Ivan D. Wainewright's Blog, page 2

Mother’s Day Bookplate

If you would like to give your mother a copy of any of my books for Mother’s Day, you are welcome to download this bookplate and stick it inside. I hope you and she enjoy it!

To download:

Click on the bookplate you want and it will open in a new browser window. You should be able to print direct from your browser; but if you can’t, right-click your mouse and select ‘Save Image As’ and save the picture to your computer.

The post Mother’s Day Bookplate first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

Caroline Tangent Becomes Amazon #1 Bestseller!

I’m stunned but delighted to say that The Other Times of Caroline Tangent recently hit the number one spot in Amazon’s Time Travel category in the UK, Canada and Australia. Plus, in the UK it spiked in the top 200 of all-Kindle books, and the top 50 in Canada. I’m gobsmacked!

My thanks to everyone who has bought, read, leant, reviewed, rated, tweeted or talked about the book – I couldn’t have done this without you.

The post Caroline Tangent Becomes Amazon #1 Bestseller! first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

My Experience of BookBub for Indie Authors

Last week, my novel went from selling a few copies a day to becoming an Amazon number 1 bestseller for Time Travel in the UK, Canada and Australia by using a BookBub Featured Deal. I hope some independent authors might find it interesting to hear how this happened.

BookBub: The Basics

I suspect many writers know about BookBub, but if not then basically it’s the world’s largest book promotion site. Readers subscribe for free, and every day, BookBub send millions of subscribers an email with links to discounted ebooks. As an author, you pay to feature in these daily promotion emails. David Gaughran describes it a lot better than me!

The challenge as an author is that it is extremely competitive to get your book featured on BookBub. BookBub state that “only about 10%-20% of [applications] will be chosen as a Featured Deal.” It’s certainly not just for independent authors; many (most?) of the books on the emails are from traditional publishers.

And it ain’t cheap. As a writer you will pay a minimum of $100 for the least competitive, smallest category, up to $4000+ for something like Crime Fiction. The payoff, however, is that the average volumes you can expect to sell from such promotions are very high. But remember, your book has to be discounted/free.

The other point worth noting is that you can apply to have your book promoted in All Regions (the most expensive option), just the USA (a little bit cheaper), or countries outside the US (the cheapest option).

I decided to hedge my bets and apply for the cheapest option for my novel. Remarkably, they accepted me and this is my story of what happened.

A Tiny Bit of History on My Novel

I published my time travel novel, The Other Times of Caroline Tangent in May 2021. Between then and my BookBub promotion, I sold about 2,500 copies (ebooks and paperbacks in total). My core advertising was (and still is) through Facebook Ads, which meant the “full price” ebook of £2.99/$2.99 was selling between 5 and 10 copies a day. When I occasionally reduced that to 99p/99c, those daily figures could double.

I sell the ebook on Amazon, and also through PublishDrive, which manages the other key platforms of Apple, Kobo, Google Play and B&N. I sell the paperback through a Clays/Gardners distribution contract. On Amazon, I have once or twice reached the top 4,000 of all-Kindle books in the UK, and the top 20/30 of the Time Travel category.

By the time I applied for my BookBub deal, I had about 250 reviews/ratings on Amazon UK and US combined, and another 150 reviews/ratings on Goodreads. All those sites had an average rating of about 4.4/5.

It’s perhaps also worth stating that my goal for this novel is not to make my millions (although, okay, yes of course I’d love to), but more importantly, to build a reader-base for any future novels I write.

My BookBub Application

I decided to discount the book to 99p/99c. And I decided to apply for one of BookBub’s “International” Featured Deals, which is all countries outside the US; primarily the UK, Canada, Australia and India. To be frank, I did this because it was the cheapest option and I was unsure if I would sell enough books to cover my costs. That cost me $167 (about £125), compared to All Regions which would be $761 (about £560). The latter cost was quite a lot to risk on something where I wasn’t sure if it would succeed.

Remember, also, that with KDP, you only get 35% royalty at the 99p/99c level, so to break even on the $167, I would need to sell about 350 copies through BookBub. That still seemed a lot to me even though BookBub’s material says the average Sci Fi book sells 410 discounted copies through them. But as that’s the average, it can of course be less.

