M. Louisa Locke's Blog, page 17
July 16, 2011
Writing Full Time: What does it look like to you?
May 20, 2011
Ebook Publishing and the Great Price Debate: My numbers tell an interesting story
I confess, as I watched my number of U.S.Kindle sales of my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune , begin a steady decline after it reached a peak in January (2841 sales), February (1461), March (1191), April (728), I began to think about whether or not I should lower my price to 99 cents. But so far I have held off. I decided that what I was seeing was a seasonal pattern, rather than a lack of competitiveness of my pricing. For example, Maids of Misfortune remained at the top of the historical mystery best-seller list, which suggested to me that other books in the list were undergoing a similar decline-otherwise they should have started to out-rank me. Shatzkin in his recent post analyzing the new data on ebook sales echoed my conclusions when he stated:
"…Christmas presents of ebook-capable devices would tend to result in ebook sales after December 25. (The devices would have been sold before Christmas, of course.) It might be true that people buy more ebooks in the first month or two that they own a device than they do on an ongoing basis.
So for the period left in our time of transition when Christmas presents of devices add new digital reading converts — and we certainly have one or two more Christmases like that coming, if not three or four — we can expect ebook sales surges right after Christmas that calm down in March and later."
I think that every time Amazon puts out a new device (with a surge in new buys), every time a gift-related holiday rolls round (first 7 days of May I averaged 15 sales a day, Mother's Day I sold 31!), Kindle books that sell well (have good reviews, good cover, are ranked high in browser categories, etc) will sell more. But I also believe that in most cases this will be followed by a decline—since people who get new devices tend to "front load" with lots of books, particularly low-priced books, and it will take them awhile to make their way through those already purchased books to begin to buy again. And I suspect that when they begin to buy again, they may not focus so narrowly on the free and 99 cent books, particularly if they found a high proportion of these cheaper books did not live up to their expectations.
This isn't to say that by lowering my price I wouldn't start to sell more books, but whether or not my book, in my genre, would sustain large enough numbers to compensate for the lower royalties over a month or two is still questionable. Since I hope to have my sequel out by early fall, it made much more sense to wait to experiment with lowering the price until closer to my launch-so that I could use it as a promotional tool to generate interest in the new book. I might also start out with a 99 cent price for the new book to generate enough sales and reviews to get it to climb the top of the historical mystery category.
Further evidence of the temporary effects of lowering the price of a work came this month when Amazon lowered the price of my short story, Dandy Detects, based on characters from the longer novel, from 99 cents to free. (Background here is that as a self-published author on Kindle I couldn't offer Dandy Detects as a free short story, which is what I wanted to do. However, I was contacted ten days ago by Kindle Direct saying they were going to offer Dandy for free because it had been offered as a "free promotion on another sales channel." I am not sure, but I think this was because Dandy had been offered as a free short on KindleNationDaily in July, 2010.
In the year since I started offering Dandy Detects, I had sold slightly over 2700 stories at 99 cents. May 11th when it was offered free for the first time, there were 3851 stories downloaded. This was the peak, and the numbers declined steadily, so that yesterday, May 19, I sold 123. However, as I had always hoped, the free short story led to sales of Maids of Misfortune. The first week in May my average sales was 15, the week after Dandy Detects started being free, my daily sales average was 31. Yet, as the number of new Dandy's downloaded declined, so has the number of daily sales for Maids of Misfortune.
Will my daily sales, despite this bump, continue to decline? Possibly, until the next new device or a new lower price is issued, until the summer holidays cause an uptick in reading, until the people who front-loaded their devices begin to buy again. This April I may have sold only 728 Kindle copies of Maids, but last April I sold only 28.
In conclusion: from my experiences in Kindle sales as a self-published author I have drawn a few simple lessons.
As the number of people who own Kindles (or devices that support Kindle books) increases, the sales of ebooks from the Kindle store will increase, including sales of Maids of Misfortune. Amazon just announced that it has sold 3 x the number of ebooks so far in 2011 as it did in the same time period in 2010.
