Over the past year or so, like many, many
other authors, I’ve been trying to sell my two ebooks. They are not only available
on Amazon, but I’m going to focus on Amazon because that is where most of the
sales occur. I’ll try to answer the following question – how useful were the
following in selling ebooks?
- Website
- Title
- Cover
- Pricing
- Amazon author page
- Excerpts from the book
- Amazon tags
- What other people bought after buying yours
- Blogs
- Reviews
- Adverts in magazines (online and paperback)
- Interviews
- Publishing stories
- Social Media
- Price changes
- Giveaways
- Kindle Nation Daily
Website
Before my first book came out as an ebook, I set up a website. My books are science fiction, and I had an idea for
the website look, but first I had to find a website designer I could trust.
Luckily, I was already published in non-fiction and was a member of the UK
Society of Authors, and they gave me a few reputable contacts. I settled on
Annie Pennington, and over the course of about a month, and a bunch of designs
we finally homed in on one, and I decided to incorporate my blog into it. All in, it
cost around £1000, but everyone said it looked good, and professional,
and I consider it money well spent. However, I don’t sell direct from the
website, I just have links to Amazon etc. But there is a bio and more info
about my books, and some free short stories. To me the website is not about selling, but
it is an enabler, and can help a reader decide whether to purchase or not, and show them how serious a writer you are.
Title
You need to check early on that your title
is not already out there (and your author name, incidentally), otherwise you may
find that when people search for you or your book that they find another one
instead. The title should be catchy.
Cover
Can you judge a book by it cover? Well,
even if you shouldn’t really, people will, especially if you are an unknown
author. My ebook was published by a small ebook publisher, and I loved the
cover design they did, but for some reason they put a gothic-style font on it,
rather than the jazzy science fiction one I had on the website. This to me was
a downside, and still is. To me the picture is eye-catching but the font looks
a bit cheap and almost hokey. If you’re publishing it yourself then you have
complete power over the look and feel, and of course absolute responsibility
for it. In either case, take your time, it matters, especially with some of the
later ways of selling I’ll come to. It becomes your ‘brand’. When the first book came out later in paperback, I got the cover re-done.
Pricing
I don’t ‘buy’ free ebooks, or ebooks for
99cents, because I figure they are cheap for a reason (lack of quality). Maybe
some of them are really good, I’ll just never know, because the few I looked at were pretty awful.
Pricing with paperbacks used to be logical
– there were printing costs, advertising, cover design, author royalties,
distribution and warehousing and retailer costs, etc. Mass trade publications
therefore hit the market at around $6.99 because this allowed a reasonably
cheap entertainment experience (how else could you get a week’s pleasure for
such a price?) and gave the publisher a profit margin and an author enough
money to live out a meagre existence in a Parisian garret on cheap red wine, French
bread and Gauloises. With ebooks, the price market got turned on its head.
Some famous authors ebooks are $16.99,
which has to be around 80% profit margin for the publisher (because there is no
printing, warehousing, distribution, etc.), and is pretty outrageous. On a production cost
basis, an ebook should be under $5, and to be competitive should be $2.99. Both
my publishers refuse to accept this, but hey, what do I know, I’m just an
author who looks at Amazon every day and sees what sells… So, my advice to
Indie authors, is this. Think about how much you spent on getting it out there.
Did you pay for professional manuscript reviews that ensured quality of the
product, or did you just get your friends to tell you they liked it, and put it out on Smashwords and then Amazon? Did you spend years honing it with
writers groups and workshops, maybe having done an MFA? Well, whatever the case, just put it
in for $2.99 and see what happens J
See ‘price changes’ later.
See ‘price changes’ later.
Amazon author page
Took me a while to realize I needed this,
as many people cruising Amazon may not want to visit separate websites for fear
of Spam, or simply because Amazon is meant to be your ‘one-stop-shop’. It needs
a good picture, short bio, and information about the book. It can help the
reader/buyer make a judgement about whether to trust the book (and author) or not.
Book excerpts
On Amazon, for most books you can read the
first few pages or even the first few chapters. This is indispensable, and it
means that what any agent or publisher would tell you is true, that the first few
pages have to be the best writing you can produce. As a reader/buyer, I always
read the first paragraph, especially the first line, to find out if the author
knows how to write, and has a fresh and interesting style. If I get hooked and
find myself reading beyond page 2, I’m probably going to buy it.
