The league table

Tags

Amazon, e-book, Faith Hope and Trickery, Fatal Forgery, Heir Apparent, Kindle, marketing, Notes of Change, paperback, Portraits of Pretence, sales, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Worm in the Blossom

Tomorrow is the big day – the publication of “Notes of Change”! Today, therefore, is a day of preparation and reflection. And I haven’t updated you recently on the sales of the Sam series. So here goes – the number I have sold in paperback (print-on-demand through Amazon, and through physical bookshops to which I supply stock) and in various e-formats (mostly Kindle, but occasional other formats):

	Paperback via Amazon	E-book	Paperback via physical bookshop
Fatal Forgery	290	954	145
The Man in the Canary Waistcoat	90	122	75
Worm in the Blossom	62	78	56
Portraits of Pretence	63	78	43
Faith, Hope and Trickery	49	46	26
Heir Apparent	32	36	27
Totals	586	1314	372

As you can see, it’s almost three-to-one in favour of e-books – which is good in some ways as the royalty for e-books is more generous than that for paperbacks. And “Fatal Forgery” is far and away the most popular title. Yes, it’s been out for longest, but I think what the figures really suggest is that not enough people like “Fatal Forgery” enough to stick with the series. That’s something I need to address – another task for the book marketing to do list (how to make sure that people know there is a whole series of lovely Sam books). To be fair to Amazon, they are very good at highlighting series: when you buy one book in a series, the others appear in a tempting carousel display. Perhaps I need to make the pricing more appealing – or investigate the possibility of a seven-title omnibus edition… (Apparently you can’t call e-books a box set, as that implies a physical box – you can, however, call it an omnibus. Like the number 27 to Clapham.)

Sam’s hit list

Tags

Amazon, Apple, formatting, Kindle, Kobo, KOLL, KU, Notes of Change, self-publishing

I’m giddy with excitement – the text of “Notes of Change” is finally, well, finalised.  It has been through several drafts with me, corrections/suggestions from two beta readers, some plot clarification (which moved the chapter count from an irritating thirty-nine to a lovely round forty) and a final read-through yesterday.  Final word count is 75,672, which is about average for a Sam Plank book (as readers will know, he’s not a man given to florid description or overlong introspection).

And now that the creative part is done, I move into the phase of lists.  I have a list of the steps to create the paperback edition, one for formatting the e-editions (more on that in a minute), one for “pre-publication tasks”, one of “people to tell about the new book”, several of “book promo and marketing ideas” and other random sets of bullet points and reminders jotted in notebooks, sent in emails to myself and written on my phone.  One day, dear reader, this will all be amalgamated into a slick publishing process – but today is not that day!  Today is the day for formatting the paperback edition.

Ah yes, the e-editions.  For the past few years – can’t quite remember when I first did it – I have published my e-editions through the KDP platform (part of the Amazon mega-corporation) and opted for their KDP Select programme.  This means that the e-books are sold exclusively in Kindle format through Amazon, and not in any other e-format through any other seller (such as Kobo or Apple).  The benefits (this is over-simplifying) are two-fold: you get a better royalty percentage from Amazon than they would offer if your book was published “wide” (i.e. with other sellers as well), and they put your book into their KU and KOLL programmes.  KU (Kindle Unlimited) is where people pay a monthly subscription and then can indefinitely borrow up to ten books – as an author, I get a pro rata share of the “KDP Select Global Fund” according to how many pages of my e-books are read by those borrowers.  KOLL (Kindle Owners’ Lending Library) allows those who are enrolled in Amazon Prime to download one book a month – as an author, I get a share of the KOLL pot according to the number of downloads of my e-books.  And over the years, I’ve rather taken my eye off the ball.  Recent soul-searching (and bean-counting) has revealed that:

• The amount of money I make from my books being in KU and KOLL is insignificant to the point of invisibility
• Competitors to Kindle books are growing in number, and many offer good exposure, international coverage, decent royalties and a chance to diversify my risk
• There is an increasing number of readers who are going off Amazon, for all sorts of reasons, and looking for alternative places to buy their books.

