David Neth's Blog, page 12
October 15, 2015
Erie, PA
Image Source: WikipediaI love to travel. So last week I decided to take a day trip with a friend of mine to Erie, PA, since it’s only about two hours away from where I live.
Erie (as I’m sure you know because you bought and devoured my book, The Blood Moon) is the setting for my Under the Moon series.
Why Erie, you ask?
Funny thing: When I was a teenager I thought it was stupid that people would set books in their hometowns. That, and I wanted to create a fictional town so that I didn’t get anything “wrong.”
You see, I knew what I did and didn’t relate to. I knew that at 15 I didn’t have a lot of experiences, so I wanted to stick with what I did know: living in a small town, less than an hour away from a mid-sized city.
That was the world I wanted to create for The Blood Moon (then titled The Lewis Brothers). However, once I got older and was really up to my elbows in edits, I found myself limited by the fictional small town I created.
In a small town, everyone knows everyone. Hiding their witchcraft would be a bigger challenge. In a small town, they didn’t necessarily have the luxury of public transportation, so they had to have a car.
These problems prompted me to change the setting from Sawens, the fictional town outside of Erie, to right in the city of Erie. That move especially paid off when I went to write The Full Moon last year.
Erie also has the gorgeous Presque Isle State Park right next to it, which created a place for the witches to battle some of their foes during the colder months when nobody is there, typically.
Since I went in October, when The Blood Moon starts, our first stop, Presque Isle, was basically empty. What I didn’t realize is that Presque Isle is basically beach town. I lost count of the number of beaches that lined the shores and I can only imagine how packed they are in the summer when the city wants to breathe some fresh air.
At one point, we wandered out onto one of the beaches and watched the waves. There was no one else around. I found myself saying, “Yeah, they could’ve fought some people here. Especially in October.” At least I got that right.
Next we went to Arlington Rd, where the Harpers live. The large Victorian house the boys live in with their aunt on Arlington doesn’t exist—obviously. But really, there aren’t any Victorian houses on that street. All the houses are really nice, but not the style I had described.
Also, that neighborhood certainly looks friendly, but nothing like I had envisioned in my mind whenever I wrote about the Harper house. I did, however, get something right. Around the corner, on Highview Boulevard, there is a small brown house that Holly lives in with her mother’s friend, Margaret. That exists!
After we left Arlington Rd, we went downtown. Overall, I was…underwhelmed. Downtown was certainly nice, despite the so-so weather, but it wasn’t the full-city feel I had envisioned when writing the books. The buildings were taller than I have in my hometown, but they weren’t exactly skyscrapers. Luckily, I hadn’t used that word in any of my books.
Besides that, everything was really interesting. I almost felt like I had stepped into the Under the Moon world and would see the characters around any corner.
Image Source: Trip Advisor
We went to Gannon University, where something happens in The Full Moon that you’ll read about this February, and then went down to the pier to find dinner while we waited for the sun to fully set.
By time we got down to the pier, we had almost no dinner options (the place is probably very popular in the summer), so we ended up eating in the Sheraton where something else happens in The Full Moon (okay, okay, Kathy and Will have their first date there).
Image Source: DeviantArtAfterwards, we intended to go to the top of the Bicentennial Tower, but it was locked, so we just ended up standing at the end of the pier where Will and Kathy’s first date gets interesting in The Full Moon.
The trip was great to see the world I had been writing in firsthand, even if I did get a few things “wrong.” I suppose that’s the beauty of fiction. You never get anything wrong.
In the future, I might just stick with what I know and base a series in a place that I live or know very well. It might work, it might not. We’ll see when I start that series. For now, I need to finish the Under the Moon series.
Image Source: Flickr
October 9, 2015
My First Promo
It’s been two months since I first published The Blood Moon and since last Sunday’s “lunar event,” if you will, was a supermoon blood moon (that doesn’t sound right, but I’m sticking to it), I figured it was the perfect time to run a promo. At a savings of $3, I figured I’d see a moderate bump in sales, even with limited promotion.
