Book cannot live by Kindle alone

As was predicted, it turns out that perhaps the most difficult part of self-publishing is not the writing or the formatting (although both nearly tipped me over the edge more than once), but rather the marketing.  Which is just a fancy word for selling the blasted thing.  You have heard me moan about this before.  As has my husband, so when I started again today he said (although rather more kindly, as he knows who provides the dinner in this house), “Stop whinging and do something about it”.  Point taken.  So I went back through various self-publishing blogs and fora that have been helpful in the past (particularly Catherine, Caffeinated), looking for tricks that I might have missed.  And indeed there was a glaring hole in my efforts: I had carefully published “Fatal Forgery” for Kindle, via Amazon, but ignored all the other e-book platforms.  Thankfully the majority of these can be accessed using one uploading service, and so this afternoon was devoted to reformatting my book for submission to Smashwords.

I’m not big on the detail, but I do know that when I Kindle-ified my book, it was turned into a format that can be downloaded (shock horror) to Kindles.  However, Kindles are not the only fruit, and this is what Smashwords promises me: “Smashwords will distribute your books via multiple online channels, including but not limited to the Smashwords.com web site, major online retailers (Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Baker & Taylor (operates Blio, a popular e-reading app, and also operates Axis360 which distributes ebooks to public libraries), the Diesel eBook Store, mobile phone appvendors (Aldiko on Android; Kobo on all mobile platforms) and other online venues.”  I say: there are platforms there that I haven’t even heard of, so that must be good.  It took a couple of hours to format the file to Smashwords’ standards and to set up my profile, plus the usual hell that is filling in a US tax form so that they don’t take 110% of my earnings at the outset, but all done now.  The sparkly new “Fatal Forgery” is awaiting final review, which I am told takes about a week, and then I shall enjoy the idea of Sam appearing on a Nook near you.

Cold hard numbers

Some years ago I was watching a documentary about Barbara Cartland (the Pink One), and she was talking about her prolific writing output.  In 1983, for instance, she wrote 23 novels, and on average throughout her career she wrote a book every forty days.  As opposed to one every four years, like this lazy toad…  Anyhoo, there she was, reclining majestically on a pink sofa, and she purred to the interviewer, “The trouble is, darling, that authors forget that writing is a business.”  And so, in homage to Dame Barbara, today I shall concentrate on the business side of writing.

“Fatal Forgery” was published on Friday 12 July, in three formats: paperback and Kindle on Amazon, and plain PDF on Gumroad.  Now I’m not sure how quickly all the sales figures make it through to the author report pages (which I am trying to ration to three checks a day) and the paperback sales have to go through the extra stage of being ordered from CreateSpace, but right now the reported sales since publication stand at this:

• Paperback via Amazon: 26 copies (at author royalty of £1.27 per copy)
• Kindle via Amazon: 22 copies (£2.09 royalty per copy)
• PDF via Gumroad: 0 copies (US$4.27 royalty per copy – as yet theoretical)

I have also sold thirteen copies to local bookshop G David, for which they paid a total of £40 (i.e. £3.08 per copy, but then I did have to buy those copies myself from CreateSpace, at US$7.03 or £4.62 per copy, so that’s a total loss of £20.06).  The six copies at Heffers are on sale-or-return, so no income from those yet.

SO [grabs calculator] this month I have made £58.94 from “Fatal Forgery”.  Perhaps I’ll put the order for the gold-embroidered pink chaise longue on hold for now.

 

In the lap of the Amazon gods

As regular readers will know, my official publication date for “Fatal Forgery” is this coming Friday, 19 July.  However, with self-publication, you need a detailed plan working backwards from the publication date, to make sure that you get everything where it should be in time.  For a print-on-demand paperback, you upload the files to your publisher (in my case, Createspace) and they then pass on the information to Amazon for listing.  This sharing of the files takes (according to the Createspace website) 5-7 days.  My “O” level maths is just about up to this, so I figured that – with a publication date of 19 July – I should upload the files on 12 July.  So I did.  And to keep things tidy, I also uploaded the Kindle file to KDP (Kindle Publishing Direct – the Kindle-y part of Amazon).  Great relief all round, and even a quiet little cry in the corner.  Well, it’s been four years in the making.

Five hours later, I was checking Facebook, and a friend had posted a link.  To “Fatal Forgery”!  On Amazon!  Both POD and Kindle versions!  So much for 5-7 days.  Of course, it’s all too exciting, but it has rather thrown my publishing plan for a burton.  You will notice that the “publication countdown clock” has gone from this website, for instance – after all, it’s published.  So, if you’re interested, you can see the book listed here on Amazon – they highlight both editions (POD and Kindle) in one listing:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fatal-Forgery-Susan-Grossey/dp/1489587403/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373868902&sr=1-1&keywords=fatal+forgery

But fear not: this is not the end of our blog journey together.  After all, if you’re reading this as a potential self-publisher yourself, you’re going to want to know about the aftermath – the marketing, hopefully the sales, and the public reaction.  Also, on the recommendation of another self-published author, as well as using Amazon for the POD and Kindle editions, I am also selling the book as a plain PDF via a site called Gumroad – I’ll tell you all about it next time.

