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.

Get “Fatal Forgery” for free!

In the middle of all the other crazy things on the news, I think the strangest fact I have learned this week is that one of the current bestselling books on Amazon is “The Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz.  It’s about a mother trying to find her son in a world devastated by a virus called Wuhan-400.  Now I don’t really care whether Mr Koontz is in fact a soothsayer – what surprises me is that people want to sit in their homes, under lock-down, and read about a fictional pandemic.  Perhaps the Koontz story ends well and readers take comfort from that – but I’ll never know because even if it were the last book on earth, I would not want to read a book about a pandemic.  No, I’m escapism all the way: for me, one of the true miracles of reading is that it can transport me to places and times and situations that I could never experience in reality.

I assume that lots of other people feel the same way as I do and are looking to fiction to take them out of themselves.  And to help with this, I have decided to offer the e-book of my first Sam Plank book – “Fatal Forgery” – free on Amazon until the end of Thursday.  (I would do it for longer, but I sell my Sam e-books through KDP Select – i.e. they’re available exclusively on Amazon, and I get a higher royalty rate because of this.  And one of the rules of KDP Select is that you can offer a free download promotion for only five days out of every ninety.  It’s a commercial decision: if I give my books away for free, Amazon makes no commission on the download.  Entirely understandable, but I thought I would explain why it’s a time-limited free download offer.)

So if you would like to download the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” for free, please do so.  (That’s an international Amazon link, so should take you automatically to the correct Amazon site.)  I can guarantee that the plot is entirely free of any mention of plague, pestilence, pandemic, virus or pox.  And please share this offer with friends and family – the more the merrier.  Perhaps you’re setting up a virtual book group, and a free download for everyone would be a great way to start.  I hope you like the book – and if you do, perhaps you would consider leaving a little review on Amazon.  So get downloading, everyone, and happy reading!

Ups and downs

It’s Friday, and time to take stock of the first official week of “Heir Apparent”.  It’s not an exact science (well, it probably is, but I don’t understand it) but according to Amazon/KDP/Book Report, I have now sold twenty-one copies of “Heir Apparent” (plus the previously-reported nineteen to bookshops and four direct to friends).  I’m very pleased with that, and will have a celebratory Jaffa Cake or three.  So that’s the up.

Now for the down – or maybe it’s an up, but I can’t quite tell.  Last Saturday I went to London to take part in the People’s Vote march (we’re campaigning for a vote on the Brexit deal, in case you’re wondering).  By chance, the friends I was meeting had decided to gather on Piccadilly, outside Hatchards.  Now, Hatchards is among the spiffiest of bookshops: it’s been selling books since 1797 and sitting at the heart of Piccadilly for over two centuries – and although it is now part of the giant Waterstones family, it still retains its elegant independence.  Suffice it to say that I would love to see Sam and Martha swanking about the place.  Back in my more innocent days, I breezed into Hatchards and spoke to the manager, saying that – as Sam is a local – the books definitely belonged on Hatchards’ shelves.  The manager kindly explained that he could stock them only if they were listed on the Waterstones buying system – which of course they were not.

Nothing daunted, I decided to get them on that system – how hard could it be?  Now pay attention.  In order to be listed on the Waterstones system, a book has to be available through one of the book wholesalers with which Waterstones deals, such as Gardners.  So I contacted Gardners and asked to be put on their system.  They explained that they don’t deal with authors – only publishers, and only publishers recognised by Nielsen BookNet.  So I contacted Nielsen and asked how I could be recognised as an independent publisher.  It took some time and lots of forms, but I managed it.  So now: Nielsen recognises me as an independent publisher, which means that Gardners is listed as my wholesaler, which means that the Waterstones catalogue (both internal for stores and external for customers) features my titles.  Hurrah!  And if anyone orders my book through Waterstones, the order goes from them to Nielsen, and from Nielsen to me (as an indie publisher).  I pack up the books and send them to Gardners, who deliver them to Waterstones, who get them to the customer (or put them on the shelf).  Simple.

