Two new reviews

Tags

Amazon, Fatal Forgery, Goodreads, Heir Apparent, review, Samuel Plank

I’ve written before about how crucial – and uplifting – reviews are for authors.  Sadly, just as the rich get richer, the well-reviewed attract more reviews, while for those of us who are generally unknown in the writing world every single review is hard-won and treasured.  Friends and family are usually marvellous at leaving reviews when a book is first published and then it’s a matter of hoping that future readers are sufficiently moved to express their thoughts on Amazon or Goodreads.

Maybe it was lock-down boredom, or maybe people are finally getting to the piles of books they have meant to read, or maybe it’s just good luck, but I have had two new reviews in the past fortnight.  One appeared on “Fatal Forgery” whose heading made me laugh (“Nothing to add”); the review itself said “Good book with an unusual twist at the end” and awarded five stars.  Short and sweet – but five stars, and every review (even a single line) brings the book to the attention of the Amazon ranking bots.

And now a new review of “Heir Apparent” has appeared, again five stars (*smiles smugly*), calling it a “thoroughly engrossing story”: “This time Constable Sam Plank is investigating a possible case of identity theft, but as usual, that’s only the start.  I am very sad to hear that there is to be only one more book in this series.  I shall miss Sam Plank, his wife Martha, Constable Wilson, and all the other regular characters who make these books so enjoyable, and also the vivid evocations of the darker side of Regency London.”

So thank you, reviewers – you cannot over-estimate how important your comments and ratings are to us.

The advertising game

Tags

advertising, Amazon, Facebook, Gregory 1, Gregory Hardiman, magistrate, promotion, research, sales, Samuel Plank, The Solo Squid

It’s been a weekend of two halves, with regard to my writing.  On one hand, I have made a tiny bit of progress with “Gregory 1” – the first Gregory Hardiman book, set in Cambridge.  I have learned a lot about coroner’s inquests, and I have decided on a couple of confidants for Gregory – yes, a coroner, and perhaps a surgeon as well.  I found John Conant – a magistrate – an invaluable part of the Sam series, as the two men were able to discuss their work, and I feel I need someone in a similarly educated position for Gregory.  (I have also discovered that he doesn’t like being called Greg; Samuel Plank was perfectly easy with being called Sam, but Gregory insists on the full Gregory.  I wonder why…)

And on the other hand, I have been running an experimental Facebook ad for the past five days.  I have a dedicated Facebook page for my non-fiction business book “The Solo Squid: How to Run a Happy One-Person Business”, and for weeks now they have been tempting me with a £5 “credit” to try an ad to promote the page.  And in a moment of weakness – OK, a moment when I should have been writing but convinced myself that doing something commercial to promote a book was actually just as good as writing [spoiler alert: it isn’t] – I went for it.  I signed up to spend up to £1 a day for five days promoting the squid page to potential buyers of the book, with an ad to entice them to click on a link taking them to the Amazon page for the book.  I will admit that I didn’t put a great deal of thought into the ad or its settings, simply accepting the Facebook defaults for most of it, on the basis that as this was my first ad, they would do their best for me in order to suck me in for future campaigns.  I did limit the ad a little, by asking for it to be shown to both genders in the age range 25 to 58 [I figure that the very young aren’t setting up their own businesses quite yet, and those at the end of their working lives aren’t looking for guidance], in the US and the UK [prime English-speaking nations] and with a declared interest in entrepreneurship.  This netted me a potential target audience numbering 11,000,000, which Facebook assured me was ideal.  And off we went.

Five days later, Facebook informs me that my ad run has finished.  Over the five days it was seen by 1,399 people, eleven of whom clicked the link.  That cost me £4.80 of my £5 credit – or just under 44p per click.  Looking at the Amazon sales figures, I see that in the same period (10 to 14 June 2020) I sold no copies of “The Solo Squid”.  I’ll keep an eye on the sales in the next few days in case one of the eleven clicks put the book in their basket for later purchase, but based on this small and most unscientific experiment, I can safely say that I will not be investing the Grossey fortune in Facebook ads.  Back to the writing board.

A plea from the Squid

Tags

Amazon, Facebook, indie publishing, promotion, review, self-publishing, The Solo Squid

Right, everyone, I need your help.  Back in January I published a little non-fiction book called “The Solo Squid: How to Run a Happy One-Person Business”.  It’s based on my own quarter-century of doing just that, and focuses on how to enjoy working alone.  It’s not a “how to set up a business” guide, nor a “grow your business and take over The World” manifesto: it’s simply full of advice on how to work alone and be happy doing so.  But sales have stalled, as have reviews – the two are, of course, connected.

