The fault is not in our stars

Tags

Amazon, Fatal Forgery, marketing, permafree, rating, review, sales, Samuel Plank

It’s been a while since I made the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” permafree on all sales platforms, and I have run a couple of promos to highlight it to people.  It’s too early to tell whether it is the right decision – i.e. whether it introduces more people to the Sam series and they then turn into buyers of the subsequent books – but I have got over my horror of giving away my work!  It’s a tricky one, because it’s certainly true that people often don’t value what costs nothing, but with the series stagnating I felt I had to do something drastic.  After all, we all know that one definition of madness (sometimes, but perhaps wrongly, attributed to Einstein) is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So how’s it going?  Since it was made permafree, there have been 2,356 downloads of “Fatal Forgery”.  On Amazon (the only place I can track this with any certainty), the number of reviews has risen by one (to 48), and the number of ratings by 21 (to 70).  (A rating is a simple 1-5-star score, while a review is anything written.  Readers can leave just a rating, or a rating and accompanying review.)  And according to the Amazon sales rankings in the UK, “Fatal Forgery” now sits at position 88 in the Historical Fiction category in the Kindle store, and at position 138 in the broader Crime Fiction category.  I’m delighted with both of those positions – apparently the fact that a book is free does not count against it when Amazon tots up which books are “selling” most frequently.

There are people who make a living from teaching us how the Amazon algorithms work, but the nub of it is that if a book (a) “sells” well, and (b) gets lots of generally favourable reviews, it will rise up the rankings.  This means that it appears higher up when people are searching, and (I think) has a better chance of being shown to them in the “Products related to this item” carousel that is displayed on each product page.  And the net result of all that is that more people see and are then tempted to download the book.

So if you have read “Fatal Forgery” – no matter where you bought it or in what format – and have not left a rating or review on Amazon, please could I ask you to do that?  Amazon does occasionally move the goalposts, but at the moment the situation is very clear: “Provided the buyer has made at least one purchase using their Amazon account they can review any product on Amazon, regardless of where they purchased that product.  However, if a reviewer did not buy the product on Amazon, their review will not be marked as an Amazon Verified Purchase.”  (The same applies to all my books, of course – please feel free to rate them all!)  And now I must immerse myself in the Cambridge University audit books from 1825 – this sorry tale of bursarial corruption won’t write itself, you know.

Downloads and rising rankings

Tags

Amazon, Fatal Forgery, free download, Freebooksy, permafree, royalties, sales

Right, gang: as promised, here is the immediate feedback from the Freebooksy promo that I ran.  I mentioned it here, and basically I paid to have the (now permafree) e-book of “Fatal Forgery” advertised to the subscribers to book promo website Freebooksy, along with links to the rest of the series.  I paid about £78 for this.  The promo ran yesterday from about 2pm UK time (it’s an American set-up, so that’s 9am Eastern Time) for 24 hours.  And during that period, this is what happened:

• 1,213 copies of “Fatal Forgery” were downloaded for free
• 4 copies of each of the other books in the series – all six of them – were downloaded for hard money.

Of course I can’t tell what drove those downloads – the Freebooksy promo or just a coincidence – but I’m guessing the former.  And the 24 paid downloads have netted me about £66 in royalties, so that’s not too far off the £78 I paid for the promo.

What I am hoping, of course, is that a proportion of those who downloaded the free book will read it, like it, buy more from the series, and perhaps even leave a review.  I appreciate that a fair number of them will do none of those – there are people who simply stuff their e-readers with freebies – but I won’t know until I try.  As I always say, I’ll keep you posted.

And a thrilling side-effect of this spike in downloads is that, right now, “Fatal Forgery” is ranking at #16 in the Historical Fiction category on the Kindle store, and at #45 in the Crime Fiction category. It will drop as rapidly as it rose, as other authors run their promos and my download rate slows, but while it’s riding high it will be appearing in front of other potential readers browsing on Amazon, which can only help.