Well, I was wrong. Despite making up a cool ad and tweeting/posting about it for about a week before, I sold zero copies. I was disappointed, to say the least. But, I sold potentially five print copies, which I actually get more money for (at a retail price of $13.99, I get about $3.78 of that from Amazon, as opposed to $2.75 from an ebook). I suspect that those print book numbers might actually be from August that is a result of delayed reporting. I can’t prove that, though.
So how did a discount like that result in no sales? I have a few theories as to what I did wrong and how I plan on correcting my mistake for future promos:
I don’t have a large enough readership yet – I was mostly advertising to folks who had already bought my book. I should be focusing on getting mailing list subscribers, not sales right now. With only one book out, it’s no surprise my sales are abysmal.
I didn’t pay for any promos – The sites I did advertise with weren’t even close to the heavy hitters. I set myself a rule that I won’t pay for promos until I have at least three books out in the same series, so I signed up with all of the free promos I could find (although, I’ll admit, I was a bit lazy when looking for promos). In general, the lists my promo was sent to and the websites they were on were not generating a lot of traffic themselves, which left my prawny little promo to travel by word-of-mouth, of which, I have none at this moment.
My ad didn’t feature my book cover – I got artsy with my ad and didn’t include my book cover. In fact, I think this may have killed my promo. Sure, my cover is strewn all over the place, but the advertisement featuring my sale should’ve included my book cover and it didn’t. How were people supposed to know they had the right book by reading my ad?
I didn’t post in between promo alerts so it looked like spam – I’m not an avid poster/tweeter. I mostly just forget about it. I’m a little jealous of how easily it comes to some people who give just little snippets of their life every day or so to remind people they’re still around and to give them a glimpse into their personal life. When I do think to post or tweet, I ask myself, “Who really cares what I’m eating/doing/wearing?” So that prevents me, but I’m going to work on the social media thing. The one thing with this promo that I didn’t realize until I looked at my Twitter page and saw my last five photos were of the ad I designed spamming people that my book was on sale. That’s not effective. That’s annoying, and I didn’t realize it was annoying until I saw the photos. Perhaps if I mixed it up with some regular social media content, it wouldn’t look so spammy? I don’t know. Something to think about for the future.
Would I do another discount? Absolutely, but I’ll definitely wait until I have my next book out. Maybe even wait until I have the third book out too and do a promo as part of a release strategy for the third book (i.e. “Get all three books for $0.99 each!”). I would only be getting $0.35 per sale from that promo, but right now I just want eyeballs and readers. I can raise the price later. And if my print books keep selling, I’ll be making a nice profit from those. And there’s audiobooks too.
This makes me wonder about the value of Kindle Select for new authors. I want eyeballs and if I can keep my 70% royalty rate while doing a countdown deal (one that Amazon helps promote), I think being Amazon exclusive for a short time might be well worth it for some new readers. In the end, I’m winning if I can add more readers to my mailing list who will buy future books at full price.
My First Promo
October 8, 2015
Introducing my new formatting service!
When I first started looking into self-publishing, there were so many pieces of the process that I was immediately overwhelmed. There are so many things to consider with a level of expertise that I just simply didn’t have.
Luckily, I found wonderful people to help my put together a professional product. I hired out my copy editing and cover design, but one thing I took on myself—and did a great job at, if I do say so myself—was the interior paperback and ebook formatting.
Not only did I take it on, but I enjoyed doing it. I know that is not the case for all authors, but other authors might love creating their own covers or editing their own work. I need help for that, but not formatting.
That’s why I’m now offering my print book formatting and ebook file conversion services under DN Publishing—a budding small-press that I started.
I think the package of a book helps enhance the reading experience. You already have a great story and a killer cover. Let me take it one step further and create a stunning and simple design inside.
