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.

Meet the voice of Sam

As you know, the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” has now been released.  Sales are going well: twelve so far.  It has been a great project, and one of the nicest things about it has been communicating with “my” narrator, Guy Hanson (or “AudioSam”, as he’s known in our house).  And I thought that you might like to know a little more about the fine fellow who has brought Sam to life (if you’re not keen on buying the audiobook, you can still hear an audio clip of Guy/Sam on Amazon, Audible and iTunes).  So Guy and I have done a little Q&A for you.

Me: I chose you as my ideal Sam after listening to dozens of voice audio samples on ACX.  But of course it is a two-way agreement, so when I offered you Sam, why did you agree?

Guy: I think very simply because I liked the character of Sam; he is a chap you could imagine running into in a pub in his later life and being able to spend hours just listening to his stories.

Me: And having now spent hours in his company, what do you think are Sam’s key characteristics?

Guy: Sam is a quiet, thoughtful person but tenacious in “getting his man”.

Me: I have written “Fatal Forgery” (and indeed the subsequent Sam novels) in the form of a constable’s notebook – short chapters, with dates, concentrating on action and dialogue rather than description.  Do you think this format works for an audiobook?

Guy: It works brilliantly and reflects Sam’s character too.  Interestingly it more of a challenging as a narrator, because you don’t have much of a lead in and you’re hitting the characters straight away.

Me: Many of the characters in “Fatal Forgery” appear in later Sam Plank novels too, and you have said that – if this audiobook is a success – you would like to do the others as well.  How do you keep track of each voice, so that, for instance, John Wontner always sounds the same?

Guy: I’m sure all narrators have their way of doing this, but my way is to start to build up a library of character voices.  I often add a note or two as well if there are certain thing about a character which I have used to “find” them in the first place.

Me: Most of the characters in “Fatal Forgery” are male but there are some women and girls.  How do you voice them without sounding like a parody?

Guy: Ah now, that an interesting question.  I don’t think that audiences actually have a problem with male doing female characters or vice versa (look at panto!); I think the important thing, as in any performance, is that you must be genuine and believable.

Me: Can you tell us a little about your narration process – for instance, do you read the whole book before starting, or just the chapter you’re about to record?  How long can you spend reading aloud before you have to give your voice (and perhaps your back!) a rest?

Guy: I first like to read through the first four or five chapters just to get a general feel for the piece.  I will then speak to the author and get notes on particular character traits or anything that might affect the voice or the way they speak, so accents, lisps etc.  I have to say that for the most part authors tend to let me get on with it, and then occasionally change something if it’s not right as we go along.  I will often record chapters in sections and tie them together during editing.  If you work on the principle that an hour’s completed and edited audio is around four hours’ work, you can see that a couple of hours’ narration is usually enough, before the voice starts to strain.

Plank on two fronts

Heavens, I’ve been so busy recently that I quite forgot to update you on my progress.  The crazy thing is that I am working on two Planks at once – the audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” and the final draft of “Portraits of Pretence”.

Audiobook first.  This is now published, and you can buy it all over the place – well, on Amazon, Audible and iTunes.  So far we’ve sold four!  A friend who is very big in the charity sector suggested that I should get it listed in the Talking Books catalogue for the Royal National Institute for the Blind, so I am finding out about that.  The narrator (known technically as the producer, as he did all of the fancy stuff with the audio files) has received his ten free download codes from ACX and is busy promoting them.  I am waiting for mine, and plan to use them to tempt reviewers.  I’ve not dealt with audiobook reviewers before, but I am going to assume that they are like all book reviewers: they have too many books to review, and you need to convince them that yours is worthwhile, so choosing the right reviewer who likes your genre of book is crucial.  (For instance, I was considering one until I looked more closely and realised that s/he reviews mainly erotic audiobooks – one of the questions is “How steamy does it get?”.  Sam is many things, but steamy he ain’t.)

Now for “Portraits of Pretence”.  Well, it’s been a busy weekend.  I’ve made the main edits suggested by Roy the beta reader – a mixture of typos, better phrasing suggestions, and actual alternations and clarifications.  I have registered the book with Createspace: at this point, all I have to give is the title, and this means that I can get the (free, Createspace-issued) ISBN.  I need to quote this inside the book as well as on the cover, so it’s good to have it.  I have cut and pasted all of the plain Word text into the book template, so that “Portraits of Pretence” will have the same interior look and feel as the other three.  This is a painstaking job that required a whole bag of chocolate buttons.  I have given a title to each chapter – this is a fun job.  I have worked out the (almost final) page count (334 – about twenty pages longer than “Worm in the Blossom”) which enabled me to set up the Createspace cover template that the cover designer needs and I have sent that to him.  (Until you have the page count you can’t calculate the spine width.)  So I have done all I can to facilitate the cover, and my remaining (big) task is to do my final read-through of the formatted text.  Thankfully my husband is away on Thursday and Friday, so I will have a mini-retreat for that.  In short, Sam and I are on track.

