And now… looking up!

Just a quick post today, to share my happiness.  In my last post [I always picture a sombre bugler when I write that] I updated you on sales of my books, including my little business book – “The Solo Squid: How to Run a Happy One-Person Business”.  And today I have received this lovely message via Goodreads (which I have linked to receive automatic sharing of my blog posts):

As one of the 16 who bought the Solo Squid e-book, please accept my thanks!  I felt I had a friend as I read it through what has been a tough year for my own business.  Your shared thoughts helped me work out whether I should give up on the business or keep going (I kept going and am now pretty busy).

Isn’t that just the loveliest thing?  I enjoyed writing the Squid, but to know that I actually helped someone to make important decisions is so exciting.  So if you’ve ever finished a book and found it has made a significant difference to you in some way, why not send the author a quick note?  I am grinning madly at mine, so I know how marvellous it is!

And if you’re now thinking that the Squid might be worth a look, here’s the link: http://mybook.to/solo_squid.  I also have a Squid Facebook page (www.facebook.com/TheSoloSquid ) and Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/TheSoloSquid ) – they feature the same information, but I try to upload a bit of “squisdom” two or three times a week.

Two new reviews

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.

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.

Publication for the Modern Miss

I imagine that the day before publication of one of his books, Charles Dickens’s to do list would say “Raise glass to self for having written another one”.  But the list for the modern self-published author – i.e. me – is much longer and less liquid.  Here it is:

• Update writing blog purchase link
• Update working blog purchase link
• Update working blog sidebar and purchase link
• Update email footer
• Update Public Lending Right dashboard
• Update Society of Authors profile
• Update Amazon Author Central profile
• Update Goodreads profile
• Update Authorgraph profile

All done now, so everything is poised – poised, I tell you – for official publication tomorrow morning.  That will be a low-key affair, with a posting on Facebook and a Tweet, and then me jumping around the room yelling, “Book four is done!  Book four is done!”.

Plank plans

Apologies for the radio silence: I have been away on holiday for a week.  But I do have plenty of updates for you.

Just before I went away, I placed my “author order” of fifty copies of “Portraits of Pretence” with CreateSpace.  I chose one of the slower delivery speeds, so they are probably on the back of giant turtle making its leisurely way across the sea as we speak, but they’re coming.  Fifty is a rather optimistic number, isn’t it?  I have pre-sold about twenty to various bookshops, and I have a few promotional ideas for a handful more, but the rest was perhaps rather reckless.  It’s always a funny, limbo period, between finalising the book and officially publishing it.

However, things are moving on elsewhere.  My lovely narrator Guy has already started work on the next instalment of AudioSam by completing the first chapter of “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  As I’ve been away I haven’t listened to it yet, but I will do that tomorrow.  We have been buoyed and encouraged by good reviews for the “Fatal Forgery” audiobook that have started appearing on Goodreads.

But perhaps the most important development is that I have made a big decision about “Plank 5”.  I am not going to write it next year – or, more accurately, I am not going to plan to publish it next year.  I always said that, once I had three books out there, I would have a good idea about whether the Sam Plank series would be a success.  And here I am, about to send the fourth one out, and it turns out that I don’t have a good idea at all.  People who read them love them, to be sure, but then not that many people read them.  It’s such a crowded marketplace now – poor old Sam is up against millions of other books.  So my plan is this: “Plank 5” will come out in October 2018.  This will give me more time to write it – or, more realistically, the same amount of time but stretched over a longer period, so that I’m not writing in every moment that I’m not working.  And the time that is freed up will be spent on marketing and promotion of the Sam Plank series.  I often have ideas of things I could do to promote them, but then I don’t have the time – and now I will.  Of course all of these deadlines and timetables are entirely made up by me, so if I get bored with promotion, I’ll start writing again.  And there is absolutely no need to worry that this is my gentle way of saying that “Plank 5” (and “Plank 6” and “Plank 7”) will not happen – I can promise that they will.  After all, I’ve got their plots all ready to go…