Everybody’s free (to feel good)

Tags

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Fatal Forgery, Freebooksy, Google Play, Kobo, marketing, Nook, permafree, promotion, royalty, Samuel Plank

Now that I have completed the Sam Plank series, and now that I have stopped the day job and am reconfiguring how I spend my time, I decided that I needed to do something significant to mark these events and to signal my intent to be a more professional author.  I considered a tattoo (no, not really) and commissioning my likeness in dark chocolate (yes, really), but in the end I have plumped for this: a permafree series opener.

For those of you (I hope all of you – it’s a horrid word) shuddering at the term “permafree”, I should explain that it means free forever.  In other words, I am making the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” free forever on all the sales platforms I can find.  My reasons are these:

• Several successful indie authors of series have already done it and highly recommend it
• A free book entices readers to take a punt on an unknown author – and once they’ve had a taste of Sam and Martha and the gang, I’m sure they won’t be able to resist buying the next six books in the series, for themselves and all their friends and every member of their extended family
• It’s scary and exciting – and at my stage in life, something scary and exciting is good.

Of course, it’s not that simple to make something permafree, unless you do it right from the start.  All of the Sam e-books were enrolled (there, you see: I’m putting it in the passive to deny responsibility, but it’s entirely my fault) in the KDP Select programme.  This means that they can only be sold on Amazon, and in exchange for this exclusivity I get a higher royalty rate (70% as opposed to 35% for e-books that are published “wide” – i.e. other places as well as Amazon).  And Amazon does not – for obvious reasons – allow you to price a book at free.  So I needed to get the books off KDP Select, and there is a three-month notice period.  That expired last week, and I had a giddy couple of days publishing the e-books to other platforms such as Google Play, Kobo and Barnes & Noble (formerly Nook).  They do allow you to price books at free, which I did for “Fatal Forgery”.  And once you have a book priced at free on a couple of reputable competitor sites, you can request Amazon to price match to zero on their site – which they have done (it’s not a given, and there’s no guarantee they’ll keep the price at zero, but we can try).  It’s as simple as that…

I have plans for world domination with permafree Forgery, and – again on the recommendation of much more successful indie authors – I have booked a series promo on Freebooksy.  This site promotes free books to its “over 150,000 voracious readers”, and with a series promo they highlight the free opener and show the rest of the series.  That’s booked in for 30 June, at a cost of US$95 – about £78.  Given that I get about £1.40 royalty per e-book sold (nothing for “Fatal Forgery”, of course – I mean the other six), I have to hope that the promo will result in at least fifty-six additional sales.  The true value of a series promo, I am told, is its “long tail” of sales, which will be hard to monitor, but I feel excited that I am trying something new.

And here’s something interesting…  Since “Fatal Forgery” went permafree a couple of days ago, I have told my friends on Facebook, and Sam’s audience of 23 on Facebook, and his 17 followers on Twitter.  (I know, I know: I really need to get a grip on his social media presence – or, more truthfully, his absence).  So not many people have been told.  And yet the word is out somehow: since yesterday, there have been 322 downloads of “Fatal Forgery”, pushing it to sales rank 54 in the historical fiction e-books category on Amazon.  And sales rank really matters on Amazon: if you rank high, they jump in with their own promotion and then, well, watch out Tanya Anne Crosby (current holder of position one in the historical fiction e-books category)!

A month of Notes

Tags

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookshop, Draft2Digital, Google Play, Gumroad, Kobo, marketing, Notes of Change, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, Smashwords

And here I am, a whole month later.  That was a deliberate gap, in case you’re wondering: I decided to take a break after publication, have a holiday, and come back refreshed and full of fab ideas for book promotion.  Well, two out of three ain’t bad!  When I was working full-time, I could carve out space to do the actual writing (which I love) but not for any marketing (not so much love here…).  Now that I have stopped work, I am hoping to take a more professional approach: my ideal routine would be to spend two days a week writing, one day researching and one day on marketing.  And so I have not beaten myself up about abandoning “Notes of Change” to its fate after publication, as I know that before too long I will be revisiting the whole series with a proper marketing/promo plan.  (I’m going on a long train journey next week – four hours each way – and my goal is to spend most of it on preparing that plan.)

