The advertising game

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

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?

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.

Taming the squid

“The Solo Squid” – my book about how to run a happy one-person business – has hit the same wall as the Sam Plank books: everyone who reads it says that it is good, but not enough people are reading it.  I don’t want to fall back into Twitter (for the reasons explained yesterday) but I do want to get the squid message out there, and so I have created a new Facebook page.

The theory is that the Solo Squid page will showcase the book, yes, but will also share tips and ideas on the theme central to the book: enjoying working alone, and being satisfied with that work status (i.e. being content with a one-person business and not plotting world domination).  To keep it manageable I plan to source and share one piece of squisdom every day or two, and I am going to be ferocious about keeping to the squidology – no veering off-message.

Like so many marketing ideas, it may die a death in a month or two, but that’s the nature of the marketing beast.  On the other hand, I should practise what I preach, and in the book I advise forgetting about formal marketing strategies: “Rather, I recommend starting at the end and asking yourself this one question: what can I do to make sure that my clients remember me in a positive light?”  And if my FB page can offer a helpful idea or a crumb of comfort to a lonely or struggling or exhausted solo squid, who then tells other solo squids about it, then I’m happy.

(And in case you’re wondering about my fictional life, I can assure you that each weekend I am immersed in research for the first Gregory book.  I have been reading a wonderful tome called “Annals of Cambridge”, which is a highly subjective – and at times unintentionally hilarious – record of the main events that happened in the city, organised by year.  And in 1830 we had this gem: “On 3 December 1830, apprehension having been entertained from the excited state of the labouring classes in many of the adjacent villages that there might be some disturbance in the town on the following market day, 800 of the [6,500 male] inhabitants voluntarily attended at the Town Hall and were sworn as special constables. Not the slightest disturbance occurred.”  I can guarantee that that little over-reaction will find its way into a Gregory book.)

Download data

Well, the numbers are in.  As explained in my last post (I can never write that phrase without thinking of a lone bugler on a parade ground) I ran a Kindle giveaway for “Fatal Forgery” for four days, from Thursday 3 to Sunday 6 January.  (When you choose the days for a giveaway on Amazon you can choose whole days only, which run on Pacific Standard Time and are therefore currently eight hours behind me in the UK, but it’s all done and dusted by now.)  I did my best to promote the giveaway by posting on this blog, putting daily notifications on Twitter and Facebook (including, on the latter, public posts) and mentioning it in all emails to friends and on Goodreads.  Thank you to all of you who shared, linked and otherwise promoted on my behalf – you did sterling work.

Over the four days “Fatal Forgery” was downloaded 572 times.  As perhaps expected, the rate fell off over the four days: 257 on Thursday, 186 on Friday, 67 on Saturday and 62 on Sunday.  At some point on Thursday/Friday the book made it into the Top 100 Free Kindle Books on Amazon, hitting the dizzy heights of number 96 in the ranking before dropping off again – it was a short but glorious reign.

As for who was downloading, of course I don’t know individual details but the KDP dashboard allows me to see which Amazon site was used for each of the 572 downloads:

(That’s 281 in the UK, 218 in the US, 52 in Germany, 12 in Canada, 5 in Australia, 2 in France and one each in India and the Netherlands.)

Of course that’s the Amazon sites that were used and not necessarily where the people actually are, but it’s the best we can do.  The biggest surprise for me is the German showing, so if you’re a German reader of this blog and you promoted the download to all of your friends, thank you!

The next phase of this experiment – and it’s a rather imprecise one – is to try and monitor whether these downloads turn into reviews and/or purchases of the other books in the series, which was the marketing point of the exercise.  I’ll keep you posted.

Free Forgery!

I am starting the new year by breaking one of the cardinal rules of marketing (or indeed any sort of experimentation): I am changing several elements at once.  You know from my previous post about my intention to be printed-on-demand by both KDP and Ingram Spark.  That project is currently in abeyance while I figure out what to do about the cover concerns – whether to add more pages to my IS version, or pay to have the cover rejigged, or get the cover files from the designer and rejig them myself, or [current favourite] ignore it all and eat Jaffa Cakes.

I am also exploring the murky world of Amazon advertising, which is generating headaches of previously unimagined kinds.  Whole books (literally) have been written about how to work the system, and although I have narrowed it down to a few principles, I am still uncertain.  I thought I would take the plunge over the festive break – but when it came to it I couldn’t even find the right part of the Amazon empire to log into to start my life as an advertiser!  I have put out a call for help to my self-publishing community, and when someone figures it out, I’ll have another go.

