A month of Notes

Tags

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookshop, Draft2Digital, Google Play, Gumroad, Kobo, marketing, Notes of Change, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, Smashwords

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.

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!

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).

Keeping the faith

Tags

Amazon, Draft2Digital, Faith Hope and Trickery, Gumroad, Kobo, publication date, Smashwords

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!

Riches (are still) beyond my wildest dreams

Tags

ACX, audiobook, bookmark, cover, CreateSpace, sales, Smashwords

At this time every year, I have to face learning whether I can retire to a glorious chateau somewhere and devote myself to my Art, to my Muse, to my Writing.  For non-UK readers, we have a bizarre situation where our tax year runs from 6 April of one year to 5 April of the next.  (It’s all to do with an ancient new year’s day being on 25 March, and then the Gregorian calendar getting involved.)  And so around the start of May I dig out all of my records to find out whether I have made any money from being a writer over the past year.  Last year, you may recall, I made a loss of £44.87 – in other words, for the honour of spending hours and hours and hours on writing and trying to sell the blasted things, I had to hand over nearly fifty quid.

Would this year be any better, I wondered?  I added up all the royalties I have received from Amazon, Smashwords and ACX (for the audiobooks), and the lovely cheques I have received from bricks-and-mortar bookshops.  And then I subtracted all the things I pay for in order to create these books.  (I should say that I don’t charge myself anything for office space, heating, lighting, printer cartridges and so on, because all of that is charged to “other Susan” for my day job.)  But I do include, for instance, paying for the design of book covers and bookmarks, and ordering copies of books from CreateSpace to deliver to those bricks-and-mortar bookshops, and subscribing to the Society of Authors.

And I can report – taxman please take note and pity – that this year I have increased my loss to a rather worrying £288.71.  I have gone a bit mad on the covers this year (two paperbacks and two audiobooks), but still, it’s rather sad, isn’t it?  What I shall do is divide it by twelve, and reason with myself that my hobby is costing me only £24 a month.  Ho hum.

Free, gratis and for nothing

Tags

Draft2Digital, e-book, Fatal Forgery, iBook, iTunes, Kobo, marketing, Scribd, Smashwords

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.

Kobo konfusion

Tags

e-book, Fatal Forgery, Kobo, self-publishing, Smashwords, Worm in the Blossom

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 countdown has begun

Tags

G David, Heffers, iBook, publication date, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, Smashwords, Worm in the Blossom

Only two days to go!  Can’t tell you how excited we are in our house – well, apart from the cat, who just yawns widely and ignores us.  Friday is the Big Day, but in the true spirit of self-publishing, I have had to work out what needs to be done in advance in order to hit that deadline.

Today I cycled into town with my deliveries for the two local bookshops who are kind enough to stock Sam; I could have delivered them on Friday, but they might not have time to process them on the day, and it seems a bit rude to hang around and watch them, so I figured that with a couple of days’ lead time I could pretty much guarantee being able to go in on Friday and see “Worm in the Blossom” on the shelf.  I have also sent out a few review copies, because if people are kind enough to agree to review the book, it seems only polite to let them have it a bit ahead of time.  And one kind person has offered to have me as a guest blogger on her book blog on Friday, so I needed to plan for that.

The appearance of the e-Worms is happening gradually, and I am reasonably hopeful that they will all be in position by Friday.  Amazon was obviously in a high gear this time round, and their listings are already live, while Smashwords is taking a bit longer – but then it does distribute its catalogue to all sorts of places, like iTunes.

So what is left to do on Friday?  I shall be updating this blog, of course, and adding all the purchase links to this and to my work blog.  I shall be doing that guest blog – I’ll give you the link when I have it – and of course snooping round the bookshops to see “Worm” on the shelves.  And I shall be turning my mind to “Plank 4” – I’ve already been jotting down ideas…

Opening a can of e-Worms

Tags

Fatal Forgery, Gumroad, iBook, Kindle, paperback, Samuel Plank, self-publishing, Smashwords, The Man in the Canary Waistcoat, Worm in the Blossom

I am a rugby widow.  Even though England have now been knocked out of the World Cup, my husband is  continuing to watch so that he can decide “who else to support” – and apparently Namibia/Georgia was the best match he has ever seen.  Luckily it has all coincided with my preference to spend time with the other man in my life, Sam Plank, and so this weekend is dedicated to the e-versions of “Worm in the Blossom”.

As I have explained before (I’m a bit obsessed with this), the key to successful self-publishing (which is not the same as profitable self-publishing – it’s just managing to get the book out there) is working backwards.  Decide on your publication date – for “Worm”, it’s next Friday, 16 October – and then work backwards from there.  And this means uploading your files several days before you want to be certain that they are available for sale.  When I was new to it all first uploaded “Fatal Forgery”, I clicked refresh on Amazon every three seconds for about four days, until I realised that these listing sites work to their own rhythm and timetable, and my fretting was having no impact on anything except my own blood pressure and sleep pattern.  So with “Canary” I just planned a bit further ahead, uploaded the files well in advance, and then went all Zen.  And I have done exactly the same with “Worm”: this afternoon I uploaded to CreateSpace everything they need for the paperback edition – cover, interior, price, distribution channels, search terms, the whole lot.  I have no idea when it will actually appear in Amazon’s catalogue, but I do know that, with six days’ lead time, it will definitely be there on the launch day.

And tomorrow is to be devoted to e-Worms.  As well as the paperback editions of the Sam Plank novels, I also offer them in Kindle, Kobo, Smashwords, iBooks and Gumroad (PDF) versions.  This is of course the same basic text, but formatted – or rather, stripped of most formatting – in slightly different ways for each one.  It’s a bit tedious, but fun when it comes to the uploading.  Again, the actual appearance date on each website is in the lap of the self-publishing gods, but come Friday, they’ll all be there.  And boy oh boy am I looking forward to Friday!