At the same time, the pace of the sales of ebook devices, while increasing over all, is influenced by such factors as the timing of when new devices are issued, the periodic lowering of the price of Kingles, and gift related holidays, causing a pattern of jumps in sales, followed by a temporary slowing in sales.
Offering short stories for free, or full length books for 99 cent prices, will also increase sales, which can be very good for promotional purposes (gets you higher ranks in categories, can raise the sales of other books), but it is not yet clear if this is a sustainable approach for the long haul (given the loss of royalties) for all ebooks (genre does matter here).
Finally, because Maids of Misfortune is a self-published ebook, and it will not go out of print (or be returned by bookstores), any declines in the number of daily sales (while does effect my monthly income) does nothing to determine the lifetime income the book will make. The first year the book was out I made over $5000, the next five months I made another $17,000 dollars, and I have every reason to expect that this income will increase in the next 5-7 months, as the number of people who own Kindles increases. And at the end of that period, I should have a second book out, and if I did my job as a writer and produced a good book, then in time my income should at least double.
So, what are your numbers telling you?
May 15, 2011
Seasonal Confusion: A Novelist's Malady?
If you live in a place like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, this is never a problem. The seasons are clearly delineated, with the gradually warming rainy days of spring, when everything turns green and flowers bloom, then the long, hot, summer days, with lightning bugs in the evening and the whine of mosquitos in the night, followed by the cry of the locusts and the gaudy colors of turning leaves of fall, gradually shading into the short days, cold nights, and occasional snows of winter.
On the coast of Southern California, where I have been living for most of thirty years, these clear seasonal markers are all mixed up. Rain tends to come in the winter, not the spring, and year round something is blooming; summer can often be chilly, with a marine layer that only reluctantly leaves the coast for a few hours each day, and the hottest days, with their Santa Anna's and forest fires come in the fall. And, not only is there never any snow, but some of the most beautiful warm summer-like days come mid-winter.
But, that isn't the sole cause of my problem. I, like most people who live in this region, have gown familiar with the more subtle indications of seasonal change, like the purple Jacaranda blossoms that signal spring, the arrival of June gloom, sometimes in May, when it is called May Gray, the flame of the liquid amber trees in fall, and the vibrant green that comes to hillsides after the rains of late winter.
So, after some thought, I have decided my recent seasonal confusion it the direct result of my decision to retire from teaching in December to start my career as a full-time writer. I have heard people talk about how hard it is to know what day of the week it is, once they no longer have a job to go to every day. But that has not been my problem. My weeks have enough regularly scheduled events so that, in combination with such daily visual clues as the morning newspaper (it's Thursday, hooray for the NY Times Home section and the pictures of remodeled houses!), I always know what day it is. What I don't know is what season or month it is.
A friend would say something about spring break, and I would frown in puzzlement. There would be an advertisement for Mother's Day, and I would be surprised. I really had to think hard about what month to put down when I was writing a check. I eventually figured out that my entire life, first as a student, then as a professor, I have run my life according to a school schedule. I didn't need the leaves to turn to tell me it was fall, the start of the new term after summer break was my benchmark. Midterms meant the end of October, Thanksgiving break, November, and taking and then grading finals the hallmark of December. Winter term, that month between semesters, meant January to me, and February the beginning of spring term, with midterms again coming in March and Spring Break in April. May was the giddy last push to the finals of early June. Summer, because I didn't teach, was marked by how many weeks until I had to start preparing for teaching again. Without the rhythm of new classes, new names to memorize, midterms, papers, semester breaks, and finals, I was all at sea.