I was delighted when I was accepted.

With hindsight, I wonder whether applying for the “International” region was one of the reasons I was accepted. After all, I’m not a bestselling author and I am self-published. I have no idea if that region is less competitive, but my guess is that the US/All Regions are possibly more in demand. I’m also very glad that I did wait to get a fair number of reviews before applying, and that the ebook is distrubuted on multiple platforms (i.e. not just Amazon). You can read BookBub’s Tips on what they look for in applications, and I think my groundwork probably helped. I also think (hope!) that my cover design by the incredible Sophie Burdess (who also designed The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) helped.

So What Happened? How Much Did I Sell?

Let’s put it this way, I’m still in awe over what happened!

Firstly, I reduced the price of the ebook to 99p/99c four days ahead of the BookBub deal date. That’s because although my experience shows that Amazon usually changes the price within a few hours of me updating it on my KDP account, Amazon say it can take up to 72 hours and I wanted to be absolutely sure it was discounted in good time! This also meant that in the few days before the BookBub promotion was emailed out, my sales figures and Amazon ranking increased slightly. This might have helped Amazon’s algorithms, in the following days, see my increased sales as “genuine” and not a sudden spike.

On the day of the BookBub featured deal, they sent the email and, well, WOW!

On the day of the promotion, on Amazon alone I sold 234 copies, and on the following day a further 109. Through PublishDrive, the other platforms sold over 150. Even allowing for the fact that some of these sales might be organic, that is still around 500 copies in total. Way more than I ever dreamt I’d sell through this deal. You can see my sales chart here to show you the impact!

But even more astonishingly, my novel made number 1 on Amazon’s Time Travel category in the UK, Canada and Australia; and at one point, reached the top 200 all-Kindle books in the UK, and top 50 in Canada. That really made my day!! I never thought I’d get one of Amazon’s little orange badges. (Now I have, I kind of agree with author & podcaster, Mark Stay, who has suggested Amazon could send authors enamel bestseller badges through the post [image error]!)

I was also really happy to see sales not just in the UK (my core market), but also in Canada where readers bought it on Kindle and Kobo; Kobo was in fact by far my second highest platform for sales.

 

A Few Days Later…

For the initial period after the BookBub featured deal, I was still amazed and delighted that my novel still sat at #1 in Amazon Canada Time Travel, and top 10 in the UK and Australia. And it remained in the UK’s top 1000 all-Kindle books for a several days. It also continued to sell on Kobo, and a few extra books on Apple, and I very rarely got sales on those platforms before the promotion.

For a few days after that, it continued to sell more than it was before the promotion, but definitely on a downward trend. And thereafter, it returned to the levels of pre-promotion sales volumes. I’m not overly surprised at that. I tried running a few Facebook Ads with “no. 1 bestseller” included in the ads, but that didn’t have much impact.

All that said, as you might imagine, I’m more than happy with the results, and there is a part of me that wishes I’d applied for the ‘All Regions’ featured deal to see what sort of volumes I might have sold! But that doesn’t matter; I know now what I might be able to achieve in the future.

The post My Experience of BookBub for Indie Authors first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

Corrections and Clarifications!

When I wrote The Other Times of Caroline Tangent, I hoped there would be some music buffs who would be find the book interesting. As such, I tried very hard to get all my musical references, songs, gigs et al correct (and I think I got most right!) but I knew there was going to be some I got wrong. So, since publication, I’ve been very happy whenever readers get in touch to tell me I have made an error!

So for all you music buffs, geeks, pedants (nothing wrong with pedantry in this instance ) and anyone who likes the facts to be correct, I thought I would include these corrections here – I don’t think there are any spoilers if you haven’t read it yet…

Bruce Springsteen concert: I had Vini Lopez on drums in the book, when it should have been Max Weinberg. [Cudos to Jim Cargill for pointing out that one]When Caroline is in 1984, I reference her listening to Springsteen’s Born to Run, and it should have been Born in the USA. [Thanks, again, to Jim, and also David Andrews]A non-musical but possibly more significant error was that I refer to ICE, the current immigration enforcement branch in the US. But, and I need to tread carefully here to avoid any spoilers, ICE was formed after the incident I refer to in the book, and it would have actually been USCIS at that time. [Jade Anna Hughes updated me on that]

If you have read the novel and spotted any inaccuracies then do feel free to let me know via my Contact Page.