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to hear how “Notes of Change” has done in its first month.  It’s the first book for a while that I have published “wide” – i.e. on platforms other than Amazon, as well as on Amazon itself.  And here are the latest stats:

• Sold to bookshops: 10 copies
• Sold via Amazon: 25 copies
• Draft2Digital: zero
• Google Play: zero
• Gumroad: 1 copy
• Kobo Rakuten: zero
• Barnes & Noble: zero
• Smashwords: zero

So that’s a total of 36 copies.  On the plus side, I’m getting excellent reviews – five five-star ratings on Amazon already.  So onwards and upwards, as I promise my poor little books that I will give them the promo help they deserve.

The league table

Tags

Amazon, e-book, Faith Hope and Trickery, Fatal Forgery, Heir Apparent, Kindle, marketing, Notes of Change, paperback, Portraits of Pretence, sales, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Worm in the Blossom

Tomorrow is the big day – the publication of “Notes of Change”! Today, therefore, is a day of preparation and reflection. And I haven’t updated you recently on the sales of the Sam series. So here goes – the number I have sold in paperback (print-on-demand through Amazon, and through physical bookshops to which I supply stock) and in various e-formats (mostly Kindle, but occasional other formats):

	Paperback via Amazon	E-book	Paperback via physical bookshop
Fatal Forgery	290	954	145
The Man in the Canary Waistcoat	90	122	75
Worm in the Blossom	62	78	56
Portraits of Pretence	63	78	43
Faith, Hope and Trickery	49	46	26
Heir Apparent	32	36	27
Totals	586	1314	372

As you can see, it’s almost three-to-one in favour of e-books – which is good in some ways as the royalty for e-books is more generous than that for paperbacks. And “Fatal Forgery” is far and away the most popular title. Yes, it’s been out for longest, but I think what the figures really suggest is that not enough people like “Fatal Forgery” enough to stick with the series. That’s something I need to address – another task for the book marketing to do list (how to make sure that people know there is a whole series of lovely Sam books). To be fair to Amazon, they are very good at highlighting series: when you buy one book in a series, the others appear in a tempting carousel display. Perhaps I need to make the pricing more appealing – or investigate the possibility of a seven-title omnibus edition… (Apparently you can’t call e-books a box set, as that implies a physical box – you can, however, call it an omnibus. Like the number 27 to Clapham.)

Sam’s hit list

Tags

Amazon, Apple, formatting, Kindle, Kobo, KOLL, KU, Notes of Change, self-publishing

I’m giddy with excitement – the text of “Notes of Change” is finally, well, finalised.  It has been through several drafts with me, corrections/suggestions from two beta readers, some plot clarification (which moved the chapter count from an irritating thirty-nine to a lovely round forty) and a final read-through yesterday.  Final word count is 75,672, which is about average for a Sam Plank book (as readers will know, he’s not a man given to florid description or overlong introspection).

And now that the creative part is done, I move into the phase of lists.  I have a list of the steps to create the paperback edition, one for formatting the e-editions (more on that in a minute), one for “pre-publication tasks”, one of “people to tell about the new book”, several of “book promo and marketing ideas” and other random sets of bullet points and reminders jotted in notebooks, sent in emails to myself and written on my phone.  One day, dear reader, this will all be amalgamated into a slick publishing process – but today is not that day!  Today is the day for formatting the paperback edition.

Ah yes, the e-editions.  For the past few years – can’t quite remember when I first did it – I have published my e-editions through the KDP platform (part of the Amazon mega-corporation) and opted for their KDP Select programme.  This means that the e-books are sold exclusively in Kindle format through Amazon, and not in any other e-format through any other seller (such as Kobo or Apple).  The benefits (this is over-simplifying) are two-fold: you get a better royalty percentage from Amazon than they would offer if your book was published “wide” (i.e. with other sellers as well), and they put your book into their KU and KOLL programmes.  KU (Kindle Unlimited) is where people pay a monthly subscription and then can indefinitely borrow up to ten books – as an author, I get a pro rata share of the “KDP Select Global Fund” according to how many pages of my e-books are read by those borrowers.  KOLL (Kindle Owners’ Lending Library) allows those who are enrolled in Amazon Prime to download one book a month – as an author, I get a share of the KOLL pot according to the number of downloads of my e-books.  And over the years, I’ve rather taken my eye off the ball.  Recent soul-searching (and bean-counting) has revealed that:

• The amount of money I make from my books being in KU and KOLL is insignificant to the point of invisibility
• Competitors to Kindle books are growing in number, and many offer good exposure, international coverage, decent royalties and a chance to diversify my risk
• There is an increasing number of readers who are going off Amazon, for all sorts of reasons, and looking for alternative places to buy their books.

