Allison M. Dickson's Blog, page 5
November 30, 2014
Join My Thunderclap Choir!
Let's all scream at the same time in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .
The world of social media is a disjointed choir, all of us singing different songs at different speeds and pitches. In other words, it's noise.
But there are places on the Internet where the voices are unified and loud, and a clear message gets through. That's what happens when you see trending topics on Twitter and Facebook--enough people talking about the same thing at the same time becomes something like a pattern in the chaos, and it draws our attention. That's what services like Thunderclap aim to help folks accomplish. It uses our social network connections to help amplify a signal in the hope of cutting through the noise and reaching as many people as possible.
But how does Thunderclap work, exactly?
Think about it like Kickstarter. You set a goal to get a minimum number of pledges in a certain amount of time. If you make goal, your customized message is trumpeted to the masses at the time and date you designate in the campaign. If you don't make goal, no message goes out.
The pledge for Thunderclap isn't monetary, and it incurs virtually zero risk on the participants. It's simply you clicking on which social network you would like the message to go out on--Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. Once you join in, you don't have to do anything else. Your message goes out automatically on the designated day, and hopefully on the other end, the campaigners see some results.
Now, this is my very first Thunderclap campaign. The service is still relatively new, but it's been catching on, and a lot of artists and activist groups are using it to help get their messages out there. I can't say for certain whether this will benefit me directly, but I also don't think my message getting a social reach in the possible tens of thousands would hurt me in any way either.
I'm looking forward to finding out. Won't you join my campaign? If you don't want to click a link, I have a widget over there in the sidebar! I have less than two weeks to make it happen, but if by this point in my career I can't cobble together a hundred people under a single umbrella, maybe I should find another form of work. :)
Thank you as always for your support!
November 26, 2014
Scenes from The Last Supper - Part 2: Life in God's Hope
In the eight-part series, I will be discussing the world and the characters of my upcoming book, THE LAST SUPPER, due out on 12/13/14. Original artwork by Justin Wasson. Pre-order paperbacks now. Kindle pre-orders due on 12/1/14.
Today, I want to talk about God's Hope, and other towns like it that populate the Supperverse.
Welcome to God's Hope. Population: You're Screwed
When I first envisioned a world where weeds and pollen had become something akin to viruses, I thought of the domed net system. A membranous material that could let the light in but somehow keep the pollen granules out, so new serpent weeds couldn't sprout in populated areas.
The Divine Rite has hundreds of such installations all over the world, and God's Hope is one of them. This is where John lived and where he has spent most of his life. As you can see above, the Divine Rite churches dominate the landscape as shining beacons. Most of the structures, however, are small, rudimentary, wooden, but everything is very orderly and neat under the net. There is just enough of everything to go around, to keep people content, which is why the Rite considers Justification is so vital, even if it is barbaric.
Of course, it isn't all a perfectly self-contained bubble. There are seeds of discontent sown in various places, people behaving in seditious ways. In a defunct military installation in the outskirts of Gods Hope lives an old man named James Turpin. He vividly remembers when the Rite took hold, and he was grandfathered in when the Justification program started, so he doesn't have to worry about taking a test or getting a Supper. This gives him room to dabble in verboten acts like reading banned literature and distilling alcohol.
Naturally, John befriends the man during a time of great need.
But why does the Rite allow this man to do these things, which run so counter to the culture? John has a theory:
You may be wondering about the fates of other places in this future world. What about major cities like New York, L.A., or Chicago? Are they covered in nets as well?
While all these places aren't addressed specifically in this book -- since it's told through the eyes of John and his own scope of the world is limited, details are murky -- other stories in this world will reveal the fates of the great metropolitan areas. But I can tell you most didn't survive, and it wasn't just about the weeds. They were torn apart from within by people fighting to stay alive during the worse of the Blight and the battles that followed over food and other resources, the final blow being dealt by the Divine Rite's regime when they steamrolled over those who rose against them. But all that happened a long time ago in the context of this story. What's left now are these these protected areas, humanity's last stand against a very frightening and increasingly alien landscape.
And what of that alien landscape? Well, that will be for another blog.
To be continued . . .
Read Part 1: What's in a Meal?
Today, I want to talk about God's Hope, and other towns like it that populate the Supperverse.
Welcome to God's Hope. Population: You're Screwed
When I first envisioned a world where weeds and pollen had become something akin to viruses, I thought of the domed net system. A membranous material that could let the light in but somehow keep the pollen granules out, so new serpent weeds couldn't sprout in populated areas.
The Divine Rite has hundreds of such installations all over the world, and God's Hope is one of them. This is where John lived and where he has spent most of his life. As you can see above, the Divine Rite churches dominate the landscape as shining beacons. Most of the structures, however, are small, rudimentary, wooden, but everything is very orderly and neat under the net. There is just enough of everything to go around, to keep people content, which is why the Rite considers Justification is so vital, even if it is barbaric.
Of course, it isn't all a perfectly self-contained bubble. There are seeds of discontent sown in various places, people behaving in seditious ways. In a defunct military installation in the outskirts of Gods Hope lives an old man named James Turpin. He vividly remembers when the Rite took hold, and he was grandfathered in when the Justification program started, so he doesn't have to worry about taking a test or getting a Supper. This gives him room to dabble in verboten acts like reading banned literature and distilling alcohol.
Naturally, John befriends the man during a time of great need.
Depending on who you were speaking to, Turpin was an “evil atheist” who performed abortions and put hexes on local missionaries. Others claimed he shot intruders with devilish pre-Blight weaponry hidden in an underground cache somewhere on his property. But the most popular anecdote, and the one that was actually true, was that he ran a “poison factory.” That was God’s Hope lingo for booze.
He might have been the town’s answer to the urbane wizard with the taboo apothecary, but Turpin’s medicine came from copper kettles and unmarked mason jars rather than bubbling cauldrons. I’d never before taken a drink of any alcohol apart from the thimble of sour grape juice at Sunday Mass, and I had no idea what intoxication actually felt like, but now something within me craved a glut of Turpin’s poison.
I guess it was just a part of the natural progression of things that led to me sitting here now.
But why does the Rite allow this man to do these things, which run so counter to the culture? John has a theory:
Drinking and drugs, of course, were not part of the regimen of anyone who planned on passing Justification, and it was difficult to get any in large quantities outside a Sin Bin, facilities where people surrendered their last year of life so they could live in complete debauchery. But liquor was easier to get than one might think. Like most “forbidden” things in God’s Hope, it wasn’t exactly illegal. It was just another tempting piece of fruit the Rite liked to have lying around for the weak of will, and the price for succumbing to such things was deadly.
You may be wondering about the fates of other places in this future world. What about major cities like New York, L.A., or Chicago? Are they covered in nets as well?
While all these places aren't addressed specifically in this book -- since it's told through the eyes of John and his own scope of the world is limited, details are murky -- other stories in this world will reveal the fates of the great metropolitan areas. But I can tell you most didn't survive, and it wasn't just about the weeds. They were torn apart from within by people fighting to stay alive during the worse of the Blight and the battles that followed over food and other resources, the final blow being dealt by the Divine Rite's regime when they steamrolled over those who rose against them. But all that happened a long time ago in the context of this story. What's left now are these these protected areas, humanity's last stand against a very frightening and increasingly alien landscape.
And what of that alien landscape? Well, that will be for another blog.
To be continued . . .
Read Part 1: What's in a Meal?
November 24, 2014
Scenes from The Last Supper - Part 1: What's in a Meal?
In the eight-part series, I will be discussing the world and the characters of my upcoming book, THE LAST SUPPER, due out on 12/13/14. Original artwork by Justin Wasson. Pre-order paperbacks now. Kindle pre-orders due on 12/1/14.
First, let's discuss what a Last Supper is in the context of this story.
This is John's Last Supper. It has a salad. He's never much liked salad.
