KDP Select and online advertising so far (now)

Like I said, I've had Trang enrolled in Amazon's exclusivity program since December 1st. So, do I have any updates?

At this point I've gone from zero borrows to one borrow ($2 in revenue!), so I feel comfortable in my opinion that you ain't gonna get a lot from the borrow program absent other enticements.

While I think (? data is not conclusive) that advertising is having some effect selling copies of Trang, it's not a large effect, so I'm also comfortable in my opinion that one should keep one's click bid as low as possible with a long-term pay-per-click campaign for a not-free book.

At this point, I'm skeptical that there's anything KDP Select could give me (since I am shut out of buying ads on the major sites promoting KDP Select free days) that I couldn't get by making Trang free.

Why's that? Well, I am seeing a significant uptick in sales of Trust. Not, you know, enough to pay off a mortgage or anything, but still...significant. Especially given that Trust has always been somewhat of a laggard. But you give away a bunch of copies of Trang, and...some of those people click on that back matter link and get Trust! I love it when a plan comes together.

So, really, the question for me is--do I make Trang free as soon as it comes out of KDP Select, or do I wait until Trials comes out? The original plan was to wait until the third book, but...remember how I was #3 on the science fiction: series free list? That might be exposure worth having. Maintaining such exposure would presumably involve occasional relatively expensive advertising campaigns plugging a free book, but it might be worth it (they weren't that expensive). Trang (or really, any non-Illuminati activity) is not a significant source of revenue for me anyway, and expanding the fan base may well pay off when a new release comes out.

Wow. Sounds like I've almost talked myself into it....

How does quality shine through?

I was recently reading something about a reclusive-but-successful author, and people were commenting on how wonderful it was that some authors refuse to market and just let The Quality of Their Work Shine Through, and that contemporary authors should do the same.

I've heard this quality-of-the-work-shines-through argument before--for example, when someone decides not to proofread their book, because The Quality of the Work Will Shine Through!!! and I guess blind the reader to all the stupid grammatical errors.

The problem with deciding that you will just let The Quality of You Work Shine Through is this: THAT IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN IF NO ONE EVER READS YOUR BOOK.

Literary quality is not actually a form of light. There is no bright halo surrounding the really good books. Literary quality cannot shine through unless someone 1. knows your book exists, 2. picks it up, 3. reads it, and then 4. talks it up.

In the past, authors didn't have to market because publishers did it for them--or, at least, that was how things were supposed to work: Publishers sent books to reviewers. Publishers paid co-op to books stores for better placement. Publishers got extracts published in literary magazines. And in return, publishers got most of the money.

It wasn't that there was no marketing going on. It was just that the authors weren't the ones doing it, or at least not all of it.

It's really easy for people to think that their contribution to a success was the only one that matters. That's true of editors, marketing people...and writers! We do the writing, so we tend to think that good writing = successful book.

But if you write the best book in the entire world and then hide it, who is going to read it? If you put your book out without a cover and no support, who is going to find it? Readers aren't psychic--they don't know that a great book exists unless they're told.

Marketing isn't easy, and it doesn't come naturally for most people. But marketing isn't only for inferior writers. The notion that good-quality writing doesn't have to be marketed is simply bullshit--there's a strategy for marketing literary fiction (New York Times book review; NPR feature) that is as by-the-numbers as the marketing done for the most crassly commercial book imaginable. And the idea that so-and-so is such a superior writer that he just sits on a mountaintop next to Bob Dylan, contemplating his own awesomeness, probably came straight from so-and-so's marketing department.

Ah, that Goodreads weirdness....

Since I'm going to have a second pair of free days for Trang later this month, I thought I would set up a pay-per-click campaign on Goodreads.

The good news: I actually managed to do it--never a sure thing with Goodreads.

The weirdness (because there is always weirdness with them): Well, it's not really a pay-per-click campaign, exactly.

See, instead of you giving them your credit card number and them charging you for the actual clicks you get, you get charged in advance for the number of clicks you think you might get.

I mean, they try to help you with this, but...unsurprisingly, I got MANY MANY more clicks with my Facebook campaign advertising a free book than I am with my current campaign advertising a book you have to pay for. So when Goodreads is telling me, "Your budget is too high--you should lower it," I'm not sure what to do, because I doubt their little automatic guesstimator is able to take into account the fact that it's an ad for a free book. I did lower the budget, because I'm getting charged in advance, but now I wonder if the campaign won't max out far too early.

So, what happens if you pre-pay for more clicks than you actually get? I'm not sure. According to the Web site, they'll just extend your campaign until your payment is used up. The problem with that is, the book will be free for only two days, so the ads saying "FREE FOR KINDLE!!!" can't run for a week. You can put a strict limit on how many days the ad runs, but then what happens if you've overpaid? I didn't see any information about that. Standard business practice, of course, would be to refund the difference, but this is Goodreads. I'm going to let the ad run, and if it doesn't max out, I'll pop in to edit it once the free days are up.

Conclusions? Initially I was thinking that I'd be a good little scientist and not run a Facebook campaign at the same time, but now I think I'll run on both--that way if Goodreads does max out early, I'll still have Facebook working for me. Also, as seems to be the case with pay-per-click in general, Goodreads' pay-per-click service seems much better suited to a long-term campaign than a short, two-day one.

How that click thing works

I posted earlier about my first pay-per-click advertising campaign, and Jim Self commented, "I bet someone out there has crunched the numbers on what level of bid gets the best results."

