As I mentioned in a previous post, I put my novelette The ElectroLive Murders up on Kindle over a year ago, and still haven't managed to sell enough copies to get paid. It's not for lack of trying, either. Just in case any other self-published authors out there are curious, I figured I'd summarize my failed promotion attempts. But before you dip into what follows, beware: this is crass business talk, and pretty long winded, and it chronicles a series of failures. You might not want to read it after all.
Failure #1: Review Blogs. The article I read that got me excited about self-publishing on Kindle was a profile of YA author Amanda Hocking. She attributed her massive success to book bloggers, saying that her sales took off once bloggers started reviewing her books. Hoping to emulate even a fraction of that success, I began researching and contacting review blogs. Early on in my research, I stumbled across the Reviewer List on Step-By-Step Self-Publishing's website, and I started working through it. In the end I probably contacted at least a dozen reviewers--and I made sure that the current information for those reviewers stated that they were open to submissions and interested in the type of book that The ElectroLive Murders is. Of those 12+ submissions, three responded, and one ended up reading and reviewing the story. No sales resulted. Statistical summary: ~6 hours of effort, 0 sales.
Failure #2: Amazon Presence. When I first opened a Kindle Direct Publishing account, Amazon sent me a welcome email with tips for newcomers. I read those tips and tried to follow them. The main one I remember now is this: put together an Amazon Author's page. So I did.. I also realized that hundreds of Kindle authors were lurking around the Amazon forums, hoping to connect with readers. The most blatant way this plays out--relating to authors flogging their books--is the creation of topic threads in the Meet Our Authors section. Basically, authors post comments mentioning their books in threads that group together books by topic--99 cent paranormal romance novels, for example. I was pretty skeptical of the likelihood of any of that sort of effort resulting in sales, but hundreds of people seem to think it's worth doing, so I figured I'd give it a shot--I posted comments on a few threads, and I started a few threads too. Guess what--my skepticism proved warranted. Statistical summary: 2 hours of effort, 0 sales.
Failure #3: Swag-bribery for reviews. Besides the writing I do as Don Broma, I also publish other projects under different names. I'm trying to create a distance between Don Broma's work and my other writing, so I won't mention it by name here (though I'm sure you could figure it out pretty easily, if you wanted to), but a few months ago I felt so eager to get the ball rolling with Kindle sales that I tried to harvest readers from my other projects. On a blog I've set up for my self-published zine, I posted an offer to give a free copy of the newest issue of the zine to anyone who was willing to read and review The ElectroLive Murders. It wasn't a very effective offer, in the end, which didn't surprise me--the audience for my zine is probably pretty different from the audience that might be interested in Don Broma's writing. Only one person took the bait (thanks Brady!). Statistical summary: 2 hours of effort and $2 invested, 1 sale.
Failure #4: Out-of-the-box promotion. Realizing that more conventional forms of ebook promotion are already pretty saturated with the efforts of desperate fools like myself, I decided to explore less traditional promotion ideas. I also figured that people who like mysteries (The ElectroLive Murders is a mystery/sci-fi story) might be receptive to and/or appreciative of "intrigue-oriented" encounters. With those thoughts in mind, I came up with two out-of-the-box promotion ideas: writing on dollar bills and placing business cards. The writing on bills idea--which consisted of writing "Who killed Franklin Moore? Kindle Search: electrolive"--made me a little nervous, though I couldn't find any specific law stating that such actions were illegal (there are laws saying you can't destroy a bill, or make it unsuitable for circulation, but bills with writing on them circulate pretty freely, so I figured it wouldn't rank as a crime). In the end, I didn't go very far with it. The other idea--of printing up business cards for a character in The ElectroLive Murders story, and then placing those cards in locations where they might be found by Kindle owners--was a bit more time consuming, and involved a minor cash investment (lots of places print cards for free, but you still have to pay shipping and handling to get the cards delivered). I went forward with it anyway, printing up 250 cards, but I sort of lost interest (notice a trend here?), and have only placed around 30 of them so far. Still, I'm guessing that a fair amount of people have seen either a marked bill or a card, and there haven't been any sales since I put them out. Statistical results: 3 hours work, $5.50 invested, 0 sales.
Failure #5: This blog. Blogging as a means of self-promotion is widely practiced, and a lot of people swear by it. Hoping to take advantage of anything with a decent chance of helping sales, I've started this blog. So far, after 5 weeks of posting, I'm getting an average of 2 hits a day. Not exactly widespread effect. My guess is that the easiest way to start increasing the size of your blog audience is by commenting on other people's blogs, but I'm not interested in just spamming people's sites, so I've been trying to find like-minded authors who've posted something I honestly want to comment on. So far, I haven't found much. Statistical results: 10 hours work, 0 sales.