And, even more upsetting, I kept thinking it was October, all spring. I wrote October on checks, and I wasn't just surprised that Mothers' Day was upon us, I thought, when did Mother's Day come in October? This was really disconcerting (when you hit your sixties such little confusions lead inevitably to the question-is this the first sign of Alzheimer's?) until I realized that for the past four months I have been working every day on my sequel to Maids of Misfortune, a historical mystery, entitled Uneasy Spirits, set in a three-week period in October, 1879. Each chapter starts with a date in October, I have pictures I look at of where the sun hits the hillsides of San Francisco in October, and I consult these wonderful websites that tell me when the moon rose and set each night of that year, in October. When I write, I describe days that get up into the seventies, the fog that begins its nightly journey over the peninsula, and how chilly it gets at night, in October, and I refer to the fall school term and the approach of Halloween. In my head, every day, it is October. So that when San Diego had an odd spell of hot dry weather a few weeks ago, I thought, of course, its fall, that's normal. Until I remembered it was spring and it was supposed to be cool and gray outside, not hot and sunny.
Living in the seasonally ambiguous region of Southern California, set adrift from my usual school routine, and living in my imagination in a very different time and place, I have become seasonally confused.
And I began to wonder, how many other full-time fiction writers suffer from the same malady? Do you?
May 13, 2011
What is a fair but competitive price for audible books?
But, today I read about a new service Amazon is providing with its subsidiary Audible called Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) where it is going to make it easier for self-published authors to produce audio books. For the year and a half that Maids of Misfortune has been out, I've kept saying to myself that I should produce an audio book. My book is a light read, just the kind of book that my busy friends like to listen to as they walk the dog or drive on their daily commute. It is also the kind of cozy mystery that is appealing to an aging population (as a baby boomer I know whereof I speak) whose eyesight makes extensive reading more problematic. But I have never done anything about this because I am already putting in sixty-hour weeks marketing the first book and writing the second.
I had considered the possibility of finding an agent that would sell those audio book rights (so someone else would do the work), but so far I have found little evidence that agents are at all interested in representing an author like me (despite my success) who isn't willing to give up their ebook rights. So, an audio version has gone on that long list of "things I might do when the new book is out to its beta readers."
Then came today's announcement about Audiobook Creation Exchange. Now making that audiobook just got bumped up the list. But, before embarking on this enterprise, I felt the need to do a little market research, because I assume, like ebook pricing, audio book pricing is an issue for debate. Just doing a quick search of the ebooks that are in the historical mystery category, I noticed that not only did very few of them have an audio version, but those of them that did, often had the price set at above $20 (or very similar to their hardback price). On the other hand, when I looked at the audiobooks list on Amazon, and searched for historical mysteries, the books at the top of the heap were more likely to be priced at or lower than the paperback price (usually between $12-15).
However, these books were all traditionally published books, and I suspect that, as with ebooks, the prices set by publishers are not necessarily competitive and they might not work for a relatively unknown, self-published author. My ebook is priced at $2.99, and my paperback at $12.75. Not surprisingly, over 90% of my sales have been of my ebook, but, because of production costs, I really can't put the price of my paperback any lower. I assume that there are going to be similar production costs that will determine the low end of pricing the audiobook, while putting it at too high a price might make it uncompetitive.
So, my question is, what do you all think would be a good price for me to charge for Maids of Misfortune when I put it out as an audiobook?
April 22, 2011
Why Do I Procrastinate?
I spent 20 years procrastinating in regards to my writing. Hell, I spent nearly 50 years procrastinating if you start counting from when I determined that I wanted to write historical fiction until the time I successfully published my first novel, Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery.
What I find interesting is that in general I am not a procrastinator. I learned in 4th grade (best grade school teacher ever) that the students who buckled down and did their work first thing ended up with plenty of guilt free time to goof off, and I have pretty much applied that concept through the rest my life as a student, a college professor, a mother, wife, and friend. Not as a writer.
The only area of my life where I procrastinate regularly is as a fiction writer. I think that this is because writing fiction is absolutely personal-it is just for me. In all those other areas of life I have been motivated in large part by my sense of responsibility to others (to make my parents proud, to be the best professor I could be for my students, to take care of my family, and be there for my friends.).
