eventually make a new thread for this, a section about from-scratch promotion and marketing would be great - that's been the most overwhelming step of the process by far for me.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2017 22:56
|
|
|
Huh. I bothered to check my monthly report for January (my first month) and my KU royalties outstripped my actual sales royalties by 3 to 1. Is that typical?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 00:24
|
|
|
Weird, you'd think they'd play that up more when asking whether you want to put your book in KU.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 02:21
|
|
|
Released the second book in my series a few days ago and somebody on Goodreads who didn't even rate the first has given it one star, which somehow breaks the space-time continuum and gives you a -2 rating.... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34447188-end-times?ac=1&from_search=true edit - My mistake, they also gave the first book a meh rating. I'm just bemused by how it's actually possible to get a sub-zero rating. edit 2 - Goodreads is really fascinating. I never would have thought the vast majority of readers of a zombie series would be women. freebooter fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Mar 5, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2017 07:27
|
|
|
moana posted:Goodreads has twice as many female users as male, though, so you're going to get a skewed perspective if you rely on those reviews to figure out your audience. Ah, that hadn't occurred to me - cognitive bias I guess, since I'm male and a heavy user of Goodreads. Whatever happened to LibraryThing, do people still use that?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 01:41
|
|
|
I released the second part of my series on March 1, and made the first part free for a week to promote it. I guess people love free stuff: http://i63.tinypic.com/2afc4cl.jpg (SA doesn't seem to show images for me anymore?) Anyway, pretty pleased with that obviously, especially cracking the top 10 free horror downloads. But I'll wait to see if it flows through to actual ratings, reviews and subsequent purchases. I think a lot of people probably just harvest the free lists to add to their TBR pile and maybe never get around to actually reading what they download.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2017 10:14
|
|
|
The Fuzzy Hulk posted:HOLY poo poo, Book Report is even better now. Wow, I didn't know about this and it's amazing. My royalty statements have so far been a pleasant surprise because (as far as I know) there's no way to track what you're earning with Kindle Select before the statement is generated, unless you feel like cracking out the calculator yourself. But it's now 4x what I make from actual sales. I've also cracked over $1,000 AUD in less than three months of sales, which I realise is chump change compared to what some of you make, but I'm honestly stoked about that. Way more than I ever would have imagined making from this. On a less e/n note, it's really fascinating to see how heavily concentrated sales are in the US: quote:Earnings by Store Just taking those four countries, all of which speak English (and I'm an Australian author writing a book set in Australia), Australia/UK/Canada make up 25% of the combined population but only 3% of the sales. Goes to show just how much new technology like ereaders and Amazon is invented and propagated in the US, and only slowly trickles out to the rest of the world. Certainly I know very few Australians with an ereader, and none at all who would buy from Amazon.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2017 01:12
|
|
|
monkfoot posted:Just published a cyberpunk/mystery novella. First in the series. Anyone know any paid newsletters that are good for scifi? http://www.readersintheknow.com/list-of-book-promotion-sites
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2017 23:54
|
|
|
jazzyjay posted:I wrote up how I launched my post-apoc scifi on page 136 - with what newsletters gave good results. Did you do any free ones? My last promo I did (second book in series released so first book free for a week) I think I only spent about $30 on a couple of paid newsletters but also put it in something like 20-30 free ones. Obviously the paid ones are going to have more reach, and it's impossible to measure exactly how useful the free ones are, but I reckon it's worth doing since it costs nothing but time. On a different note, looking at my book stats, I'm now making about 5 times as much money from Select as I am from sales. Last stats I saw, Amazon accounts for something like 75% of the ebook marketplace in the USA. I'm no expert and maybe my books are an anomaly but I can't see getting access to that other 25% of the market to be anywhere near as profitable as Select.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2017 07:25
|
|
|