If you're scratching your head as to what he's talking about, when you book a pay-per-click advertising campaign, you bid a certain price that you will pay if the ad is actually clicked on. Bid too low, and your ad never actually gets shown to anyone--which is what happened my first day. Bid really high, and your ad will get shown to everyone, right away!

Sounds like a good idea to bid high, right? But it's not, for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, you need to look at your potential revenue per customer--you don't want to bid a dollar a click if you only have one 99-cent book out and can only possibly make 35 cents off each customer. The math isn't always that simple--my first pay-per-click campaign was for a free book, after all, but the hope is that they'll buy copies of Trust. Some already are, which is awesome, but I have no idea what the conversion rate is, so I can't sit down and calculate my exact return on investment. But it really doesn't matter--I'm more likely to cover the cost of the campaign (which wasn't much--$71.22) if I keep the bid price low.

The other reason to bid low is that you set a daily budget, and once your campaign hits that cost, it closes down for the day. So, if you have a daily budget of $100, and you bid a dollar a click, your ads will stop showing after 100 people click. If you bid 50 cents a click, 200 people can click before your campaign goes dark. Ten cents a click? One thousand people!

If you're running an ad campaign where the click takes someone to where they can buy your book, then clearly you want to maximize clicks. In that scenario, getting as many clicks as you can before your money runs out matters far more than having the ad shown to everyone quickly.

The tricky thing is that, as Lindsay Buroker notes, Facebook suggests a range of bids per click that is very high. Lindsay said that Facebook suggested she bid almost a dollar per click; she wound up doing fine at 20 cents. I'm assuming that costs have gone up because of all the post-holiday advertising, because I initially bid 30 cents, and the ad wasn't being shown. I raised it to 50 cents, and the ad got shown fairly often.

That was for a short-term campaign--I was only running those ads for two days, so I couldn't wait and see if the bid price was going to drop. Now I've started a new campaign advertising Trang at its normal price, and I've set the bid price at 40 cents, which gets it shown some, but not a lot. I'm fine with that because this is a long-term campaign, so I can check on it every now and again to see if the bid price should be raised or lowered.

So, just to demonstrate potential-revenue-per-customer thinking:

The campaign for free copies of Trang cost me 50 cents per customer and has the potential to make me $3.44 per customer (assuming 100% buy through for both books, which is absurd, but we're talking potential here). That means if one out of every 6 or 7 clickers goes on to buy Trust, I will break even.

The current campaign for Trang is costing me 40 cents per customer and has the potential to make me $5.44 per customer. That means if one out of every 13 or 14 clickers goes on to buy both books, I will break even.

If I only had Trang out, the first campaign would be strictly a money-loser, and the second campaign would have only the potential to make me $2 per customer (one out of every 5 clickers would have to buy Trang for me to break even). If Trang was 99 cents, the second campaign would have only the potential to make me 35 cents per customer, which would make it a money-loser at my current bid price of 40 cents.

If Trials was already out and priced at $4.99, the first campaign would have the potential to make me $6.88 per customer, and the second would have the potential to make me $8.88 per customer.

In other words--get back to work!

Who's clicking?

When I put together the original pay-per-click advertising campaign I did on Facebook, I went to a lot of trouble to target people with likes I thought would fit well with Trang--social science-fiction, Babylon 5, etc.

But yesterday, when I first noticed that no one was clicking on the ad, and before I figured out that the ad simply wasn't being displayed, I though the problem might be that these people didn't read e-books. So I quickly threw up an identical campaign that was aimed solely at Kindle users. (Again: Beat that, dead-tree advertising!)

Well! Today both ads are indeed being displayed, but still none of sci-fi crowd is clicking on the ad. The Kindle folks, however, are clicking. (And they appear to be actually grabbing free copies--Trang is now #3 in science fiction:series, which kind of cracks me up. Can I claim it's a bestseller now?)

So, definitely ads for the next set of KDP Select free days will be aimed at Kindle users. Trang is available as a paper book, so I'm gonna keep things going with the sci-fi crowd, since it can't hurt (and if they don't click, it doesn't cost me a dime--seriously, pay-per-click ads are kind of like e-books, where it's more trouble to take them down than to leave them up). But it looks like it'll be well worth it to have specific campaigns for each kind of e-reader user--Kindle, Nook, Kobo, whatever.

The reason I didn't initially market to Kindle users is that marketing sci-fi to a general audience often isn't very productive. But with pay-per-click, as long as I am very up-front about the kind of book it is (and I'm using the "clever return to the social sci-fi of yesteryear" line), the audience seems to self-select. Since (unlike with display ads) I don't pay for those who don't click, it doesn't matter if only 1% or 0.1% or 0.01% or 0.001% of the people who see the ad are interested.

KDP Select and online advertising so far

I put Trang into KDP Select (Amazon's exclusivity program) December 1, and today was my first free day, which I promoted doing my first online advertising campaign. So I thought I'd post about how all that is going.

Lots of people get lots of different results with KDP Select, but there are two advantages to it: 1. People enrolled in Amazon Prime can borrow your books for free (you get paid for the borrows), and 2. You get to make your book free.

Some people make so much money off the borrows that they don't even bother with the free days, but nobody has borrowed Trang since I enrolled it, so I get the feeling that's one of those things (like sale pricing) that works if people already know about the book or the author. Certainly in my case it's not going to do the job all by itself.

But I wasn't going to let the free days work all by themselves--I was running an advertising campaign on Facebook!