Put simply, the Last Supper is a death kit comprised of a poisoned feast. Citizens in this ravaged version of earth receive one when they fail Justification.
What exactly is Justification?
It is a yearly test citizens sixteen and over must take in order to prove their worthiness to society. In this ravaged world with so few resources to spread among the remaining population, the luxury of life is afforded only to the most worthy, those who follow the strict guidelines set forth by the ruling party known as the Divine Rite. Some of the guidelines include regularly attending church, not producing out of turn, fulfilling a minimal work and salary quota, and avoiding hedonistic pleasures like drinking, smoking, and gluttony. The test is conducted according to an algorithm that doesn't make exceptions, as John Welland and his family soon learned when his wife, who had been stricken by cancer earlier that year, received a Last Supper for failing to meet her work obligations.
Each Supper is designed according to specifications set in the Justification exam, although there is no guarantee you will get what you want. It comes in a box decorated with a facsimile of the famous Da Vinci painting of its namesake, and inside, along with the food, is a letter designed to remind the citizen that he or she is making a worthy sacrifice on behalf of the rest of the world.
To ensure a painless and dignified passing, we present you
with a meal handcrafted by our expert chefs to your exact tastes
as specified on your Justification Exam.
The Divine Rite will place your earthly remains in a planter
with a beautiful tree for one of our scenic Memorial
Gardens designed with the comfort of your eternal rest in mind.
The Holy Uniter would like to thank you for your service to our
nation and to the world.
The meal itself is, at best, of suspicious origin. Though it smells and looks tantalizing, the texture doesn't match. It all has a strange manufactured quality, which is not surprising given how rare things like meat and chocolate are in this a world ravaged by blight and serpent weeds. John's meal includes a hunk of meat (species indeterminate), some stale bread, a piece of chocolate cake, a glass of wine, and a salad.
John hates salad, but as he remarks in the beginning of his harrowing memoir, it's what he deserves. We soon learn why he feels that way.
Read Part 2: Life in God's Hope
First, let's discuss what a Last Supper is in the context of this story.
This is John's Last Supper. It has a salad. He's never much liked salad.
Put simply, the Last Supper is a death kit comprised of a poisoned feast. Citizens in this ravaged version of earth receive one when they fail Justification.
What exactly is Justification?
It is a yearly test citizens sixteen and over must take in order to prove their worthiness to society. In this ravaged world with so few resources to spread among the remaining population, the luxury of life is afforded only to the most worthy, those who follow the strict guidelines set forth by the ruling party known as the Divine Rite. Some of the guidelines include regularly attending church, not producing out of turn, fulfilling a minimal work and salary quota, and avoiding hedonistic pleasures like drinking, smoking, and gluttony. The test is conducted according to an algorithm that doesn't make exceptions, as John Welland and his family soon learned when his wife, who had been stricken by cancer earlier that year, received a Last Supper for failing to meet her work obligations.
Each Supper is designed according to specifications set in the Justification exam, although there is no guarantee you will get what you want. It comes in a box decorated with a facsimile of the famous Da Vinci painting of its namesake, and inside, along with the food, is a letter designed to remind the citizen that he or she is making a worthy sacrifice on behalf of the rest of the world.
To ensure a painless and dignified passing, we present you
with a meal handcrafted by our expert chefs to your exact tastes
as specified on your Justification Exam.
The Divine Rite will place your earthly remains in a planter
with a beautiful tree for one of our scenic Memorial
Gardens designed with the comfort of your eternal rest in mind.
The Holy Uniter would like to thank you for your service to our
nation and to the world.
The meal itself is, at best, of suspicious origin. Though it smells and looks tantalizing, the texture doesn't match. It all has a strange manufactured quality, which is not surprising given how rare things like meat and chocolate are in this a world ravaged by blight and serpent weeds. John's meal includes a hunk of meat (species indeterminate), some stale bread, a piece of chocolate cake, a glass of wine, and a salad.
John hates salad, but as he remarks in the beginning of his harrowing memoir, it's what he deserves. We soon learn why he feels that way.
Read Part 2: Life in God's Hope
Scenes from The Last Supper: Part 1
In the eight-part series, I will be discussing the world and the characters of my upcoming book, THE LAST SUPPER, due out on 12/13/14. Original artwork by Justin Wasson. Pre-order paperbacks now. Kindle pre-orders due on 12/1/14.
First, let's discuss what a Last Supper is in the context of this story.
This is John's Last Supper. It has a salad. He's never much liked salad.
Put simply, the Last Supper is a death kit comprised of a poisoned feast. Citizens in this ravaged version of earth receive one when they fail Justification.
What exactly is Justification?
It is a yearly test citizens sixteen and over must take in order to prove their worthiness to society. In this ravaged world with so few resources to spread among the remaining population, the luxury of life is afforded only to the most worthy, those who follow the strict guidelines set forth by the ruling party known as the Divine Rite. Some of the guidelines include regularly attending church, not producing out of turn, fulfilling a minimal work and salary quota, and avoiding hedonistic pleasures like drinking, smoking, and gluttony. The test is conducted according to an algorithm that doesn't make exceptions, as John Welland and his family soon learned when his wife, who had been stricken by cancer earlier that year, received a Last Supper for failing to meet her work obligations.
Each Supper is designed according to specifications set in the Justification exam, although there is no guarantee you will get what you want. It comes in a box decorated with a facsimile of the famous Da Vinci painting of its namesake, and inside, along with the food, is a letter designed to remind the citizen that he or she is making a worthy sacrifice on behalf of the rest of the world.
To ensure a painless and dignified passing, we present you
with a meal handcrafted by our expert chefs to your exact tastes
as specified on your Justification Exam.
The Divine Rite will place your earthly remains in a planter
with a beautiful tree for one of our scenic Memorial
Gardens designed with the comfort of your eternal rest in mind.
The Holy Uniter would like to thank you for your service to our
nation and to the world.
The meal itself is, at best, of suspicious origin. It smells and looks tantalizing, the texture doesn't match. It all has a strange manufactured quality, which is not surprising given how rare things like meat and chocolate are in this a world ravaged by blight and serpent weeds. John's meal includes a hunk of meat (species indeterminate), some stale bread, a piece of chocolate cake, a glass of wine, and a salad.
John hates salad, but as he remarks in the beginning of his harrowing memoir, it's what he deserves. We soon learn why he feels that way.
To be continued . . .
First, let's discuss what a Last Supper is in the context of this story.
This is John's Last Supper. It has a salad. He's never much liked salad.
Put simply, the Last Supper is a death kit comprised of a poisoned feast. Citizens in this ravaged version of earth receive one when they fail Justification.
What exactly is Justification?
It is a yearly test citizens sixteen and over must take in order to prove their worthiness to society. In this ravaged world with so few resources to spread among the remaining population, the luxury of life is afforded only to the most worthy, those who follow the strict guidelines set forth by the ruling party known as the Divine Rite. Some of the guidelines include regularly attending church, not producing out of turn, fulfilling a minimal work and salary quota, and avoiding hedonistic pleasures like drinking, smoking, and gluttony. The test is conducted according to an algorithm that doesn't make exceptions, as John Welland and his family soon learned when his wife, who had been stricken by cancer earlier that year, received a Last Supper for failing to meet her work obligations.
Each Supper is designed according to specifications set in the Justification exam, although there is no guarantee you will get what you want. It comes in a box decorated with a facsimile of the famous Da Vinci painting of its namesake, and inside, along with the food, is a letter designed to remind the citizen that he or she is making a worthy sacrifice on behalf of the rest of the world.
To ensure a painless and dignified passing, we present you
with a meal handcrafted by our expert chefs to your exact tastes
as specified on your Justification Exam.
The Divine Rite will place your earthly remains in a planter
with a beautiful tree for one of our scenic Memorial
Gardens designed with the comfort of your eternal rest in mind.
The Holy Uniter would like to thank you for your service to our
nation and to the world.