Back to the march last Saturday.  There I am, standing outside Hatchards and gazing through their lovely window, when I spot the manager standing alone at his till.  I wander in, all casual-like, and go up to him.  “You may not remember me,” I say, “but you once said that if my books could be ordered through your system, you would give them a go”.  “Are your books marvellous?” he asked.  “They are,” I confirmed, and he went to his computer and ordered – he said – two each of “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  I was floating on air for most of that march – Sam and Martha, in Hatchards!  And to think, she couldn’t even read much apart from bottle labels until she met Sam.

This week, I waited patiently – hah! – for that order to come in from Nielsen.  And yesterday I contacted them, and Gardners, to check that I hadn’t misunderstood the process.  But no, no trace of any order from Hatchards or Waterstones – not a one.  After pondering what to do, I’ve gone passive-aggressive: I sent an email to the manager saying “I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that my books will be on the shelves of Hatchards – I shall tell all my London friends to come in and buy them”.  So near, and yet so far…

All over bar the selling

Aye, as Sam would say.  It’s done.  Over the weekend I completed the final editing of “Heir Apparent” and cut and pasted it into the template that I use for the interior formatting.  It’s a bit of a beast, at 377 pages, but everyone who has read it tells me that it needs the extra space because it is more “twisty-turny” than the previous novels.  That would explain the headaches I had during my writing retreat…

I have now ordered my paper proof copy – I’ve checked it online, but it’s important to check it in the flesh, to make sure that the paper quality is good and that the cover looks as spiffy in real life as it does on the screen.  Plus, I can dance around the house waving the proof copy in the air – I just look daft if I do that with my laptop.

I have also emailed all the lovely bricks-and-mortar bookshops which stock the Sam books to ask how many copies they would like of his chunky new adventure – it’s one of my great pleasures to cycle to my two local bookshops on publication day and drop off their orders.  That said, “publication day” is a rather elastic concept: it’s all very well me pressing – with great fanfare – the giant “Publish!” button on KDP, but then it’s up to Amazon.  One of the Sam books took four (fevered) days to appear; another was listed within the hour.  I’ve learned to chill about it – but for general celebratory purposes, I’m aiming for the long-promised Friday 18 October.

So all that is left to do now is, erm, format the five e-versions that I need (Kindle, Draft2Digital, Gumroad, Kobo and Smashwords) – I’ll certainly be cross-eyed after that lot.  And then I’ll need to sell some books.  Easy-peasy.

Titles and sales

Apologies for the silence.  I’ve been away on holiday, plus it’s that peculiar limbo phase in the writing and publication of a book: the draft is out with beta readers and I am waiting (nails bitten almost to the quick) for the feedback.  There’s no point making any changes myself until I get that, although I am allowing my mind to wander to the matter of chapter titles.  My working titles are always terrible – “Sam goes to Chelsea”, or “Freame discusses tontines”, for instance – so I remove those from the beta draft as they contain spoilers for each chapter.  Once the text is finalised, I get to devise proper chapter titles, which I really enjoy.

A while ago I asked you whether I should continue with the final (sob!) Sam book next, or launch into my new Cambridge-set series, saving the seventh Sam for later.  At the moment, I have four votes in favour of starting the new series and two (one by email) in favour of sticking with Sam.  Still undecided…

And here’s a conundrum – although perhaps I shouldn’t mention it in case it jinxes something.  I track my book sales quite closely, looking at the KDP sales dashboard a couple (OK, several) times a day – it’s like a nervous tic.  And someone introduced me to the marvellous and colourful (and free) Book Report app, which takes the sale data and displays it as multicoloured bar charts and pie charts, and even tells me how much money I have made today (£4, thank you for asking).  And these have both revealed a peculiar spike in sales of “Portraits of Pretence” – that’s the fourth Sam book, the one about art fraud.  Ten copies sold in the past month, which is many more than usual.  Has it had a good review somewhere?  Is someone’s book club reading it?  Have some art historians discovered it?  I’m not complaining, obviously, but I am curious.  I’ll carry on watching it…