When I do a good job (ie don't procrastinate) my reward, in my mind, has always been to give myself permission to read fiction (ie goof off.) But even there I was careful not to start a good book unless I knew I could finish it before the next task in my "real life" came due. I was always worried that my pleasure in reading would distract me from my responsibilities!
Only twice in my life as an adult did I let what I wanted come first for an extended period. The first time was when I was 23, and I quit my first boring job and for a solid year just read (the new feminist body of work was just coming out at this time and I devoured it). This led me to the decision to get a doctorate in history, with an emphasis women's history.
The second time came when I was 38 and had left my tenured track job in Texas (oh those good old boys were too much for this feminist to take) and I faced the possible future of being a part-time adjunct teacher for the rest of my life. I decided if this was to be my fate, then I was justified in taking the time to fulfill my life-long dream of writing fiction. Oh the bliss! Six months of writing my mystery, my husband at work, my daughter in day-care. But then I got a full-time job at the local community college, and I no longer put myself and my writing first. That book never got published, and I stopped writing anything new.
So now, retired, my daughter grown with children of her own, my husband happily working on his own writing, I have finally put myself first. I rewrote the first mystery, published it, and I now spend day after day writing the sequel. I can spend the hours it takes to let my mind run free (and perhaps even not hear when my husband says something to me-cause I am off in that world of my own.) I can decide to go back to writing after dinner, rather than use that time to make call backs to friends. I can be selfish (listen to the pejorative term I am still using!)
However, I think in writing this I have just had a revelation. When I "procrastinate" by checking my email, or commenting on someone else's post, or writing for my own blog, it is not because I enjoy these activities more than I do working on my book. It is because these activities are more other directed. I feel more comfortable doing these things because they help other indie writers, or because they will help sell my book (and produce the income needed to keep the family budget healthy).
I don't think that this is necessarily a totally gendered response. Goodness knows male writers have put paid employment, in order to support their families, above their desire to write for centuries. However, until recently, most women didn't even see there was a choice. Other responsibilities, financial or not, always came first. And I think that I often procrastinate as a writer because I haven't yet entirely thrown off the belief that if I do something, just for myself, I am not being a good person.
So, how about you? Why do you procrastinate?
And while you think about it, I am going to go write a couple more paragraphs on my next novel, selfish person that I am!
April 5, 2011
Managing Expectations: Patience and Perspective in Indie Publishing
First of all, I read a guest post on J.A. Konrath's blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, by an author Guido Henkel where Henkel described how, despite all the changes he had made to his book Demon's Night, (new cover, new description, better editing, etc), after a relaunch of the book four weeks ago he hadn't seen any great improvement in sales.
I found myself mentally chiding Henkel for being so impatient. Four weeks, particularly if he hadn't been doing anything to let the potential readers out there know about his new and improved book, is a very short period of time in the self-publishing world. And one of the wonderful benefits of self-publishing is that there is time to build a market for our work. Unlike traditionally published authors, we aren't facing the 6-8 week window, where one needs to achieve enough "sell-through" before your book is remaindered and your book is labeled a failure. (Of course today, when I checked Henkel's ranking on Kindle, Demon's Night was now in the top 100's of several categories. This should help improve his sales dramatically, which I am sure was his hope, and Konrath's plan; so he is probably no longer feeling so discouraged.)
However, thinking about Henkel reminded me that it took me seven months to reach the point where my book was selling enough copies so that it was high enough in the rankings to reach its potential market. Seven months and a whole series of actions on my part to increase my sales. This also reminded me if I had expected to make a lot of sales instantly that I might very well have gotten discouraged and not taken the actions that did ultimately achieve success. Fortunately, when I first published in December 2009, I really hadn't heard of very many previously unpublished indie authors hitting it big, so my expectations were very modest. I was honestly delighted after four months of sales to discover I had sold 158 books, because this meant someone besides my circle of family and friends had actually bought my book.