The meal itself is, at best, of suspicious origin. It smells and looks tantalizing, the texture doesn't match. It all has a strange manufactured quality, which is not surprising given how rare things like meat and chocolate are in this a world ravaged by blight and serpent weeds. John's meal includes a hunk of meat (species indeterminate), some stale bread, a piece of chocolate cake, a glass of wine, and a salad.
John hates salad, but as he remarks in the beginning of his harrowing memoir, it's what he deserves. We soon learn why he feels that way.
To be continued . . .
November 19, 2014
Why Bailing From KDP Select Right Now Is An Awesome Idea
When Amazon unveiled its Kindle Unlimited subscription service earlier this summer, a lot of folks expressed some worry about whether the service would affect author earnings.
As a refresher to those who aren't familiar with how KDP Select works, it's a service offered to authors who publish on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. In exchange for giving Amazon exclusive rights to sell your work in 90 day chunks, they give you the following:
1. 5 free promotional days OR 1 Countdown Promotion (where you have timed discount tiers over the course of several days starting at $.99 and gradually increasing to the full price again by the end of the promotion).
2. Enrollment in the Amazon Prime Lending Library, where readers can borrow up to one book per month as part of their Prime subscription.
3. Enrollment in Kindle Unlimited, the "all-you-can-eat" service that people can join for $9.99 a month.
All downloads that authors incur as a result of items 2 and 3 are paid for through a designated Global Fund, which is anywhere from 2 to upwards of 7 or 8 million bucks Amazon sets aside every month. Depending on the total number of downloads all enrolled authors incur (Amazon doesn't share that info with us), your earnings can fluctuate anywhere from over two bucks a download, and as we're seeing now, all the way down to $1.30 range. Really, that Global Fund number is meaningless without any additional information. It's just used to put stars into our eyes. But I digress.
Ever since the unveiling of Kindle Unlimited, downloads have increased dramatically for many authors while the earnings per download have fallen. October's $1.33 was the lowest number yet, and it was also the month that Amazon put about two million fewer dollars into the Global Fund. It was also the month Amazon had a less than stellar quarterly earnings report. But again, I digress.
As you can imagine, this creates a lot of instability for author earnings. We have no idea what we're going to be making on borrowed or Kindle Unlimited downloads from month to month, and with said downloads slowly starting to match and outpace actual sales, that means very volatile monthly earnings for authors in general. Amazon doesn't release earnings figures until the 15th of the following month, either, so the reason you're hearing murmurings about October's disappointment is because we just learned about it ourselves.
To give you a taste of how Kindle Unlimited is affecting author earnings, here is a list of the previous earnings Amazon was paying out up to and then after the unveiling of the program:
12/11: $1.70
01/12: $1.60
02/12: $2.01
03/12: $2.18
04/12: $2.48
05/12: $2.26
06/12: $2.08
07/12: $2.04
08/12: $2.12
09/12: $2.29
10/12: $2.36
11/12: $1.90
12/12: $1.88
01/13: $2.23
02/13: $2.31
03/13: $1.94
04/13: $2.27
05/13: $2.24
06/13: $2.24
07/13: $2.04
08/13: $2.26
09/13: $2.42
10/13: $2.51
11/13: $2.46
12/13: $1.86
01/14: $1.93
02/14: $2.24
03/14: $2.10
04/14: $2.24
05/14: $2.17
06/14: $2.24
******************INTRODUCTION OF KINDLE UNLIMITED**********************
07/01/14: $1.81
08/01/14: $1.54
09/01/14: $1.52
10/01/14: $1.33
At this point, unless Amazon starts dumping in millions more dollars to shore up the Global Fund to compensate for the increased downloads through Kindle Unlimited, there is no reason to believe the figures will rise above the $1.33 low water mark. In fact, they will probably dump even lower than this as the holiday season commences. $1.33 is a fine return on a $.99 download, but if you're getting that on a $2.99 and up title, that's far below what you get when you sell it outright.
And lest you think that increased downloads will help you make up any loss in per-download revenue, there are several authors already seeing losses in the thousands of dollars. This program is hurting more than it is helping.
And lest you think KU customers aren't cannibalizing your sales, that the people downloading on that program are different from the people who buy books outright, don't expect that to hold for long. As the program attracts more big name authors and publishers, more and more people will sign up for the program, and they will stop paying money for individual books. It will become the norm, in fact, just as services like Netflix and Spotify have become the norm. In fact, the chief worry was that Kindle Unlimited would cannibalize Amazon's existing sales base, and actually hurt Amazon in the long run and not just authors.
It's too early in the game to say whether or not that will happen, and Amazon is nothing if not nimble and forever changing, but the current trend just doesn't look good for anyone involved.
Of course, none of this would be nearly as big a thorn in authors' sides if Amazon weren't demanding exclusivity. At the very least, we could accept lower revenue streams if we knew we could try to recoup those losses through other vendors.
But Amazon doesn't want that. Amazon wants to kill its competition and it wants to employ its legions of devoted KDP authors in that fight by making it so the work of millions of authors is available at only one store: Amazon. Once enough of the midlist and indie segment is enveloped under that umbrella, people will just naturally buy the bestsellers there too. We're already seeing that happen.
But this competition-killing mentality is killing our bottom lines, and Kindle Unlimited is, essentially, a slow rot.
Will the authors do the right thing and revolt until Amazon comes back to the table with fairer terms? When Amazon decides to nix their unfair exclusivity clause? It's hard to say. Some authors are so beholden to Amazon for "giving them a career," that it likely won't happen until earnings fall below a buck. And even then, who knows. Writers are notoriously bad at math, and they'll cling to their vastly shrinking islands with the notion that there is nothing out there but endless, empty ocean.
Then again, taking your work out of KDP Select does come with a caveat. As most authors will tell you, enrolling in the program has a way of improving your standings in Amazon's almighty algorithm. Once we take our work out of the program, many of us seen our sales fall dramatically down to a trickle of what they once were. It's hard to say how long it can take for them to bounce back. I'm coming off the worst summer I've had since I entered this business in 2010, which also happens to be the summer I attempted to redistribute my work via Draft2Digital and Payhip. After three months, my complete lack of sales drove me to re-enroll certain titles, and I've since seen my sales (and borrows) return.
So right now, the prevailing wisdom seems to be to give up KDP Select for good. Quit the sauce entirely. Or at the very least, remove all titles that are over $2.99 and leave in a few cheapie short stories or loss leaders. All new work gets automatically distributed wide to all markets. As for the stuff that was enrolled in Select and boasts the taint of bad Amazon Algorithm Voodoo, the only answer for that I guess is to be patient. To hope that the sales of the newer, shinier titles will help pull the other ones out of the gutter. Gaining a presence in other markets takes a lot of time and patience. I squandered what I had built on Barnes & Noble and Apple two years ago, and getting that back won't be easy, but it will be worth it. Amazon will only continue these abusive policies as long as it has authors willing to line up and hand them their work without question, to take smaller and smaller cuts of the pie because they believe Jeff Bezos is a benevolent god.
I've unchecked all my renew boxes and this time they will stay unchecked this time. I'm battening down my hatches and preparing for a long and very dark winter. Let's just hope spring comes early.
As a refresher to those who aren't familiar with how KDP Select works, it's a service offered to authors who publish on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. In exchange for giving Amazon exclusive rights to sell your work in 90 day chunks, they give you the following:
1. 5 free promotional days OR 1 Countdown Promotion (where you have timed discount tiers over the course of several days starting at $.99 and gradually increasing to the full price again by the end of the promotion).
2. Enrollment in the Amazon Prime Lending Library, where readers can borrow up to one book per month as part of their Prime subscription.