Yeah, promoing is way more time consuming than I thought it would be - I think there are some middleman services that will do like 20 or 30 free newsletter applications for you for about $30, which might be worth looking into. I can justify it by saying I earn nearly $30 an hour at my day job and I'm pretty sure I spent much more than an hour submitting to all those free newsletters, so... A question for the old hands - are there any other solid marketing strategies besides ebook mailing lists, which are a thing I didn't know existed before I did this? Pretty much the only other thing I do is tweet about my book, and since my pen name account has about 12 followers I'm banking on hashtags. I thought I was being awfully clever (since I'm writing a zombie series) by using the #TWD hashtag right before and right after the Walking Dead airs on Mondays, but really, I doubt that does much. I've also been using the Ask David service, which gives you about twenty scheduled tweets for their 50k follower book promo account. But it's just impossible to measure. Like, when I did my "Book 2 is released so Book 1 is free for a week" thing, I shifted 1000 free units (way more than I'd ever sold) and saw my Kindle Select stats really spike, and thought that had been very worthwhile... until I released that a lot of it was simply the fact that I have two books out now instead of one, so all my sales and page read counts are almost doubled anyway. Which I guess underlines the fact that it's important to just keep writing and keep publishing, which is why I should go back to writing Book 3 instead of loitering around here.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2017 04:35
|
|
|
jazzyjay posted:No, unfortunately I've been pretty time poor and haven't done anywhere near the sort of promo I should be doing. But that list you posted earlier looks pretty great and I intend to start working through it when I get Book #2 off to the editor, so cheers for posting that. Actually when I published my own Book 2 I found myself with a conundrum: how do you advertise Book 2 of a series? Nobody's going to just pick that up; if they think it's interesting they'll click around until they find book 1, so you may as well just advertise that to begin with. I ended up doing a huge promo blitz for the temporarily free Book 1, and nothing whatsoever for Book 2, relying on flow-through sales from people who liked Book 1. But I'm not sure what I'll do for Book 3, or when I'm six books deep or whatever. I guess maybe I'll just make Book 1 temporarily free every time I publish a new one.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2017 04:39
|
|
|
Before I respond to this let me just mention that I appreciate the long post there, especially breaking down the actual spending and finances, even though those numbers are insane to me. They're massively useful to people who are reading this and just starting out and are wary of what they're getting into, especially in an age when people still seem - even on the anonymous internet! - awkward about discussing income. But I specifically wanted to respond to this: angel opportunity posted:If these numbers I am throwing out there about my daily spend are scaring the poo poo out of you, realize that romance is a huge money maker, so you have to spend more to make more. In non-romance genres, something like $20-$50/day spend might be really high. I also feel more and more convinced from doing this full time and from reading this thread that it doesn't make much sense to self pub a genre that isn't able to make money. If I ever get around to writing a scifi or fantasy novel, I'm pretty sure I will try to traditional publish it. Even with everything I've learned from making a living at selling romance books, and even with all the experience that comes with that, I wouldn't bet on myself to be able to release a scifi or fantasy book (one that I'd actually want to write for fun) that would profit me more than $1,000. If I started feeling like I had to "target the market" as I'm advising you to do, I'd just say "gently caress it" and write another romance novel to make real money. I think there is probably an unavoidable gap between the people in this thread who self-pub fulltime and the people who don't, or who are just starting. I started self-pubbing this zombie series (which I already wrote 10 years ago and I'm now mostly editing; I wouldn't have chosen to write a zombie series from scratch) and in the last couple of months I've made more than $1,000. The bulk of that has been in March alone, and I'm hoping that will continue over the course of the year as I publish more books in the series. Making $1,000 that quickly was jawdropping to me. I know it probably sounds silly to people who are writing fulltime but it really was. The idea of quitting your job to write fulltime is such a distant pipe dream to so many writers that even making enough money in a month to boost your standard of living (the more expensive dinner, the new phone, not delaying that trip to the dentist) is quite startling. More so when it's profit from something you enjoy doing in the first place. But this is obviously a world apart from somebody earning enough money to completely quit their day job and do it full time. (And sure, maybe that 1k will be a shortlived anomaly, but even if it is it's more than I ever expected to make from that particular bit of writing.) Reading that back it seems snarky - which is not what I mean at all! This thread has been massively helpful and I literally would not have selfpubbed without it. I suppose I'm just throwing myself out there for lurkers and saying, hey, you can self-pub whatever it is you've been writing for fun in your spare time and still get a return on investment. (I think so far I spent about $200 on two covers, plus maybe $50-100 on promotional stuff.) If you're already writing it for your own enjoyment, then why not? (Just remember the holy mantra, YOUR COVER AND YOUR BLURB ARE AS IMPORTANT AS YOUR BOOK!) You talked about going the trad pub route for a sci-fi or fantasy series, and I get that, but I have to say the unexpected success of this zombie series makes me actually less inclined to go down the trad pub route. Although that may come from being Australian where apparently the average author makes about 13k a year. Americans' mileage may vary. (And there is definitely something deeper there about Amazon giving easier access to the global English-speaking market.) But even if you think the art is more important than the money (which I do, if it's writing I actually put my heart and soul into) I suspect I'd get more eyeballs on Amazon.