In short, I have decided that the e-book of “Notes of Change” will not be going into the KDP Select programme and instead will be published “wide”.  The existing six Sam Plank books are stuck in the programme for a couple more months (auto-renew – a casualty of taking my eye of that ball) and then will be withdrawn and also published “wide”.  You can see why I need all those lists…

Looking backwards and forwards

Tags

Amazon, Gregory 1, Kindle, paperback, Plank 7, plotting, promotion, sales, Samuel Plank, The Solo Squid, writing

And here we are, staring into a whole new year – there can’t be many among us who are sad to see the back of 2020…  I know that my creativity took quite a knock; much as I admire all those who managed to use the endless weeks and months of lockdown to burrow into their projects, I have to admit that constant low-level anxiety and uncertainty took up most of my brain space.  As a result, I am now confronted by two stalled books – “Gregory 1” and “Plank 7” – and I am very much hoping that 2021 will be different.

Self-pity aside, I must gird my loins and look at my sales figures for the past year.  But despite Amazon reporting target-busting sales and (apparently) people turned to reading for comfort and escape, the boom has not quite hit my own titles!  In 2020, I sold 36 paperbacks across the six titles in the Sam series, and 185 e-books.  (But before you pat me on the back for those e-books, I must confess that 153 of those were downloaded for free during a promotion I ran in March/April.  So only 32 of the e-books brought in any money.)  And my little business book – “The Solo Squid” – sold 12 paperbacks and 16 e-books.

And so to money: with an average royalty of 90p per sale, my life as an author netted me about £86.40 in royalties in 2020.  Unfortunately, I also had to pay £200 for the cover for “The Solo Squid”, plus my memberships of the Society of Authors and the Alliance of Independent Authors (neither of which I would do without), so I’m actually about £350 in the red.  But as I don’t drink (yet…), smoke, or collect diamond jewellery or expensive cars, it’s a hobby I can afford.  And once I can reclaim some of this mis-used brain space, I can get back to enjoying it.  Happy new year to one and all!

All over bar the selling

Tags

Amazon, bookshop, Draft2Digital, editing, Gumroad, Heir Apparent, KDP, Kindle, Kobo, proof copy, publication date, Smashwords

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.

All that effort – for nothing!

Tags

Amazon, Draft2Digital, e-book, Kindle, pricing, Samuel Plank, Smashwords

I tell you, wrestling with Amazon is the aspect of the indie writer’s role that no-one warns you about.  As I mentioned a mere nine days ago, I have created an official guide to the Sam Plank books, which includes the first chapter of each book, to whet the appetite, and a glossary of Regency terms, as well as links to encourage people to sign up to my newsletter and indeed to buy the books.  I want to give this guide away – in Kindle form only – but Amazon is not keen on listing books for free.  This is understandable: they make their money by keeping a little cut of the price of each book they sell, and if it sells for nothing, they get nothing.  That’s not to say they don’t run their own promotions, listing Kindle books for free – indeed, you can always download free books from Amazon – but they like to call the shots, having made (I assume) the decision that the giveaway will increase sales in the future.

But thanks to excellent advice from members of the sainted Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), I knew that there was a way to force Amazon’s hand.  And this is what you have to do:

• Create an alternative version of the book for uploading to Smashwords – another e-book distributor
• Create an alternative version of the book for uploading to Draft2Ditigal – another e-book distributor
• Upload the book to these two platforms, giving the price as zero – they both permit this, whereas KDP (the e-book publisher for Amazon) does not
• Wait a couple of days for Smashwords and Draft2Digital to publish the book and distribute it to – importantly – Amazon’s main competitors, Kobo and Barnes & Noble
• Find the book listings on those two competitor websites, showing the price as zero, and save links to those listings
• Find – deep, deep, deep within the Amazon help system – the option that allows you to send a price match request to Amazon, including the links to the listings on Kobo and Barnes & Noble
• Receive a standard reply from Amazon: “Thanks for the pricing information. While we retain discretion over our retail prices, I’ve passed your feedback on for consideration.  We’ll need a little time to look into your issue.  We’ll contact you and provide more information soon.  Thank you for your patience.”
• Check the Amazon listing feverishly every ten minutes or so for four days
• Cheer mightily when – this morning – the freebie appears!