The post Corrections and Clarifications! first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

My First Page Before It Was Edited

I was looking back today at my original manuscript of The Other Times of Caroline Tangent, before my editor, Lucy York got hold of it and provided all her wonderful improvements. And I thought it might be interesting for some writers (and readers) to see what it looked like at that point, and what sort of changes Lucy recommended.

As you will see, it started with the very first sentence of my book!!

What I can say is that my novel wouldn’t have been what it is without Lucy’s input – I highly recommend her.

The post My First Page Before It Was Edited first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

How I Sold My First 1000 Books: The Marketing

Following on from my introductory post that details I have just reached a mini-milestone of 1000 book sales for my self-published novel, The Other Times of Caroline Tangent, this second post explains the marketing I did to achieve that.

Book Reviews: They’ve Gotta Help!

First off, book reiews. Although ultimately, my marketing is about generating sales, book reviews help so much – both in terms of volume and positive reviews. As of today, I have got 70 reviews/ratings on Amazon UK with a 4.5 score, 44 ratings on Amazon.com (USA) with a 4.7 score, and 74 ratings on GoodReads with a 4.43 average. Which I am very happy about! Readers have said so many lovely things. I read every single review and I’ve been blown away by the kinds words people have written about the novel. I quite seriously never expected to get such wonderful feedback. Of course, I do have a few 1 and 2 star ratings too, which Mark Dawson’s blog assures me provides gravitas to the book – I hope he’s right!

How did I get the reviews? I did do an initial Blog Tour (see below) and I approached a few specific book bloggers who I’ve built an online relationship with, but the vast majority have been organic with readers posting reviews of their own accord – which is of course the best!

Once or twice, when one of my Facebook Ads has received some nice comments from people who have already read the book, I have added a comment myself inviting people to add a review if they would like to do so. And I do post occasional tweets reminding people how beneficial reviews are for indie authors. When I do that, I have noticed a few reviews more than I might otherwise expect, so although I don’t know for sure if those SM posts help, I hope they do!

(For any of my readers reading this blog: if you are one of the fantastic people who have written a review of my novel – thank you! So much. And if you have read my book but you haven’t posted a review yet, well… )