Well, it turns out I have something to learn about pay-per-click advertising. My first glimmering of this came a couple of days ago when I was reading an old post about online advertising by Lindsay Buroker. She wrote:

With Facebook, I tried some ads to direct people to the free-ebook tab on my Facebook Author Page. It didn’t cost me much (a couple of dollars most weeks), and it did get some people to click the links on the free-ebook page....

Note the bolded bit. With a pay-per-click campaign, you pay only when people click on your ad. If nobody's clicking, it doesn't cost you much to run one--you know, just a couple of dollars a week.

In other words: Better-known author than me + free book = little interest on Facebook. Doesn't sound so good for me, does it?

Compounding the problem, I didn't bid enough for the ads, so for most of today (which is Day 1 of a two-day period of free Trang) Facebook didn't actually serve up any ads. I'm assuming the price is especially high today because there are a lot of post-Christmas promotions going on. Anyway, I bumped my bid up (which you can do mid-campaign--beat that, dead-tree advertising!), and now Facebook is showing to ad to people. But they haven't clicked on it.

Which, apparently, is par for the course with pay-per-click ads! The upside is that this ad hasn't cost me a thing (and of course I don't know that I'm not benefitting from getting my name out there--I just know that people aren't clicking). It definitely seems to me like pay-per-click is better suited to a long-term campaign--I might not get very far running one for only two days, but given the low cost, I could keep one (or many) going pretty much indefinitely. Good to know!

Anyway, despite the Facebook campaign being kind of a flop, the free book is doing OK, presumably helped by me finally getting around to posting about it on Kindle Boards and Tweeting about it. Trang has even spent most of the day in the top 10 among free books in the science fiction: series category!

I went to see how it was doing in the science fiction: space opera category, and...whoops! It's not there! Yoikes--apparently when I got the books put into the science fiction: series category (which requires special dispensation), they lost their other categorization. So I put them back in science ficiton: space opera, but they're not showing up on that list, presumably because I didn't do that until late in the day. We'll see if Trang shows up there later on--I'm assuming science fiction: space opera is a bit more competitive that the science fiction: series category, what with it having 7,419 titles instead of 326.

Down with friction!

I just wanted to point out just as Amazon is successful in no small part because it makes it easy for people to buy books, authors need to think that way, too.

Someone is trying to give you their money! Don't make it difficult!

Even removing small barriers can make a big difference, which again, is something I think Amazon gets better than most other retailers--you want to make your books easy to find and easy to buy.

That can take some thinking. For example, when Brian S. Pratt began marketing his book:

I first looked around for a good place to advertise and found Project Wonderful. They suited my needs perfectly; ads would run on websites for pennies a day. I then created a coupon code that would discount my first book for free. I then created a series of ads stating that a free copy was available, all they had to do was copy down the code and go to Smashwords for their free copy. Well, that bombed and bombed badly. Came to realize that I was asking way too much of customer. In order to get my book, they had to go to Smashwords, create an account, put in the code, then download.

People are inherently lazy about shopping, especially in this world where everything is a click away. I pondered on the lack of success with my coupon code, then realized that if I just made the book free, they would only have to click the link in the ad, then download a free copy. Simple. (Keep it Simple-Stupid) I made it so easy for people to download my book, that downloads jumped. Subsequently, sales for books 2-7 jumped as well.

If it’s free and downloading is just a click away, people will do it.

Is it hard to redeem a Smashwords coupon? No. But that doesn't matter. You can't fall into the trap of thinking that people "ought" to be smart enough and diligent enough to figure out how to buy your book. They're looking for entertainment, not another hassle in their life.

That's why when I do back matter for my books, I link to the next book at the retailer where the first book was bought (although if the book is distributed through Smashwords, I don't know where it was bought, and I have to link back to Smashwords itself instead of the retailer--this is one reason I'll probably work with more retailers directly once I'm out of KDP Select). I don't link to the book pages on this Web site, even though I've got sample chapters and whatnot--I want the person to be able to go click, click and have their copy of Book 2 without having to think about it.

Likewise with advertisements--I mean, right now, that's a no-brainer because Trang is in KDP Select, and I'll be advertising the free days there. But even if that wasn't the case, I'd rather run multiple campaigns (TRANG FOR KINDLE! TRANG FOR NOOK! TRANG FOR KOBO!) than have one campaign (which isn't any cheaper if it's pay-per-click) that sends them to a page here, and then they have to find the links, and then figure out what edition they want, and then go over--oh, hey, Joe e-mailed me back! Yeah, Joe, I'd love to go for coffee! I'm heading out right now!

Oops. Bye-bye sale, have fun with Joe!

And while I just complained about how unrealistic it is for retailers to expect people to hack Amazon's cloud service, guess what? If ever I do wind up selling e-books on this Web site, I'm going to include instructions about how to do that, with them and with whoever else offers that kind of service.

Whatever it takes to make it easy to buy.

You do know that you have to work at this, right?

The Passive Voice has this great baffler of a post today where a guy explains that he doesn't self-publish because 50 years ago, people didn't self-publish (and the industry hasn't changed a bit since then), plus he threw up a book without a cover and didn't do anything for it and it didn't sell. So there.

The comments are hilarious because it's a bunch of people saying, "I know this guy is hopeless and doesn't want to learn, but if he would just" and then there's an ENORMOUS list of things this guy could and should be doing for his book.

The thing that confounds me about people like this (and he's not the only one) is that they say, I did nothing for my book, and SOMETHING COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED HAPPENED: I got nothing results. WAAAAHHHH!!!!

And I'm the first to admit that I have done next to nothing for my books, and I have next-to-nothing sales, but this does not surprise or frustrate me, because I do not expect something for nothing.