3. Enrollment in Kindle Unlimited, the "all-you-can-eat" service that people can join for $9.99 a month.
All downloads that authors incur as a result of items 2 and 3 are paid for through a designated Global Fund, which is anywhere from 2 to upwards of 7 or 8 million bucks Amazon sets aside every month. Depending on the total number of downloads all enrolled authors incur (Amazon doesn't share that info with us), your earnings can fluctuate anywhere from over two bucks a download, and as we're seeing now, all the way down to $1.30 range. Really, that Global Fund number is meaningless without any additional information. It's just used to put stars into our eyes. But I digress.
Ever since the unveiling of Kindle Unlimited, downloads have increased dramatically for many authors while the earnings per download have fallen. October's $1.33 was the lowest number yet, and it was also the month that Amazon put about two million fewer dollars into the Global Fund. It was also the month Amazon had a less than stellar quarterly earnings report. But again, I digress.
As you can imagine, this creates a lot of instability for author earnings. We have no idea what we're going to be making on borrowed or Kindle Unlimited downloads from month to month, and with said downloads slowly starting to match and outpace actual sales, that means very volatile monthly earnings for authors in general. Amazon doesn't release earnings figures until the 15th of the following month, either, so the reason you're hearing murmurings about October's disappointment is because we just learned about it ourselves.
To give you a taste of how Kindle Unlimited is affecting author earnings, here is a list of the previous earnings Amazon was paying out up to and then after the unveiling of the program:
12/11: $1.70
01/12: $1.60
02/12: $2.01
03/12: $2.18
04/12: $2.48
05/12: $2.26
06/12: $2.08
07/12: $2.04
08/12: $2.12
09/12: $2.29
10/12: $2.36
11/12: $1.90
12/12: $1.88
01/13: $2.23
02/13: $2.31
03/13: $1.94
04/13: $2.27
05/13: $2.24
06/13: $2.24
07/13: $2.04
08/13: $2.26
09/13: $2.42
10/13: $2.51
11/13: $2.46
12/13: $1.86
01/14: $1.93
02/14: $2.24
03/14: $2.10
04/14: $2.24
05/14: $2.17
06/14: $2.24
******************INTRODUCTION OF KINDLE UNLIMITED**********************
07/01/14: $1.81
08/01/14: $1.54
09/01/14: $1.52
10/01/14: $1.33
At this point, unless Amazon starts dumping in millions more dollars to shore up the Global Fund to compensate for the increased downloads through Kindle Unlimited, there is no reason to believe the figures will rise above the $1.33 low water mark. In fact, they will probably dump even lower than this as the holiday season commences. $1.33 is a fine return on a $.99 download, but if you're getting that on a $2.99 and up title, that's far below what you get when you sell it outright.
And lest you think that increased downloads will help you make up any loss in per-download revenue, there are several authors already seeing losses in the thousands of dollars. This program is hurting more than it is helping.
And lest you think KU customers aren't cannibalizing your sales, that the people downloading on that program are different from the people who buy books outright, don't expect that to hold for long. As the program attracts more big name authors and publishers, more and more people will sign up for the program, and they will stop paying money for individual books. It will become the norm, in fact, just as services like Netflix and Spotify have become the norm. In fact, the chief worry was that Kindle Unlimited would cannibalize Amazon's existing sales base, and actually hurt Amazon in the long run and not just authors.
It's too early in the game to say whether or not that will happen, and Amazon is nothing if not nimble and forever changing, but the current trend just doesn't look good for anyone involved.
Of course, none of this would be nearly as big a thorn in authors' sides if Amazon weren't demanding exclusivity. At the very least, we could accept lower revenue streams if we knew we could try to recoup those losses through other vendors.
But Amazon doesn't want that. Amazon wants to kill its competition and it wants to employ its legions of devoted KDP authors in that fight by making it so the work of millions of authors is available at only one store: Amazon. Once enough of the midlist and indie segment is enveloped under that umbrella, people will just naturally buy the bestsellers there too. We're already seeing that happen.
But this competition-killing mentality is killing our bottom lines, and Kindle Unlimited is, essentially, a slow rot.
Will the authors do the right thing and revolt until Amazon comes back to the table with fairer terms? When Amazon decides to nix their unfair exclusivity clause? It's hard to say. Some authors are so beholden to Amazon for "giving them a career," that it likely won't happen until earnings fall below a buck. And even then, who knows. Writers are notoriously bad at math, and they'll cling to their vastly shrinking islands with the notion that there is nothing out there but endless, empty ocean.
Then again, taking your work out of KDP Select does come with a caveat. As most authors will tell you, enrolling in the program has a way of improving your standings in Amazon's almighty algorithm. Once we take our work out of the program, many of us seen our sales fall dramatically down to a trickle of what they once were. It's hard to say how long it can take for them to bounce back. I'm coming off the worst summer I've had since I entered this business in 2010, which also happens to be the summer I attempted to redistribute my work via Draft2Digital and Payhip. After three months, my complete lack of sales drove me to re-enroll certain titles, and I've since seen my sales (and borrows) return.
So right now, the prevailing wisdom seems to be to give up KDP Select for good. Quit the sauce entirely. Or at the very least, remove all titles that are over $2.99 and leave in a few cheapie short stories or loss leaders. All new work gets automatically distributed wide to all markets. As for the stuff that was enrolled in Select and boasts the taint of bad Amazon Algorithm Voodoo, the only answer for that I guess is to be patient. To hope that the sales of the newer, shinier titles will help pull the other ones out of the gutter. Gaining a presence in other markets takes a lot of time and patience. I squandered what I had built on Barnes & Noble and Apple two years ago, and getting that back won't be easy, but it will be worth it. Amazon will only continue these abusive policies as long as it has authors willing to line up and hand them their work without question, to take smaller and smaller cuts of the pie because they believe Jeff Bezos is a benevolent god.
I've unchecked all my renew boxes and this time they will stay unchecked this time. I'm battening down my hatches and preparing for a long and very dark winter. Let's just hope spring comes early.
November 14, 2014
What Sort of Woman Writes These Things?
Quote courtesy of my dear friend Kirstin,
who is in the dedication of STRINGS for a reason
It's a refrain I've heard often about female authors. Particularly female authors of dark or gritty fiction.
What sort of woman writes these things?
As if women can't write about the brutality people inflict upon other people, male or female. As if brutality itself has a gender and its gender is exclusively male.
Do people really believe women are incapable of being cruel and visceral and dark? Maybe we just never met the same women, but I can spout off at least a dozen without taking a breath, and if you can't, you're either lying or not paying much attention. Despite well-known examples of female serial killers, female despots, and female psychopaths all throughout human history, women have long been steeped in a flowery brew of virtue, frailty, and elegance as a counter to the stereotypical male's chauvinistic brutishness. It's a stereotype we often don't acknowledge until a woman is found to be in violation of it.
What sort of woman writes these things?
Must we really be so scandalized in 2014 about what women are capable of? I've never worn a corset in my life, but I can sometimes feel the invisible squeeze of one, especially when someone pairs gender with genre. But we're not only scandalized. We are also very confused.
Take Gillian Flynn. When the movie GONE GIRL was released, it ignited a discussion among feminists and traditionalists alike about whether or not the story was progressive, simply because the story revolves around the actions of a psychopath with a vagina, as if such a combination of traits doesn't exist in nature, or if it does, well we certainly don't want to write about it, because that only makes women look bad! Contributing to the head-scratchery was this notion that, as a woman writing about such a character, Flynn was perpetuating negative female stereotypes. Double bad! The overall tone was she should have "known better."
As if "woman" is a country to which we owe our most jingoistic of platitudes, and Flynn is a traitor of the highest order for misrepresenting us somehow.
But wait . . . isn't it more sexist to portray women exclusively as victims? Even if we see more violence against women, and that certainly is no laughing matter, how exactly is it wrong to show the reverse?
What sort of woman writes these things?
Because certainly women can do no wrong. And they certainly cannot write "these things." Leave such horrific matters to the men, the fighters of our wars, the executors of our patriarchy, the bearers of the keys to our womanly shackles. Leave them to their brutal ways while the woman lingers in the shadows, looking and smelling nice, longing for victimhood, never to express her own darkness, her own aggression, the stuff that makes her every bit as much an animal as her male counterpart.