A second occurrence again brought home how changing expectations can be a trap for an indie author. I was rewriting a talk I had given in November about the new opportunities in ebook and independent publishing and I ran across the statement that as of October 2010 I had sold over 2100 books, and that since I was then averaging 14 books sold a day, I estimated that in the next twelve months I would sell over 5000 books. I remember being so proud of this, and it eliciting a distinct gasp from my audience of academics. (Academic monographs seldom sell more than 600 books in a title's lifetime.) That was my expectation five months ago, but when I sold nearly 3000 books in one month (January) my expectations changed. Now, even though I have sold over 8000 books in just six months-way over my estimate, I was discouraged because my average sales for March was down to 42 books per day, a number that would have made me ecstatic five months ago. Objective reality hadn't changed, my expectations had.
Hence my need for an attitude adjustment.
As an indie author I needed to remember what the process would be like if I was going through the traditional (commercial) publishing process. How long it takes to get an agent. How long it takes an agent to find, if they ever do, a publisher. How small most advances are. How long it takes to get the book actually in print. How short the time period a book stays on the shelf, and how seldom the book pays back its advance so that it will start to pay out royalties. Finally, how short a time most books stay in print.
As an indie author I needed to remember that in self-publishing the time line is reversed. It takes very little time (from a few days to a few months) to get your book published (cover designed, interior formatted, product description written, files uploaded) but you have forever to sell it-particularly if you have written fiction, or in my case an historical mystery that is never going to seem "dated."
As an indie author I needed to remember that indie publishing and ebook publishing are transitioning so rapidly that expectations built on today's experience are probably going to be outdated tomorrow. Experimentation not expectation needs to be my watchword. For example, I know one of the reasons my author site hasn't yet attracted many fans is that at the start I didn't set up any mechanism to connect up with people who bought my book. I did have my website listed at the end of the book, but this website has remained static, and I didn't even have a contact email on it until recently. Truth was, I really didn't expect to have fans! Now I have an email address, I am careful to respond when someone reviews my book on GoodReads and other sites, and I plan to update my ebook with a link to my facebook author site at the end, to encourage readers who liked the book to go on and sign up. Maybe I will even institute my first contest and giveaway to get more people signed up! A drop in sales doesn't mean the market has dried up, it means I need to be more experimental in expanding my reach to the market that exists.
These tactics may work or they may not. My sales may go up again when we hit the summer holidays, or they may not, my sales of my second book may match or exceed that of my first, or they may not. But the point is, I needed to regain the perspective I started out with, that the benefit of self-publishing was that a book I had worked hard on and believed was good got to see the light of day and wasn't stopped by some gatekeeper. I needed to remember its success or failure to sell was contingent on the work itself and my efforts to market it (not some corporate marketing department or book store purchaser).
With that perspective I can once again rejoice whether 40 people (my sales number last night) or only one person buys one of my books or stories. Because without self-publishing, no one would have been reading Maids of Misfortune, or Dandy Detects, and that would have been the real disappointment.
March 27, 2011
Musing on Illness in the Victorian Era
This is today's post:
Well, I came home from my visit to my Dad with a head cold. I have discovered I don't write very well when my head is stuffy. But it made me think about what it was like to be a worker in 19th century when no one had paid sick days, in fact, if you didn't come to work, you might get fired. One diary by a servant that I read when working on my dissertation revealed that once when she got ill, and her mistress didn't let her cut back on her duties, she eventually had to quit her job because it was the only way to get the needed rest and get better.
Doctors were too expensive to turn to for ordinary illnesses, there was no health insurance, and antibiotics didn't exist yet to help with infections. Most people turned to home remedies to combat the symptoms of the common cold.
In Burrough's "Encyclopedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information" published in 1889, I learned that to cure a cold I should "Take three cents' worth of liquorice, three of rock candy, three of gum arabic, and put them into a quart of water; simmer them til thoroughly dissolved, then add three cents' worth paregoric, and a like quantity of antimonial wine."