Of course, Amazon can change its mind at any time and revert to the official price that I was forced to enter when publishing the book with KDP – the lowest they offer is 99p.  And it’s showing as free only on Amazon.co.uk at the moment – the other Amazons have yet to catch up.  But it’s progress and in the indie publishing world that’s to be celebrated, when nothing is ever as simple as you think it should be!

So now, folks, please make it worth all the anguish and send this link on to everyone you know so that they can all download the guide – it’s the gateway drug to the Sam series and we need to get pushing!

Boxing clever

Tags

ALLi, Alliance of Independent Authors, box set, glossary, indie publishing, Kindle, pricing, Samuel Plank, self-publishing

As many of you will know, the “indie” (independent) publishing world is very co-operative, very inclusive and very helpful.  I belong to a marvellous organisation called ALLi (sounds like “ally” and it’s the Alliance of Independent Authors) and their members’ forum on Facebook is the place to go with all manner of writerly and self-publisher-ly queries.  The joy is being able to follow in successful footsteps of those who have gone before, and it is in that spirit that I have created my first box set of Sam books.

Before you get too excited, I should clarify that it is an e-box set of e-books – nothing physical here.  The idea is that readers of series really like series, and box sets appeal to them.  If you set the price right it can represent a saving on buying individual titles – and readers do love a bargain.  And if your series is longer than the box set, you are encouraging people to persevere further into the series.

As for how much work is involved, it’s not too onerous.  Obviously you have to create a single file out of the separate book files – for me, this was a fairly simple cut and paste exercise, with a bit of jigging to create one glossary out of two.  You then have to put an overall title at the beginning; in my case, I went for the rather predictable “The Sam Plank Mysteries Box Set One: Books 1-3”, with the three separate titles listed below.  (I said “Box Set One” in case I decide to do another one with later titles.)  And then I put bookmarks and hyperlinks into this title so that people can jump straight to the book they want – although I imagine that most people will read straight through, and the Kindle keeps your place.

Then there’s the cover.  I did contact my cover designer to ask about cost but decided that I could do something myself that is just good enough.  After all, the individual covers are eye-catching and beautiful, so I simply created a single image out of the three covers.  I have no talent at all for design, so I went to the ALLi forum and put up two different options for the cover – and people very kindly suggested various improvements (including having the faces looking at each other instead of turned away, although I do worry that the yellow fellow is now staring rather too appreciatively at the red girl).  And here it is:

With combined interior file ready and cover assembled, all I had to do was upload them to KDP – and decide on the price.  The total price of buying the first three Sam books in Kindle version is £9.97 so I priced the box set at £5.99 – in effect, people get the third book free.  I uploaded it yesterday, and so far I have sold one.  As ever, I’ll keep you posted.

Keep buggering on

Tags

Amazon, BookBub, Gardners, IngramSpark, Kindle, marketing, promotion, Waterstones

I’m a big fan of Winston Churchill – one of life’s great over-achievers (soldier, journalist, politician and artist) – and in particular his repeated exhortations to just stick at it, variously “Never, never, never give up”, “If you’re going through hell, just keep going” and, of course, “Keep buggering on”.  I too am one of life’s plodders: I’m not given to flights of fancy or flashes of brilliance but I am a great sticker-at things – including the marketing of self-published books.

I try – some weeks more successfully than others – to do at least one marketing activity per week.  I keep a list of ideas and suggestions in a little notebook and when I have time I try to cross off, or make a little advance on, one of them.  They vary in size and complexity – from “contact events person at local Waterstones” to “get to grips with how Amazon ads work” (there’s a project…) – and, as with pretty much all marketing initiatives, it’s all but impossible to know which will bear fruit and why.