In short, I have decided that the e-book of “Notes of Change” will not be going into the KDP Select programme and instead will be published “wide”.  The existing six Sam Plank books are stuck in the programme for a couple more months (auto-renew – a casualty of taking my eye of that ball) and then will be withdrawn and also published “wide”.  You can see why I need all those lists…

Jam doughnuts all round!

Tags

Amazon, beta reading, Crime Writers' Association, editing, marketing, promotion, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, The Notes of Change

In life it is important to celebrate achievements, and today I have had a jam doughnut for elevenses because I have completed my draft of “The Notes of Change”.  [As an aside, am I the only person who eats a jam doughnut by spearing it onto a fork and then eating it like a toffee apple?  So much tidier than the doughnut-in-fingers method.]  I realise that there will be more work to do, but for today – I’m happy.  I have sent the file to my lovely beta reader Roy, to check for plot madnesses and general readability and likeability, and at the same time my husband will be close-reading it for spelling mistakes, poor punctuation, extra spaces and all the other typos that return to haunt us.

Meanwhile, I have been contacting the people who have kindly reviewed other Sam Plank novels, to ask whether they would like to take this one on as well.  Other more organised authors would have blog tours and the like lined up, but I’ve just not managed that this time round.  However, I have decided not to chastise myself too much for these promotional shortcomings – after all, I’ve written a whole book!  By myself!  And this “being an author” thing is meant to be fun.

That said, I do have plans.  On the advice of several people, I am planning to get to grips – or at least within gripping distance of – Amazon ads: I have bought a couple of books on the subject (of course I have – when faced with any new endeavour, I will always buy a book) and will read them while I wait for comments on my draft.  My other task in that hiatus is to apply to join the Crime Writers’ Association – it’s quite the application process, and acceptance is far from guaranteed, but as they have just opened their well-respected and much-coveted “Daggers” awards to self-published novels, I now have a real incentive to try.  And just think: if they do accept me, it will be the perfect excuse for another doughnut!

Hear ye, hear ye!

Tags

Amazon, Audible, audiobook, Fatal Forgery, Guy Hanson, narrator, Samuel Plank, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat

After something of a gap owing to other commitments (including working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, darlings! Only the best for us!), our wonderful audiobook narrator Guy Hanson has just started work on the third Sam Plank book, “Worm in the Blossom”.  Guy has the perfect voice for Sam – warm, mature, humorous and gently London.  And having read both “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, he’s also a dab hand (throat?) at adjusting his voice to encompass Martha, Conant, Wontner and all our other regulars.

If you’ve not yet sampled audiobooks – ideal for car/train/plane journeys, and good company when gardening/jogging/dog-walking – did you know that you can get a free 30-day trial to Audible (the audiobook arm of Amazon)?  With a free trial you get:

• One free audiobook of your choice – which you can keep even if you cancel after the trial (and if you’re an Amazon Prime customer, you get two free audiobooks during your trial)
• Unlimited listening to the Plus Catalogue, which contains thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and select audiobooks (including mine, of course)
• After the 30-day trial, you can download one book a month, with unlimited access to the Plus Catalogue, for £7.99/month (which renews automatically)
• And you can pause or cancel your membership at any time.

(In the interests of openness and transparency, I should tell you that – should you take out a trial or membership through my link – I get what Amazon calls a “bounty”.  Sadly not a yummy coconut chocolate bar, but just some ordinary money.)

So if you’re tempted to meet Guy/Sam and make a Sam Plank novel your free starter audiobook, here are the links: “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.