I do remember begin given paregoric when I was a child in the 1950s, and when I looked it up just now, discovered that until 1970, in 27 states (including Pennsylvania where I lived) paregoric was available without a prescription. I was rather shocked to discover that paregoric's main active ingredient was powdered opium!
This put the recipe for cough mixture I found in Burrough's Encyclopedia in perspective. "Two ounces ammonia mixture; five ounces camphor mixture; one drachm tincture of digitalis (foxglove); one-half once each of sweet spirits of nitre and syrup of poppies; two drachms solution of sulphate of morphia." (By the way a drachm was 1/8 fluid ounce.) It was recommended that you take a tablespoon of this mixture 4 times a day.
An alternative to this recipe (which I would imagine would not only be expensive, but also make it unsafe to work with factory machinery or over a hot stove) was to "Roast a large lemon very carefully without burning; when it is thoroughly hot, cut and squeeze into a cup upon three ounces of sugar candy, finely powdered; take a spoonful whenever your cough troubles you. It is as good as it is pleasant." It sounds a lot like the lemon flavored Halls cough drops I have been sucking on this week!
I also learned that In the 1890s Echinacea, which had been used by Native Americans, became a popular ingredient in patent medicines, and was supposed to cure a whole list if ailments, including colds. Interestingly, my accupuncturist has me sucking on "Tasty Echinacea" tablets as well (laced with zinc), and it does seem to help.
Ok, I have now gotten completely grossed out, right under the cough medicine recipe, is a recipe to cure deafness that consists of mixing ant eggs with something called union juice, and putting it in your ear.
So what I have I learned? Well, first, since we still have not found the cure for the common cold, I suppose it isn't surprising that some of the same remedies are being used. Second, if I was a domestic servant or factory worker who worked the kind of long days doing hard physical labor they did in the 19th century, I would probably be willing to pay good money for a cough medicine with a drachm of morphia in it to help me sleep at night.
Time to go and drink some ginger tea and take a nap.
March 15, 2011
Getting Past the Sally Field Moment: Personal Reflections on selling over 10,000 copies of Maids of Misfortune
Not to say that what I call the Sally Field moment isn't a natural one. I doubt there is an author out there that doesn't react with joy and relief when they get proof the precious part of themselves they put into what they write and fearfully put out into the world to be judged is liked by somebody. In fact, when I look back to when I first published my book, I realize it didn't take all that much evidence to satisfy me. One of my early blog posts, last April, had as its subtitle, "Can I call myself a real author yet?" My answer at the time was a resounding affirmative, even though I had only sold 158 copies of Maids of Misfortune in the first four months it was out. The people who give advice about how to be a successful self-published author often say that you have to have a vision of that success. Well a year ago, my vision didn't go further than the grand possibility of selling, maybe, dared I dream, 500 copies of the book in total. 10,000? Not even a remote possibility.
So, once the Sally Field moment passed, I began to reflect on how my goals had begun to change over the past year. Almost accidently, I had become a champion of the indie author movement. This blog, which I had initially envisioned as a place to explore the historical world of my book, instead became a place where I recorded my journey into self-publishing, where each book I sold became more evidence that self-publishing was a viable alternative to the traditional route. 10,000 books! Sold without a huge social network, without a backlog of content, without a price tag of 99 cents! 10,000 books sold! Take that you naysayers!!!
OK, Ok, I'll calm down. But, really, couldn't you just see my "vorpal sword" going snicker-snack?
But then the figure 10,000 rang a bell. I remembered that a few years back, probably one day while I was slowly making my way through a stack of midterm essays I was grading (my least favorite part of teaching), I started to add up all the students I had taught over my more than 30 years of teaching, and I came up with the startling figure of 10,000. 10,000 separate college freshmen, who had sat in one of my US history and US women's history classes over the years.