Press release, and hope

Well, it’s all over bar the promoting.  Today I finalised the text for both POD paperback and e-book versions of “Fatal Forgery”, and sent them off to be readied for sale from next Friday.  Now all I have to do is drum up some interest.  Yes, I am afraid that the time has come to write what used to be called press releases, to try to encourage various publications, blogs and websites to take a look at the book and – the Holy Grail – review and promote it.

A while ago I read a very useful post by someone (to my shame, I forget who and where) who suggested that, in deciding where to promote a book, you should go through it and see where the “hooks” might be.  To give you my own example:

• The hero of “Fatal Forgery” is a policeman, so I have contacted various police magazines and police history societies
• I live in Cambridge and already write a weekly column for the local newspaper, so I have contacted them, along with the local radio station
• I regularly visit Guernsey as part of my work in financial crime prevention, so I have contacted their local paper
• Part of “Fatal Forgery” is set in Gibraltar, so I have contacted their local paper and the Commissioner of the Royal Gibraltar Police.

You get the idea.  It’s hard to gauge how swamped these people are with similar stories, and so I am not sure what response to expect.  I’ll let you know.  And if any of you can think of other places or people I should contact, please do let me know.

A right royal dilemma

A little while ago I shared with you my thoughts on pricing for both the POD paperback and e-book editions of “Fatal Forgery”.  Now that the proof copy is on order, I have to come to a final decision on this, and so yesterday evening I started playing around with the pricing options for the POD paperback.

As the book is, as the name suggests, printed on demand, there are costs involved.  I select a cover price, and the buyer pays that.  From that payment, the sale channel takes a nibble (or a walloping great bite) – and I get what is left.  So if I sell a black-and-white paperback book through Amazon.co.uk, they take their 40% of the list price as their fee for listing and selling it.  To cover the printing of the book, they then take 70p per book as a fixed charge, plus 1p per page.  So if I list my POD paperback at £5.99 as planned, Amazon.co.uk takes 40% of that (£2.40) plus 70p plus £2.82 (the book is 282 pages long) – which is a total of £5.92.  So if I sell the book at £5.99, I get 7p per copy.  *shocked face*

Given that some of this Amazon share is fixed (per book plus per page elements), it seems that I need to increase my cover price to give myself any reasonable royalty.  If I run the numbers again with a cover price of £7.99, I can increase my own share to £1.27 per copy, which is a bit more palatable.

So how does this compare to “proper” (i.e. traditional) publishing?  Well, a typical royalty rate for the author of a paperback book published through a mainstream publishing house is 7.5%.  So for a cover price of £5.99 that’s 45p, and for a cover price of £7.99 it’s 60p.  In short, I’d be mad to price at £5.99 – but will people pay more?  I’ve gone to the bookshop this morning and looked at similar books of similar length in similar departments, and £8.99 is the standard price.  So maybe £7.99 for mine will work.  The thought of getting only 7p for a whole book is just too, too depressing – that outfit alone on the cover is worth more!

Let’s talk money

I know we all like to imagine writers sitting in a, well, not a garret these days, but perhaps a sunlit back bedroom, a cat purring under the desk, surrounded by ramshackle bookshelves overflowing with books, family photos and inspirational ornaments.  And much as I like to picture myself in just such a romantic setting, concerned only with thinking arty thoughts and crafting the finest novel I can, the reality is that much of the business of writing is just that: a business.  Not for one moment do I envisage “Fatal Forgery” making my fortune, such that I can retire from the day job and spend all my hours in the sunlit back bedroom, etc. – but I do have to think about the money side of things.  And one of the most obviously financial decisions I have to make is how to price the book.

As you know, I am going to publish both a print-on-demand paperback (known in our house as the POD) and an e-book (the E) – so I need not just one but two prices.  Being of a certain age (oh go on then, 47) I’m still not quite convinced that an e-anything should cost the same as its physical counterpart, and so I would like to have one price for the POD and a lower one for the E.

For the POD, I went into a few local bookshops and looked at how much paperbacks cost these days – specifically, historical fiction.  And they seem to weigh in at about £8.99.  I then looked sternly at “Fatal Forgery” (I think it cowered a bit), and reasoned that (a) it’s quite a short novel at 55,000-ish words, (b) it’s self-published, and (c) hardly anyone has heard of me – so we need to come down from that.  On the other hand, I don’t want to suggest with a bargain basement price that it’s not a quality book.  And what about that “.99” ruse?  What about pricing a book at a round pound, or “.50” instead?  But apparently this screams “self-published amateur” and is best avoided.  So I’ve pretty much decided on £5.99 for the POD.

The E is much trickier, not least because almost entire books have been written on the art/science of e-book pricing.  Because it is so easy to adjust the price of an e-book, people suggest all sorts of complicated pricing models: e.g. offer it free (free!) for the first day, then when demand is created bung the price up to £4.99, then when the initial flurry is over, tempt in the stragglers with a discounted price of £1.49.  All of this seems to entail much more monitoring (and cunning) than I can provide, so I’d rather set the price to what I think it’s worth and see how we go.  So I’m thinking of £2.99 for the E.

So in short, we’re looking at £5.99 for the physical paperback, and £2.99 for the e-book.  What do you think?