Ratings So FarMy Core MarketingPre-Orders: For four weeks prior to my formal launch date, I did sell my novel on Amazon for a reduced price of £1.99/$1.99, and I promoted the reduced price on my Facebook Ads and Twitter (see below). I got over 150 sales which, personally, I was very happy about.Blog Tour: The first paid marketing I did was organise a blog tour with Anne Cater. She was marvellous and recruited 24 bloggers to write reviews of my novel. That was a brilliant way to get some initial reviews.Facebook Ads: The core of my paid marketing has been done through Facebook Ads. I’ve done that consistently since the launch, with different ads for the UK and the US, trying different images and videos, different audiences and so on. On average, I’ve spent between £4 and £8 a day. As my average sales per day are 6.5 – but increasing at the moment – then the revenues from those sales generally mean I have broken even! This is pretty much what I hoped for – I would have loved to have sold many more books, of course, but as long as I’m not spending more than I’m receiving, I think that’s a decent enough approach for now. All that said, the most frustrating thing is that you can’t definitely tell that a clickthrough has generated a sale – there are lots of blog posts about that online – so I’ve had to assume (dangerously?!) that these Facebook ads are helping. One thing I can say is that when I have stopped advertising for a few days, my sales have gone down.A 99p/99c promotion, partly through RobinReads. A few weeks ago, I discounted my ebooks to 99p/99c for 4 days over a weekend, and I used RobinReads‘ author services to promote it to their email newsletter list. I also promoted the price through my Twitter and Facebook pages. It was certainly successful in so much that for 4 days, my sales shot up and spiked on the day that the RobinReads newsletter was sent out. I didn’t recuperate the outlay for that service but for a 99p/99c book that would mean alot of sales to do so. I treated it more as a promotion and awareness campaign and to get more sales and hopefully more reviews. Interestingly, since that promotion, my average sales per day have stayed consistently higher than they were before the promotion.Twitter: I do like Twitter and I do a fair amount of tweeting (although nothing compared to some people!) I can’t say whether it has led directly to sales, but I can track the links clicked from my tweets and profile (using Booklinker, Geniuslink, bit.ly etc) and there has been plenty of traffic to my target pages from those links. So, I do think it’s well worth my time. I know that when some other authors were kind enough to retweet my launch announcement and 99p promotion that did generate some sales. (Thanks in particular to Keith Pearson, Mark Stay and Khurrum Rahman).Other Things I’ve TriedAn interview on Radio Kent: Linden Kemkaran and Dominic King were kind enough to invite me onto the Dominic King Book Club to discuss my novel with me. I did already have an “in” with Linden because I had contacted her prevoiusly when I published my first novel, The Kosher Delhi. They interviewed me during the pre-sales period of my launch which I’m sure generated a few sales and some interest!Amazon Ads and BookBub Ads: I have run a few campaigns on Amazon and BookBub. Amazon has generated me a few sales (but very low numbers compared to my clickthroughs), and I can literally count on one hand the number of clickthroughs from my BookBub ads! For Amazon, I think this is primarily because my book cover, as much as I love it, isn’t obviously a time travel genre, plus it’s only now that I am getting higher numbers of reviews and ratings which might attract more sales; I will try that again. With BookBub, I clearly haven’t produced the necessary imagery to capture readers’ imagination – must try harder!LoveReading: LoveReading is the only book recommendation website I used the services of. It is one of the most popular sites of that ilk. But although I received an “Indie Books We Love” sticker/review from them, I have no idea if it has generated much in the way of sales. My gut instinct is that it hasn’t, and I didn’t get included in any of their email newsletters. I was rather disappointed by this.Other Social Media: I post a few things on Instagram and I have my author Facebook page, and whilst both might help add something to my online author presence, I don’t think they’ve generated many sales per se. I did also add a single post on my LinkedIn page on the day of publication and that got plenty of likes and comments from business contacts, and several sales. Every little helps!Other stuff I’ve tried: I’ve sent press releases to newspapers, magazines and websites but with very little response. One exception was Music-News.com who ran a competition which offered 3 copies of my novel as a giveaway. I’ve also emailed celebrities and influencers, but so far Tom Robinson (Radio 6 presenter and still a recording artist!) has been the only such person kind enough to have responded to my email and downloaded a copy – thanks, Tom! (I use BookFunnel to distribute free ecopies).An Unfortunate Omission…

Finally, you may notice a glaring omission from the above lists: an email list. I know all authors are supposed to collate an email list of readers so they can market their books to them but sadly, I didn’t have one, and even now, my list is tiny. It’s just something I’ve never managed to make work. I’ve promoted it, added a reader magnate of a short story, encouraged sign-ups, but in general to no avail. Clearly I am not doing something right! But it is on my list to improve from now on…

The post How I Sold My First 1000 Books: The Marketing first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

How I Sold My First 1000 Books (Part One)

I have just reached a mini-milestone for sales of my self-published novel, The Other Times of Caroline Tangent: 1000 books sold. Whoop! So, I thought it might be of interest for some writers (and readers) to hear how I’ve done that.

Let me acknowledge immediately that I realise 1000 books is very little compared to many authors. But, if I understand correctly from reading other blogs, it’s also more than a lot of self-published books. As such, I hope that this post could be of some help to indie authors starting out on their journey.

I have split this article into two parts because it has gotten quite long: so, the first part (this one) details the background of my book and what I’ve sold, and the second part will detail the marketing I’ve done.

A Bit of Background

The Other Times of Caroline Tangent is a time travel/music story, although it’s just as much a contemporary story about what happens in a relationship when people don’t want the same outcome. I did use editors and a professional cover designer during the writing and publication process, and I decided initially to print a number of paperbacks using Clays printers (and distribute those through Gardners) rather than Amazon POD. You can read how and why I did that on another of my blog posts, Printing Paperbacks with Clays.

