David Neth's Blog, page 4

Preorder Blown Away today!

The Under the Moon Series continues this fall! Preorder Blown Away, to be released December 3, 2016! Blaze and Timeout are also available for preorder!

Josh Harper hasn’t used his magic in a long time. Instead, he chooses to help people medically rather than magically. But giving up his supernatural side comes with the sacrifice of his family. With an estranged brother and an aunt he only sees in passing, nonmagical life isn’t everything Josh thought it would be.

His past pulls him back in after his inexperience with magic nearly gets him and a date killed. With no choice but to return to the magical world, Josh must come to terms with his actions and stop blaming magic for his fractured family.

Blown Away is available at these retailers:

Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Google Play

Social Media for Authors

Among the laundry list of things each new author “has to do” in order to be successful, social media is one that comes up often. You may be stressing about figuring out how to tweet or trying to decide what to share to Facebook. And Instagram? Forget it.

The thing about social media is that you don’t have to be everywhere. Sure, it might be helpful to be everywhere, but your #1 job as an author is to write. Give people a reason to find you on social media. At the end of the day, that’s the most important.

If figuring out Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Goodreads, or any of the other social media sites is taking away from your writing time, you’re heading in the wrong direction. If you have a lackluster account at 5 different sites, you’re not likely to get many followers at any of them. But if you have a spiffy account at one of them, readers know that’s where you hang out and are more likely to engage.

That’s not to say they won’t be talking about your books on their favorite social media sites. That’s what you want. Word of mouth marketing.

Even if you only focus on the two biggies, Facebook and Twitter, if you generally dislike it and are bad at it, you’re better off staying away from it. Maybe only use the accounts to announce a new book.

An important thing to remember about social media is its unlikely to sell books. Unless you’re paying for ads. The sites just aren’t designed for that.

The main goal of being on social media is to engage with your readers. Share things that they’d like to see and reply to their comments and interact with them. By showing that you’re a real person and displaying some of your other interests that don’t across in your books, your readers will become more familiar with you and will likely stick with you for the long haul. They’ll tell their friends about your books and that’s when you’ll make new sales.

Like everything with indie publishing, you need to decide what’s right for you. Building a social media presence takes work and time. Time that if you only have one or two books out, might be better spent writing more books.

Personally, most of my attention is focused on Facebook. I don’t care for Twitter, I don’t even have an account on Pinterest, and I really only use Instagram and Goodreads for personal use. Although, I make both of those accounts public. My following at each isn’t very large, but it’s always nice to see the likes and comments when I do share stuff. In the very least, it’s motivation to keep going.

The Harvest Moon is now available in audio!

The Harvest Moon is now available in audio! Available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. Contact me for a free copy!

Getting Stores to Carry Your Book

One of the goals I set for myself for 2016 was to get my books in physical bookstores. Or at least try. I actually forgot about this goal (whoops) until I was editing The Independent Author: Year One. I touch on the results a bit in that book, but I wanted to dive into the topic further here.

For an author, seeing your book in a bookstore is fantastic. For an indie author with no real way to distribute to bookstores, sometimes that dream never becomes a reality.

Let’s back up to May 2016. I was editing The Independent Author: Year One when I read that I wanted to get my book into bookstores. Figuring that that was a dream to be shelved for 2017, I side-stepped it in my reflection for that post.

I moved on to the next post and, like I often do when editing, I got distracted and ended up on Facebook. That’s when I remembered seeing a call for local authors from an independent bookstore about a half an hour away from me. They were having an author event in August so I figured I’d at least call about it. The worst they could do was tell me no thank you.

One of the first things the guy on the phone asked was, “Do we carry your books?” I told him no, and then begrudgingly told him that I was self-published (waiting for the sour response). He just said, “No problem! Most of the authors who do these events are self-published, so you’ll fit in just fine.” He told me to bring in three copies of each of my books so they could get me in the system and they’d set me up for the event.

When I dropped them off, I filled out a small slip of paper that basically listed my books, ISBN, retail price, and my contact information. Just like that, my books were listed with an independent store.

Well, this inspired me, so I called six other places to see if they’d be interested in carrying my book. Three indie bookstores, two Barnes & Nobles, and one 5&10 store.

Basically, the secret sauce to getting my books in bookstores was: I asked.