Swallow it down ladies. Don't express it. You're mothers. Delicate flowers. Nurturers. Bearers of life. Behave accordingly.
Of course, we women are unique creatures with our own drives, our own uniquely female pathologies. That leaves opportunity for expression, not ignorance.
What sort of woman writes these things?
The sort of woman who has had it up to the top of the Hoover Dam with being told how to dress, how to speak, how to believe, how to act. The sort of woman who doesn't let her gender get in the way of telling stories about real human beings in horrific situations, many of whom ultimately PREVAIL (but we'll forget about that part for now, because we must only focus on the fact that she wrote about "these horrible things").
The sort of woman who wants to live by example for all the OTHER people out there, male or female, who have stories and characters inside them that may go against the current of common thought, who sees that current and its brackish undertow and has decided to chart a different course.
The sort of woman with an imagination that goes down some very dark rabbit holes, who can envision with very feminine empathy how a woman could be violated in a most horrific way, and then show you how she gets through it. The sort of woman who is driven to document these things, because maybe if you glimpse that horrid thing and live that painful moment with that thankfully fictional woman, you might think, hey, my life isn't so bad. The sort of woman who needs to remind HERSELF of that from time to time.
I visit the dank cellar of my mind and I take stock of the people inhabiting it, and I say to myself that if she can get out of this, maybe I can get out of my own pain. Or if she doesn't make it out, that doesn't mean I can't. That is and has always been the function of horror for me.
But never is it intended to be an endorsement of violence, and if you're reading it as a symptom of something abnormal about me, you may be reading out of your level.
What sort of woman writes these things?
The kind you walk by on the street every day without a second thought. The kind who hands you your change and tells you to have a nice day. The kind who teaches your kids, nurses your wounds, cooks your food, mops up after you. In other words, all sorts of women. Womanly women, (whatever that means), normal women (ditto). A human woman who may be different from you, but is no less valid or deserving of common decency and respect.
But take heart. Your mawkish and cowardly views only empower me and women like me to venture deeper into those forbidden corners of our minds, no matter how much it ails you. To be "the sort of woman who writes these things" isn't only a calling. It's an honor.
November 9, 2014
THE LAST SUPPER Gets a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly! Also, the Trailer has Released!
2015 has been a year of publishing milestones. I signed with an agent this year. I topped several Amazon bestseller lists with STRINGS and saw it top 100 reviews. But I had yet to receive a review from a major trade publication until now.
When Hobbes End submitted THE LAST SUPPER to Publishers Weekly a couple months back, I honestly wasn't even sure they would review it at all. And then I figured if they DID review it, they would thrash it mercilessly, but that I would still take that as a major feat to be ripped apart by a PW reviewer, because hey, it's PW.
But then I noticed not only my book on the PW website, but also the red star next to it. According to PW, the red star denotes a book they believe to be of "outstanding quality."
So then I screamed.
And then I died.
And then I came back to life, because I needed to cherish the moment a little longer.
Publishers Weekly writes:
I don't think I've ever seen anything of mine written so . . . academically. Look all those big words! Fabulist? Paean? KAFKAESQUE?
I can't even. I just can't. To put this a little into perspective, imagine you're a nobody indie band who plays bar gigs, and your album just got reviewed by Rolling Stone or Spin. It's a little like that.
Finally, take a look at the trailer my awesome husband and I put together over the weekend. A couple months back, I commissioned Justin Wasson, my go-to artist for my COLT COLTRANE books, to draw scenes from SUPPER for use in the trailer and for other promotional work, so it feels great to finally get to use the art for its intended purpose. I decided to take a more "talky" approach to the trailer, because I felt it was the sort of story that couldn't be explained through illustrations and text alone. I wanted to make it feel more personal.
When Hobbes End submitted THE LAST SUPPER to Publishers Weekly a couple months back, I honestly wasn't even sure they would review it at all. And then I figured if they DID review it, they would thrash it mercilessly, but that I would still take that as a major feat to be ripped apart by a PW reviewer, because hey, it's PW.
But then I noticed not only my book on the PW website, but also the red star next to it. According to PW, the red star denotes a book they believe to be of "outstanding quality."
So then I screamed.
And then I died.
And then I came back to life, because I needed to cherish the moment a little longer.
Publishers Weekly writes:
Tragedy and triumph charge this story set in a weed-infested, mutated future full of provocative paradoxes of amorality and faith. “My last meal has a salad. I’ve always hated salad,” recounts tortured hero John Welland at the beginning of his memoir of a life spent battling and dodging sentient superweeds, the land-savaging Blight, and the Divine Right, religious zealots who ensure obedience through terror. After Welland’s wife fails her yearly “exam,” a justification for further life, and eats her poisoned last supper, “white hot rage” propels Welland to join an underground rebellion. They introduce him to the Elan Vital, the life force, and soon he discovers a personal connection to it. Marrying speculative, realistic, and fabulist traditions to dystopian formula, Dickson’s paean to individualism both breaks and strengthens the heart. Welland’s character receives “no comfort as he comes face to face with his own tragedy.” The Kafkaesque world of warped normalcy and cruel politics brings intimacy to the classic theme of self-definition in the face of oppression.
I don't think I've ever seen anything of mine written so . . . academically. Look all those big words! Fabulist? Paean? KAFKAESQUE?
I can't even. I just can't. To put this a little into perspective, imagine you're a nobody indie band who plays bar gigs, and your album just got reviewed by Rolling Stone or Spin. It's a little like that.
Finally, take a look at the trailer my awesome husband and I put together over the weekend. A couple months back, I commissioned Justin Wasson, my go-to artist for my COLT COLTRANE books, to draw scenes from SUPPER for use in the trailer and for other promotional work, so it feels great to finally get to use the art for its intended purpose. I decided to take a more "talky" approach to the trailer, because I felt it was the sort of story that couldn't be explained through illustrations and text alone. I wanted to make it feel more personal.
November 5, 2014
When Your 13-Year-Old Daughter Comes Out
When your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you do not ask her if she's sure. You don't treat it like a weird phase she'll grow out of. You don't belittle or demean or diminish her feelings, just as you wouldn't for a heterosexual child who expresses an interest in the opposite sex. This isn't an anomaly. This isn't something that went wrong. This is a biological feeling every bit as integral to who she is as your particular preferences are to you. Only, after years of society's ignorance and cruelty, you're privileged enough to be considered "normal" while she will always in some way be treated as "deviant." Don't reinforce those horrible stereotypes and dogmas.
When your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you don't turn all weird and make it sexual. If she's gone through puberty, she should have a pretty good idea where her antenna is pointed, and it's okay for her to express that out loud. Again, don't diminish. I'm pretty sure you all knew by that age if you liked boys or girls "that way."
When your 13-year-old daughter comes out, is it okay to say, "I'm not surprised?" I honestly don't know. I don't pretend to know all the right things to say. But even so, I wasn't surprised. I could see the writing on the wall for a good while, but it's good to give someone space in these matters, to let the egg hatch on its own while you provide enough warmth to further things along. It's not like anyone was holding their breath around here. This isn't TMZ. "Is she or isn't she? The world must know!!" It wasn't like anything would change between us, except for maybe an addendum to the whole safe sex talk.
When your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you may feel like you did something right raising her well enough to feel safe in herself and her home, for not feeling the need to hide for half her life pretending to be something she's not, possibly marrying a man in order mask her true feelings out of a sense of shame, or a fear that she could lose us if we knew. By the way, if either of my kids felt for a second that being open about who they choose to love would result in me or their father denying or shunning them, I would be the biggest fucking failure as a parent.