Be careful what you wish for

Last autumn CreateSpace – which I had been using for my print-on-demand paperbacks for nearly a decade – was bought out by the Amazon behemoth and absorbed into its KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) offering.  Monopoly concerns aside, I was delighted for two reasons.  Firstly, KDP customer service offers a call-back service to anywhere in the world (CreateSpace would call only US numbers, so I never spoke to them).  And secondly, whereas CreateSpace POD paperbacks were printed in South Carolina and it took ages and cost a fortune to have them delivered to the UK, KDP POD paperbacks are printed in (it turns out) Poland, which is much closer and therefore quicker and cheaper for delivery.  With a spring in my step and a song on my lips, I placed an order for twenty copies of “Fatal Forgery” with KDP on 29 October 2018.  And then it all went wrong…

• 29 October 2018: Order placed for twenty copies
• 12 November 2018: Order arrives – and eleven out of the twenty copies are trimmed far too meanly, with the title disappearing off the edge of the cover.  Using the fab new call-back facility, I explain the problem to a nice person at KDP and they tell me to return the faulty eleven copies for a refund and then place another order – which I do.
• 18 November 2018: The replacement eleven copies arrive – with exactly the same poor printing.  I speak to another nice person at KDP and explain the problem, and they say that the matter will be escalated to a manager.  After about a fortnight – with several chasing calls and emails in the middle – the manager finally confirms that the eleven replacement copies I received were the same ones I had returned…  Apparently the stock system was delighted to find just the right number of copies on their return shelves to fulfil a new order.
• 16 December 2018: The manager places a new order for eleven copies, and says that I can keep the eleven dodgy ones (otherwise, if I return them – well, you can guess).
• 24 December 2018: Four replacement copies arrive.  I chase the remaining seven copies and am told that the manager ordered only four and not the agreed eleven – this nice person at KDP orders another seven.
• 9 January 2019: The seven copies arrive – with two of them packed so badly in the box that their covers have bent and they are not suitable for sale.  I speak to another nice KDP person – they are all charming and seem genuinely saddened by the poor service I have received – and they order two replacement replacement copies.
• 18 January 2019: The two replacement replacement copies arrive.

Et voilà – it’s as simple as that!  A mere 80 days after placing my order for twenty copies, I have them.  Didn’t someone manage to get all the way around the world in that time?  I begin to dream longingly of South Carolina….

Shades of Forgery

Matters are moving forward at a sedate pace in my quest to use IngramSpark as well as KDP for my print-on-demand paperbacks.  The cover of “Fatal Forgery” has been suitably tweaked to accommodate the slimmer spine of the IS edition (because IS uses thinner paper stock and over nearly 300 pages – 150 thicknesses of paper – it makes a difference), and I have today received my proof copy from IS and am happy with it.

I am now working out my next steps, which will involve (scarily) un-publishing my current KDP paperback and then republishing it with the new ISBN that I bought for the IS edition – all paperbacks of the same title, regardless of who actually prints them, must have the same ISBN.  This would be simply an administrative thing – unpublish then upload the files again – except that I am not sure what will happen to all the lovely reviews on Amazon that are associated with the current KDP paperback.  I certainly don’t want to lose them, so I’m investigating if/how I can get the reviews carried over to the “new” paperback.  It may be simple (if the reviews are associated with the title) or it may be awkward/impossible (if they’re associated with the ISBN).  Who knew that writing the darn book was by far the easiest part of the process?