The people I needed to talk to at Barnes & Noble weren’t there (I guess there’s a specific rep at each store that handles community relations) so I had to email them. I got responses back that same day. The one woman told me that since I publish through Createspace, and therefore my books are “non-returnable” from a bookstore, they couldn’t carry my books. Barnes & Noble doesn’t do consignment like indie bookstores.

What she did offer me was a chance to be a part of an author event later this month. I’ll have to bring copies of my books, but they’re happy to have me.

The other Barnes & Noble rubbed me the wrong way. After insulting my intelligence and my experience (“You know, being an author isn’t just writing a book and uploading it to Amazon…”), she asked me several unrelated questions (“What magazine do you work for?” and “What are you doing to promote your book?”), but basically told me no. Since I was a little pissed, I replied with, “I’m very well aware of the challenges of promoting a book. Thank you for your email. I’ll be focusing my efforts elsewhere.”

Besides the Barnes & Nobles, I was able to get my books into stores in the surrounding area. Unfortunately, there isn’t a bookstore in Batavia (although I’m working on changing that), so the best I can do is 20 miles out.

For all of these places, my books are listed on consignment. We do a 60/40 split, so I get 60% of the profits. They don’t do any special promotion for my books, other than offering to have me for an author event (although I’d have to do the legwork to get people there).

It might not pay off at all, but it’s good visibility. I’ll post about my stats with these stores later.

Go Indie – the book

It’s been over two years since I first started the blog. Initially called “The Independent Author,” I’ve recently renamed it “Go Indie” for a snappier title.

It’s been just over a year since I first began publishing and I thought it’d be appropriate to put everything I’ve learned in my first year into one book. That way, aspiring indie authors who use the Go Indie blog as a resource to plan their debuts won’t have to search through my site in order to find whatever it is they’re looking for.

Not only does the book collect my posts from throughout my first year of publishing, but I’ve updated each post with a reflection after a year in. My opinion of some things changed, my opinion of others didn’t. Basically, in that year I’ve gained perspective and have further defined what type of author I want to be.

I’ve also asked three of my friends to contribute a summary of their first year, so you’ll read about the first year of Sever Bronny, Andrei Cherascu, and Libbie Hawker.

Go Indie: A Guide to Your First Year Self-Publishing is now available across all major ebook retailers. Paperback and audio will soon follow, so stay tuned for the details.

Amazon | iBooks | Kobo | Nook | Google Play

Thinking of self-publishing? Do you have a great book but not sure where to go from here? You’re not alone. Every day, authors are deciding to self-publish with varying levels of success.

Fantasy author David Neth shares his first year experience as an indie author including his mistakes, successes, and plans to grow his business in his second year. Using his journey as a case point, you’ll learn what worked and didn’t work for one author so you can determine what will work for you.

With chapters on writing, editing, publishing, promoting, and everything in between, Go Indie breaks down a typical first year for an indie to help you go from aspiring writer to published author.

Book Review: For Love or Money

For Love or Money, Susan Kaye Quinn’s second book in her Crafting a Self-Publishing Career series, is all about changing your mindset when you begin to write.

This book has great information about writing for love or writing to market. I love the idea that you can do both. Write your money-making books while also writing your “craft” books that could also make you money. Or not.

One of the issues I had with this book is that the idea of writing to market wasn’t fully explained. For the most part it was left to, “Research the market.” She did give an example of how she analyzes new markets to write in, but that method might not work for everyone. Certainly not me.

Another thing that bothered me, like a lot of indie authors, was her general negative feelings toward traditional publishers. They weren’t too bad with this book, but they were present. She’s been traditionally published so maybe she just had a bad experience, but I don’t think that dictates what everyone’s experience will be.

Another thing worth mentioning, and this might be another sign that indie authors can have tunnel vision at times, I read the paperback version of this book. Even though at the beginning of the book she encourages you to pick up the ebook from Amazon for free, she didn’t seem to make any effort in the rest of the book to differentiate between what was intended for the ebook and what was intended for the print book.

I didn’t expect her to include links in paranthesis (although that would’ve been nice), but I didn’t want to see places that were clearly supposes to be hyperlinks. Having an underlined “Click here” with no link does me no good when reading the paperback. She could’ve even just said, “Find more information at…”

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I may even pick up the first book, although I have no immediate plans to do so. If you’re still a newbie, though, I’d start with the first book.

What I Found Most Helpful: Her attitude toward writers and their abilities. “Your results may vary” was a common theme throughout the book. Everyone dreams of a different Dream Author Life and she wasn’t pushing one way or another.