Amazon tags
These are very important. For example, I
read science fiction but not fantasy, nor crime or mystery, and never
‘romance’. But a mystery/crime set in science fiction – well, hell yes, why
not? And interestingly enough my first book was classified this way. My second
was classified as science fiction / space opera. Here’s the important selling
difference: when book 1 hits 20,000 or less (higher) on the Amazon ranking, it
will say, for example #75 in science fiction/mystery crime. The second book
will just say #20,000 on Amazon rating. If either book gets to #10,000, they’ll
both get into say #50 in science fiction / space opera, but the first one will
also by then say #35 in science fiction mystery/crime. Now, any reader can do
the math and realize that they’re still not big sellers on Amazon, but the
point is that they get into the top 100 in certain categories, and they look
more like winners. Also, Amazon may then start recommending these books to
other buyers in those categories. If either book gets as high as say #6,000,
then they will get into the top 100 science fiction scale, and then you start
to rub shoulders with some of the more famous authors. It can have a snowball
effect, and happened to me about a month ago, and was nice to see! So, tags
matter. They help you get noticed. For example, I just cut and pasted this morning's ratings on The Eden Paradox (book 1) and Eden's Trial (book 2), see below, from Amazon.co.uk, where I sell most books. The ranking isn't much different, but book 1 is #72 in the SF/mystery crime bracket. Looks better, right? Which one would you buy, given the choice?
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #17,565 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #72 in Books > Fiction > Science Fiction > Mystery & Crime
This feature is good on Amazon for readers,
but the author has little control over it. For instance, with my second book,
Eden’s Trial, some people thought it came from another ‘Eden Trilogy’ which came
out about the same time as mine, but it is not science fiction, and is more
fantasy/romance. This put people off, until thankfully enough others bought mine and
then bought more science fiction, so that it looks like it is sitting on the
right ‘shelf’ now.
Blogs
It took me a while to get into writing
blogs, but now I usually look forward to writing them. I only write on average
about once a week. My publisher(s) [yes, I have two] tell me to do more
blogging, or guest blogging, but I don’t, because my job is pretty demanding
(about 60hrs per week, usually encroaching into the weekends and evenings), and
if I did more blogging I would not be working on my third novel. But I like
blogging, and I either blog about science fiction or else the art of writing as
I understand it, in the context of science fiction. Blogging only costs time,
and usually sells a few books with each blog. I now see through blogger’s
analytics that quite a few of my older blogs get read, so people are finding my
stuff one way or another. I don’t have many formal ‘followers’ as far as I can
tell, but my blogs get read, and occasionally I get comments, though not that
many. But if they get sufficient interest and get new readers interested in
buying the books, well, that’s good. I often show passages from parts of the
books, or from stories I’m working on, or new sequences from the current
novel-in-progress. That way people really see how I write, and, if it interests
them, they splash out with a few dollars and buy the book(s).
I don’t have so many reviews on Amazon, but
they’re generally five stars, and no, I don’t know all the reviewers. Some of
the reviews are quite detailed, and one even had a ‘spoiler’ in it, but they were
all good so I just left them there. Someone told me to write my own reviews
under false names and email addresses. I said no. I’m sure such practices go
on, but I don’t agree with it. It’s wrong, plain and simple.
By the way, if a book has only 5* reviews,
and lots of them, I don’t trust it. Appreciation by readers is subjective, so
somebody is bound not to be enthralled by your book, so get over it, because
some middling reviews or even a couple of turkeys won’t do you too much harm.
I did use Goodreads to review my book and
advertise it for a year. What happens is that almost immediately they promote
it, and then they get a review done of it, which was fairly honest (I got four
stars), and then they get the review published in at least a dozen places. This did
spur sales, especially in the US where the science fiction market is biggest
and I sell the least books (!?). On a pure numbers basis it wasn’t worth it,
but I figured that the more the book gets out there, particularly to a new and
diverse audience, the more chance that pure ‘word of mouth’ recommendations
might occur, so I don’t regret it, but I think it’s not as good for science
fiction as it probably is for mainstream. Cost about $300 if I recall. I also
felt they delivered what they promised, so fair’s fair J
For my first book, after about nine months
I got it published by a small indie publisher in paperback. I then sent it out
to around ten places (e.g. science fiction journals like Asimov’s and a bunch
of other places) for review as my publisher couldn’t at the time, but after
seven months it’s still not been reviewed. I guess they get hundreds of books
to review, and focus on the more well-known ones. Maybe I don’t know the right
people, as I’ve always felt publishing is a ‘contact sport'. I did get early
manuscripts of each book reviewed by a science fiction author, however, and
used some of the nice things he said about my book (with his permission, of
course) on the back jacket and on Amazon etc., which I do think helped sales.
Adverts
This one was a bit of shock, so much so that it took three attempts
before I learned that splashing out hundreds of dollars on half-page colour
adverts, or as an online glitzy banner on a nice top Scifi website like Analog SF,
sells virtually no copies whatsoever. They are nice to see, however, and I’m
afraid I probably haven’t learned my lesson yet. Oh well, I’m helping magazines
survive I suppose, even if they only rarely accept my stories. I do think it
makes some people check out my website, however, as I always put that in
adverts.