The first time I put Trang up for sale, it didn't even have a cover--just like that guy's book! And do you know what the very first thing to pass through my mind was when I finally saw my book--my wonderful book! that I sweat blood for! finally published after years of frustration!--up for sale with a generic cover?

"No one's gonna buy this. It's got no cover!"

And even when I had the cover up, did I expect Trang to sell? No, because I knew that having just the first book in a series out would turn off a lot of readers, who would fear that the series would never be finished. So I chose not to market it, and this single, first-in-a-series book with no marketing behind it didn't sell much.

This was not a shock to me, because, as a rule, I do not expect something for nothing. 

Sure, sometimes you do get something for nothing--sometimes a writer will have a big hit despite doing absolutely nothing for their book. But such events are very rare indeed and should not be expected, ever. Even when a writer gets surprised by an unexpected success, they usually immediately get working to help that success along as best they can. You can claim that such efforts are unnecessary, but I'm sure such a writer would counter that, after all, you can't expect something for nothing.

Of course there's a learning curve with self-publishing, but you know what? A lot of this stuff, once you do it (get it formatted properly, get a real cover, get a good description, find a suitable category, put some links on your blog), it's done with--you don't have to do it again. I am just now starting to explore on-line advertising, but I can tell you this much: An on-line advertising campaign takes all of five minutes to set up--the hardest part is typing in your credit-card number.

Let's put it this way: I recently was at such a loss for time-consuming publishing chores that I began recording an audiobook. This is not the action of a writer who is being overwhelmed by publishing tasks.

Yes, I will hopefully be doing more now that Trust is out, and figuring out what works, but again, I just don't see tweaking on-line advertising campaigns as something that will take a ton of time--you run one campaign with one tag line or on one Web site, run another with or on another, and discard the one that works less well. Lindsay Buroker can tell you all about it.

Of course, it's possible that I won't be doing more--maybe things will get crazy in my personal life and leave me unable to finish Trials, record the audiobook version of Trang, or even take five minutes to set up an advertising campaign. That would certainly make me sad, but if such things occurred, I would not be the least bit surprised if sales of Trang and Trust were damaged as a result.

Because (say it with me), you can't expect something for nothing. Or you can, but you just wind up sounding like you're freaking three years old.

Nothing is really wasted

If you haven't noticed, I haven't written in a while, primarily because life circumstances are not allowing it.

The funny thing is, this off time has resulted in my figuring out some plot problems in Trials that were bedeviling me, and gave me some good ideas for making the book's climaxes more climatic. So this "wasted" time, this time not spent writing, has actually turned out to be really beneficial, and when I finally get back to writing (which I will), I will do so feeling newly excited about my book.

That got me thinking about how very few things are truly wasted. For example, I "wasted" a good deal of money marketing at sci-fi conventions--and indeed, from a marketing perspective, that money was very poorly spent. But from a professional-development standpoint? Well, I probably wouldn't be doing an audiobook right now were it not for the money "wasted" at GeekGirlCon.

And remember that very successful indie writer I met earlier? This person initially put tremendous effort into social media, garnering gazillions of Twitter and Facebook followers, and then discovered that those followers were not their actual audience.

What did this writer do? Well, they started a business promoting indie books. It turns out that having a business that promotes lots and lots of other people's books affords excellent opportunities to promote your own as well!

While having big social-media presence among authors might not have directly led to sales, I'm sure it helped to build this book-promotion business--which did lead to quite a lot of sales.

You just never know. Crabby McSlacker, who just produced a book based on her Cranky Fitness blog, writes: 

I said goodbye to Cranky Fitness back in the beginning of 2010, with no plans to return. I had tried to turn it into a part time job, but alas, couldn't get quite enough ad revenue to swing it.  But I left the blog up, and checked back in every quarter or so with an update... just in case.  Then after a year and a half (an eternity in blog time) I missed it too much.[. . .] Plus I'd reinvented myself as a Life Coach and figured it might make sense to use Cranky Fitness to let people know about that.  Quitting back in 2010 was totally the right thing to do! And yet, so was returning.[. .  .]

Did I regret all the time I'd spent on Cranky Fitness the day I quit?  You betcha!  Do I regret it now? Not one bit.  Life is weird that way.

Before you think this is all mushy Pollyannaish goo, it turns out that a willingness to be a little wasteful, as well as a willingness to work with what you have (which includes the results of previous "wasted" efforts) are both traits of successful entrepreneurs. According to the Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

Research by Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, suggests that learning to accommodate feelings of uncertainty is not just the key to a more balanced life but often leads to prosperity as well. For one project, she interviewed 45 successful entrepreneurs, all of whom had taken at least one business public. Almost none embraced the idea of writing comprehensive business plans or conducting extensive market research.

They practiced instead what Prof. Sarasvathy calls "effectuation." Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then imagined the possible ends. Effectuation also includes what she calls the "affordable loss principle." Instead of focusing on the possibility of spectacular rewards from a venture, ask how great the loss would be if it failed. If the potential loss seems tolerable, take the next step.

Progress report

Did some noise removal, but I was feeling pretty out of it (no sleep), so I scheduled my first Facebook ad to promote my first KDP Select free days. This is my first foray into online advertising, so we'll see how it goes.

End of year data dump: Counting costs

It's not to early for this again, right?

Note that I do not include the cost of a new computer (my old one was a decade old and was having serious problems, so I probably would have replaced it anyway) or organizer dues for my Meetup group (that's really a personal expense).