On a related subject, it has been very interesting to compare the look of “Fatal Forgery” as produced by the different printing presses:

On the left is the original version, printed by CreateSpace in (I think) South Carolina.  In the middle is the version that I now get from KDP (who took over CreateSpace, and moved the printing for UK authors to Wroclaw in Poland).  And on the right is the IngramSpark version, printed in (I think) Milton Keynes.  They all use the same cover file from the point of view of colour – it’s only the trim dimensions and spine width (and spine print size) that are different.  And yet, how different they look!  The cover designer said this about the trio: “The one on the right appears to be slightly closer to how it was intended than any other.  Somewhere between the one on the left and the one on the right (but closer to the right) would be as intended by me.  The one in the middle is much too bright.”  Thankfully very few buyers will see the difference as they won’t have all three versions, but I thought you might find it interesting – and it certainly shows that being too precious about precise shades of colour when designing a cover might not be worth the fuss!

Chaos behind the scenes

I can imagine that you’re all thinking how lazy I am – no Sam updates, no new plot developments, not a bean.  But you would be wrong, as I am knee-deep in behind-the-scenes Sam work.  As you know, it is a dream of mine to get the Planks into every bookshop in the land.  I have tried to find out how to achieve this on numerous occasions but the picture is so confused and murky that I have always failed – until now.  (You may remember my short-lived excitement at getting myself registered as a publisher with Nielsen here in the UK – an achievement that has resulted so far in precisely zero sales.)  But then – thanks in no small measure to the advice and encouragement I have received from ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors, which I cannot recommend too highly) – the lightbulb has been lit.  To be order-able from UK bookshops I need to be listed with wholesaler Gardners, and to get into their catalogue I need to print my books via Ingram Spark (part of the Lightning Source family) as well as via KDP (CreateSpace-as-was).

Simple, you might think.  But there are a couple of snags – one I have solved, and one I continue to battle.  The solved one is to do with ISBNs.  When I first published the Sam books with CreateSpace (now absorbed by Amazon and part of their KDP platform) I chose to use the free ISBNs handed out by CS, rather than buying my own.  But IS will not print and distribute a book that uses a CS ISBN – and so I need to withdraw the original books and their ISBNs from sale and replace them with new books using new ISBNs that I have bought myself.  Buying ISBNs is easy but not cheap; I bought ten of them for £159.  And changing the ISBNs on the KDP books is simple: you just withdraw the old books and then upload the same files again but quote the new ISBN and the cover will be adjusted automatically.

Which brings me to my unsolved snag: the cover.  The cover files I have were designed for use with CS books and were created using a CS template, which was manufactured to the right specifications given my cover size and the number of pages.  People warned me that IS uses thinner paper than CS, which means that the IS books are slimmer than their CS cousins – which in turn means that the spine dimensions on the IS cover file will be wrong.  I enquired with my cover designer about adjusting the files to meet IS dimensions – and was quoted £75 per cover, for five books….  Not an inconsiderable sum (which would require a significant – and probably unrealistic – boost in sales to justify the outlay).  Could I get away with the original cover files, I wondered?  So I just tried it: I registered with IS and created a new title and uploaded the interior and cover files that I use for CS/KDP.  There was a bit of a hiccup when the IS system said that the interior PDF did not have embedded fonts, but an hour’s work sorted that out.  And IS seemed happy enough with the cover file – all looked fine with the online proof.  I went ahead and ordered a paper proof, and it arrived today.  Two things are obvious: the cover file is not quite right, and the colour is very different:

The colour difference looks worse because they are side by side (that’s the brighter CS one on the left and the duller IS one on the right) but it is disappointing.  And the spine will just not work (that’s the original CS copy on the top, with the slimmer IS one below):

My engineer husband has suggested simply adding some blank pages to the IS interior file, to bulk it up to fit the spine, and has offered to get out his micrometer to measure the page thickness and work out exactly how many cushioning pages I will need.  As they say, back to the drawing board.