Royalties and Reality: My First Year

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since I first started publishing. In some ways, I feel like I’m still new to this business and have so much to learn. In other ways, I know I’ve come a long way in just one year.

In my first month, I sold 33 copies of The Blood Moon. Obviously, that was higher than normal with a new release and my debut. I’ve had worse months than that and even better months than that. (I sold 50 copies in April and I’m pushing 75-100 for August.)

As far as sales numbers go, I’m still in the small potatoes range of indie authors. I’ll get to the actual numbers in a bit, but first I’d like to discuss the things that negatively influenced my sales:

Ads. I didn’t use them until The Harvest Moon was published, so my marketing efforts were limited to social media, word-of-mouth, and group promos. Now that I’ve experimented with paid advertising and seen some of the results, I’ve factored in an advertising budget for Year 2.
KDP Select. I launched The Blood Moon wide, didn’t see any sales outside of Amazon, so launched my subsequent books in KDP Select, which requires Amazon exclusivity. That meant that my visibility was limited to basically only Amazon Kindle readers. Sure, I had the benefits of Select, but I don’t know how much they actually helped me. Other authors see results from Select and KU, so clearly it works for some people.
Inconsistent series order. I published The Blood Moon and then decided to publish two prequels. By the time I published The Full Moon , I figured it’d be best to reorder the series so the prequels actually served as Books 1 & 2, but I still needed to wait for The Harvest Moon to be published. In the meantime, I didn’t designate whether The Blood Moon or The Full Moon served as Book 1 in the series, so whatever sell-through I would’ve had was lost.
Slow releases. If I would’ve stuck to my series and published in rapid order, I probably would’ve sold more and made more money. But my circumstances didn’t allow that kind of production schedule.

Despite my many mistakes, I managed to sell 356 copies across four titles in one year. Again, that’s an average month for some authors, but for an author who sold 33 copies in his first month (and has sold an average of 30 books a month since), this is pretty big!

Below is a breakdown of how each book did:

The Blood Moon (August 2015) – 132 sold
Snow After Christmas (November 2015) – 106 sold
The Full Moon (February 2016) – 101 sold
Limelight (May 2016) – 17 sold

For the most part, novels sell better than short stories (and make more money). And naturally, the longer a title is available, the longer it has to sell.

Snow After Christmas is funny, though. I expected to see sales similar to Limelight for it, but for some reason it sells well. I must’ve hit the right tropes and genre expectations without even trying!

What I think really helped me was that I made my books available on a variety of platforms. With KDP Select, I was limited to other ebook retailers, but that didn’t stop me from producing paperbacks and audiobooks.

In my first year, I put out just 4 titles. That’s what I planned to do when I started. Going into Year 2, I’ve already published The Harvest Moon (in Standard and Deluxe editions) and have plans to publish 7 more titles across all retailers. Just the increase in my catalog will help me sell more because I’m sticking to my series.

As of right now, I’m still not selling in huge numbers. If I can sell 356 copies in my first year with only 4 titles, I know that number will only grow.

Should you read your reviews?

One of the many questions that’s often debated among other self-publishers is whether or not you should read your reviews.

“Reviews are for readers, not authors,” some say. Others, “Reviews are like a critique group, guiding you to do better with your next piece.”

When I first started out, I wasn’t going to read my reviews. I didn’t want it to influence me as a writer. Not only that, but I didn’t want to read anything bad.

Turns out I’m not as strong-willed as I thought I’d be. I’ve read every single one of my reviews. And you know what? I don’t regret it. If anything, it helps give me a sense of my books and my series overall from the perspective of a reader.

I don’t exactly feel good when I read bad reviews, but typically I can determine if it’s me or them. I’ve had people review my books that clearly don’t like genre fiction. The way they write the reviews are written and what they say in the reviews indicate that they expected my books to be literary fiction, which I don’t claim to write whatsoever. I don’t even like literary fiction. That’s clearly their issue, not mine.

Other people have written that they’ve never read in my genre before (them) or that the story felt rushed (me). You need to differentiate.

Reading my reviews helps me determine what I have to work on in the future. Now that I have reviews and readers and I’ve gotten some feedback, I see the problems in my books and how to fix them.

But that doesn’t mean I like to read my bad reviews. Even now, to write this post, I skimmed over some of my bad reviews to get examples and I didn’t read the review word-for-word. I skimmed it.

Information processed. Point taken. Let’s move on.