But in the meantime I am trying a third tack: going narrow.  Yep, that’s what they call it when you limit the sales of your e-books to Amazon only.  In the past I have gone wide by creating all possible e-versions of my books for distribution via iBooks, Kobo and Smashwords (which distributes e-books to all sorts of places like Barnes & Noble and Scribd).  This takes time, and the rewards are slim to the point of emaciation: perhaps a dozen copies have sold across all those alternative channels.  If, however, you throw in your e-lot with Amazon only, you can enrol in their “KDP Select” programme, and this brings with it a raft of possibilities, as explained on their website: “If you make your eBook exclusive to the Kindle Store, which is a requirement during your book’s enrolment in KDP Select, the book will also be included in Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. You can earn a share of the KDP Select Global Fund based on how many pages KU or KOLL customers read of your book.  Enrolling in KDP Select also grants you access to a new set of promotional tools.  You can schedule a Kindle Countdown Deal (limited time promotional discounting for your book) for books available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk or a Free Book Promotion (readers worldwide can get your book free for a limited time).”

Like most people I am chary of monopolies and don’t really like the idea of Amazon controlling e-books in this way.  But – with my handful of sales each month – I am not really the author to take a stand on this issue and thereby make Amazon think again.  That’s for the Rowlings and Pattersons of this world.  And so I have taken the plunge: I have de-listed my Plank e-books from all other channels and made them exclusive to Amazon.  I have enrolled them all in KDP Select – which you renew every 90 days, so I can track it and see how it goes.

And – rather daringly – I have decided to try that promotion malarkey and offer the “Fatal Forgery” e-book free for a few days.  Yes: free, gratis and for nothing.  I am hoping that it will prove to be the gateway drug to the Sam series, hooking people in and leading to actual sales of the other books.  I have done all I can to promote the giveaway via my Facebook and Twitter presences but please, if you can, pass on the link to your friends and family – the giveaway has started today and will run until the end of Sunday 6 January 2019.  To download your free “Fatal Forgery” e-book from Amazon, here’s the link (which should take you to the correct page of your local Amazon site).

Press here for publicity

As regular readers will know, one of the hardest aspects of being a self-employed author is the marketing.  It’s not the time it takes so much as summoning the ongoing enthusiasm and imagination – particularly in such a crowded marketplace, when every author and his dog (probably literally) has a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and an Amazon profile, all screaming “Buy my books!” (or, in the case of the dog, “Take me out for a walk!”).  Marvellous though it is that anyone can publish their books these days, it does mean that you have to work so much harder to be spotted in the throng.  But it sometimes seems that the old ways are the best.

I mentioned a little while ago (or did I?) that next month I am doing a talk at the latest bookshop to stock the Sam Plank series – Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden (just the other side of the Cambridgeshire border, in northern Essex).  The shop has its own website with an events page, and I have also listed the event on Sam’s Facebook page.  But what else to do?  The manager of the shop suggested asking the local newspaper, the Saffron Walden Reporter, to publicise the talk, as – if you can believe such a thing still exists – this local weekly paper is delivered free to every address in the town.  Thankfully I have some experience of writing press releases, which I know reporters like as it saves time and fills space, and so I looked up the paper online, checked which reporter’s name was on the book-ish stories, and counted how many words were in the average piece before crafting my press release and emailing it to her.  I also suggested that it would be jolly helpful to have the story appear a fortnight before the event to give people time to get to the bookshop to buy tickets, and then of course we would need to print more tickets and hire a marquee and a warm-up act and lay on extra buses…  I may be straying here into the realms of fantasy.

But, dear reader, it all worked – and here is my press release (with a few improvements, I must admit) in today’s Saffron Walden Reporter.  The bookshop is on standby for the hordes of ticket-seekers, although my own husband has now dropped out as something better has come up.  (To be fair, he’s had a bellyful of Sam over the years.  It can’t be easy sharing your wife with a dead policeman.)

Where there’s no will…

Wasn’t that a terrific bank holiday weekend?  In fact, it was so hot here in Cambridge that I had the perfect excuse to stop tidying the garden and head indoors to spend time with Sam and Martha.  As regular readers will know, I have now plunged back into research and preparation as I turn my mind to the writing of “Plank 6”.  To encourage without scaring myself witless, I have even settled on a publication date and have reset the countdown clock on the left.  Taa-dah!

As I may have confessed some time ago, “Plank 6” is actually a little more advanced than usual.  When I first decided to write a series of seven Sam books, I plotted them all in general terms – which crime would happen in which year, and which significant character milestones would occur in which book.  But when it came to “Plank 5” – now published as “Faith, Hope and Trickery” – I just wasn’t feeling it.  I tried: I did lots of research, and I even wrote the first chapter – but in the end I had to admit defeat and swap it with the plot for “Plank 6”.  And so now I find that a fair amount of preparatory work has been done, and you’ll be glad to hear that the time has indeed come for this particular plot – now I’m really feeling it!

