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.

All over bar the selling

Tags

Amazon, bookshop, Draft2Digital, editing, Gumroad, Heir Apparent, KDP, Kindle, Kobo, proof copy, publication date, Smashwords

Aye, as Sam would say.  It’s done.  Over the weekend I completed the final editing of “Heir Apparent” and cut and pasted it into the template that I use for the interior formatting.  It’s a bit of a beast, at 377 pages, but everyone who has read it tells me that it needs the extra space because it is more “twisty-turny” than the previous novels.  That would explain the headaches I had during my writing retreat…

I have now ordered my paper proof copy – I’ve checked it online, but it’s important to check it in the flesh, to make sure that the paper quality is good and that the cover looks as spiffy in real life as it does on the screen.  Plus, I can dance around the house waving the proof copy in the air – I just look daft if I do that with my laptop.

I have also emailed all the lovely bricks-and-mortar bookshops which stock the Sam books to ask how many copies they would like of his chunky new adventure – it’s one of my great pleasures to cycle to my two local bookshops on publication day and drop off their orders.  That said, “publication day” is a rather elastic concept: it’s all very well me pressing – with great fanfare – the giant “Publish!” button on KDP, but then it’s up to Amazon.  One of the Sam books took four (fevered) days to appear; another was listed within the hour.  I’ve learned to chill about it – but for general celebratory purposes, I’m aiming for the long-promised Friday 18 October.

So all that is left to do now is, erm, format the five e-versions that I need (Kindle, Draft2Digital, Gumroad, Kobo and Smashwords) – I’ll certainly be cross-eyed after that lot.  And then I’ll need to sell some books.  Easy-peasy.

All that effort – for nothing!

Tags

Amazon, Draft2Digital, e-book, Kindle, pricing, Samuel Plank, Smashwords

I tell you, wrestling with Amazon is the aspect of the indie writer’s role that no-one warns you about.  As I mentioned a mere nine days ago, I have created an official guide to the Sam Plank books, which includes the first chapter of each book, to whet the appetite, and a glossary of Regency terms, as well as links to encourage people to sign up to my newsletter and indeed to buy the books.  I want to give this guide away – in Kindle form only – but Amazon is not keen on listing books for free.  This is understandable: they make their money by keeping a little cut of the price of each book they sell, and if it sells for nothing, they get nothing.  That’s not to say they don’t run their own promotions, listing Kindle books for free – indeed, you can always download free books from Amazon – but they like to call the shots, having made (I assume) the decision that the giveaway will increase sales in the future.

But thanks to excellent advice from members of the sainted Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), I knew that there was a way to force Amazon’s hand.  And this is what you have to do:

• Create an alternative version of the book for uploading to Smashwords – another e-book distributor
• Create an alternative version of the book for uploading to Draft2Ditigal – another e-book distributor
• Upload the book to these two platforms, giving the price as zero – they both permit this, whereas KDP (the e-book publisher for Amazon) does not
• Wait a couple of days for Smashwords and Draft2Digital to publish the book and distribute it to – importantly – Amazon’s main competitors, Kobo and Barnes & Noble
• Find the book listings on those two competitor websites, showing the price as zero, and save links to those listings
• Find – deep, deep, deep within the Amazon help system – the option that allows you to send a price match request to Amazon, including the links to the listings on Kobo and Barnes & Noble
• Receive a standard reply from Amazon: “Thanks for the pricing information. While we retain discretion over our retail prices, I’ve passed your feedback on for consideration.  We’ll need a little time to look into your issue.  We’ll contact you and provide more information soon.  Thank you for your patience.”
• Check the Amazon listing feverishly every ten minutes or so for four days
• Cheer mightily when – this morning – the freebie appears!

Of course, Amazon can change its mind at any time and revert to the official price that I was forced to enter when publishing the book with KDP – the lowest they offer is 99p.  And it’s showing as free only on Amazon.co.uk at the moment – the other Amazons have yet to catch up.  But it’s progress and in the indie publishing world that’s to be celebrated, when nothing is ever as simple as you think it should be!

So now, folks, please make it worth all the anguish and send this link on to everyone you know so that they can all download the guide – it’s the gateway drug to the Sam series and we need to get pushing!

