My flexible festival

It’s raining cats and dogs and we’re still under lock-down (at least here in the UK), which gives me the perfect excuse to stay indoors all day and “attend” not one but two virtual book festivals.  I wasn’t sure to begin with but now I’m a real convert: I don’t have to pay for travel or accommodation, and I can still see everyone even if I can’t meet them in person (plus I get to nose around their backgrounds and bookshelves).  Moreover, with Zoom and the like, we audience members can ask questions via the chat facility, which is actually a fairer system: you don’t have to wave your arm madly to catch the moderator’s eye – we’re all equally visible to the chat bar.

So far today I have heard talks by Elizabeth Buchan, Debbie Young, A A Abbott, Orna Ross, Joanna Penn, Jo Ullah and Kate Mosse, and I still have four more sessions to look forward to – what bounty!  I have been scribbling notes like a demon, recording a mixture of inspiration (Elizabeth Buchan: be patient – allow the batteries to recharge and the ideas to percolate), writing skills (Kate Mosse: create a strong historical scaffolding for your characters and let them loose within it to choose their own story) and practicalities (Orna Ross: every author needs a premium product – it is very hard to make a living just from books and Joanna Penn: look at your books’ reviews to find the right language to use in your promotional material and ads).  I’m fizzing, I tell you.  And the one concrete thing I have done between sessions is to create anew the @ConstablePlank twitter handle that I had abandoned.  It’s not quite the right handle, now that Gregory Hardiman is making himself known, but it will do for now – and at least I can follow other inspirational people and get these posts promoted a little more widely.

And to complete the festival experience, I grabbed a quick pizza for lunch between sessions and pretended there was a queue for the loo.

Taming the squid

“The Solo Squid” – my book about how to run a happy one-person business – has hit the same wall as the Sam Plank books: everyone who reads it says that it is good, but not enough people are reading it.  I don’t want to fall back into Twitter (for the reasons explained yesterday) but I do want to get the squid message out there, and so I have created a new Facebook page.

The theory is that the Solo Squid page will showcase the book, yes, but will also share tips and ideas on the theme central to the book: enjoying working alone, and being satisfied with that work status (i.e. being content with a one-person business and not plotting world domination).  To keep it manageable I plan to source and share one piece of squisdom every day or two, and I am going to be ferocious about keeping to the squidology – no veering off-message.

Like so many marketing ideas, it may die a death in a month or two, but that’s the nature of the marketing beast.  On the other hand, I should practise what I preach, and in the book I advise forgetting about formal marketing strategies: “Rather, I recommend starting at the end and asking yourself this one question: what can I do to make sure that my clients remember me in a positive light?”  And if my FB page can offer a helpful idea or a crumb of comfort to a lonely or struggling or exhausted solo squid, who then tells other solo squids about it, then I’m happy.

(And in case you’re wondering about my fictional life, I can assure you that each weekend I am immersed in research for the first Gregory book.  I have been reading a wonderful tome called “Annals of Cambridge”, which is a highly subjective – and at times unintentionally hilarious – record of the main events that happened in the city, organised by year.  And in 1830 we had this gem: “On 3 December 1830, apprehension having been entertained from the excited state of the labouring classes in many of the adjacent villages that there might be some disturbance in the town on the following market day, 800 of the [6,500 male] inhabitants voluntarily attended at the Town Hall and were sworn as special constables. Not the slightest disturbance occurred.”  I can guarantee that that little over-reaction will find its way into a Gregory book.)

Bye bye birdie

As some of you will know, I serve in a voluntary capacity as a magistrate (perfect for crime research…).  A large part of our work is sentencing, and at this stage in the proceedings a defendant will often say in mitigation, “But miss, I’ve got mental health”.  We know s/he means just the opposite, but every time I hear it I reflect how grateful I am that, for almost all of my life, I have indeed had mental health.  And in a bid to keep things that way, I have decided to stop using Twitter in my private and writing lives – although I shall keep a very inactive account for work purposes, so that people can find me.

When I realised that my narrator Constable Sam Plank would live beyond one book, I decided to hide behind his name and created the @ConstablePlank Twitter handle.  I did this on the advice of more experienced authors, who said – without exception – that the key to selling lots of books was to have an active social media presence.  And (like everyone else) I have no way of knowing whether that is true: it is impossible to know what proportion of readers were alerted to the Sam books via Twitter (or Facebook or this writing blog or Amazon searching or shop displays).  But what I do know about Twitter is this:

• Anything that I post on Twitter can just as easily be posted on Facebook or this blog
• My tweets – like everyone else’s – disappear within hours, if not minutes
• Nearly all the tweets I read from the authors that I follow are – like mine – attempts to sell more books, which becomes rather dull quite quickly
• Too many tweets are unpleasant in tone
• Twitter sucks up too much of my time, as I seem to be addicted to scrolling through yards and yards of irrelevant tweets.