Spent creating Trust:

$568.75....copy editing

$9.51........proof from CreateSpace

$25.00......expanded distribution on CreateSpace

$603.26....TOTAL

Spent creating audiobook of Trang:

$69.18....microphone

$19.70....pop filter

$88.88....TOTAL

Spent marketing:

$46.23........hard copies of Trust and Trang for reviewers

$19.93........postage to mail hard copies to reviewers

$65.00........Westercon admission

$20.00........Westercon parking

$152.15......Westercon flyers

$32.04.......GeekGirlCon admission (one day)

$216.22.....GeekGirlCon flyers

$55.00.......Foolscap admission

$23.54.......Foolscap flyers

$45.00.......Norwescon admission

$675.10.....TOTAL

GRAND TOTAL: $1,367.24

Which is actually more than last year's $1,308.68.

The major costs were copy editing (which was considerably more expensive this time around because the copy editor did a style sheet and a lot of checking for series continuity) and all those science fiction conventions, which I've noted are not a particularly effective means of marketing. In fact, I debated over whether or not to include the Norwescon admission as a marketing cost, because at this point I really consider going to a con as more of a personal indulgence. Nonetheless, you can watch how I educated myself regarding the cost of flyers: The Westercon flyers were expensive because they were four color, the GeekGirlCon flyers were expensive because there were 4,500 of them, but the Foolscap flyers were cheap, cheap, cheap (if remarkably ineffective--but that had nothing to do with their cheapness).

Beyond good and bad

M. Louisa Locke has another good post up: It's supposedly about marketing for the holidays, but it's really about figuring out how to reach readers who like your kind of book.

She writes:

Over time . . . I started to notice that fans of the books also kept mentioning that they liked my books because they were “clean,” that they could recommend them to anyone, of any age, that they were a “comfort” read, that they were “gentle,” etc. It dawned on me (head slap) that these readers were saying they liked the books because they fit the format for a cozy mystery.

The common definition of a cozy mystery is that there is an amateur female sleuth with a partner––sometimes love interest––who is in police or legal profession, a community of secondary characters––including animals, and no explicit sex or violence. My series features Annie Fuller (widowed woman supplementing her income as a clairvoyant), Nate Dawson (her romantic partner and a lawyer), a cast of interesting characters (the people living in Annie’s boarding house––including Dandy the Boston Terrier), and the murders occur off-stage while the sex stays carefully within the bounds of 19th century middle class propriety.

At the same time, the few negative reviews I got mentioned the tameness of the romance, frustration that the mystery pace wasn’t fast enough––which also seemed to suggest these readers were looking for a book with either the more explicit sex of an historical romance or the tension of a thriller. Clearly I needed to make sure that the potential audience for cozy mysteries would find my books, and those who wanted something more racy or thrilling would look elsewhere.

This is precisely why I think it's important to read reviews and listen to reader feedback--not so you can beat yourself up over your shortcomings as an author or so you can say, "Well, that reader was stupid," but so you can figure out how to reach readers who will like your book. If Locke were insecure, she might have responded to the criticism by striving mightily to make her next book racy and violent (which--no, I just don't see that working for her); if she were dismissive she would have just bemoaned our violent and racy times.

Instead, she had the emotional distance and analytical propensity to realize that her book had this quality of coziness that divides mystery readers, and that if she appropriately labeled and categorized her book, it would get her more happy readers and fewer miserable ones. It also helped that she didn't think in terms of value judgements like "good" or "bad." Think about it: Is the quality of coziness good or bad? That's clearly an absurd question, because whether coziness is good or bad is strictly a matter of taste. And taste varies mightily among readers, even those readers who like mysteries.

Thinking about your book this way is a little like reaching the point where you realize that romantic relationships don't typically fail because one person is right and the other person is wrong: They fail because the two people are a bad fit. You want to attract a reader who is a good fit with your book--that's what really matters.

Biennial data dump: What sold when & where

I put Trang up in January 2011, so it's been almost two years since I began e-publishing. I recently decided to actually look at all my sales reports (a first for me). My sales have never been stellar, but I thought it would be interesting to break down what sold when and where. These percentages are on a per copy basis, not a revenue basis, but I did not count freebies.

These sales are limited to e-books, and for good reason--I have sold almost no paper books.

Untill this month, my books have been available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, which distributes to a variety of retailers (I've been on expanded distribution most of the time). The Smashwords data complicates things, because at least in the spreadsheets I downloaded, they don't tell you the exact date of when a sale through a retailer occurred--they just give you the year. So sales data within a year is approximate.

So what's selling where? Everything's pretty much selling on Amazon--89% of sales there; 11% on Smashwords (through a mix of retailers). Barnes & Noble has yet to sell a single copy.

Which title sells more? I have two titles out, Trang (which has been out since January 2011), and its sequel Trust (which has been out since June 2012). Trang accounts for the lion's share of my sales--fully 76% of copies sold are Trang, only 24% are Trust.

So Trust was kind of a bust, right? Oh, no. Before you decide that, you have to ask...

When did you sell your books? The short answer is: After June 2012. Obviously all of my Trust sales occurred after that date, since that was when Trust was released. But surprisingly, approximately 45% of copies of Trang were sold after June 2012, meaning that I have sold almost as many copies of Trang in the five months following the release of Trust as I did in the 17 months before the second book's release. I have also sold more copies of Trang since Trust was released than I have copies of Trust. Overall, approximately 60% of my sales have accrued since the release of Trust last June--and only about 10% of my sales took place in the first six months of 2012.