Keeping the faith

Tags

Amazon, Draft2Digital, Faith Hope and Trickery, Gumroad, Kobo, publication date, Smashwords

I will admit that I don’t remember this happening before…  I have found a flaw in my publishing plan.  Once a book is uploaded to CreateSpace, it is formatted and then sent back to me for final checking.  If all seems well with the digital proof, I can then order a paper proof copy, if I wish, or simply press the Publish button to launch it onto an adoring and waiting public.  (At least, that’s how I choose to see you.)  Once the book is published, I can order my own copies to distribute to bookshops and reviewers.  However, this means that there is no way of making sure that the book appears on Amazon and in bookshops on the same day – Amazon is always going to be first.

Ideally I would prefer to have a halfway publication option: press Publish on CreateSpace but specify a launch date, which I would then try to co-ordinate with delivery of paperbacks to the shops.  But this does not exist: you cannot order copies from CreateSpace, even as the author, until the book is officially published – and once it’s officially published, it’s sent to Amazon for inclusion in their next update, which these days is often within the hour.

All of which is a long-winded way of announcing to you – stand by your beds – that “Faith, Hope and Trickery” is now available on Amazon, in both paperback and Kindle formats.  They seem to be shown separately at the moment, but I know from experience that Amazon will eventually unite them.  In the meantime, you can find both by searching for the title.  I have also uploaded e-versions to Kobo, Gumroad, Smashwords and Draft2Digital, which between them cover most of the e-book formats.  I sell very few books through these channels, but I figure that I won’t sell any at all if they’re not listed…

I realise that it all seems a bit of an anti-climax, but I was lying awake last night trying to figure out how to tie together the various publication strands, and hit the promised publication date exactly, when I realised that the book was ready to go and I might as well just do it!  And my husband has pointed out that Mothering Sunday is perhaps the perfect day to launch this particular story.  I have now ordered my giant box of books, which I am told will arrive in about ten days’ time, and then I’ll be sending them out for review and making deliveries to bookshops.  In the meantime, you can order your very own purple pages from Amazon – hurrah!

Free, gratis and for nothing

Tags

Draft2Digital, e-book, Fatal Forgery, iBook, iTunes, Kobo, marketing, Scribd, Smashwords

As promised, I have been spending more of my “Sam time” trying to figure out how to improve sales of the current books, with writing of the new book a more relaxed affair this time round.  Over the weekend I read hundreds of pages of information on the marketing in particular of e-books, and there is much support for the idea of giving books away.  Free, gratis and for nothing, as my father used to say.  “Permafree” is the current term for it.  The thinking is that people have too much choice when it comes to books – millions of them out there.  So you tempt them to try yours by giving it to them, which removes the “shall I risk my money on an author I don’t know?” dilemma for them.  They read your book and – so goes the theory – are so enamoured of your work that they rush to slap down hard currency for all your other books.

I can see the logic, I really can: it’s like the free samples given out in supermarkets and at railway stations.  But “Fatal Forgery” (it makes most sense to give away the first in the series) would be quite the free gift: all those years of work and all those words, just for nothing.  I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that – plus I would feel bad for all the people (219 at the last count) who paid good money for their “FF” e-books and could have got it for nothing had they only waited.  And do people value something they are given for nothing?

However, my weekend has not resulted simply in yet more dithering.  During my reading I discovered that I have let myself fall behind the times.  Apart from publishing direct to Kindle, I rely on a service called Smashwords to distribute my e-books through various other channels, such as iBooks (part of iTunes), Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and so on.  You format your text in as clean a way as you can, and Smashwords converts it to these various formats (hah! I say that so glibly, but I remember that it took days of painstaking formatting), gets it into the various catalogues, and then takes a percentage of the sales.  Last year I made ten sales through Smashwords.  And now I discover that there is a new competitor on the block: Draft2Digital.  Their website is considerably more user-friendly, and the conversion for the channels they use – similar to the Smashwords offering – is much more straightforward (cleverer software behind the scenes, I guess).  So I have signed up, and so far have published two titles with them.  (I am doing only e-books with them, but they also offer print-on-demand paperbacks, which I currently do with CreateSpace.  In my next marketing session, I might compare the two.)  So as not to cause confusion, I have delisted on Smashwords from the channels offered by Draft2Digital, and kept all of the channels that are unique, if that makes sense – so that my titles are offered through the maximum number of channels.  As I always say, I’ll keep you posted.