Everybody’s free (to feel good)

Now that I have completed the Sam Plank series, and now that I have stopped the day job and am reconfiguring how I spend my time, I decided that I needed to do something significant to mark these events and to signal my intent to be a more professional author.  I considered a tattoo (no, not really) and commissioning my likeness in dark chocolate (yes, really), but in the end I have plumped for this: a permafree series opener.

For those of you (I hope all of you – it’s a horrid word) shuddering at the term “permafree”, I should explain that it means free forever.  In other words, I am making the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” free forever on all the sales platforms I can find.  My reasons are these:

• Several successful indie authors of series have already done it and highly recommend it
• A free book entices readers to take a punt on an unknown author – and once they’ve had a taste of Sam and Martha and the gang, I’m sure they won’t be able to resist buying the next six books in the series, for themselves and all their friends and every member of their extended family
• It’s scary and exciting – and at my stage in life, something scary and exciting is good.

Of course, it’s not that simple to make something permafree, unless you do it right from the start.  All of the Sam e-books were enrolled (there, you see: I’m putting it in the passive to deny responsibility, but it’s entirely my fault) in the KDP Select programme.  This means that they can only be sold on Amazon, and in exchange for this exclusivity I get a higher royalty rate (70% as opposed to 35% for e-books that are published “wide” – i.e. other places as well as Amazon).  And Amazon does not – for obvious reasons – allow you to price a book at free.  So I needed to get the books off KDP Select, and there is a three-month notice period.  That expired last week, and I had a giddy couple of days publishing the e-books to other platforms such as Google Play, Kobo and Barnes & Noble (formerly Nook).  They do allow you to price books at free, which I did for “Fatal Forgery”.  And once you have a book priced at free on a couple of reputable competitor sites, you can request Amazon to price match to zero on their site – which they have done (it’s not a given, and there’s no guarantee they’ll keep the price at zero, but we can try).  It’s as simple as that…

I have plans for world domination with permafree Forgery, and – again on the recommendation of much more successful indie authors – I have booked a series promo on Freebooksy.  This site promotes free books to its “over 150,000 voracious readers”, and with a series promo they highlight the free opener and show the rest of the series.  That’s booked in for 30 June, at a cost of US$95 – about £78.  Given that I get about £1.40 royalty per e-book sold (nothing for “Fatal Forgery”, of course – I mean the other six), I have to hope that the promo will result in at least fifty-six additional sales.  The true value of a series promo, I am told, is its “long tail” of sales, which will be hard to monitor, but I feel excited that I am trying something new.

And here’s something interesting…  Since “Fatal Forgery” went permafree a couple of days ago, I have told my friends on Facebook, and Sam’s audience of 23 on Facebook, and his 17 followers on Twitter.  (I know, I know: I really need to get a grip on his social media presence – or, more truthfully, his absence).  So not many people have been told.  And yet the word is out somehow: since yesterday, there have been 322 downloads of “Fatal Forgery”, pushing it to sales rank 54 in the historical fiction e-books category on Amazon.  And sales rank really matters on Amazon: if you rank high, they jump in with their own promotion and then, well, watch out Tanya Anne Crosby (current holder of position one in the historical fiction e-books category)!

A month of Notes

And here I am, a whole month later.  That was a deliberate gap, in case you’re wondering: I decided to take a break after publication, have a holiday, and come back refreshed and full of fab ideas for book promotion.  Well, two out of three ain’t bad!  When I was working full-time, I could carve out space to do the actual writing (which I love) but not for any marketing (not so much love here…).  Now that I have stopped work, I am hoping to take a more professional approach: my ideal routine would be to spend two days a week writing, one day researching and one day on marketing.  And so I have not beaten myself up about abandoning “Notes of Change” to its fate after publication, as I know that before too long I will be revisiting the whole series with a proper marketing/promo plan.  (I’m going on a long train journey next week – four hours each way – and my goal is to spend most of it on preparing that plan.)

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to hear how “Notes of Change” has done in its first month.  It’s the first book for a while that I have published “wide” – i.e. on platforms other than Amazon, as well as on Amazon itself.  And here are the latest stats:

• Sold to bookshops: 10 copies
• Sold via Amazon: 25 copies
• Draft2Digital: zero
• Google Play: zero
• Gumroad: 1 copy
• Kobo Rakuten: zero
• Barnes & Noble: zero
• Smashwords: zero

So that’s a total of 36 copies.  On the plus side, I’m getting excellent reviews – five five-star ratings on Amazon already.  So onwards and upwards, as I promise my poor little books that I will give them the promo help they deserve.

Sam’s hit list

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…

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.

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).

Keeping the faith

I will admit that I don’t remember this happening before…  I have found a flaw in my publishing plan.  Once a book is uploaded to CreateSpace, it is formatted and then sent back to me for final checking.  If all seems well with the digital proof, I can then order a paper proof copy, if I wish, or simply press the Publish button to launch it onto an adoring and waiting public.  (At least, that’s how I choose to see you.)  Once the book is published, I can order my own copies to distribute to bookshops and reviewers.  However, this means that there is no way of making sure that the book appears on Amazon and in bookshops on the same day – Amazon is always going to be first.

Ideally I would prefer to have a halfway publication option: press Publish on CreateSpace but specify a launch date, which I would then try to co-ordinate with delivery of paperbacks to the shops.  But this does not exist: you cannot order copies from CreateSpace, even as the author, until the book is officially published – and once it’s officially published, it’s sent to Amazon for inclusion in their next update, which these days is often within the hour.