Well, what about promotions? Hard to say. I put Trust on sale in its first month of release and it did fairly well that month, but then again sales probably would have been relatively strong at release anyway. And its impossible for me to tease out the effect of promotion like con flyers (although sales were not particularly strong in July and August, when I did my most aggressive efforts) or putting a Smashwords coupon on Kindle Boards from the effect of simply having a second book out (which implies to readers that I'm actually going to finish the series). It's not like I did absolutely nothing to promote Trang before June 2012, but my focus was certainly different--I ran an ad and sought reviews (and while I don't think that particular ad worked, I still think reviews are important). I can say that putting Trang at 99 cents with no other promotion had a negligible impact--I didn't actually sell no copies during those five months, but I sold very few.

Well, exactly!

This by Mike McIntyre (via Lindsay Buroker) is just spot on: "More than a quarter of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels have Amazon ratings of less than 4 stars." Among the under-4s are Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and Tender is the Night, which happens to be my favorite book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

McIntyre writes:

It amuses me that if Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce were still alive and wanted to run free promos, they'd need special dispensation to get shout outs from Pixel of Ink and Ereader News Today.

It amuses me much less, since I just put Trang into KDP Select and was hoping to promote its free days. What's especially annoying to me is that some of those places won't even let you buy advertising if your book is under four stars (or 4.2 stars--how they determined that was an acceptable level, I don't know).

And gee, yes, I am close to four stars, so I could just get a couple of my friends to give the book five stars and get over the hump that way, but no, no, no, I have to be ethical.

What was it Anne R. Allen said about combating paid reviews? Oh, yes:

Encourage review sites to change their policies if they require books to have a certain number of 4 and 5 star Amazon ratings to be featured. Sites like Pixel of Ink and Digital Book Today are great—but they insist on 10 four-or five-star Amazon reviews for a book to be considered for review. Not easy if you're a new writer launching a new book. Easy if you're a fat cat who uses a review mill. Because these ratings can now be purchased so easily, the arbitrary barriers do nothing but exclude new authors who don't cheat. 

Branding confusion

Dean Wesley Smith once did a post on pen names where he made up a list of reason to use one.

On the list was:

-Your Real Name Is Stephen King

Let me think… Oh, yeah, write under a pen name. That name is taken.

If your real name is Stephen King, Smith's advice may strike you as unfair. Stephen King is YOUR name, after all, and maybe you're like me and Stephen has been a traditional name in your family for centuries--centuries!--and who is this dopey little horror writer to come along and make it so you can't even use your own damned name!!!

But none of that matters, because if you write under the name of Stephen King, you will quickly discover that there are only two kinds of people willing to talk about your book. The first kind are the people who bought your books expecting a Stephen King horror novel, who are going to be very upset that your book is not that. The second kind are the people who figure out before they buy your book that you are not the Stephen King they were expecting, and they will assume that you are some kind of horrible scam artist who is trying to take advantage of fans of the horror writer.

The same thing applies to titles. I recently saw a book--well, let's pretend that the book was a murder mystery set in the fashion world, and the title of the book was Murder in Vogue.

Why would you do this to yourself? If you're really unlucky, Vogue is going to sic their lawyers on you. If you are slightly less unlucky, you are going to find that there are a lot of readers who either, 1. buy your book thinking it has something to do with Vogue magazine and get really pissed off when they realize it doesn't, or 2. realize by looking at your non-Richard-Avedon cover that your book has nothing to do with Vogue magazine, and take a pass on it because they think you're sleazy.

(Yes, I realize Madonna released a song called "Vogue" and did just fine, but at the time she was one of the most popular singers on the planet. She had her own brand, which was extremely strong, strong enough to basically eclipse the Vogue brand. She wasn't some unknown.)

Instead, you could have brainstormed a little more and given your book another, equally snappy title, like, say, Dead Is the New Black. You could have titled the series the Fashion Avenue Mysteries, and behold, you are building an independent brand with a life of its own! (And yes, there's another Dead Is the New Black out there, but it hasn't been around for over a century the way Vogue magazine has.)

I realize there's this desire to piggyback onto something--hence the many [Random Number] Shades of [Random Color] titles--but nobody takes that kind of book seriously. It's like Shaving Ryan's Privates: It indicates to readers that your book is not meant to be anything lasting or significant.

Or it might indicate to readers that, like Nora A. Roberts, you're a scumball who is seriously trying to mislead them. That sort of thing can really hurt your career--you can change a pen name, but as people have noticed, having your account blackballed by retailers like Amazon is indeed a serious handicap.

There's no need to rush

I read two blog posts, one right after the other, by two writers who are both feeling SO overwhelmed by all the stuff they have to do. Just reading those things gave me knots of sympathetic stress.

I've written for a long time, and I think it's important to think hard about how writing is going to fit into your life--after all, if you do it right, writing is something that you can pursue well into old age.

Music is that way, too: You can enjoy music in all sorts of ways throughout your life, and you can do that without ever becoming a full-time professional musician. You can be a doctor who sings bass in a variety of choirs, as was my father, and no one blinks an eye at it.

There seems to be a resistance to approaching writing that way, I assume because of the myth that getting published is some marker of quality. And since self-publishing has rather suddenly begun to offer the possibility of turning writing into lucrative full-time work, people think that they must exploit that possibility. They feel like they gotta do their damnest to hit the jackpot. They gotta write write write write write write!!! and they gotta promote the hell out of everything all the time! Including when they're writing! You just write with your right hand and tweet with your left--don't be a slacker!!!