The bard and the Mess

Tags

advance, Amazon, cover price, Hodder & Stoughton, profit, publishing, Shakespeare, writing

To an outsider – and certainly to me before I became a writer – publishing can seem a rather gentlemanly industry.  Surely what happens is that an elegant, erudite, well-read and softly-spoken chap in a tweed suit reads your work and then takes you for a quiet lunch in an oak-panelled bistro, promising to bring your oeuvre to the reading public to the mutual benefit of both writer and reader.  Of course it’s not like that at all, and publishing – like any other industry – is built (and depends) on profit.  And as such the decisions of publishers are sometimes enormously, bile-inducingly unfair.  In a fair world, well-written books would be published and lauded while self-promoting, celebrity-endorsed drivel would never see the light of day – but, as we were all told by our parents from the age of about three onwards, life is not fair.

Today I read that the Eton Mess – our current Prime Minister, whose name is not spoken in this house – was rather distracted at the start of the pandemic by his need to meet a publishing deadline.  Now, he has a former life as a journalist and has already published several books (mostly significantly discounted on Amazon, which gives me great pleasure), so I am not surprised that he is planning to write more.  But given that his previous books did not much trouble the bestseller charts, why has Hodder & Stoughton promised him an advance of £250,000 (with £98,000 already paid) for his proposed book about Shakespeare, “The Riddle of Genius”?

Industry insiders report that the Mess’s book about Winston Churchill sold about a quarter of a million copies – but that’s a book by a politician about a politician.  Are people who are interested in politics going to want to read about Shakespeare?  And are those who are interested in Shakespeare going to care what a politician thinks about him (particularly one not known for his close relationship with historical accuracy), when there are far better qualified Shakespeare scholars out there (presumably being given much less generous advances for their books)?  A cursory search suggests that publishers expect to keep about 10% of the cover price of a book – after paying the author, printer, distributor, bookshops, marketing costs and all the rest.  If “The Riddle of Genius” appears in hardback at £25 and paperback at £15, and is quickly discounted, they’re going to need to shift hundreds of thousands of copies just to break even.  From a commercial point of view, it seems a bad deal for everyone except the Mess himself.  Although you have to laud his interest in the subject: mistress Jennifer Arcuri confirms that he would recite passages from “Macbeth” as foreplay during their encounters.  I can only assume he chose “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”.  If that doesn’t put you off your porridge, nothing will.

Looking backwards and forwards

Tags

Amazon, Gregory 1, Kindle, paperback, Plank 7, plotting, promotion, sales, Samuel Plank, The Solo Squid, writing

And here we are, staring into a whole new year – there can’t be many among us who are sad to see the back of 2020…  I know that my creativity took quite a knock; much as I admire all those who managed to use the endless weeks and months of lockdown to burrow into their projects, I have to admit that constant low-level anxiety and uncertainty took up most of my brain space.  As a result, I am now confronted by two stalled books – “Gregory 1” and “Plank 7” – and I am very much hoping that 2021 will be different.

Self-pity aside, I must gird my loins and look at my sales figures for the past year.  But despite Amazon reporting target-busting sales and (apparently) people turned to reading for comfort and escape, the boom has not quite hit my own titles!  In 2020, I sold 36 paperbacks across the six titles in the Sam series, and 185 e-books.  (But before you pat me on the back for those e-books, I must confess that 153 of those were downloaded for free during a promotion I ran in March/April.  So only 32 of the e-books brought in any money.)  And my little business book – “The Solo Squid” – sold 12 paperbacks and 16 e-books.

And so to money: with an average royalty of 90p per sale, my life as an author netted me about £86.40 in royalties in 2020.  Unfortunately, I also had to pay £200 for the cover for “The Solo Squid”, plus my memberships of the Society of Authors and the Alliance of Independent Authors (neither of which I would do without), so I’m actually about £350 in the red.  But as I don’t drink (yet…), smoke, or collect diamond jewellery or expensive cars, it’s a hobby I can afford.  And once I can reclaim some of this mis-used brain space, I can get back to enjoying it.  Happy new year to one and all!