In my view, this should be a prime time for “The Solo Squid”: many more people are working from home for the first time, spending a good deal of working hours alone, and some of them will decide that they prefer it to being in an office and will stay solo once the pandemic is over.  I am trying to reach these people, with news about the book and also with hints and tips on working alone via the book’s Facebook page – I call it Squisdom (forgive me).  But it’s really hard to get to the right audience.

With my Sam Plank books, I know I’m looking for people who are interested in financial crime, or police history, or Regency stories – and they gather in various groups that I can find.  But “people who might want to work in a one-person business” is not an actual category.  There are entrepreneurs – but most of them want to turn their back-bedroom business into a gazillion pound empire.  There are small business owners – but many of them are looking for specific advice on tax matters or employment legislation.

So can I please ask for your help?  If you know anyone – in any type of activity, be it a hairdresser or a poet or a financial adviser or a tutor or a gardener or whatever – who works alone or is thinking of doing so, please could you point them first to the Squid’s Facebook page (so that they get the idea of what the Solo Squid is all about – you can follow the page so that you get a notification each time I post, which is about two or three times a week) and then to the book’s page on Amazon?  (The book is also available in high street bookshops – including via their online sales channels.) And if you have already read the book, please could you leave a little review on Amazon – without enough reviews, it languishes at the bottom of the business book pages. (You don’t have to buy a book on Amazon to be able to leave a review there.)

Many, many thanks to you all from the Squid and me!

New fans for Sam?

Tags

Amazon, blogging, e-book, Facebook, Fatal Forgery, KDP, KDP Select, marketing, promotion, sales

Well that was fun!  I was trying to think of anything I could do to make people feel a bit better and my husband suggesting offering a free book, and the first Sam book – “Fatal Forgery” – seemed the obvious choice.  I now realise that lots of authors are doing this, and it’s wonderful – I’ve snagged a couple myself.  (The more escapist, feel-good and light-hearted the better – I’m certainly in no mood for dark or dismal disaster.)

When I explored KDP to find out how to do this, it turns out that as my Sam e-books are listed with KDP Select – which means that they are sold exclusively through Amazon (and the exclusivity brings me a higher royalty rate from Amazon) – I can take advantage of a couple of promotional schemes that they offer.  And one of these is the chance to offer my book for free, for five days out of every ninety days.  (Obviously Amazon does not want people offering their books for free all the time, otherwise they make no commission on the sales…)  And I decided to take all five days in one hit, rather than spreading them out (which you can do).  I did consider doing a day here and a day there, but I thought that with the time difference (days are according to US time zones, not European) I would confuse myself and everyone else about when the day started and finished, and by the time I got the word out it might all have ended – so I went for simplicity.  I publicised the offer on this blog, on my personal and author Facebook pages, and via an e-newsletter that I send out as part of my day job (to people who are tackling financial crime every day, so I thought some of them might like to read about historical financial crime instead).  The one thing I forgot to do was to ask people to leave reviews, but here’s hoping that some of them do it anyway.

So how popular was my offer?  Here’s the breakdown:

• Day one: 31 copies downloaded
• Day two: 55 copies
• Day three: 36 copies
• Day four: 8 copies
• Day five: 10 copies

So that’s a grand total of 140 copies.  Turning to my spreadsheet of “Fatal Forgery” sales, I can see that since it was published in July 2013 – and discounting this recent free promotion and another free promotion I did in January 2019 – I have actually sold 348 e-books.  I’m not sure what that tells us, except that people like free books!  (And that day two of the offer is the big one – by then, the word’s out.  But by day four, everyone who wants it has downloaded it, and I don’t think the word is spreading any further.  So perhaps – for commercial purposes – two widely-spaced two-day promotion periods would work better.)

During the promotion I did look every day at the Amazon list of 100 free best-selling e-books, always hoping that “Fatal Forgery” would appear, but it did not.  Nonetheless, I have had some lovely emails from people saying that they are already enjoying the book, and it’s a small thing that I can do.

Get “Fatal Forgery” for free!