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2017 07:45
|
|
|
Why on earth do people do that?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2017 07:45
|
|
|
Huh - just ran up against the end of my free trial for Book Report, didn't realise it was a subscription service. I don't think I actually will get a subscription, though, because all I end up doing is obsessively checking my daily earnings instead of writing my next book.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2017 00:12
|
|
|
SquirrelFace posted:Anyone have any experience with This calculator? Does it look accurate? I don't write romance but this is overestimating the sales of the the two horror books I have out by a factor of around 2/3 to 1. But I'll say as I have before, I'm making about 4 or 5 times as much money from Kindle Unlimited page-reads as I am from actual "sales."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2017 14:43
|
|
|
Soooo it looks to me like I finally shelled out for Book Report just in time to see Amazon change its reporting data for the better so that you don't really need it anymore. Ah well.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2017 07:45
|
|
|
Drunken Baker posted:I was reading this thread about a month ago and there was a service you could sign up to where it sent out info on your book to a load of mailing lists and someone said that that, combined with a "free promotion" was a good was to get your work noticed via amazon? Not sure what the exact one is but there's a whole sortable list here... https://www.readersintheknow.com/list-of-book-promotion-sites ...and there's definitely more than one which offer the service of basically saving you the hassle of individually signing up to all the free ones - if you pay them $20 or something they'll submit to about 35 free newsletters for you. Personally I prefer to do it myself, because there's a lot of sorting the wheat from the chaff - a lot of the free ones have bad web design, outdated links etc and I doubt whether they're actually worth the time. I'm coming up to releasing my third book in a series and once again making the first book free, and last time I did that I basically just signed up to as many free newsletters as possible and dropped maybe $100 cumulative on the paid newsletters. It's a scattershot approach because it's impossible to tell which ones are actually leading to the clickthroughs and downloads, but it seemed to work. I made that $100 back many times over within a week, at any rate. edit - also, this might be obvious, but it wasn't to me at first: keep track of anything you spend on promotions, and also what you spend on a cover or editing, because if you end up turning a profit they'll be tax deductible. freebooter fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Jun 19, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2017 08:08
|
|
|
Aferisan posted:Could anyone kind of provide insight on to what the current climate of genres or self pubbing in general is like right now? General impressions, anecdotes etc. For my own general impression - I know there are people in this thread who are making insane amounts of money, I personally am making a) a pittance if it was my only income, which is also b) way more money than I ever thought I'd make off writing and more than enough to put a smile on my face.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2017 10:06
|
|
|
oliveoil posted:Does anyone use dragon naturally speaking? I read that it basically massively speeds up your output if you're a slow typist, but I'm not sure how beneficial it would be for me if I'm already someone who can type at like 80wpm if I'm willing to accept lots of obvious typoes like swapped character pairs. I use it in my day job, have never considered using it for personal writing. You have to use a real robotic monotone and verbally dictate all your punctuation and I think that would completely take me out of the zone when writing fiction.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2017 10:51
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:50 |
|
|
Abandon any notion of having a cool cover or a different cover or an interesting cover. Amazon is not just a bookstore, it's a search engine in which 99% of people are first glimpsing your cover as a compressed thumbnail. There's a reason the vast majority of book covers (even in traditional publishing) are boring as hell: they're logos for genre recognition. Also bear in mind that even the most basic of and generic of professionally done covers will cost you around $100.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2017 08:43
|
|