On my list at the moment are these:

• Once the IngramSpark versions of my books are finalised [nearly there – paper proof copies are on order] update all the ISBNs on Amazon and elsewhere
• Wait several weeks – it seems to take about six – for the IngramSpark catalogue to update in the Gardners system so that bookshops can order the books, and then think of ways to get them to do that…
• Contact events person at local Waterstones – no point doing this until they can order the books (see above)
• Consider running a BookBub promotion – general consensus in the indie writing community is that this is a good idea but hard work as you need to jump through dozens of hoops before BookBub will take you on
• Consider releasing a “box set” of the first three Sam titles in Kindle format – this has been recommended by a writer friend
• Get to grips with how Amazon ads work

Today I have asked for a quotation from my cover designer to create the new image I would need for Amazon for a box set.  And now I am going to read some of the thousands of blog posts out there which discuss Amazon ads and the black magic that seems to underpin them…  It’s not glamorous and it’s not much fun, but then neither was being sent to Bangalore with the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars in 1896 – if Winston can keep buggering on, so can I.

Download data

Tags

Amazon, Facebook, Fatal Forgery, free download, Goodreads, Kindle, marketing, Twitter

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!

Tags

Amazon, cover, designer, Facebook, Fatal Forgery, free download, iBook, Kindle, Kobo, marketing, Smashwords, Twitter

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).

A right royalty rumpus

Tags

Amazon, CreateSpace, KDP, Kindle, print-on-demand, royalty, self-publishing, tax

Part of being a self-published author is dealing with the money side of things.  I am extremely lucky in that, for me, writing is a hobby and so I do not count on it for my income.  (Just as well, considering it makes me £25 per week.)  I do hope that one day I will be able to rely on it a little more, but for the moment, it’s an enjoyable side-line.  And this is why I have never bothered getting to grips with the royalty situation.  (Isn’t that a marvellous word for something rather ordinary?  Here’s the explanation from etymologyonline, one of my most-used websites: “c. 1400, ‘office or position of a sovereign’, also ‘magnificence’, from or modelled on Old French roialte [12c., Modern French royauté], from Vulgar Latin regalitatem, from Latin regalis.  Sense of ‘prerogatives or rights granted by a sovereign to an individual or corporation’ is from late 15c.  From that evolved more general senses, such as ‘payment to a landowner for use of a mine’ [1839], and ultimately ‘payment to an author, composer, etc.’ for sale or use of his or her work [1857].”)

Don’t get me wrong: I have a fair grasp of how much I make from each copy sold.  (It’s a bit approximate, because it does vary according to country of sale, exchange rates, etc., but it’s about £1.10 per paperback copy sold on Amazon, and £1.10 per Kindle book.)  But what mystifies me is that every month I get five royalty payments.  Yes, five.  Three of them come accompanied by statements, while the other two sneak in alone.  The three statements cover purchases made in pounds, US dollars and euros.  But I have no idea what the other two payments are for.  On my bank statement all five payments say simply that they have come from “Amazon Media”.  And so I tot them up and bung them on the tax return.

But now change is a-foot.  I have received an email from CreateSpace (the print-on-demand company that I use, which is – like almost every business under the sun – owned by Amazon) announcing that “CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing will become one service”.  KDP is the service I use to sell my Kindle books, and CreateSpace authors seem to have little choice in the matter (pick your battles, as my grandma used to advise), so I have pressed the button to migrate my CreateSpace titles to my KDP account.  On the surface, this seems like a good development: I can now go to one dashboard to see all my sales – POD paperbacks and Kindle books.  But I can’t help thinking that things might not be that simple…  For a start, I’m going to have to wait longer for my £25: “CreateSpace pays monthly royalties 30 days after the end of the month in which they were earned while KDP pays monthly royalties approximately 60 days after the end of the month in which they were earned.”  And those royalties might well shrink a little, as they are calculated after the cost of production is deducted, and “some low-page count books will see an increase in printing fees when they are printed in the UK and EU”.  It remains to be seen how low is low when it comes to page count…