Tags

Amazon, book group, Fatal Forgery, free download, KDP, Samuel Plank

In the middle of all the other crazy things on the news, I think the strangest fact I have learned this week is that one of the current bestselling books on Amazon is “The Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz.  It’s about a mother trying to find her son in a world devastated by a virus called Wuhan-400.  Now I don’t really care whether Mr Koontz is in fact a soothsayer – what surprises me is that people want to sit in their homes, under lock-down, and read about a fictional pandemic.  Perhaps the Koontz story ends well and readers take comfort from that – but I’ll never know because even if it were the last book on earth, I would not want to read a book about a pandemic.  No, I’m escapism all the way: for me, one of the true miracles of reading is that it can transport me to places and times and situations that I could never experience in reality.

I assume that lots of other people feel the same way as I do and are looking to fiction to take them out of themselves.  And to help with this, I have decided to offer the e-book of my first Sam Plank book – “Fatal Forgery” – free on Amazon until the end of Thursday.  (I would do it for longer, but I sell my Sam e-books through KDP Select – i.e. they’re available exclusively on Amazon, and I get a higher royalty rate because of this.  And one of the rules of KDP Select is that you can offer a free download promotion for only five days out of every ninety.  It’s a commercial decision: if I give my books away for free, Amazon makes no commission on the download.  Entirely understandable, but I thought I would explain why it’s a time-limited free download offer.)

So if you would like to download the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” for free, please do so.  (That’s an international Amazon link, so should take you automatically to the correct Amazon site.)  I can guarantee that the plot is entirely free of any mention of plague, pestilence, pandemic, virus or pox.  And please share this offer with friends and family – the more the merrier.  Perhaps you’re setting up a virtual book group, and a free download for everyone would be a great way to start.  I hope you like the book – and if you do, perhaps you would consider leaving a little review on Amazon.  So get downloading, everyone, and happy reading!

It’s alive!

Tags

Amazon, bookshop, Heffers, Heir Apparent, Nielsen, orders

Many moons ago I wrote about my efforts to be listed on the Nielsen catalogue, so that my books could be ordered through – and supplied to – any bookshop in the land.  The Nielsen people were lovely and helpful but the system was convoluted, and in the faceof its ongoing silence I have never quite had faith that it is working for me – perhaps the emails are going into a spam folder.  Every couple of months I log in to check that there isn’t a queue of dozens of orders waiting for me, unloved and unfulfilled, but of course, nothing.

And then this morning – there it was!  An email from Nielsen BookNet with the subject line “New Book Order”!  With trembling fingers I opened it.  Someone wanted a single copy of “Heir Apparent” – so not exactly a bulk order, but someone out there, somewhere in this fair nation of ours, had taken the trouble to request, nay, demand that their bookshop acquire my book for them.  And which shop is it?  In which distant county does it sit, serving customers I shall never meet and of whose lives I know nothing?  Well, it’s Heffers.  Yes, the bookshop only seven minutes’ walk from my own front door.  The bookshop that already stocks my books, and has done from the very start.  It’s a mystery, but I have clicked the button that says that I shall attend to the order forthwith, and in about an hour I shall walk briskly into town and hand over the book.  I’ll save on postage and – if feedback is encouraged from the bookshops – I should get a top rating for speediest order fulfilment ever: five hours from placing the order to receiving the book.  Amazon, eat your heart out.

War and squeace

Tags

Amazon, Good Housekeeping, Gregory Hardiman, Heffers, marketing, research, review, sales, The Solo Squid

The past week has had a split personality: of the time I was able to allocate to writing (rather than working, or unloading the dishwasher, or talking to men about guttering – not a euphemism but a boring reality) I spent half on researching the British army in the early nineteenth century and half on thinking of ways to promote “The Solo Squid”.

With regard to the military research, I think it’s probably no spoiler to say that life in Wellington’s army was pretty grim: one chap wrote to his mum about staggering off the battlefield and carrying his own severed arm to the nearest farm, where the farmer gave him cognac for the pain before cauterising the stump and slinging the arm onto a bonfire.  I assume the arm he had left was his writing arm…  I can safely say that my brain is now chock-full of handy nuggets of infantry info that I will probably never mention but which give me a lovely feeling of security as I inch towards meeting Gregory for the first time.