And don't do anything else! You have no other interests now--you're a writer! You can't possibly expect to get anywhere if, say, you're a doctor who, instead of singing bass in choirs, writes poetry in your spare time. That's just crazy: You can only be one thing!

There was a time where that kind of insane focus was totally necessary--go back and read some of Joe Konrath's pre-self-publishing posts if you don't believe me. But that time is past, and clearly it was yet another symptom of how dysfunctional publishing had become--it's not like things were going swimmingly for Konrath despite all his work.

The problem with the old paradigm was, you either had to sell like crazy, or you had no career whatsoever--your books would never see the light of day. For Konrath, it was scramble or die. But nowadays, if you're not a bestseller, so what? If your book just trundles along, occasionally selling a copy here and there (or not), it's not going to kill you. No one is going to stop you from publishing your next book because your current one isn't selling--believe me, if that was the case, Trust would never have come out.

The other thing is, in the old days, when a book had only a few months to make it, it made sense to scramble to promote it for that short period of time. But now there are no limits to shelf space, and no time limits on your book. So if you're scrambling, there's no end to it. E-books are forever. You will burn out long before your book ever leaves the store.

Which means you need to think long and hard about what you "have" to do to promote, since you'll be doing it for the foreseeable future. The thing I really like about Lindsay Buroker's approach is that she molds tasks to her own personal preferences--she doesn't spend huge hunks of her time doing unrewarding stuff just because someone else told her she has to. There's stuff she hires out, there's stuff she does in the most-efficient way possible, there's stuff she does in her own way, and there's stuff she just does not do, because she's not comfortable doing it. She always looks at these tasks through that paradigm: Do I want to be doing this?

Even writing tons of books--the go-to approach for people who don't like marketing--is only worth doing if you enjoy writing tons of books. Maybe you don't want to do nothing but write all day. Maybe you only have an idea for one book. Maybe you actually enjoy what other people sneeringly call your "day job." I've always preferred freelancing to regular full-time work, but mine is by no means the only way: Despite his fame, Harvey Pekar never left his dead-end job as a file clerk until he retired. His job didn't interfere with his art, and the structure of it helped keep him sane, so he sensibly held onto it.

We get it drummed into our heads that we have to have ambition, that we need to grab that brass ring, that when opportunity knocks, we'd damned well answer the door. What doesn't get mentioned is that after you get that brass ring and open that door, you still have to live your life. You're still you, and you can still be made miserable if you're not careful. Publishing has gotten a lot more flexible; there's no point in ruining that with your own rigid expectations.

Let's do it better!

Camille LaGuire made a good comment on the Passive Voice. The post was another one about the never-ending paid-review scandal, but LaGuire points out that "simple group behavior" can trip up an algorithm, too:

Let’s say there is a large forum frequented by authors who are all interested in promoting their books, along with some book bloggers who are into the same culture....

They all review more than your average reader. And everybody who reads their books and interacts with them on blogs or elsewhere hears again and again how important reviews are to authors, so they also have a “bubble” in their reviewing behavior. They also all submit to the same book bloggers. And they all have an overlapping readership, and even though they avoid mutual reviewing… the authors and their fans tend to read a lot of books from other authors in the same forum. And so their reviews are clustered in the same pool.

From the algorithm’s standpoint, it sure looks like a mutual admiration society, and in some ways it is. It’s not intentional, but people are using leverage to get an unnatural number of reviews, and the reviews are created with a different pre-conscious agenda than most reviews are.

And this pattern shows up really obviously in an algorithm....

Your best bet is to not to work against what the goals of the algorithm are. The goals of the algorithm is to NOT favor one book over another but to make every book equally available to the people who would most want it. Therefore, the best way to work with the algorithm is to work on good labeling, appropriate covers, titles, blurbs — and, of course, good content.

Or alternatively, you can just keep coming up with new leverage strategies when Amazon cuts off the old ones. That’s perfectly legit. Just don’t be all surprised when Amazon cuts those off too.

I liked this because I think there's a temptation for indies to revert to the clubby sort of reviewing that marks a lot of traditional publishing--after all, that's what we know and what appears to have worked for them.

But the clubbiness of that world actually limits the usefulness of those reviews--a lot of people don't bother with, say, The New York Times book reviews because they know that paper only reviews certain kinds of books, so if you like, say, potboilers or romances or erotica, you'll never find anything useful there. Amazon works as a retail outlet because it's good at getting things in front of people that they actually want--it doesn't worry about who's in the club, it just offers up the goods. And readers have clearly responded quite favorably to that, which benefits us all.

Filthy, filthy promotions!

Passive Voice has a great rant today inspired by a pretty silly post bewailing how indie writers are devaluing their work with the 99-cent price point and freebies and giveaways in exchange for a reader promoting the book in some way.

The original post is very over-the-top and contains the hilarious line, "Traditionally published authors aren’t stooping to these tactics." (You know, like sock-puppet reviews and selling cheap books.) And PG comes back in a way I think is awesome, pointing out that if you actually value literature and reading, then the rise of indie publishing should make you very happy.

The funny thing is, the original post was written by a bestselling author who works as a consultant for other indie authors. And the other day I met a bestselling author who works as a consultant for other indie authors who has embraced things like the 99-cent price point and giveaways with equal if not greater stridency. And of course I can think of two authors right off the top of my head who credit their success in large part to the savvy use of freebies. (So, you know, there's a lesson about blindly following "experts" here.)

But the thing that really struck me about the original post was the writer's clear discomfort with the concept of promotions.