Even so, when your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you may feel a flutter of panic. You have done your best to create a safe haven for her at home, but you will always worry about the people who fall outside that safety zone, who do think she should be ashamed, who might ridicule and reject her, who might shoot barbs at her, who might actually physically harm her for simply being who she is. You fleetingly think of the movie Boys Don't Cry and become sick to your stomach, because there are still people like that in this world. You might feel a desire to tell her to keep it under wraps so she can stay safe from the wolves out there, because the thought of something happening to your child makes your soul bleed.
But you must never ever do that. If you've given her the tools to live authentically, you can't take them away, anymore than you can prevent her from driving because she might have a wreck, or do her homework for her so she won't get an F. She is your daughter and she may share half of your DNA, but she is not an extension of you.
She is a person.
Finally, when your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you say she's awesome. You tell her you're proud of her for living fearlessly and out loud in this crazy world of ours that seeks to silence anyone who steps out of bounds.
And then you tell her to go unload the dishwasher, because she's only 13, and you still have a few years left to extract free household labor.
When your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you don't turn all weird and make it sexual. If she's gone through puberty, she should have a pretty good idea where her antenna is pointed, and it's okay for her to express that out loud. Again, don't diminish. I'm pretty sure you all knew by that age if you liked boys or girls "that way."
When your 13-year-old daughter comes out, is it okay to say, "I'm not surprised?" I honestly don't know. I don't pretend to know all the right things to say. But even so, I wasn't surprised. I could see the writing on the wall for a good while, but it's good to give someone space in these matters, to let the egg hatch on its own while you provide enough warmth to further things along. It's not like anyone was holding their breath around here. This isn't TMZ. "Is she or isn't she? The world must know!!" It wasn't like anything would change between us, except for maybe an addendum to the whole safe sex talk.
When your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you may feel like you did something right raising her well enough to feel safe in herself and her home, for not feeling the need to hide for half her life pretending to be something she's not, possibly marrying a man in order mask her true feelings out of a sense of shame, or a fear that she could lose us if we knew. By the way, if either of my kids felt for a second that being open about who they choose to love would result in me or their father denying or shunning them, I would be the biggest fucking failure as a parent.
Even so, when your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you may feel a flutter of panic. You have done your best to create a safe haven for her at home, but you will always worry about the people who fall outside that safety zone, who do think she should be ashamed, who might ridicule and reject her, who might shoot barbs at her, who might actually physically harm her for simply being who she is. You fleetingly think of the movie Boys Don't Cry and become sick to your stomach, because there are still people like that in this world. You might feel a desire to tell her to keep it under wraps so she can stay safe from the wolves out there, because the thought of something happening to your child makes your soul bleed.
But you must never ever do that. If you've given her the tools to live authentically, you can't take them away, anymore than you can prevent her from driving because she might have a wreck, or do her homework for her so she won't get an F. She is your daughter and she may share half of your DNA, but she is not an extension of you.
She is a person.
Finally, when your 13-year-old daughter comes out, you say she's awesome. You tell her you're proud of her for living fearlessly and out loud in this crazy world of ours that seeks to silence anyone who steps out of bounds.
And then you tell her to go unload the dishwasher, because she's only 13, and you still have a few years left to extract free household labor.
October 25, 2014
Thirty-Five
I turned thirty-five today.
My thirty-five face.
Thirty-five years and still mostly intact. The engine is probably in need of some scheduled maintenance, but it still feels like it has a lot of miles left. In medieval times, I would be an old woman, but I'm lucky to live in an age where thirty-five is still plenty youthful, at least if you're not a model, actress, or professional athlete.
At thirty-five, I have a pretty normal and existentially boring life (this is a good thing). I still have both of my parents with me. I have a good marriage and two great kids. I have a roof over my head. We keep the lights on. We stay warm. We don't go hungry. I get to whine about things on the Internet from the comfort of my very own broadband-connected laptop. I don't have to walk for hours a day to collect water and carry it on my head. I'm better off than most.
A lot of thirty-five year-old people today are just now starting to think about having families. My two kids are already half-grown, and it probably won't be much longer before I'm a grandmother.
I can still taste this sandwich. It can't be six years ago.
Last week. Time, you are relentless.
Thirty-five years, and my face is a tad droopier. I have a crease forming between my eyes, probably because I have spent more time frowning than was warranted. My hands are not nearly as limber as they used to be. My crop of gray hair is growing exponentially. My body often hurts for no damn reason. I'll be due for my first mammogram in a few years. Nevertheless, I've tested my body with various fitness challenges, and I can feel the untapped potential in my bones.
But even after thirty-five years, I'm still lazy as fuck.
The clock is speeding up, though. Of this I am sure. Five minutes ago, I recited wedding vows in tiny chapel in Las Vegas.
Yesterday, I was twenty-one and holding my brand new daughter.
Last week, I graduated high school.
My optimism was unbreakable.
A month ago, I was fourteen and had my first kiss from a boy in the shadow of a huge maple tree on a nighttime walk. I can even still feel the awkward collision of our teeth, and my immediate, hormone-driven desire to do it again and again.
Only a year ago, I was standing on the edge of a field, straining my eyes to see beyond the horizon to a future that looked nothing like the life I'm living now.
No one could daydream like this kid.
I caught myself this morning nearing the event horizon of a very scary thought, one that threatened to toss me into a dark hole of depression and fear: two rather feisty emotions I have to fight harder and harder to keep at bay. The thought was if I could blink and watch my kids go from being babies to teenagers, if I could inhale a breath as a care-free sixteen-year-old and exhale as a middle-aged suburban mom/writer, then I will only have to blink three or maybe four more times, and I'll be dead.
I really don't have much time left. The older we get, the faster the world spins.
Then I realized how arrogant I was being to even assume I have another thirty or forty years left when there is no guarantee I will see tomorrow or five breaths from now. I might not even make it to the end of this blog. Each typed word could be a countdown until the signals keeping my brain working and my heart beating decide to short out for good, and I won't even have the opportunity to finish a sentence or punctuate it.
Seems a little silly to fret over the number of years I have left when a freak lightning storm of bad luck and chance could rob me of my next breath.
After I reminded myself of that, I felt better, secure in my imminent, unknowable death. Funny how that works.
My thirty-five face.
Thirty-five years and still mostly intact. The engine is probably in need of some scheduled maintenance, but it still feels like it has a lot of miles left. In medieval times, I would be an old woman, but I'm lucky to live in an age where thirty-five is still plenty youthful, at least if you're not a model, actress, or professional athlete.
At thirty-five, I have a pretty normal and existentially boring life (this is a good thing). I still have both of my parents with me. I have a good marriage and two great kids. I have a roof over my head. We keep the lights on. We stay warm. We don't go hungry. I get to whine about things on the Internet from the comfort of my very own broadband-connected laptop. I don't have to walk for hours a day to collect water and carry it on my head. I'm better off than most.
A lot of thirty-five year-old people today are just now starting to think about having families. My two kids are already half-grown, and it probably won't be much longer before I'm a grandmother.
I can still taste this sandwich. It can't be six years ago.
Last week. Time, you are relentless.
Thirty-five years, and my face is a tad droopier. I have a crease forming between my eyes, probably because I have spent more time frowning than was warranted. My hands are not nearly as limber as they used to be. My crop of gray hair is growing exponentially. My body often hurts for no damn reason. I'll be due for my first mammogram in a few years. Nevertheless, I've tested my body with various fitness challenges, and I can feel the untapped potential in my bones.
But even after thirty-five years, I'm still lazy as fuck.
The clock is speeding up, though. Of this I am sure. Five minutes ago, I recited wedding vows in tiny chapel in Las Vegas.
Yesterday, I was twenty-one and holding my brand new daughter.
Last week, I graduated high school.
My optimism was unbreakable.
A month ago, I was fourteen and had my first kiss from a boy in the shadow of a huge maple tree on a nighttime walk. I can even still feel the awkward collision of our teeth, and my immediate, hormone-driven desire to do it again and again.