And as for the squid, it’s a tricky one: finding potential readers for a book about working alone is not easy, as such people by their very nature tend not to congregate.  But I am taking comfort from the five five-star reviews that have appeared on Amazon and am now concentrating on thinking of clever ways to get the book in front of the right people.  I went into Heffers (our local university bookshop) today and asked the chap in charge of the business section to promote the squid from the bottom shelf to the waist-level “ledge” which is considered the ideal place to catch the passing eye, and I think we can agree that it is a great improvement:

     

And in the middle of the night I had a wheeze of an idea.  I am a dedicated reader of “Good Housekeeping” – it’s my version of fantasy, as I gaze upon the pages of elegant homes and nutritious meals.  And they often feature women at work – women who have started their own companies or had a world-changing business idea or (as this month) who run charities.  And the squid, I thought, could offer two perspectives: running a one-person business, and being happy at work.  I researched the features editor and – as luck would have it – she has written her own book about happiness.  So I emailed her this morning with my terrific idea, and we shall see.  Perhaps you should all write in to “GH” and say that you were considering taking out a subscription but had been put off by their lack of articles on how to run a happy one-person business….

Apologies for the awful title of this post, but it seems that the word “squid” lends itself to fanciful thinking: one reviewer has written about the book promoting “squidology”, while someone else mentioned its “squisdom”.  How I wish I had thought of them.

The nitties and the gritties of indie publishing

Tags

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, free download, Gardners, Heir Apparent, pricing, Samuel Plank, Waterstones

Much as I love being a self-publisher author – or what is now called an indie publisher – there is a lot to remember.  Writing the books is really only a part of it; keeping up with all the publishing of those books is administratively heavy and can overtake me at times.

Yesterday, for instance, I was looking at my listings on Amazon and noticed that my free guide to the Sam Plank series – the little publication that offers the first chapter of each Sam Plank book as a taster and a lure – was priced at 99p, rather than free.  Nowadays you are not allowed to list items as perpetually free on Amazon (special offers only), but one way to achieve the same aim is to list the item for free on a competitor site and then ask Amazon to price-match that product.  My Sam guide is available on the Barnes & Noble website for just this purpose, and Amazon has always price-matched it on their UK and US sites.  But it seems that this is not a forever done deal, because – as I noticed yesterday – Amazon had unilaterally re-priced it to 99p (and $1.29 in the US).  Thankfully the mechanism for asking them to instigate a price match is now quite simple – there’s a template email provided in the KDP help system – but it does rely on the publisher (i.e. me) spotting in the first place that the price has been unmatched.  Anyway, email sent yesterday and price re-matched today, to zero.

Also yesterday, I went into my local branch of Waterstones to check that my titles are appearing on their ordering system, after all my efforts to be accepted as an indie publisher by Gardners.  And that was when I realised that I had failed to tell Gardners about “Heir Apparent”, which is therefore absent from their catalogue – and presumably missing out on thousands of orders up and down the land…  (For the record, I have yet to receive a single order from any bookshop via this hard-won Gardners route, but I am sure my day will come.)  I really must create a check-list of things to be done once a book is actually published, and stop thinking of publication day as the end-point – it’s only the beginning for the indie publisher!

(As for the title of this post, I once heard a speaker at a professional conference who was from France; his accent was divine, darlings, and my heart was completely won when he talked of having to adjust his bank’s procedures to take account of “ze nitties and ze gritties” of some new legislation.  From that moment on, the phrase has been a very welcome part of my vocabulary.)

Kind words and five stars

Tags

Amazon, Heir Apparent, research, review, sales, update

I can breathe again!  “Heir Apparent” now has three reviews on Amazon (the UK version – I still don’t understand why reviews on one Amazon site don’t automatically appear on all Amazon sites) and they are all five-star.  Here are a couple of lovely extracts, which warm the cockles of my authorly heart:

• “‘Heir Apparent’ is certainly the most complex case the experienced constable has had to tackle; it concerns the question of stolen identity and the law of succession in the early decades of the nineteenth century.”
• “The biggest draw is enjoying the company of [Susan’s] characters, so well-drawn, realistically flawed yet hugely likeable (for the main characters), and although the villains are suitably villainous, they too are three-dimensional, with their reasons for erring clearly drawn”
• “I love how many times pie is mentioned.”