 

“Like a good radio drama”

Waiting for reviews is always rather scary, and with “AudioSam”, there is the extra tension of knowing that there is someone else involved too – what if someone says something bad about the narrator and it’s actually my fault for writing a bad book?  So it is a HUGE relief to be able to report that Guy (the narrator) and I have received our first review for the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery”, and it’s really positive and encouraging.  It’s on Goodreads, and here’s what it says:

Like a good radio drama

I enjoyed Fatal Forgery.  The storyline and narration were good.  Guy Hanson as Constable Sam Plank brought the whole story to life and I was transported to Victorian London.  I did like it when Sam got excited at the trial and with all the different character witnesses quite quick fire.  Felt like a Sherlock Holmes in Part and a James McLevy but without the sidekick.

The main downside is that this is the first in the Sam Plank series to be made available through Audible and I would really like to listen to the next one now to follow the story.  So can you please get on with this now.

Please note that this review was undertaken through The Good Reads audiobook programme.

Bill Scott
Edinburgh September 2016

I am so thrilled that Guy’s hard work on the large number of voices needed for the trial chapter was noticed – I felt a bit bad about that one!  I think we’ll probably wait a little while to check that sales go well (we’ve just cleared twenty) but it’s certainly nice to know that at least one listener would like the (audio) series to continue.

Eyeballs by the thousand

You know, I pretend to be annoyed but actually the Six Nations rugby tournament is a godsend.  It means that my husband does not suggest going out for long bike-rides at the weekend, and it keeps him amused in the lounge while I sneak upstairs to spend my afternoons with Sam.  I’m still at the plotting stage – I have the broad outline but not the chapter-by-chapter detail yet – so my time is spent half on writing, and half on deciding what to write next.  This week I have managed only 1,658 words, which is a little shy of my 2,000-word target.  But I have thought of a possibly interesting plot development, so I’m not too annoyed.

Tomorrow I am going away on holiday for a week, to celebrate a landmark birthday – why yes, twenty-one again, thank you for asking.  As it’s supposed to be a complete break I am not allowed to bring my Sam computer with me, so there’ll be no writing.  But I have cunningly printed out my chapter outlines as they stand at the moment, so I can be mulling them and hopefully filling in some of the gaps – e.g. I want Sam to meet this person, but how could that be achieved?

On the practical side of things, I have been spending quite a bit of time on what I consider “marketing”.  In response to encouragement from Catherine Ryan Howard – the self-publishing guru whose advice is always wonderful – I decided to run another giveaway on Goodreads.  (In short, you offer a book for free and people sign up to enter a prize draw to win it.)  I did exactly as Catherine advised – one book on offer, for a week only (so that your listing moves seamlessly from “recently listed” to “ending soon”, to all countries of the world – and a copy of “Fatal Forgery” is at this very minute winging its way to a lady in Regina in Canada.  But the really magical thing is what Catherine calls “eyeballs”: everyone who clicks on your giveaway listing is now aware of your book and you, when they almost certainly weren’t before, and the majority of them also add your book to their Goodreads “to read” shelf, which brings it to their attention over and over again.  So how many eyeballs did my giveaway garner?  1,756!  Well, to be more accurate, 3,512, as most people have two eyeballs – but 1,756 people entered the draw.  I have run “Fatal Forgery” giveaways twice before, and they attracted 137 and 118 people respectively – but I limited their exposure to UK people only, and you can see the difference.  So now I am beadily monitoring my sales figures to look for a spike in, well, anywhere.  I’ll let you know.

Sam shows me the way

First of all, thanks to everyone who took pity on me after my disappointment last week, and wrote to encourage me to take it on the chin.  Excellent advice, and next week I will be going to see the new manager and start again with the wooing.