This is to take nothing at all from those of you who enjoy tweeting and/or enjoy reading tweets.  It’s just that I have not got from it what I was hoping (over and above book sales), which was an insight into the writing process and the lives of other writers and therefore a sense of community.  (Plus, if I read the phrase “hand sanitiser” once more, I may indeed get mental health.).  So for now, @Constable Plank is no more.

Download data

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!

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).

Press here for publicity

As regular readers will know, one of the hardest aspects of being a self-employed author is the marketing.  It’s not the time it takes so much as summoning the ongoing enthusiasm and imagination – particularly in such a crowded marketplace, when every author and his dog (probably literally) has a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and an Amazon profile, all screaming “Buy my books!” (or, in the case of the dog, “Take me out for a walk!”).  Marvellous though it is that anyone can publish their books these days, it does mean that you have to work so much harder to be spotted in the throng.  But it sometimes seems that the old ways are the best.

I mentioned a little while ago (or did I?) that next month I am doing a talk at the latest bookshop to stock the Sam Plank series – Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden (just the other side of the Cambridgeshire border, in northern Essex).  The shop has its own website with an events page, and I have also listed the event on Sam’s Facebook page.  But what else to do?  The manager of the shop suggested asking the local newspaper, the Saffron Walden Reporter, to publicise the talk, as – if you can believe such a thing still exists – this local weekly paper is delivered free to every address in the town.  Thankfully I have some experience of writing press releases, which I know reporters like as it saves time and fills space, and so I looked up the paper online, checked which reporter’s name was on the book-ish stories, and counted how many words were in the average piece before crafting my press release and emailing it to her.  I also suggested that it would be jolly helpful to have the story appear a fortnight before the event to give people time to get to the bookshop to buy tickets, and then of course we would need to print more tickets and hire a marquee and a warm-up act and lay on extra buses…  I may be straying here into the realms of fantasy.

But, dear reader, it all worked – and here is my press release (with a few improvements, I must admit) in today’s Saffron Walden Reporter.  The bookshop is on standby for the hordes of ticket-seekers, although my own husband has now dropped out as something better has come up.  (To be fair, he’s had a bellyful of Sam over the years.  It can’t be easy sharing your wife with a dead policeman.)

Getting to know you

As I have said countless times before, one of the hardest things about being an author today is getting your books noticed in a very crowded, very busy, very diverse marketplace.  In the old days, an author handed their manuscript over to a publisher, who distributed it to bookshops which sold it to readers.  Nowadays, with e-books and self-publishing, books sold in supermarkets and via Amazon, it is all but impossible for the individual author to know where to direct her marketing time – for yes, reader, that befuddled author is me.

Thankfully I am not alone in my befuddlement.  MK Tod is another writer of historical fiction, and for the fourth time she has put together a survey into readers.  It takes about ten minutes to complete, and will help authors like me to better understand what sort of books modern readers like to read and in what format, and how readers want to hear about books, communicate with authors, get updates, etc.  So if you could spare the time to take part, that would be marvellous.  Here’s the link.

Armed with the results, I will be able to decide whether it’s worth continuing with Twitter, and/or this blog, and/or the proposed monthly Sam updates (which only a dozen people have signed up for, including my own husband because he values a quiet life).  I’m very keen to avoid the approach of several authors and publishers, which is to put “BUY THIS BOOK!” on Twitter every sixty seconds – I’m much happier with the idea of building interest in Sam and the Regency period.  But how to do that?  I’m hoping the results to this survey will help, so please do take part and distribute it as widely as you can.

Pricing and promo problem

It’s an odd time, post-publication.  For authors with traditional publishing houses behind them, I daresay this is a period of frenzied promotional activity, with champagne-lubricated launches across the world and endless media interviews.  But for little old me, it means sitting here checking the UPS website every ten minutes to track the delivery of my books from CreateSpace in South Carolina, while occasionally looking at Amazon to see whether anyone has left a review.  I know that people are receiving their copies – thank you, Carol in West Row, for your wonderful photos of the grand unwrapping! – and here on my desk I have pre-prepared addressed envelopes ready to send out the review copies as soon as they arrive.

