The league table

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.)

New fans for Sam?

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.

Please send cake

It’s time for the annual totting-up, as I prepare my self-assessment tax return and work out whether being an author makes me any money at all, or whether I am in fact paying for the privilege.  (Incidentally, my top tip for filling in tax returns – and indeed any complex form – is this: if you don’t understand the question, the answer is no.)

First, some stats for you:

• I have self-published 21 non-fiction books (all about anti-money laundering, all in paperback only), five Sam Plank novels (all in paperback and various e-formats, and the first two as audiobooks as well), one collection of articles that I wrote for the local newspaper (paperback only) and one box-set of the first three Sam Plank novels (e-format only)
• I have also self-published a guide to the Sam Plank series, with the first chapter of each novel and a glossary of Regency terms, but that’s free and so it brings in no royalties
• In June 2015 my tax return revealed that I had made just under £1,500 from the writing side of my professional life
• In 2016 that disappeared into a net loss of £44.87
• In 2017 I increased my net loss to £288.71 – obviously too much spending and not enough writing
• In 2018 I bucked the trend and went into the black, making a net profit of £1,338

So what can I report this year – up or down?  Profit or loss?  In the period 6 April 2018 to 5 April 2019 (that’s the crazy English tax year for you), I made a net profit from my authorliness of £1,294.31.  In essence, that’s royalties and sales minus cover designs, promo materials and membership of the Society of Authors.  It works out at £24.89 per week.  At this rate, I’ll be lucky to afford even a modest garret.

Don’t forget to vote for the title of “Plank 6” – for £24.89 a week, I’m certainly not choosing my own titles.

(And in case you’re wondering, the blog title is from a letter my father sent to his mum from university in the 1950s, which we still have in the family archive and which reads, in its entirety: “Dear mum, Washing enclosed.  Please send cake. Pete.”)

All that effort – for nothing!

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!

The Fussy Librarian interviews the Very Grateful Author

Heavens, the speed of modern communication quite dazzles me at times!  Less than twenty-four hours ago I indulged myself by replying to a very interesting email questionnaire sent to me by Sadye of the Fussy Librarian website.  This website is a big deal in the e-book world, as it (to quote its own description) “is the first website to match readers not only with the genre of books they like but also their preferences about content… We also only bother with the good stuff so you know you’ll see great reads every time you open our daily email.”

So you can imagine that I was delighted to be asked to take part in their regular “author Q&A” feature.  I expected it to sit around for a while, waiting its turn – but no!  It’s there today!  I’ll let you know if I see a spike in sales in the Des Moines area.  (Only kidding – I can’t track purchases that closely.  At least not legally.)

Going goggle-eyed with editing

I know you think I’ve been lounging around in a silk kimono, watching Hollywood movies and eating bonbons, but in reality I have been editing like a demon.  And I can finally report that the finish line is in sight.

I have done my last edits – so if you don’t like the story the way it is now, that’s just tough.  I have uploaded the interior file to CreateSpace, so that it can calculate the number of pages it will need to publish the paperback (328, as you’re asking).  It has now told me how wide the book’s spine needs to be, and I’ve sent this vital statistic to the cover designer, who can then finalise the cover.  Once I upload that to CreateSpace, I can order my proof copy, which takes about a week to get to me.  And if I’m happy with that copy when I see it, I will press the big, red, flashing, honking Publish button – oh, how I wish it was that exciting a button, but it isn’t – and you will be able to rush to Amazon in your thousands to buy your own copies.

In the week’s gap while I wait for my proof paperback, I will return to the hell that is formatting, in order to create the various e-versions of the book – which means taking out all of the beautiful formatting that I have just put in.  Such is life.

But in short: we’re nearly there!

The book-buyer’s marketplace

Whenever I give talks about writing – and I’ve spoken in libraries and bookshops, and to book groups, WI meetings and the Rotary Club – people are always fascinated to know about the economics of self-publishing.  Telling them how much it costs to self-publish – nothing! – always surprises them.  (Of course writing a book costs a great deal in time, and you might well choose to spend money on professional editing services, or a cover designer, or a pretty template for the layout of the interior, but you can actually upload a book to a self-publishing service for no payment at all.)  But what really surprises them is how little of the purchase price eventually makes its way back to the author.

If I sell a paperback via Amazon – cover prices are £7.99 and £8.99 for the Sam books – I eventually get about £1.30 of that sale.  If I supply bookshops directly – which entails me ordering the books myself and then selling them on to the bookshop – I get about 50p per book in the end (and, in one case, I am actually subsidising a bookshop because I think it’s the right thing to do, and I lose about 20p per copy that they take…).  And if I sell an e-book – Amazon lists them for about £3.10 – I eventually get about £1.10.  I’m not eyeing up that retirement villa just yet!