I focus on “neat and organized” designs that will draw attention to your story. I can do any size manuscript for most retailers and I accept any genre.
My prices vary by word count and service requested. I do have combo offers, so ask about those!
To see samples, click “Formatting” using the “DN Publishing” dropdown.
Please let me know if you’re interested! I hope I can be a part of your indie publishing career!
October 7, 2015
Introducing My New Formatting Service!
October 2, 2015
Understanding Keywords with Stella Wilkinson
One thing I noticed after my first month of publishing is that my sales basically came to a halt. Another thing I noticed is that I very much did not like that. So, I tried to come up with ways to increase sales while not spending any advertising money. I discovered that the keywords I entered upon submitting my book for publication on Amazon could actually get me into better search results (think SEO for Google) and even better categories.
Keywords are still somewhat foreign to me, so I’m going to use the post I found on KBoards that helped me adjust my keywords to explain. Stella Wilkinson was unfortunately unavailable to be a full-on guest blogger, but she gave me the “OK” to post parts of her thread to my blog to help out readers. Her advice has really helped me out, and I hope it helps you out as well. Take a look below.
While I think that covers and blurbs generate sales, your keywords generate people looking at the book in the first place.
Firstly I would say that one word keywords are essentially useless. If “LOVE” is one of my keywords, then they are too broad to get much return. If I type “LOVE” into Amazon search, will my romance novel appear on the first page? Will it even appear on the first 100 pages? No. It will get me nowhere at all! Using such generic terms will not help people find your book.
I used to have: “Teen Romance, young adult love, high school boys,” stuff like that. But even though all those terms are relevant to me, they also got lost in the “noise” of all the other authors with the same thing. You need to rise above the noise, but still put in keywords that people might use to search.
The key is to find keywords that are popular but not too popular. But remember, it isn’t how many people search for those keywords, it is how many hits those keywords produce. If it is millions then your books will be lost. But you want to find the keywords that millions of people are searching for and yet are not being over-used.
I absolutely know that sounds difficult but it isn’t. What I mean is — if you search for “Love” in books, you will get millions of hits, but if you search for “Werewolf Love,” you will get a much more specific list of products, if you narrow it again and search for “Werewolf and Mermaid Love,” then you should get quite a small list of hits as I can’t imagine there are millions of books in that niche (if any!). So you would, in an ideal world, basically want something between search two and search three. See how I’m trying to narrow down a search to something that is a popular search but does not create a huge list of relevant products? You want your product to be the one that comes up at least on the first page of products that are relevant to the search.
For my book, Halloween Magic & Mayhem, I have used “Paranormal Romance,” but then specified further using: “Paranormal Romance Witch Werewolf,” so if people want a book that covers witches and werewolves in love then I’m up there. Then I cheated and put: “paranormal romance witch werewolf zombies ghost shifter love.” I basically used what we call on here “keyword stuffing” to cover my bases. The romance is between a witch and a werewolf but there are zombies and ghosts in the story and the werewolf is a shifter. So I show up even if they are searching for a slightly different term. If they are searching for a “zombie romance” I show up. They will quickly see that I am not a zombie romance, but they might be intrigued anyway as the book is a romance and there are zombies in it. Do you see what I am doing? I use repetition to ensure that I get close to the exact search term they might put in AND I keyword stuff to make sure that I at least have a combination of the words they put in.
People usually search for terms, not for one word, so put terms in. If your book is about a human and an alien falling in love then try something like: “Paranormal love story book,” “alien romance sci-fi love,” “paranormal science fiction romance,” “fantasy ebook alien romantic fiction,” “non-human romance relationship alien lover.” See how I am using lots of different search terms for basically the same words? That’s because you want to capture that market, you want to appear when people specify what they are looking for.