In the meantime, I wanted your opinion on the special price reduction I have done on the Kindle edition of “Fatal Forgery”.  I did it as a way to draw people into the series, just before the appearance of “Faith, Hope and Trickery”, and the initial uptake was encouraging.  I reduced the price to 99p (99¢ in the US; 0.99 euros in the EU) on 7 March.  Between 7 March and 9 March – when I suspect you were all kindly passing on the good news, and I had links on Facebook and Twitter – I sold twelve copies, but nothing since then (I suppose the promo links have fallen from view).  Should I return “FF” to its normal Kindle price, to fit in with the others – that’s about £3.62?  Or should I keep it at 99p permanently, as a sort of entry-level drug to get people to sample the series, and do more puffs about it?  Amazon does occasionally promote its 99p Kindle catalogue and there’s a chance “FF” could appear in such a promotion – but I suspect that’s for books with higher sales figures already.  (What I do know is that it definitely won’t appear in a 99p promo if it’s priced at £3.62!)  Complicating the issue is the fact that Amazon – of its own volition – has created a Kindle bundle of the first four Sam books, and that includes “FF” at 99p.  I don’t think anyone has bought the bundle – my current sales info shows no sales in recent weeks of any of the middle books in the series, which it would if the bundle had sold.

So, dear readers, what do you think?  Leave it at 99p, or put it back to the higher price?  (I suppose you need this info: if it sells at 99p I get 35p royalty, and if it sells at £3.62 I get £2.09.  But that’s only if it sells!  So lots of 35p is better than no £2.09…)

A week of promotion

Thanks to all who voted in the “which Plank should I submit to this competition” poll, and the winner (of the poll, not the competition!) is “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  So this weekend I will be preparing the first five thousand-ish words of that for submission, and then it’s fingers crossed until winners are announced in February 2018.

In other news, I have been working in Guernsey all week and so have had little time for writing, but I have managed about 600 words.  I’m still struggling a little with the plot of “Plank 5”, in that I have the basic plot but want more complication – you know how I like to have several strands to the story.  But I am reasonably confident that the additional strands will reveal themselves as I go along – they always have in the past.

On the promotional side of things, I read recently in a magazine that Sophie Raworth (an English news-reader on the telly) has a book review blog.  She seems nice and approachable, and so I tweeted her to ask whether I could send her a copy of “Canary” – it’s set partly in Langham Place, now the home of the BBC, and I thought that might appeal.  I have not had a reply, which perhaps is not surprising.  But I do try!

I have also taken my book of newspaper columns – “Susan in the City” – into the Cambridge branch of WH Smith (a large chain of bookshop/stationer/newsagents), to see whether they would be interested in stocking it on their “local interest” shelf.  The manager seems keen – he said that the sale-or-return basis of my offer was crucial – but he still needs to put the case to head office.  I’m hoping to hear by the end of next week.  As regular readers will know, putting copies in physical bookshops actually costs me money (in other words, it costs me more to order the books from CreateSpace and have them shipped from the US than I make from the eventual sales) but I see it as a promotional move, to get the books being read and – hopefully – recommended.  Although, as with all my promotional efforts, it is all but impossible to assess the success of the approach!

A group of one

Last time I said that I would keep you posted about my marketing efforts, and this is sort of related to that.  I decided that I have been a rather selfish author, concentrating on my own books and my own sales, and – in the spirit of “what goes around, comes around” (which I apply in all other areas of my life, with volunteer work and the like) I decided to try to become a productive member of the writing community.  As a first step, I scoured Facebook and Twitter for suitable groups of authors, readers and bloggers.  My aim was not to find reviewers or readers, but rather to be more of a reader and a reviewer myself, and to learn more about my author contemporaries.  I found four seemingly like-minded groups of people – three involved in crime fiction and one in historical fiction – and signed up.  And the long and short of it is that I don’t belong anywhere.

The crime fiction people are all about über-realistic bloody murders and “disturbing psychological thrillers” – that’s a big thing at the moment, the criminal who messes with your head first figuratively and then literally.  As someone who has never actually got past the Guildford Cathedral scene in “The Omen”, I’m not very comfortable with head-messing.  My Sam Plank novels all have murders in them, certainly, but death is very definitely a by-product of the financial crime, and I certainly don’t dwell on it.  And any in-depth psychological analysis would be completely anachronistic, even for a curious man like Sam.

Meanwhile, the historical crime people aren’t sure what to make of Regency non-romance.  Regency fiction seems to concentrate exclusively on bodice-ripping – “The Lascivious Duchess and the Gallant Groom”, or “The Indiscretions of Lord Albemarle”.  For urban drama and detective stuff, we have to wait for the Victorians, and they go quite mad on it all.  And as for financial crime at the centre of it all, well, that’s impossible to categorise.

So, fascinating though it is to read about the latest publications of all these other authors, and their special offers on Amazon – “99p until midnight – that’s only 20p per vicious slaughter!” – I don’t feel I can bring much to these particular parties.  I can see now what all those publishers meant when I first took them “Fatal Forgery” and they dithered over genre and “which shelf you can live on”.  On the plus side, perhaps Sam’s unique selling point is that he is unique.  Martha certainly thinks so.