Interviews
I’ve done a few interviews with the writing
scene in Paris where I live, and they are fun, though I don’t think they lead
to sales, they just make you more three dimensional as an author. They also made
me think about how I was projecting the book and re-evaluate some aspects of my
sales pitch and target audience. But like I say, they’re fun. The time they
probably work best is with a book launch, and then getting an interview with a
local paper, for example. When I did a (paperback) book launch in my home town in southern
England in March this year, my sister tried to set up an interview for me with
about six papers, but the papers didn’t get interested (maybe a scifi thing).
Social Media
When I first started, people said “Facebook
sells, sell on Facebook!” It was like a mantra. I didn’t like the idea. I
thought Facebook was about friends, and trying to sell would be a good way to
lose some real ones, and find lots of others who wouldn’t really be my friends,
no matter what Facebook told me. After about six months the mantra changed, and
went like this: “Don’t try and sell on Facebook, or you’ll be a douche-bag!
Sell on Twitter! Sell on Twitter!”
The point is this. There are millions of
people writing and trying to get noticed. Someone like John Locke or Amanda
Hocking comes along and does something different and sells a million. Everyone
then copycats, jumps on the bandwagon and creates so much noise that nobody
stands out anymore, until the next wannabe makes it. So, in a few months the
mantra will probably change again. It’ll be something else. So, I use Facebook
to see what friends are up to. I use Twitter to spread my blog to relevant
communities who might be interested (e.g #SciFi, #Writers, etc.). Occasionally
I tweet if I have something interesting that’s going on, but I usually don’t
spend much time on social media because most of it is so banal, and it stops me from doing what I could be doing, which is writing, and I like to see and talk in person to friends…
Latest request from my publishers is to do
blog tours. But these take a lot of time, and, well, I’m just not convinced.
I’ve done some guest blogs, and it was fun, but no big deal really. Again, for
me, I have limited time. But over the summer I'm going to try it and see, just
to reach some new audiences, and get in touch with other indie scifi authors.
Price changes
Dropping the price can attract people.
Amazon do this sometimes in a laughable way, e.g ‘was $2.99, now $2.78!’ like
anyone would care. However, ‘was $8.99, now $2.99' will get noticed. Of course
the reader will look at the Amazon ranking and if the book is still in
nowhere-land, will not be so impressed. Also, it tends to be a one way street.
‘Was $2.99, now $8,99!’ is obviously not going to endear readers. So, take your
time before you plunge your price. A better option might be the ‘giveaway’.
Giveaways & Amazon Prime
These are normally for a fixed duration,
e.g. a day, three days, or in the case of Amazon Prime, three months. I think
the latter one is daft – you’re going to make your ebook free for three months to a random group who buy lots of ebooks. My publisher for the second ebook did
this, and nothing much happened – it actually suppressed sales, because the
price for non-Amazon Prime readers was very high $9.30 for an ebook by a unknown
author.
However, the publisher then did a three-day
giveaway followed by a price reduction, and this shifted 1400 ebooks in three
days, coupled with my efforts on blogs and twitter, and it triggered a
significant spike in sales on book 1 as well. Because both books rocketed up
the Amazon charts, this then had the desired snowball effect as both books got
into the top 100 Science Fiction category ( #3 in UK, and #20 in US), and so
sales continued to remain high for the next few weeks. I had interesting
comments from people I’ve never met, saying, for example, “I’d never heard of
you but liked the cover and it was free, so I downloaded it. After reading the
first chapter I realised this was quality writing and it was a sequel, so I
immediately bought the first one, and read them in sequence. So, when is book 3
coming out?” Sweet.
Kindle Nation Daily
This is Kindle’s own Facebook-style way of
pushing ebooks to 80,000 readers. I know it works for some people, but I paid
something like $130 for a one-day sponsorship, and it sold five ebooks worldwide. Don’t
know why. Maybe it’s because my books are science fiction, maybe it was the
cover. I’ll never know. But whilst the service was good, and they did push it
out there, I won’t use KND again, that’s for sure.
To sum up, you’ve probably gathered by
now that I’m not big into social media, not big into selling myself, and would
rather be writing novels, stories or blogs than all the rest of the ‘marketing
stuff’, and hanker after the old days when authors wrote and publishers did the
rest (if such days ever truly existed). Still, the books keep selling, so
between the blogs, twitter, a website and having a series of books, something
must be working (I'm hoping it's the writing). I hope some of the info above might help other Indie authors
navigate through the marketing maze and not waste money on things that don’t
work. Just remember two things, both of which are probably true: (1) Publishers will tell you that effort spent
on marketing is more important if you really want to sell, than writing your
next novel. (2) You are defined by what you do.
Good luck!
The Eden Paradox is available in ebook and
paperback on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis ebooks, and Waterstones
UK.
Eden's Trial is available in ebook from
Amazon.
Eden's Revenge will be out for Xmas 2012.
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