Obviously, I haven't gone very far with all of the above attempts, and I'm guessing that more effort would produce more results. You haven't really failed until you've stopped trying, right? On the other hand, dumping lots of time and energy into promotion isn't especially attractive to me--I'd rather use what little free time I have for writing. So for now I'm musing about other promotion options, in hopes that something else I come up with has a better ratio of time/energy invested to sales produced. The main thing I'm thinking about doing next is temporarily making The ElectroLive Murders available for free, but I don't want to do that until I've got my next novelette Cool Blue on Kindle, too, and I'm still waiting on the cover for that. I'm also open to other suggestions, so if you're one of the 10 people who will stumble across this blog post, feel free to make a suggestion in the comments section.
3 comments:
Part II
Even at 99 cents, the list of well reviewed books grows exponentially. The economics of becoming a known author are that you need to do absolutely anything to become known. You need people to be waiting for your next book. I have no idea how Michael Connelly, Lee Child, et al got their first books out and read so people learned who they were way back when. But I bet they spent a lot of time traveling, their publisher spent a lot of time pushing the books to book stores. And how many good books got that same extensive treatment and still did not get enough people to read them, and the authors faded away.
Don Broma, I do not know you, but someone you trust needs to have a heart to heart talk with you about marketing. I am betting that over your cut of 99 cents (I don't know what Amazon's cut is) you are missing out on most of the sales you could have generated. You spent some number of hundreds of dollars to be on the email service, and then sabotaged your efforts over how many pennies? At the least, you desperately need reviews on your first book. I suspect you are already writing a second book, and wondering why what is wrong with the first one because it is not selling the way you expected. You may be a good author (or may not). But you clearly need to read more so you can learn some basics about marketing.
Robert
rmccaffertyy@hotmail.com
I continue to be fascinated at the world of being an author. The whole Kindle thing lets you see a lot of what that life is like. How important things like editing and promotion are. And how different authors respond to this new world of publishing. Some clearly believe that if you have a good plot and a way with words, you should find success. If there is anything Kindle has taught me, it is that this scenario is the rare exception, not the rule.
First, of course, is my ongoing complaint about new e-book authors who do not go through (or pay or trade someone for) the drudgery of editing. Reading what was written without paying attention to plots, only to grammar, spelling and the like.
Then there is the side of promotion. I have read articles giving advice to authors in the print only world about what it takes to get the attention of a print publisher of books. E-books open up other methods of promotion, some of which I like, some of which are annoying.
This is getting weird. I had to break this up due to size limits. What starts as Part II ended up being part 3. This is part II
A common way to promote, especially to the higher volume readers, is to use the services that send out emails offering books at a temporary low price, usually somewhere between free and $1.99. And in the genres I like, I am quite sure that if I were just a bit less impetuous, I would find more good books to read than I could ever find time to do. The services I am signed up for, to receive such email offers, give me an aggregate of a dozen or two options a day in the above price range, but at least 3 or 4 daily, often more, that are free. And most of them are well rated in Amazon's reviews.
So today I saw a book being promoted. The summary of the plot sounded good. So I went to Amazon to see the reviews. There are no reviews. And it is the author's first book, so I cannot even go on reviews of previous works. I then went back to the email. The book is not free. Now, I respect that the author would like to make at least a little money. But in the business of being an author, the competition is seemingly endless and getting this book is a complete crap shoot.
It turns out, the promotional price on the book is 99 cents. I know I am cheap. But so is everyone else on these promotional email systems. When there are nearly endless books out there free, ones with good reviews, why would I waste even 99 cents on a book/author with no history?
art I
I continue to be fascinated at the world of being an author. The whole Kindle thing lets you see a lot of what that life is like. How important things like editing and promotion are. And how different authors respond to this new world of publishing. Some clearly believe that if you have a good plot and a way with words, you should find success. If there is anything Kindle has taught me, it is that this scenario is the rare exception, not the rule.
First, of course, is my ongoing complaint about new e-book authors who do not go through (or pay or trade someone for) the drudgery of editing. Reading what was written without paying attention to plots, only to grammar, spelling and the like.
Then there is the side of promotion. I have read articles giving advice to authors in the print only world about what it takes to get the attention of a print publisher of books. E-books open up other methods of promotion, some of which I like, some of which are annoying.
A common way to promote, especially to the higher volume readers, is to use the services that send out emails offering books at a temporary low price, usually somewhere between free and $1.99. And in the genres I like, I am quite sure that if I were just a bit less impetuous, I would find more good books to read than I could ever find time to do. The services I am signed up for, to receive such email offers, give me an aggregate of a dozen or two options a day in the above price range, but at least 3 or 4 daily, often more, that are free. And most of them are well rated in Amazon's reviews.
So today I saw a book being promoted. The summary of the plot sounded good. So I went to Amazon to see the reviews. There are no reviews. And it is the author's first book, so I cannot even go on reviews of previous works. I then went back to the email. The book is not free. Now, I respect that the author would like to make at least a little money. But in the business of being an author, the competition is seemingly endless and getting this book is a complete crap shoot.
It turns out, the promotional price on the book is 99 cents. I know I am cheap. But so is everyone else on these promotional email systems. When there are nearly endless books out there free, ones with good reviews, why would I waste even 99 cents on a book/author with no history?
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