I published the book on May 17th 2021 and it is now September 19th, so that’s 18 weeks since publication date; although I did offer pre-sales for 4 weeks prior to that. That means an average of 6.5 books sold per day. That doesn’t sound a lot when I write that, but it adds up!

The Kindle version is £2.99/$2.99 and the paperback RRP is £7.99. (See below for a bit more information on non-UK paperback sales). The pre-order price was £1.99/$1.99.

I only have about 750 followers on Twitter, and negligible numbers on Instagram and Facebook. (I do have a strong LinkedIn network but that is all about my “real” job as an IT consultant for charities.)

I have published one book before this, The Kosher Delhi, which I published with RedDoor Press; I guess I have a few followers from that but it sold less than my new novel and was a different genre, so suspect I may have generated a few sales of Caroline Tangent from those readers.

What Have I Sold?

As you can see in this graphic, the majority of my book sales have come from Kindle sales. Perhaps not surprising for an indie author. They are split fairly evenly between the UK and the US (and 1 sale in Australia!).

My paperback sales through my Clays/Gardners distribution account for about 12% of total numbers; they have been sold by Amazon UK, a few on Amazon.com (USA), Waterstones, The Book Depository and some good folk who have bought the book through their local independent bookshops. I do wish that number was higher.

Just over 2% of my sales have come from other ebook versions: Apple, Kobo, Google Play and a few via Overdrive. I use PublishDrive to manage and sell all those formats.

And finally, something I have only recently introduced, I now also sell the paperback version through Amazon POD on non-UK Amazon websites, but so far I’ve only sold a handful using this method. I’ve realised that Amazon.com is unlikely to stock any copies of my Clays-printed book and so for American/international readers to buy my paperback, they either needed to buy it through an Amazon reseller with expensive shipping costs, or via a UK website such as The Book Depository which offers free shipping worldwide. Thus, POD is probably better for those markers. Do I wish I had done this earlier? Yes, but I’m still happy I printed some books through Clays.

The Highs and Lows

We all want to reach that number one Best Seller spot on Amazon/other sites – I’m a long way from that! But I did reach the dizzying heights of number three on Amazon’s Time Travel Hot New Releases during my pre-sales period (which gave me a great excuse for a few appropriate marketing tweets!); and during my 99p/99c promotion (more of that in my next post on marketing), I squeezed into the top 4000 of all UK Kindle books, and the top 25,000 of Amazon.com ebooks. That’s never going to make me my millions, but considering my average UK ranking is between 10,000 and 20,000, I was quite happy.

Amazon UK Time TravelAmazon.com

Now on to the second part of this blog post – The Marketing I did.

The post How I Sold My First 1000 Books (Part One) first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

My Top 10 Fictional Places to Visit

Now we can go on holiday again, I thought I would collate my top fictional places I would like to visit. Far more interesting than Venice, Ibiza or canoeing the Amazon…

10) Wonderland – with Alice. Not the (admittedly very good) Tim Burton version, but the original, the just-as-strange locales that Carrol originally created. I mean, how wonderful would it be to meet The White Rabbit, The White Queen (because I’ve always wanted to know which impossible things she imagined before breakfast), some of the Cheshire Cat.

9) Outer Space. Okay, I know this isn’t a specific place (or rather, it’s a rather large space place) but of course I want to go there – who wouldn’t? Not as a Musk/Branson tourist but on The Heart of Gold, as part of HG Wells’ crew, with Brian Aldiss’s characters (or ideally, on the USS Enterprise or Discovery, but that’s cheating for this blog post so naturally I won’t say that).

8) Narnia. Magic, mythical beasts, talking animals. Adventure and mysteries. And arriving via the wardrobe, which has spawned so many other literary portals. I could bore my friends for hours with photographs when I got back from this trip.

7) The Night Circus. I know this isn’t in one specific location, but I would find it and I do so want to visit the tents: The Carousel, the acrobats in The Hanged Man, The Labyrinth, the list goes on and on. It would certainly mean more than one visit to do it justice.

6) Much Hemlock. Human-sized, anthropomorhpic rabbits? The MegaWarren? Jasper Fforde’s imagination? Tick, tick, tick – yes, please.

5) Milliways. To eat in The Restaurant at The End of the Universe, the most significant eatery of all time, that would be a waiting list worth being on. Hoping OpenTable add it soon.

4) Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. To taste the chocolate, of course (assuming Vianne guesses my favourite); but also for the architecture and to stroll by the river.

3) Rafi Zabor’s Manhattan: I would love to visit one of the smoky jazz bars with The Bear in Zabor’s ‘The Bear Comes Home’, and listen to him play his alto sax alongside Lester Bowie. Holy cow, that would be a night to remember.

2) Besźel and Ul Qoma. You would obviously have to visit both cities at the same time, and I’m sure it would be more of an experience than a holiday. I know I would have to apply for permission before I could visit either place, but it would be worth all the work and preparation. I just hope I could unsee anything which I needed to.

1) Ankh-Morpork. Well, it has to be number one, doesn’t it. (Have they ever had any tourists there…? ) If there was only one place on this list I could visit then there isn’t a question in my mind of where else I would want to go. We can all see the walled city already in our minds: the characters, the streets, the assassins. To smell the smells. To stroll alongside the River Ankh, hmm. I’m hoping there are organised walking tours of the inns. Just keep one particular character away from me…

——–

I did also consider the following: Middle Earth (but you could spend your whole life there); the Troposphere (as long as I could definitely get back) in Scarlett Thomas’s wonderful ‘The End of Mr Y’; and yes, Hogsmeade (ideally with an invisibility cloak). I was also tempted to add The Past, but that’s probably a whole other post…

The post My Top 10 Fictional Places to Visit first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.

Love that when I ask...

... "If you could travel back in time to see any concert, who would you go to see?", some people are suggesting Mozart, Vivaldi, Mahler, Beethoven, rather than Elvis, Queen & Live Aid!

The Bands Which Just Missed Out From Inclusion in Caroline Tangent

When I was writing The Other Times of Caroline Tangent, I thought a lot about which bands and artists to send Caroline and Jon back to see. And there were plenty who I considered but didn’t quite make the final cut for various reasons. Here’s a few of those which just missed out:

Elvis at his Comeback Special. Unsurprisingly, Elvis is one of the most popular acts which people say they would go back to see if they had a time machine. I really wanted to include his TV Comeback Special in the book, but I couldn’t find a good way to get Caroline and Jon into the TV studio! I could have landed them directly in that room, but the risk of being seen would be too high; I could have got Jon to bribe someone to let them in, but that didn’t seem to work; and perhaps most importantly, even if they had got into that show then they would have been filmed, and that could have led to Andrew asking all sorts of questions back in 2021!! (Unless they’d gone in disguise…)

Johnny Cash at San Quentin Prison: This was a truly iconic gig, but again, trying to get my characters into the prison would have been a nightmare! I had various ideas but all too far fetched. (One of which was to get Jon arrested several years earlier and then get him transferred to San Quentin prison nearer the date of the gig. But that would have been beyond even Jon’s dedication! And he would have had to get out again!!) A shame.

The Sex Pistols first ever gig. There’s an apocryphal story that does the rounds that if everyone who claims to have been at the Sex Pistols’ first gig was really there, then the room couldn’t have held that number! I decided this was just too cliche, even for Jon.

The Stone Roses at Spike Island in 1990. At one point, I considered whether Jon should try to capitalise on his time machine by visiting concerts which were never recorded/filmed and sell bootleg tapes; and this Roses’ gig is one of the most famous of such concerts. That storyline didn’t make the final cut.

Several festivals: I thought about sending them to the extremely muddy Glastonbury 1982 instead of the 2015 show they went to, as 1982 was when Van Morrison headlined (Caroline’s favourite singer). But Jon’s arrogance of wanting to see Kanye overruled that. I also thought about the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, but Woodstock trumped that.

Other acts: The Rolling Stones (can’t believe I didn’t include them!), AC/DC down under when Bon Scott was still singing, an early Police gig, and I also considered Bob Dylan in Boston 1978 for a key part of the book. And then the more recent iconic acts such as Lady Gaga, Eminem, even Britney Spears, but they just weren’t “Jon and Caroline”.

Who else do you think I should have included??!

The post The Bands Which Just Missed Out From Inclusion in Caroline Tangent first appeared on Ivan Wainewright.