AudioSam is here!

It’s here!  The audiobook of “Fatal Forgery” is now available for purchase from Amazon, Audible and iBooks, with five-minute free samples offered on all three sites.  Obviously I am a novice at this, but here’s what I have gleaned so far (from a technical, publishing, money-earning perspective).

On Amazon, the link is made automatically between other editions of the book and this new audio version, so all the existing reviews can be seen – hurrah!  If you want to buy through Amazon, you are patched through to Audible, which Amazon now owns, but it still looks more Amazon-ish than Audibl-ish.  Once there, you have two options: ordering a one-off download, or setting up a monthly subscription to Audible (£7.99 per month) which allows you to download one new book a month.  They are currently offering a 30-day free trial, and there is also a system of credits that you can buy to save money on your monthly sub.  If someone signs up to the monthly sub and downloads “Fatal Forgery” as their first book – which demonstrates that “FF” is what brought them to Audible – and then they stay with Audible for at least two paid monthly cycles, I get a bounty payment.  It’s US$50, and it’s shared equally between the narrator and me.

You can also do all of this (one-off download or monthly sub) by going direct to Audible, rather than through Amazon – but the net result is the same.  Well, almost the same: the one-off download is (today) priced at £14.60 on Amazon, and at £16.69 on Audible.  (I mentioned a while ago that the strangest thing about audiobooks for me as a self-published author is that the pricing is out of my control – I’m used to setting my own prices.)

Lastly, if you’re Mac-ish by nature, you can download the audiobook to your iPhone or Mac from iTunes.  I’m not nearly as au fait with this system, but I have managed to find the link, and today the iTunes download price for “Fatal Forgery” is £10.95.

As far as I can tell – and this is all theory at the moment, as I have had no sales yet – I can track it all via my ACX dashboard, which will record all sales and bounties.  And, as with paperback and e-book sales, I will no doubt fail almost instantly in my resolution not to check the figures every hour or so.

Hear today, Amazon tomorrow

I am delighted to report that I have finished checking the “AudioSam” files – i.e. the first run-through of the audio recording of “Fatal Forgery”.  Narrator Guy Hanson is doing a sterling job, and with his technical capabilities can seemingly change just a single word in a whole chapter without me spotting the join.  I thank my lucky stars every day that I did not make the mistake of trying to read my own book – wrong gender, for a start, but more importantly it is obviously such a skill.  For instance, in my final set of comments, I asked Guy to re-record Commissioner Mayne of the Met as “educated, slight Irish”, and he didn’t turn a hair.

As Guy slaves away at a hot microphone, I am researching how to market this audiobook.  I have tracked down some audiobook reviewers and will be tempting them with free downloads.  Part of the ACX process is the creation of a five-minute audio sample, and I will be adding that to my websites, Twitter feeds, blogs and Facebook pages.  I will also – once he has had time to recover – be interviewing Guy about his thoughts while recording Sam.  He doesn’t seem too alarmed at the thought of six more books, so that’s a good sign!  It turns out that, quite fortuitously, Sam lends himself well to audification (that really should be a word), as the books are quite dialogue-heavy rather than narrative- or description-heavy, and apparently most listeners prefer that.

I have also – perhaps rather late in the day – been familiarising myself with the ACX offering.  As I opted for the profit-share arrangement, I am required to offer exclusive distribution to ACX.  This means that “AudioSam” will be available only for digital download (no CDs) and only for sale via Amazon, ACX and iTunes.  But I figured that, for a first toe in the audio water, it made sense to share the risk, and anyway those are the three largest marketplaces for audiobooks.  The most unfamiliar thing about the process is that I have no say about the price of the audiobook.  As a self-published author, I have grown used to setting my own price for all of my paperbacks and e-books – it’s a bit scary, and there are reams written about the psychology of pricing, but I’ve done it.  But not for the audio ones: the price is set (and, I assume, adjusted as needed) independently by Amazon, ACX and iTunes.

An idea for marketing that did occur to me is that audiobooks might be good for learning English – particularly if the written English is good, standard English (that’s Sam for you) and the narration is clear (there’s Guy).  So someone trying to learn pronunciation could have the written book in front of them and read along with the narration.  I’ll have to put my mind to how to find those people.