Which is odd, right? I mean, no one writes articles in Retailing Today that say, "For God's sake, DON'T PUT YOUR STUFF ON SALE!!! NO FREEBIES!!! DON'T OFFER YOUR CUSTOMERS A CHANCE AT A GIFT CARD IN EXCHANGE FOR LIKING YOU ON FACEBOOK!!! YOU'RE DEVALUING YOUR BRAND!!!!"

Sure, a company can devalue a retail brand via promotions, but it has to be a VERY high-end brand for that to happen (or the promotions have to be so terribly mismanaged that they make people feel like they're being ripped off). To be vulnerable, the brand also has to thrive on recognizability--if I have an Hermès bag, you know I paid a freaking arm and a leg for it. That is a major reason why people buy Hermès bags. Hermès does not put its bags on sale.

I don't know how an author can possibly create that kind of brand. If I'm reading Stephen King on my Kindle, how the hell are you supposed to know? If I'm reading Stephen King in a hardback, it's not like you're going to look at that and say, "Ooooh, that's a Stephen King book! Gosh, I wish I could afford one of those!" You're not going to sneer if I got it on sale or--shudder--at an outlet. That is completely irrelevant to your perception of the book's worth. (It's true that books can be status objects, but they are supposed to be indicators of internal worth--I read poetry because I am such a sensitive soul, not because I'm mad flossing.)

All that is why book consumers are somewhat insensitive to price--for most readers, avoiding a bad book is more important than saving a couple of bucks.

As a result, if your book lacks reviews and recommendations, dropping the price probably won't help much. But it's also not going to hurt your brand--people might look at a dodgy 99-cent/free book, think "Looks dodgy" and avoid it. But they're not going to associate that with your name and refuse to buy all your books forever because six months ago one of your titles was 99 cents or free. (I know I've spoken out against always having books at 99 cents, but that's because I think it causes the writer to devalue the financial worth of their business, not because I think it causes the reader to devalue the literary worth of the books.)

If someone likes your stuff, or is curious about you because other people like your stuff, or otherwise thinks your book might be worth reading, doing a promotion can tip them over into buying. Which is a good thing.

Believe it or not, some people will argue that getting more buyers through promotions is not a good thing. These are usually big believers in finding your 1,000 True Fans, who apparently will give you all their money and will spend all their time promoting you and will carve your name on their foreheads with a screwdriver and will hide in your bushes chanting your book titles until the police come and haul them away.

I think it's fine to focus your attention on cultivating (non-scary) fans (who respect boundaries)! That's great! Read The Gift of Fear while you're at it!

But in addition to your True Fans, there are other audiences out there you can sell to. I wouldn't spend big hunks of my time chasing bargain-hunters, because your margins are going to be lower with them, but if someone will only buy your book if it is 99 cents, aren't you better off getting that 99 cents from them than getting nothing at all? For every tech company like Apple or Intel that make money catering to True Fans who will pay a ton of money for the latest thing, there are a dozen companies that make money catering to the more price-sensitive people in the mass market. And unlike a tech company, you can 1. tap into both markets, and 2. convert the tightwads into True Fans--there are very few people out there who won't pay more for a book they know they're going to like.

Seeking beta

You know, after writing Wednesday's post on what to do when you can't write, it occurred to me that I don't really have any beta tasks going on right now--production on Trust and Trang is wrapped up, and while I have some marketing plans (I'll be moving Trang to KDP Select at the beginning of December), it's nothing that's should be very time consuming.

I had two potential beta tasks in the back of my mind: changing the layout of the paper books and producing a Trang podcast. Changing the layout is going take a lot of time, involve doing a lot of something I do not enjoy, and the end result (a paperback that costs $9 more than the e-book instead of $10 more) doesn't strike me as something that will move the needle on sales. Doing a podcast costs a little money, will take a lot of time, and may or may not be something I enjoy, but it has the potential to reach a new audience.

Long story short: Yesterday I ordered a USB microphone. The Blue Snowball is less than $70 now!

Do I smell opportunity? Or rotten fish?

Last night I met someone who is a big believer in the 99-cent price point. This person has had tremendous success with their own books, and feels the price point was a major factor in that success. (Don't worry--once the books started to take off, the person raised the price, thereby sparing me more cerebral trauma.)

Their further evidence in favor of that price point was the fact that they help writers with largish backlists put out e-books, and the 99-cent price point has been very helpful in driving sales for those people as well.

The person was very adamant about the virtues of that price point, which was odd to me, because 1. they were not John Locke, and 2. my experience with the 99-cent price point was much more negative. I had Trang at 99 cents for a fairly long time last year, and I don't think it sold a single copy during those months. And you have people like Elle Lothlorien who saw sales increase every time she raised her book's price. Enough writers have had similar experiences that there's even a whole theory that the 99-cent price point is actually harmful, tainting your work with the odor of off-price sushi.

But then I thought about how I respond to the 99-cent price point when books by an author I am interested in are offered at that price. I jump all over those suckers.

And that's what I think is happening here. The type of writer this person services has a backlist of several books. In other words, these are writers who have already done the work of building a fan base.

In that case, the process presumably goes something like this:

1. Author releases backlist as 99-cent e-books.

2. Author's fans go, "zOMG!! SQUEEE!!! That's a great price!" and BUY BUY BUY.

3. Author's books shoot up Amazon's charts.

4. Amazon's algorithms do the rest.

But I think for somebody new...eh. Then I think you do run the risk of smelling a little fishy. You'd need to get a lot of "this book is good"-type indicators before dropping things to 99 cents is going to move the needle.