Only a year ago, I was standing on the edge of a field, straining my eyes to see beyond the horizon to a future that looked nothing like the life I'm living now.
No one could daydream like this kid.
I caught myself this morning nearing the event horizon of a very scary thought, one that threatened to toss me into a dark hole of depression and fear: two rather feisty emotions I have to fight harder and harder to keep at bay. The thought was if I could blink and watch my kids go from being babies to teenagers, if I could inhale a breath as a care-free sixteen-year-old and exhale as a middle-aged suburban mom/writer, then I will only have to blink three or maybe four more times, and I'll be dead.
I really don't have much time left. The older we get, the faster the world spins.
Then I realized how arrogant I was being to even assume I have another thirty or forty years left when there is no guarantee I will see tomorrow or five breaths from now. I might not even make it to the end of this blog. Each typed word could be a countdown until the signals keeping my brain working and my heart beating decide to short out for good, and I won't even have the opportunity to finish a sentence or punctuate it.
Seems a little silly to fret over the number of years I have left when a freak lightning storm of bad luck and chance could rob me of my next breath.
After I reminded myself of that, I felt better, secure in my imminent, unknowable death. Funny how that works.
October 14, 2014
How to BookBub: Should You Do Discount Promotions or Free Ones?
Let's talk BookBub. Do you BookBub?
If you're an indie author, you've probably at the very least heard of BookBub, a well-known discount book promotion service. Millions of people looking to save a lot of money on digital reading material subscribe to this service, and they receive daily emails with fresh offerings. And, if you're an author, chances are you've been turned away at their door after failing to meet their stringent requirements for advertising with them, which in many cases are a mystery. But what seems apparent is people get turned down by BookBub for one or all of the following reasons:
1. Book is part of a series or is an anthology. BookBub doesn't like those as much, though they have been known to make exceptions. In general, I think the book has to appear to be popular with readers.
2. Book hasn't been reviewed enough (or positively enough).
3. Book cover isn't good enough.
4. Your genre is a bit too niche for one of their categories.
At any rate, it's worth it to keep trying, because once you can actually get a BookBub promotion, it has the potential to do great things for you. But I must stress when I say potential. There are no guarantees, and often times an otherwise successful promotion may only barely cover the cost of your ad. There are numerous things that can affect this, and I'll detail all that below.
My book STRINGS has had two BookBub campaigns in the last year. The first one was for a discounted promotion in February, when we dropped the book to $.99. The second one was for a freebie promotion just recently that started on October 1st. I'm going to break down the performance of each promotion and the pluses and minuses of each one.
Keep in mind a couple things first:
1. BookBub pricing varies based on the genre of the book. Some genres have more subscribers than others and have the potential for far bigger sales; therefore, the cost of the ad is that much higher. STRINGS is listed in Horror, which is one of the more affordable genres. It also has a smaller subscriber base. This chart demonstrates cost, subscribers, and average downloads for each of the genres it lists, and from what my publisher has experienced, the numbers are more or less accurate.
2. If your book is in Amazon's KDP Select, and you have a BookBub discount promotion scheduled, it's a good idea to schedule a Kindle Countdown Deal starting the day of your promotion. Countdown deals allow you to keep 70% of your discount price as opposed to the usual 35% on books priced below $2.99. This increases your chances of your ad being profitable. Alas, we didn't do this with the STRINGS discount promotion, but lesson learned.
What to Expect from a BookBub Discount Promotion
BookBub emails typically arrive in subscriber inboxes around noon, Eastern time, so don't hop out of your bed like a kid on Christmas morning expecting a major spike in sales.
Then, when sales do start to kick in, expect Amazon to lag a little bit on updating your rank. While typically agile enough to adjust by the hour, when a book is seeing a ton of new activity, it's a bit like throwing a wrench into a Kitchen Aid mixer while it's running. I didn't start getting steady ranking data until around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
Another thing, your sales won't immediately taper off after the ad finishes running. Expect about 2 weeks' worth of decent sales and rank as Amazon gives your temporary little superstar a bit more TLC before sending it back down into the rankings crapper from whence it likely came.
So the average downloads for my BookBub promotion was about 700 copies. A little short of the average BookBub states for horror books, but overall, not terrible. I peaked at around #300 on the Amazon bestseller list and in the top twenty of the horror and thriller bestseller lists. Exciting stuff! I managed to get a handful of new reviews out of it too, though it's tough to say how many of them were directly attributable to BookBub or any other promotions we were running at the beginning of the year.
Was it worth the $180?
Let's do the basic math: 700 x $.35 = $245.
The sales DID pay for the ad, so there is that. However, since that money had to be split between the publisher and me, the publisher did not turn a profit. Still, as a promotional expense, that's a lot of books in hands for less than $60. A paid ad at that price on most any other website would probably not fare nearly so well. If you're your own publisher, you would have an extra $65 in your pockets (or $130 if you did the Kindle Countdown promotion alongside it), so all in all, not a bad venture as far as these kinds of things go.
Assuming this is all relative, you can probably apply similar ratios to your genre to get an idea for how much you might profit from doing a discount ad. Mystery and Romance authors would undoubtedly have much larger numbers. It's just a larger risk you're taking with the price of the ad.
What to Expect from a BookBub Free Promotion
It probably sounds a little crazy to run a paid promotion for a book you're giving away, but bear with me here, because I wasn't initially convinced either.
Normally, when you use a few freebie days on KDP Select, it's not a bad idea to advertise your freebie with a few promotional sites who put out Tweets, Facebook posts, or send out alerts to mailing lists letting people know about what's available. These things are free and they can usually give you a small bump in downloads, though not always. Many freebie days, I've received as few as 20 downloads. But if the constellations and planets are all in proper sync, big things can happen. I've had days where I didn't promote anywhere but Facebook and Twitter, but still managed to give away up to 1500 copies of a single title. There's no explaining it. When your numbers get that high, you can normally count on a little bit of a post freebie bump, too. Those bumps have decreased more and more over the years, making KDP Select less appealing from that perspective, but it's always interesting to see if you get any real payback out of a promotion.
However, I was not prepared for what came my way when Hobbes End ran our $90 freebie ad with BookBub.
Now, first of all, the actual promotion on Amazon started October 1st, and the BookBub ad didn't run until October 2nd, and we had nearly 5000 downloads before then from other ads we had run (one of them with E-Reader News Today, another great promo site worth checking out). However, when BookBub went online, numbers jumped exponentially. In four hours, we had over 9000 downloads (in addition to the pre-existing 5K, so around 14K total). By the time the dust had settled on October 5th, over 26,000 people had copies of STRINGS on their Kindles.
The book reached #8 overall on the Kindle freebie charts, and was in the top 3 in three other categories over the course of several days.
But the fun didn't end there. We are still experiencing a great post-freebie bounce, with around 70 and counting paid downloads (sales and Kindle Unlimited combined), as well as a spike in paperback sales. And the reviews. On October 1st, STRINGS had 58 reviews. As of this writing on October 14th, there are 80. Some days, I've had up to 6 new reviews post one after the other. Activity on GoodReads has also increased considerably, with new ratings and reviews posting throughout the day.
Assuming around a $2 earning on the Kindle Unlimited/Lending Library borrows, that alone paid for the cost of the ad. Everything else is just cake. And it's earnings on 70% of $2.99 instead of $.99, so that's very good indeed. Ten days after the promotion, the book is still hanging out in the 10K-20K rank section, which isn't too terrible at all.
It sounds crazy giving away that many books, but this isn't really about that. It's about raw exposure, and this is the true benefit of doing the free promotion. While the discount promotion will certainly bring you good rank and put a few hundred bucks in your pocket, if you're really looking for people to download, read, and review your book, the free promotion has been monumentally better. Furthermore, with 80+ reviews on STRINGS, the Amazon algorithm gods will treat the book far better, increasing the chances it will sell.
So Which Should You Choose? Free or Discount?