And a very interesting article on this subject – where to buy your books in order to best benefit the author – has appeared on the website of the Society of Authors.  It’s a very illuminating read and, as you might imagine, flies the flag for independent bookshops and local libraries.  If you have any choice at all in how you consume your reading material, it’s well worth having a read – some of the observations will surprise you.  (Although much of it is concerned with traditionally published books – they talk of buying in bulk from distributors, which is obviously only a pipe dream for the self-published – it is still useful to have the marketplace dissected in this way.)  Click here for the article.

Free, gratis and for nothing

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.

Putting Sam on the map

Some time ago I mentioned that I was hoping to include a map in what I was then calling “Plank 3”.  This became “Worm in the Blossom”, published in October 2015 with no map.  But I have news.  I live in Cambridge (east of England) and recently some maps appeared in the windows of local shops, highlighting some street art in our neighbourhood.  The maps were just wonderful: black and white, with clear lettering, and beautiful little drawings of local landmarks.  Perfect for Plank, I thought – but bound to have been done by some fancy-pants design studio in London.  However, after asking a few questions, I discovered that the artist lives about ten minutes’ walk from me, and what a lovely man he is.

Jon Harris is perhaps even more batty about Cambridge and about history than I am, and is blessed with the ideal skill for communicating his enjoyment: an ability to draw glorious maps.  I met him this weekend in a café in town and explained what I envisaged for Sam, and he got it immediately.  We bonded over a love of Ronald Searle’s drawings and – to cut to the chase – Jon has agreed to do Sam’s map for me.  Or rather, Sam’s maps.

We decided, after I had explained the concept of the series of seven books, that what we need is eight maps: one “base map” showing the four or five key Sam locations (his house, the Great Marlborough Street police office, Newgate and so on) and then a version of this for each individual book, showing the base key locations plus the places that feature in that particular book.  So for “Fatal Forgery”, for instance, we would add Fauntleroy’s bank and the Coldbath Fields house of correction, for “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” Freame’s bank would appear, and so on.

As for how to distribute these maps, this is still a little uncertain, but what I am thinking is this.  For the books that are already published – “Fatal Forgery”, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” and “Worm in the Blossom” – we will prepare the relevant maps and then have them available as a free PDF downloads from this website.  I will also put a note in the front of each book to that effect, so anyone who buys the books from that point onwards will know where to find the maps.  I don’t want to actually add maps to these books as it’s a bit of a swizz for people who have already bought them.  But for new books – “Plank 4” onwards – I will put a map in the paperback book itself and offer the free PDF download as well.  The map in the book might have to be slightly abbreviated, given the limited space available on a paperback page, but the PDF one will be the full monty.  E-books, I suspect, will not have maps – apparently diagrams are the very devil to get into e-books and I don’t fancy wrestling with it for days.  So e-book buyers – past and future – will be directed to the PDF downloads.  I think.  We’ll have to see about the technical stuff as we go along.

But for those of you who said you’d like to have a map so that you can trace Sam’s footsteps, just a little more patience: it’s on its way!

Kobo konfusion

I have now given quite a few talks about self-publishing, and I always say that it’s very straight-forward, good fun, and perfectly do-able as long as you’re organised.  But sometimes I forget how much I had to learn the first time round – my husband remembers me tearing my hair out as I fought with several slightly different formats for “Fatal Forgery”.  Of course, being one of those über-organised people, I made myself a checklist, and now publishing a new Plank is simply a matter of working my way through that.  Until recently.

A friend in the Netherlands commented in an email that she was really enjoying “Worm in the Blossom” which she had downloaded from Kobo.  My little ears pricked up: I check my sales channels at least once a week (sometimes once a day, well, OK, several times a day…) and I hadn’t seen a single Kobo sale of “Blossom”.  I went onto my KWL [Kobo Writing Life – it’s their self-publishing arm] dashboard and no, not a one.  I emailed Kobo: where’s my sale?  How do we know you’ve had a sale, they asked in return.  I sent them my friend’s confirmation email – “Thank you for buying your Kobo book, etc.”.  Ah, said Kobo: this is a Smashwords Kobo sale, not a direct Kobo sale, so you need to check your Smashwords dashboard, not ours.  Eh?

For the e-versions of my books, I produce a Kindle version which I publish through KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing], a Gumroad version (a plain PDF, uploaded direct to Gumroad), a Kobo version which I publish through KWL, and a Smashwords version.  Smashwords is slightly different from the others in that it is an “e-book distribution platform”: you upload your e-book to them, and they translate it into various formats and ensure that it is listed in all sorts of places, such as Apple iStore, Barnes & Noble (big in America), Scribd – and Kobo.  And when a book sells, they take their little cut before sending on the royalty to the author.  When I upload my books to Smashwords, I tick all available distribution channels – which meant that I was inadvertently creating two listings for each book on Kobo: a direct one via KWL, and an indirect one via Smashwords.  Of course, the books are identical, but – thanks to royalty calculations and currency exchange rates – the prices were slightly different.  I have rectified it now, by removing the KWL listings (I chose Smashwords over Kobo because the former’s customer service as I tried to sort out my confusion was so much more helpful and prompt).  But it just goes to show that – as with most things – you never stop learning in self-publishing.