One of the key plot points I need to clarify concerns intestacy – what happens to your assets if you die without a will.  (Not really a concern for me, as I plan to spend it all before I go, on shoes, chocolate and books, but for rich folk it’s quite an issue.)  And, as you can imagine, it’s something of a legal minefield – particularly when it comes to researching historical legislation.  I did some reading around the subject, tying myself in knots with new vocabulary like “cousin-german” and the crucial difference between heirs and next-of-kin.  But in the end I decided – for the first time – to take advantage of the huge amount of knowledge out there in the historical writing community.  For quite a while I have been a follower of a Facebook group called English Historical Fiction Authors, and have enjoyed reading all the posts they feature.  But yesterday I put up a question about my particular intestacy issue and wham! within about an hour I had four very learned and helpful explanations.  How very generous people are with their time and expertise.  I have previously answered a query myself – about Georgian insults, if I remember – but will make sure to contribute more when I can, to repay my debt.

Pricing and promo problem

It’s an odd time, post-publication.  For authors with traditional publishing houses behind them, I daresay this is a period of frenzied promotional activity, with champagne-lubricated launches across the world and endless media interviews.  But for little old me, it means sitting here checking the UPS website every ten minutes to track the delivery of my books from CreateSpace in South Carolina, while occasionally looking at Amazon to see whether anyone has left a review.  I know that people are receiving their copies – thank you, Carol in West Row, for your wonderful photos of the grand unwrapping! – and here on my desk I have pre-prepared addressed envelopes ready to send out the review copies as soon as they arrive.

In the meantime, I wanted your opinion on the special price reduction I have done on the Kindle edition of “Fatal Forgery”.  I did it as a way to draw people into the series, just before the appearance of “Faith, Hope and Trickery”, and the initial uptake was encouraging.  I reduced the price to 99p (99¢ in the US; 0.99 euros in the EU) on 7 March.  Between 7 March and 9 March – when I suspect you were all kindly passing on the good news, and I had links on Facebook and Twitter – I sold twelve copies, but nothing since then (I suppose the promo links have fallen from view).  Should I return “FF” to its normal Kindle price, to fit in with the others – that’s about £3.62?  Or should I keep it at 99p permanently, as a sort of entry-level drug to get people to sample the series, and do more puffs about it?  Amazon does occasionally promote its 99p Kindle catalogue and there’s a chance “FF” could appear in such a promotion – but I suspect that’s for books with higher sales figures already.  (What I do know is that it definitely won’t appear in a 99p promo if it’s priced at £3.62!)  Complicating the issue is the fact that Amazon – of its own volition – has created a Kindle bundle of the first four Sam books, and that includes “FF” at 99p.  I don’t think anyone has bought the bundle – my current sales info shows no sales in recent weeks of any of the middle books in the series, which it would if the bundle had sold.

So, dear readers, what do you think?  Leave it at 99p, or put it back to the higher price?  (I suppose you need this info: if it sells at 99p I get 35p royalty, and if it sells at £3.62 I get £2.09.  But that’s only if it sells!  So lots of 35p is better than no £2.09…)

A group of one

Last time I said that I would keep you posted about my marketing efforts, and this is sort of related to that.  I decided that I have been a rather selfish author, concentrating on my own books and my own sales, and – in the spirit of “what goes around, comes around” (which I apply in all other areas of my life, with volunteer work and the like) I decided to try to become a productive member of the writing community.  As a first step, I scoured Facebook and Twitter for suitable groups of authors, readers and bloggers.  My aim was not to find reviewers or readers, but rather to be more of a reader and a reviewer myself, and to learn more about my author contemporaries.  I found four seemingly like-minded groups of people – three involved in crime fiction and one in historical fiction – and signed up.  And the long and short of it is that I don’t belong anywhere.

The crime fiction people are all about über-realistic bloody murders and “disturbing psychological thrillers” – that’s a big thing at the moment, the criminal who messes with your head first figuratively and then literally.  As someone who has never actually got past the Guildford Cathedral scene in “The Omen”, I’m not very comfortable with head-messing.  My Sam Plank novels all have murders in them, certainly, but death is very definitely a by-product of the financial crime, and I certainly don’t dwell on it.  And any in-depth psychological analysis would be completely anachronistic, even for a curious man like Sam.

Meanwhile, the historical crime people aren’t sure what to make of Regency non-romance.  Regency fiction seems to concentrate exclusively on bodice-ripping – “The Lascivious Duchess and the Gallant Groom”, or “The Indiscretions of Lord Albemarle”.  For urban drama and detective stuff, we have to wait for the Victorians, and they go quite mad on it all.  And as for financial crime at the centre of it all, well, that’s impossible to categorise.

So, fascinating though it is to read about the latest publications of all these other authors, and their special offers on Amazon – “99p until midnight – that’s only 20p per vicious slaughter!” – I don’t feel I can bring much to these particular parties.  I can see now what all those publishers meant when I first took them “Fatal Forgery” and they dithered over genre and “which shelf you can live on”.  On the plus side, perhaps Sam’s unique selling point is that he is unique.  Martha certainly thinks so.