All of which is a long-winded way of announcing to you – stand by your beds – that “Faith, Hope and Trickery” is now available on Amazon, in both paperback and Kindle formats.  They seem to be shown separately at the moment, but I know from experience that Amazon will eventually unite them.  In the meantime, you can find both by searching for the title.  I have also uploaded e-versions to Kobo, Gumroad, Smashwords and Draft2Digital, which between them cover most of the e-book formats.  I sell very few books through these channels, but I figure that I won’t sell any at all if they’re not listed…

I realise that it all seems a bit of an anti-climax, but I was lying awake last night trying to figure out how to tie together the various publication strands, and hit the promised publication date exactly, when I realised that the book was ready to go and I might as well just do it!  And my husband has pointed out that Mothering Sunday is perhaps the perfect day to launch this particular story.  I have now ordered my giant box of books, which I am told will arrive in about ten days’ time, and then I’ll be sending them out for review and making deliveries to bookshops.  In the meantime, you can order your very own purple pages from Amazon – hurrah!

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.

Scenting the finish line

Just a quick update for you today, as things are moving along apace with “Portraits of Pretence”.  I have now done my final edits (until, that is, an eagle-eyed reader writes to me in a few months’ time to point out something I’ve missed!) and have cut and pasted the text into the format needed for uploading to CreateSpace.  I’ve written the back cover blurb (which doubles as the book description on Amazon), chosen the key words (for Amazon cataloguing) and set the price.  All I need now is the cover, which I have approved in draft and am hoping to see in finished form very soon.  So you don’t have long to wait to see that!  All I’m saying at the moment is that it’s green…  Once I’ve uploaded the cover to CreateSpace I can order my author copy, and once I’ve seen that I can publish quietly and order my big box of books to be delivered to bookshops ahead of the official publication date of 21 October.

Before then, I still have to take the finalised text of “Portraits of Pretence”, strip it of all its formatting, and turn it into different versions suitable for Kindle, Kobo, iBooks, Nook and Gumroad.  I sell hardly any in any e-format except Kindle, but the other books are available in those formats and it seems churlish to stop now.  I’m working in Guernsey this coming week, so I figure that creating one format per evening should see me through.

And just this morning, I found myself thinking about the plot of “Plank 5”…

Kobo konfusion

I have now given quite a few talks about self-publishing, and I always say that it’s very straight-forward, good fun, and perfectly do-able as long as you’re organised.  But sometimes I forget how much I had to learn the first time round – my husband remembers me tearing my hair out as I fought with several slightly different formats for “Fatal Forgery”.  Of course, being one of those über-organised people, I made myself a checklist, and now publishing a new Plank is simply a matter of working my way through that.  Until recently.

A friend in the Netherlands commented in an email that she was really enjoying “Worm in the Blossom” which she had downloaded from Kobo.  My little ears pricked up: I check my sales channels at least once a week (sometimes once a day, well, OK, several times a day…) and I hadn’t seen a single Kobo sale of “Blossom”.  I went onto my KWL [Kobo Writing Life – it’s their self-publishing arm] dashboard and no, not a one.  I emailed Kobo: where’s my sale?  How do we know you’ve had a sale, they asked in return.  I sent them my friend’s confirmation email – “Thank you for buying your Kobo book, etc.”.  Ah, said Kobo: this is a Smashwords Kobo sale, not a direct Kobo sale, so you need to check your Smashwords dashboard, not ours.  Eh?

For the e-versions of my books, I produce a Kindle version which I publish through KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing], a Gumroad version (a plain PDF, uploaded direct to Gumroad), a Kobo version which I publish through KWL, and a Smashwords version.  Smashwords is slightly different from the others in that it is an “e-book distribution platform”: you upload your e-book to them, and they translate it into various formats and ensure that it is listed in all sorts of places, such as Apple iStore, Barnes & Noble (big in America), Scribd – and Kobo.  And when a book sells, they take their little cut before sending on the royalty to the author.  When I upload my books to Smashwords, I tick all available distribution channels – which meant that I was inadvertently creating two listings for each book on Kobo: a direct one via KWL, and an indirect one via Smashwords.  Of course, the books are identical, but – thanks to royalty calculations and currency exchange rates – the prices were slightly different.  I have rectified it now, by removing the KWL listings (I chose Smashwords over Kobo because the former’s customer service as I tried to sort out my confusion was so much more helpful and prompt).  But it just goes to show that – as with most things – you never stop learning in self-publishing.

The Worm is launched!

The Big Day is finally here!  And the (some might say obsessive…) planning has paid off, as “Worm in the Blossom” has hit all the relevant shelves at the right time.  Here it is in Heffers this morning:

And I have checked all the e-venues – iBooks, Nook, Kobo, Gumroad – and all listings are now live.  The only laggard is the Book Depository, and their catalogue will pick it up on their next sweep.  (I’ve never sold anything through them but no-one likes a monopoly, so I try to give an alternative for people who want a paperback-not-through-Amazon.)

My lovely friend and book blogger Jo has kindly featured me as her guest blogger today – you can read my post here.  Jo is also one of my reviewers, so now I wait on tenterhooks to see what she thinks of “Worm”.  Because yes, that’s the next step: waiting for those reviews and rating to start appearing…

But for now Sam and I will enjoy the moment.  And then next week I start thinking in earnest about “Plank 4” – I’ve already booked a library research day in the diary.