All authors agree that Amazon reviews are important.  Sometimes we can forget that Amazon – no matter how big and no matter how global – is just a shop.  And all (most) shops care about is selling things to customers.  So Amazon tries to put its most tempting items in front of potential buyers – and the most tempting items are the ones that other buyers have bought and loved, and indeed loved enough to come back and rave about how much they loved them.  Hence the value of the review: if someone has read your book and thinks it’s terrific and tells Amazon how pleased they are, that will help your book rise up the rankings at Amazon, and it will be shown higher up the search results, so that more potential buyers can spot it.  Interestingly, you don’t have to buy a book – or anything, I suppose – at Amazon to leave a review for it on Amazon.  So if you have read any of my Sam titles, even if you’ve borrowed it from a friend or bought it somewhere else, and you liked it, please consider leaving a review for it on Amazon.  (The only restriction is that to be able to leave reviews on Amazon, you have to have spent at least £40 – US$50 on the US site – on Amazon in the past twelve months.)

And I am just putting the final touches to my free monthly research update, which will be sent out to subscribers on 1 November.  This month it’s about education in Sam’s time, so if you’re interested in the research behind the Sam books (I can’t shoehorn it all into the books – there’s far more in my files than I can ever use), why not sign up now?  I occasionally offer giveaways and competitions too – who could resist?

Ups and downs

Tags

Amazon, Book Report, Fatal Forgery, Gardners, Hatchards, Heir Apparent, KDP, Nielsen, sales, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Waterstones

It’s Friday, and time to take stock of the first official week of “Heir Apparent”.  It’s not an exact science (well, it probably is, but I don’t understand it) but according to Amazon/KDP/Book Report, I have now sold twenty-one copies of “Heir Apparent” (plus the previously-reported nineteen to bookshops and four direct to friends).  I’m very pleased with that, and will have a celebratory Jaffa Cake or three.  So that’s the up.

Now for the down – or maybe it’s an up, but I can’t quite tell.  Last Saturday I went to London to take part in the People’s Vote march (we’re campaigning for a vote on the Brexit deal, in case you’re wondering).  By chance, the friends I was meeting had decided to gather on Piccadilly, outside Hatchards.  Now, Hatchards is among the spiffiest of bookshops: it’s been selling books since 1797 and sitting at the heart of Piccadilly for over two centuries – and although it is now part of the giant Waterstones family, it still retains its elegant independence.  Suffice it to say that I would love to see Sam and Martha swanking about the place.  Back in my more innocent days, I breezed into Hatchards and spoke to the manager, saying that – as Sam is a local – the books definitely belonged on Hatchards’ shelves.  The manager kindly explained that he could stock them only if they were listed on the Waterstones buying system – which of course they were not.

Nothing daunted, I decided to get them on that system – how hard could it be?  Now pay attention.  In order to be listed on the Waterstones system, a book has to be available through one of the book wholesalers with which Waterstones deals, such as Gardners.  So I contacted Gardners and asked to be put on their system.  They explained that they don’t deal with authors – only publishers, and only publishers recognised by Nielsen BookNet.  So I contacted Nielsen and asked how I could be recognised as an independent publisher.  It took some time and lots of forms, but I managed it.  So now: Nielsen recognises me as an independent publisher, which means that Gardners is listed as my wholesaler, which means that the Waterstones catalogue (both internal for stores and external for customers) features my titles.  Hurrah!  And if anyone orders my book through Waterstones, the order goes from them to Nielsen, and from Nielsen to me (as an indie publisher).  I pack up the books and send them to Gardners, who deliver them to Waterstones, who get them to the customer (or put them on the shelf).  Simple.

Back to the march last Saturday.  There I am, standing outside Hatchards and gazing through their lovely window, when I spot the manager standing alone at his till.  I wander in, all casual-like, and go up to him.  “You may not remember me,” I say, “but you once said that if my books could be ordered through your system, you would give them a go”.  “Are your books marvellous?” he asked.  “They are,” I confirmed, and he went to his computer and ordered – he said – two each of “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  I was floating on air for most of that march – Sam and Martha, in Hatchards!  And to think, she couldn’t even read much apart from bottle labels until she met Sam.

This week, I waited patiently – hah! – for that order to come in from Nielsen.  And yesterday I contacted them, and Gardners, to check that I hadn’t misunderstood the process.  But no, no trace of any order from Hatchards or Waterstones – not a one.  After pondering what to do, I’ve gone passive-aggressive: I sent an email to the manager saying “I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that my books will be on the shelves of Hatchards – I shall tell all my London friends to come in and buy them”.  So near, and yet so far…