I have also – after reading this inspiring post by Catherine Ryan-Howard, whose book “Self-Printing” was my bible when I first started self-publishing – set up a Goodreads Giveaway for “Fatal Forgery”, starting on 4 February and running for about a week.  As Catherine explains, giveaways are all about publicity (“eyeballs”, as she puts it) and I figure that for the price of one paperback and postage to somewhere in the world, “Fatal Forgery” could do with a little more exposure.  So in mid-February, Sam could be winging his way to any country in the world.  As ever, I’ll keep you posted – particularly around whether the exposure seems to translate into sales.  (One of the few benefits of having quite low sales figures is that I can spot a peak very easily!  Pity poor old John Grisham, trying to figure out which were the fabulous weeks for book sales among the merely terrific.)

And as though to make up for my despondency, Sam himself has been on cracking form this weekend.  He demanded attention for most of yesterday and then two hours this afternoon and has dragged me to three London premises in the course of 2,655 words. He also finally told me where Wilson lives – although sadly we can’t go there as it’s now under the railway lines at St Pancras.

Remember, it’s supposed to be fun!

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that I have altered the publication date of “Plank 2” from 20 October to 31 October.  (Apologies if you had already planned your diary around it…!)  I’m not used to adjusting deadlines, but then nor do I like missing them, so when I was in a lather with my diary yesterday, my ultra-logical husband suggested that I simply change the date to one that suits me better.

The problem was this.  I think I can get the text finalised by mid-October at the latest.  The cover designer is working to that date too.  And I know from “Fatal Forgery” that it takes only about three or four days from publication (i.e. uploading of files) for CreateSpace to have the book listed on Amazon.  But I am going away on holiday in mid-October and – although I had originally thought that it would be good to publish the book and then have the holiday immediately afterwards – I suddenly thought that it would be a shame to miss the fun part of publishing, which (for me at least) is telling everyone that the book is out, and then manically checking the CreateSpace sales page every three minutes until I see the first copy sold.  And I’m not sure husband’s patience would extend to manic checking while on holiday,  Plus I’ll want to take early copies round to the three bookshops that are stocking “Fatal Forgery”, and see if I can get another appearance on the local radio station (do you “appear” on the radio, or just “sound”?), and organise a giveaway on Goodreads, and send emails to kind people who have done reviews in the past, and all the other fun promotional stuff.

So I have (belatedly) remembered the two key features of self-publishing – that is is under my control, and that it’s supposed to be fun.  And I have solved my diary dilemma by simply changing my own, self-imposed publication date to one that suits me better: 31 October 2014.  Which still leaves plenty of time for the bookshops to order the dozens, nay, hundreds of copies that they will be selling in the Christmas rush…  (The third key feature of self-publishing may be over-optimistic self-delusion, but I’ll write about that another day.)

Juicing the reviews

Remember how I told you that I was going all out to try and get some reviews for “Fatal Forgery”?  Well, after a lot of silence and then a slow start, I am finally starting to see some returns on my effort.  The latest is a review by Debbie Young, a well-respected writer herself and a much-followed book blogger and reviewer.  And it is such a lovely five-star review – plenty of detail, with specific comments, and encouragement for “Plank 2”!  You can see it here on Amazon (if it’s not obvious, re-sort the reviews to put the newest first).  And Debbie – being, as I say, an author herself and therefore well aware of the importance of reviews – has kindly put her review on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Goodreads, to get as much coverage as possible.

So now here’s a question for you: how can I carry on Debbie’s good work and wring as much juice as possible from that review?  I have thanked her on Twitter (that’s something else she did, to reach her 6,300+ followers) and retweeted her Tweet to my (small in number but enormous in quality) 95 followers.  I am writing this post.  And of course I shall quote liberally from Debbie’s review (with her permission) on “Plank 2”.  I’m reluctant to put another review link on Facebook – my family and friends are probably all Planked out by now.  Should I forward it to the three booksellers who are stocking the physical book – given that the review appears on Amazon…?  Or maybe I could send them the Goodreads version instead.  Any other ideas?