Taking cover

Things have been a bit quiet on the Sam front in recent weeks as my day job – in the anti-money laundering world – has been very busy.  New legislation in Guernsey has required me to update five of my non-fiction books and negotiate the new publishing process (since migration from CreateSpace to KDP).  It seems to work fairly smoothly but the proof will be in the pudding – or rather, in the printing.

You see, I am in the middle of a frustrating discussion with KDP about the quality of their printing.  Whatever my gripes about their postage charges and time-frames, I was always been delighted with the print quality of books from CreateSpace.  After the migration I placed an order for twenty copies of “Fatal Forgery” with KDP, thrilled to see that the postage cost has dropped significantly because (a) they are now printed in Europe [Poland, as it turns out – at least in this instance], and (b) you get a discount on the postage for ordering multiple copies.  So twenty copies of an average paperback book cost me just £7.28 in postage (compared to US$32.99 for the same order from CreateSpace).

Sadly, it seems that the savings are being made elsewhere, as the books I received from KDP were not up to standard.  Of the twenty I ordered on 8 November 2018, eleven had to be sent back because the books were trimmed 5 mm too narrow, making the cover art fall off the edge:

    

KDP offered to send a replacement set of eleven copies – and they were worse!  They were not only printed wrong again (in exactly the same way – indeed, I’m not convinced that these aren’t the same copies coming back again), but packed loose into a large box with no packing material, resulting in knocked corners and bent covers.  And what’s that ugly bar-code sticker they have added?  For a month now I have been waiting for a resolution, with emails coming from KDP twice a week assuring me that my complaint is of great concern to them and that they are looking into it as a matter of urgency…  Thank goodness I always keep a few copies in stock, otherwise I’d now be finding it impossible to meet bookshop orders.

So I am reserving judgement on KDP as a worthy successor to CreateSpace and am investigating alternatives – other authors have good things to say about Ingram Spark.  I’ll keep you posted.

Hart’s and minds

Is there anything an author enjoys more than talking about her books?  It’s certainly easier than getting on with writing the next one.  And yesterday evening was a great treat as I spoke to a small (I think we had eleven in total) but terrifically interested and engaged audience at Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden.  Hart’s – as a printer, stationer and bookseller – has been associated with Saffron Walden since 1836, and the current bookshop is part of the Daunt family but retains a very independent feel.  I’d had my eye on them for a while but I rarely look my best in Saffron Walden: it’s the usual destination for our Sunday tandem rides (there’s a local café that does a wonderful fried breakfast which is my reward for cycling twenty-five miles) and I’m always a sweaty, fly-dotted creature when I arrive.  Not the best image to persuade a bookshop that you are a serious writer of worthy tomes.  But one Sunday I just took a chance, and the manager Max was sufficiently impressed by my enthusiasm – or so desperate to get my pungent carcass out of his shop – that he agreed to stock Sam.  And when I suggested an author event, he kindly agreed.  And that was last night.

At such talks I am never sure which aspect is going to chime with the audience: the books themselves, or the history behind them (of policing and justice, or of London), or the writing process, or the self-publishing procedure.  And so I start with a general introduction – how I came to write the first book, why I wrote four more – and then (if the audience seems keen) open it up to questions.  Well, last night “keen” was an understatement.  I’d barely spoken two sentences before the questions started, and it didn’t let up for over an hour – fantastic!

I promised myself that I would always be completely honest in my answers, particularly when it comes to money issues – people need to know that it’s not the route to quick riches.  And in the spirit of full disclosure, I can report that last night’s event garnered me about £7.65 – that’s about 45p per book, and we sold seventeen.  (It’s not that the bookshop takes an enormous cut – their deal is to keep a perfectly reasonable 35% or 40% of the cover price.  It’s just that we self-published authors have to supply the books ourselves, so by the time I have ordered them from CreateSpace, sorry KDP – recent take-over – and paid for them to be sent from the US to me in the UK, and then given the bookseller his discount, I’m left with about 45p per book.)  As I say, not the route to riches – but just the most enormous fun and I wouldn’t stop doing it for the world.