If you were searching for a book like yours what would you type into Amazon? Now try it and see how many results you get. You don’t want to pick words on their own in a saturated genre (like “love,” “romance,” or “science fiction”) because you will never show up. Equally, you don’t want to waste time with keywords that no-one is searching for. So it is a balancing act.
You need to take ten minutes and do some searches, you want to find terms that produce under 10,000 hits but more than just a few hundred. You need to decide what this figure should be, based on how niche your genre is.
Now, you don’t need to have the exact phrases that people are searching for, as keywords work together, and you get seven of them. But you do want to have ALL the necessary keywords if at all possible. The whole point of keyword stuffing is so that whatever phrase they type in, as long as you have the relevant keywords, then you should show up. The more spot on you are with what people search for, the more likely you will come up on that first page of results. So no, it doesn’t need to be the exact wording, but I do think it helps! Basically, I think that you want to have the exact words but in any old order in your keywords. So make sure all relevant words are in there and get stuffing!
They also serve one more purpose, which is to get you in the right “categories.” So when you are done with keywords relevant to search terms, then you should also have a quick think about keywords that are category specific. For example, if you want to appear in the category “Short Stories>Alien Landings>England” then you want to put that phrase in as a keyword. The best way to locate these is to do a search for a popular book that is similar to yours and see what categories they have gotten into. You will be surprised by some of the categories but a lot of people search that way, so it is a good idea to pay attention.
Amazon will actually help you with this. There are pages in their help with guides, for example I might use this one:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A1XEN0SRCO1KPB
I can not recommend strongly enough that you at least go and have a look at some of the search terms that they suggest for your own category!
Okay, now I’m going to drill it down even further. Those of you that are already running for the hills — stop at this point and just do the bits above. Because those are the basics of how keywords seem to work on Amazon.
Now…If you have more than one book in a series, you can use tighter, more specific keywords for your second book (which will of course lead people back to your first book). For your second book, you can use some more unusual terms, and find smaller categories. You want words that people search for that are relevant to your book, but perhaps are not so popular.
For instance, going back to my Magic & Mayhem series, I will stuff book one with all the more common terms about witches and love, and use phrases like “Coming of Age first kiss love teen romance,” stuff like that. But I will stuff Book Two with keywords I couldn’t fit in for book one that are more specific, like: “Magic witches witchcraft Wicca pagan worship ceremony nature-worship moon goddess sorcery wizards wand occult” (all those are just one keyword). This is to direct the more niche market to my books and also to get me into some of the very small categories that I might even hit a number one spot in, which is fantastic because it really increases visibility for the whole series.
Do you see how vitally important they can be? They shouldn’t be generic and ignored! They work on a lot of levels for you. I only learned this very recently so I’m still updating a lot of my books, and playing with combinations, and doing new searches I think of or discovering new categories I want to be in, but I see an instant upswing when I get it right 
Stella’s most recent book, Bend it like a Bookworm, was released on September 22nd on Amazon. She can also be found at www.stellawilkinson.com and on Twitter at @fantasyscribble.
Understanding Keywords with Stella Wilkinson
Be the first to see my new book cover
I have officially wrapped production on my second book, The Full Moon! Everything’s all set to go for publication February 6, 2016. I should be getting the first printed proof in the mail tomorrow, which will be very exciting, as always.
I’ve been teasing about the cover reveal for The Full Moon for a week or two now and I’m ready to share it with all of you!
But, there’s a catch…
I’ll be revealing it exclusively to my mailing list on Saturday, October 10th.
“I don’t need anymore emails…”
Don’t worry! My emails aren’t just some hyped-up retail rewards program email that you forgot you signed up for to get 20% off a pair of jeans! I actually have things to say when I email you!
In this case, I have something to show you, too.
Members of my mailing list are always the first to know about new releases, sales, giveaways (*hint hint*), and updates on where I stand with my writing. (Also, it’s an insurance policy for me. If Amazon and all the other retailers somehow crash and burn, I still have my mailing list to get in contact with.)