If you can get BookBub to list your book, chances are you will do well regardless of which option you choose. The subscriber base there is immense and faithful. People WILL download your book. Possibly a lot of them. Or at least enough to pay for your ad. In that regard, it's just a decent promotional expense.
However, if you can throw away artistic ego a little bit and not chafe too much at the notion of giving away your work for free, in exchange for far more reviews and the immense exposure that comes with upwards of 26K or more people having your book in their hands . . . even if only 1% of them actually follows through, reads it, and reviews it, that's STILL a lot of advertising value for $90. And even if some of those people hated your book? They know who you are. They won't forget your name. With those kinds of numbers, the flavor of your publicity doesn't matter so much.
If you're an indie author, you've probably at the very least heard of BookBub, a well-known discount book promotion service. Millions of people looking to save a lot of money on digital reading material subscribe to this service, and they receive daily emails with fresh offerings. And, if you're an author, chances are you've been turned away at their door after failing to meet their stringent requirements for advertising with them, which in many cases are a mystery. But what seems apparent is people get turned down by BookBub for one or all of the following reasons:
1. Book is part of a series or is an anthology. BookBub doesn't like those as much, though they have been known to make exceptions. In general, I think the book has to appear to be popular with readers.
2. Book hasn't been reviewed enough (or positively enough).
3. Book cover isn't good enough.
4. Your genre is a bit too niche for one of their categories.
At any rate, it's worth it to keep trying, because once you can actually get a BookBub promotion, it has the potential to do great things for you. But I must stress when I say potential. There are no guarantees, and often times an otherwise successful promotion may only barely cover the cost of your ad. There are numerous things that can affect this, and I'll detail all that below.
My book STRINGS has had two BookBub campaigns in the last year. The first one was for a discounted promotion in February, when we dropped the book to $.99. The second one was for a freebie promotion just recently that started on October 1st. I'm going to break down the performance of each promotion and the pluses and minuses of each one.
Keep in mind a couple things first:
1. BookBub pricing varies based on the genre of the book. Some genres have more subscribers than others and have the potential for far bigger sales; therefore, the cost of the ad is that much higher. STRINGS is listed in Horror, which is one of the more affordable genres. It also has a smaller subscriber base. This chart demonstrates cost, subscribers, and average downloads for each of the genres it lists, and from what my publisher has experienced, the numbers are more or less accurate.
2. If your book is in Amazon's KDP Select, and you have a BookBub discount promotion scheduled, it's a good idea to schedule a Kindle Countdown Deal starting the day of your promotion. Countdown deals allow you to keep 70% of your discount price as opposed to the usual 35% on books priced below $2.99. This increases your chances of your ad being profitable. Alas, we didn't do this with the STRINGS discount promotion, but lesson learned.
What to Expect from a BookBub Discount Promotion
BookBub emails typically arrive in subscriber inboxes around noon, Eastern time, so don't hop out of your bed like a kid on Christmas morning expecting a major spike in sales.
Then, when sales do start to kick in, expect Amazon to lag a little bit on updating your rank. While typically agile enough to adjust by the hour, when a book is seeing a ton of new activity, it's a bit like throwing a wrench into a Kitchen Aid mixer while it's running. I didn't start getting steady ranking data until around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
Another thing, your sales won't immediately taper off after the ad finishes running. Expect about 2 weeks' worth of decent sales and rank as Amazon gives your temporary little superstar a bit more TLC before sending it back down into the rankings crapper from whence it likely came.
So the average downloads for my BookBub promotion was about 700 copies. A little short of the average BookBub states for horror books, but overall, not terrible. I peaked at around #300 on the Amazon bestseller list and in the top twenty of the horror and thriller bestseller lists. Exciting stuff! I managed to get a handful of new reviews out of it too, though it's tough to say how many of them were directly attributable to BookBub or any other promotions we were running at the beginning of the year.
Was it worth the $180?
Let's do the basic math: 700 x $.35 = $245.
The sales DID pay for the ad, so there is that. However, since that money had to be split between the publisher and me, the publisher did not turn a profit. Still, as a promotional expense, that's a lot of books in hands for less than $60. A paid ad at that price on most any other website would probably not fare nearly so well. If you're your own publisher, you would have an extra $65 in your pockets (or $130 if you did the Kindle Countdown promotion alongside it), so all in all, not a bad venture as far as these kinds of things go.
Assuming this is all relative, you can probably apply similar ratios to your genre to get an idea for how much you might profit from doing a discount ad. Mystery and Romance authors would undoubtedly have much larger numbers. It's just a larger risk you're taking with the price of the ad.
What to Expect from a BookBub Free Promotion
It probably sounds a little crazy to run a paid promotion for a book you're giving away, but bear with me here, because I wasn't initially convinced either.
Normally, when you use a few freebie days on KDP Select, it's not a bad idea to advertise your freebie with a few promotional sites who put out Tweets, Facebook posts, or send out alerts to mailing lists letting people know about what's available. These things are free and they can usually give you a small bump in downloads, though not always. Many freebie days, I've received as few as 20 downloads. But if the constellations and planets are all in proper sync, big things can happen. I've had days where I didn't promote anywhere but Facebook and Twitter, but still managed to give away up to 1500 copies of a single title. There's no explaining it. When your numbers get that high, you can normally count on a little bit of a post freebie bump, too. Those bumps have decreased more and more over the years, making KDP Select less appealing from that perspective, but it's always interesting to see if you get any real payback out of a promotion.
However, I was not prepared for what came my way when Hobbes End ran our $90 freebie ad with BookBub.
Now, first of all, the actual promotion on Amazon started October 1st, and the BookBub ad didn't run until October 2nd, and we had nearly 5000 downloads before then from other ads we had run (one of them with E-Reader News Today, another great promo site worth checking out). However, when BookBub went online, numbers jumped exponentially. In four hours, we had over 9000 downloads (in addition to the pre-existing 5K, so around 14K total). By the time the dust had settled on October 5th, over 26,000 people had copies of STRINGS on their Kindles.
The book reached #8 overall on the Kindle freebie charts, and was in the top 3 in three other categories over the course of several days.
But the fun didn't end there. We are still experiencing a great post-freebie bounce, with around 70 and counting paid downloads (sales and Kindle Unlimited combined), as well as a spike in paperback sales. And the reviews. On October 1st, STRINGS had 58 reviews. As of this writing on October 14th, there are 80. Some days, I've had up to 6 new reviews post one after the other. Activity on GoodReads has also increased considerably, with new ratings and reviews posting throughout the day.
Assuming around a $2 earning on the Kindle Unlimited/Lending Library borrows, that alone paid for the cost of the ad. Everything else is just cake. And it's earnings on 70% of $2.99 instead of $.99, so that's very good indeed. Ten days after the promotion, the book is still hanging out in the 10K-20K rank section, which isn't too terrible at all.
It sounds crazy giving away that many books, but this isn't really about that. It's about raw exposure, and this is the true benefit of doing the free promotion. While the discount promotion will certainly bring you good rank and put a few hundred bucks in your pocket, if you're really looking for people to download, read, and review your book, the free promotion has been monumentally better. Furthermore, with 80+ reviews on STRINGS, the Amazon algorithm gods will treat the book far better, increasing the chances it will sell.
So Which Should You Choose? Free or Discount?
If you can get BookBub to list your book, chances are you will do well regardless of which option you choose. The subscriber base there is immense and faithful. People WILL download your book. Possibly a lot of them. Or at least enough to pay for your ad. In that regard, it's just a decent promotional expense.
However, if you can throw away artistic ego a little bit and not chafe too much at the notion of giving away your work for free, in exchange for far more reviews and the immense exposure that comes with upwards of 26K or more people having your book in their hands . . . even if only 1% of them actually follows through, reads it, and reviews it, that's STILL a lot of advertising value for $90. And even if some of those people hated your book? They know who you are. They won't forget your name. With those kinds of numbers, the flavor of your publicity doesn't matter so much.