Reading bad reviews is like laying in bed at night and cringing at that stupid thing you said in the 7th grade lunch line. Get over it. It’s in the past. Nothing you can do about it now.

Like everything in life, it all comes down to you: how thick is your skin? Ultimately, I think reading reviews will help you as an author. But you might not be ready for that yet. Especially if you’ve hooked some of the wrong readers, like I have, who don’t like your book because it’s not their favorite genre. On the flip side, you could read the reviews and toughen up a bit (although don’t get cynical when someone writes a good review) so when you do find your core readers, you’ll be in for a treat. Set the expectations low.

Bear in mind that some authors can’t get any reviews. So whether you’ve got good reviews or bad, be thankful that they’re there.

One last thing before I wrap this up: You should never respond to reviews. I’ve only responded once to a review and that was to answer a question about when the next book was out. I simply said something along the lines of, “I’m glad you enjoyed the book. [Title], the next book in the series, will be out [release date].”

What I have done, that some people may consider a response, is reply to an email to someone who got a free copy in exchange for a review in which I said, “I’m glad you liked the book.” That’s it. I’ve never challenged a review because reviews are a matter of opinion and when people argue over opinion you have…American politics…no right answer.

Sales Funnels

One of the biggest setbacks to my sales so far has been my incomplete sales funnel.

What does that mean, exactly? When readers pick up one book, it should be clearly stated that it’s Book 1 and at the end of that book, Book 2 should be indicated (and linked).

Until last week, that wasn’t the case for my books. The Blood Moon was published last year and I thought it would be cool to write two prequels before I wrote a sequel. Perhaps this method would’ve worked if I had other complete sales funnels out to pick up the slack for this backwards approach to releasing, but The Blood Moon was my first book.

What made things more confusing was that I listed The Blood Moon as Book 1. When I released The Full Moon in February, I listed it as Book 2, even though it’s actually Book 1 and The Blood Moon should be Book 3.

I knew once The Harvest Moon came out that I would list it as Book 2 and my sales funnel would finally be corrected. In the meantime, though, I decided not to confuse people with the chronology issue (as I’ve had several questions regarding it) and simply list The Blood Moon and The Full Moon as part of the “Under the Moon Series.” I didn’t indicate order.

That tactic didn’t help any. Maybe it was because The Full Moon was in Select and The Blood Moon wasn’t or maybe it was something else entirely, but sales for The Blood Moon basically died while sales for The Full Moon continued to trickle in with page reads.

I’ve since corrected the series order with the release of The Harvest Moon (Book 2), although not enough time has passed to see if it made a difference with my sales. I’ll report on that again in the future (maybe after a month).

My sales funnel still isn’t complete, though. All my books are still full-priced, so even though the series order is properly stated, readers don’t have a low-risk point of entry to my series.

In other words, the first in the series needs to drop from $3.99 to $0.99 or free. I’ll probably do that this weekend, but the effectiveness of the sales funnel won’t be fully realized until I take The Harvest Moon out of Select and release it wide. That’s when I should see sell-through for my series across all vendors.

It makes me wonder how long I should keep The Harvest Moon in Select for. What I did with The Full Moon was keep it in Select for two terms (six months) and then release it wide, which I just did last week. If I release The Harvest Moon wide and drop the price of The Full Moon, that means I’ll have a complete sales funnel not only on Amazon, but across all vendors and my sales will hopefully start at the other retailers.

I’ll have to think about that further. The Harvest Moon‘s Select period will be up at the beginning of November. That means I couldn’t run a free sale or a Countdown Deal during the holiday season, but it also means that I’ll have three books wide by the holiday season and could hopefully capitalize on the post-Christmas gift card spending season.

I’ll have to consider further. The good thing is, with a complete sales funnel (once I drop the price of The Full Moon), combined with my rapid releases planned for the end of this year and beginning of next year, will hopefully kickstart sales for the whole series.

Preorder Timeout now!

The next story in the Under the Moon Series is now available for preorder! Reserve your copy of Timeout for only $0.99!

More than ten years after Kathy’s divorce, she is now a successful author in the midst of releasing her third book. A determined businesswoman, Kathy’s focus has solely been on her career lately. While magic is still a part of her life, it’s no longer her purpose.

On her way home from meeting with her publisher, Kathy encounters a man spewing threats of a malevolent force. Chalking it up to another crazy New Yorker, she ignores him.

Then he calls her name.

Thrown back into a world of magic and danger, Kathy searches for answers before this force can hurt anyone. But is she already too late?