“I don’t know. Can’t I just look you up on Facebook and Twitter?”
I mean, I suppose you can. But then you’ll be the last one in the know. Awkward.
Okay, so to spice up this deal, for those of you who join my mailing list, I’ll send you my short story, Snow After Christmas (which won’t be released until November 7th), for free. No charge to you. The only thing you need to do is sign up for my mailing list.
Be cool. Sign up for my mailing list. Be in awe when you see the cover for The Full Moon. And get yourself a free holiday story.
September 27, 2015
Get The Blood Moon for $0.99!
While I’m hard at work on my next couple projects, I thought I’d offer a special promotion for The Blood Moon for a limited time.
In case you’re not aware, the next blood moon will take place tonight and will be visible to most of the world. Hopefully it’s not cloudy wherever you are and you can catch a glimpse of the real blood moon.
If you can, snap a picture and post it on my Facebook or Twitter page for a chance to win a signed copy of The Blood Moon. You can also email me your picture if you’d prefer that.
As a way to “celebrate” the unique lunar experience, I’m dropping the price of the ebook of The Blood Moon down to $0.99 for two days only! Today and tomorrow you can get my book for less than $1! Make sure to snatch this deal while it lasts!
(Fine print: This deal is only available on Amazon.)
In other news…
I’ve finished formatting the print version of my second book, The Full Moon (February 2016). Now my designers are working on the cover, which I will reveal sometime next month, so stay tuned.
The audiobook of The Blood Moon has also been in production, and I will let you all know when that is available. It’s my first audiobook, so I’m really excited to hear the finished product.
September 18, 2015
Royalties and Realty: My First Month
One of the things I was most excited about when I first published was to see how my book would do among the different retailers. Sales are so fickle and different for each author that it’s hard to guess how your book is going to perform. I have been planning this post for a long time now and I’m glad that I’m finally able to write it. I don’t know if this will be a monthly feature, but I plan on frequently sharing my numbers because I think it helps put everything into perspective.
First off, I have to say that I am thrilled about how my first month went! I sold over 30 books, although mostly to friends and family, but that’s still about $80 (I’m still waiting for the final Createspace numbers to come in and for Amazon to convert the currency). I sold books in the US (obviously), the UK, Germany, and Canada. I sold at least six paperbacks (although I think the reporting might be off because I definitely know I sold more than that…) and even got phone calls from people wanting to buy copies off of me personally. Exciting stuff!
I am a little disappointed that I only sold books on Amazon (and paperbacks on Barnes and Noble, although those numbers haven’t shown up yet). I figured that starting off with wide distribution would help me, but I think it may have actually hurt me. If I knew I wasn’t going to sell at any other retailers, I could’ve enrolled in KDP Select and used that to gain exposure or even tested out a few different price points. It makes me wonder if I should launch my second book in KDP Select in order to gain exposure for the first book. That’s something I’m seriously considering and will likely do, just because I can always go wide later.
Another thing I tried, but I don’t think helped, was get a short story up as soon as I could to help build my catalog. The problem is that it’s not related to The Blood Moon at all, so I don’t think it’ll do much to help the sales of that book. Still, without any promotion, Snow After Christmas has gotten three preorders. Not bad for such a short time. After all, it’s still summer.
Selling 33 copies in your first month isn’t bad. I’ve gotten three reviews so far (two 5-stars and one 4-star) and I’m playing around with keywords to see if anything helps. At the end of the month I’m going to run a $0.99 promo to see if that’ll help kick off sales, but if not, The Full Moon goes up for preorder in November after Snow After Christmas is released. I guess at this point, I need to focus more on building my catalog and sales funnels and less on promotion. The sales will come.
If you’re a fan of urban fantasy, witches, or anything paranormal, pick up The Blood Moon for an adventure that is just beginning.
If sweet holiday romance is more your thing, check out my upcoming short story, Snow After Christmas. Only $0.99!