Of course, not all of them finished my classes (although I prided myself on my good retention rate), and many of them who finished probably forgot everything I taught them, and me, as soon as they turned in the final exam, grateful that they were never ever going to have to take another history class in their lives. But over my career a satisfying number told me face-to-face, in little notes, in their student evaluations, on the ratemyprofessor website, and when they ran into me years later, that they had actually enjoyed my classes. They told me that I made the subject interesting because I made it be about real people, they still thought about some of the things they learned, and they were glad they had taken my class. In short, in my career as a college professor, I had gotten the chance, and even sometimes succeeded, in both entertaining and teaching over 10,000 students.
But it took me nearly thirty-five years to reach that number of people.
It took me only a year and half to reach an equal number of people through the publication and sale of my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune.
As I have written before, I first came up with the plot of Maids of Misfortune while working on my history doctoral dissertation. I had been working for four years researching and writing a 375 manuscript entitled, 'Like a Machine or an Animal': Working Women of the Late Nineteenth-Century Urban For West, San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles, and I knew, even if I was fortunate enough to ever get it published (I wasn't) that at the most, if it was a real winner and history professors decided to assign it to their graduate students, fewer than 500 people would ever actually read it.
It was then I became intrigued by the idea of using a mystery series, as Ellis Peters was doing in her Brother Cadfael series, to show readers what life was like for a specific group of people, who lived in a particular historical time and place, in my case–women who worked in late 19th century San Francisco. I wanted to tell these women's stories, make their lives real, and do it in a way that also entertained. That was my dream. A dream deferred, a story I have already told on this blog, but a dream never lost.
So, when people who have read Maids of Misfortune consistently comment on how well I portrayed Victorian San Francisco, how they had never thought about how difficult a servant's life could be, how interesting it was to see how an independent woman maneuvered through the social mores of the nineteenth century, and how they can't wait for the sequel, I smile, my dream finally realized.
10,000 people have bought Maids of Misfortune. And I didn't have to grade a single essay.
March 10, 2011
Seven Tips on how to sell books on Kindle
This post was originally a guest post over on Patty Henderson's blog, The Henderson Files, entitled 7 Tips on how to sell books on Kindle. I am reprinting it here.
First of all, why should you listen to me, an unknown author, tell you how to sell your book on Kindle? A little more than a year ago, I was a semi-retired professor of U.S. Women's history who, besides a few academic articles, had never published a thing. What I did have was a manuscript of an historical mystery I had written 20 years earlier, based on my doctoral research on working women in the late nineteenth century. In the 20 years after writing the first draft, while I pursued my teaching career, I found an agent, collected rejections, lost an agent, published briefly with a small Print on Demand (POD) press, rewrote the manuscript several times, and I was now giving the book one more chance. I also owned a Kindle, which I loved. After serious investigation, I decided to publish my book, Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco, as an ebook with Amazon and Smashwords, and in print through CreateSpace. I paid for a cover design, but put the book up on Kindle myself. That was December of 2009.
Since then, I have sold over 9000 books, the vast majority of them from the Kindle store. I now average 55 books sold a day, and I am making enough money that I have retired completely to work on the sequel, Uneasy Spirits. When I started, I had no particular expertise and no fan base, but I did have access to a world of advice being put out daily on blogs and websites hosted by indie authors, designers, editors, and marketers. I found that when I put their advice to work, was patient, and persistent, it paid off. Here are some of my tips distilled from what I learned from others and my own experience.
Tip #1: Think about selling from the buyer's perspective. When a reader goes to buy a book in a traditional bookstore, they either go to the store looking for a specific book because they have heard about it, or they browse the shelves and tables in the store and discover a book. Then they either buy it or they don't. As an author of an ebook, you need to figure out how readers are going to find out about your book or find it among all the more than 800,000 books in the Kindle store. Then you are going to have to do everything to make sure that once they have found it, they buy it.
Tip #2: Hang out where readers of Kindle books hang out. While you can promote your book through traditional means (print reviews, book tours and signings, mailed postcards, conventions, business cards), increasingly this is a world where potential readers hang out in cyberspace. They find book reviews on blogs like Mysteries and My Musings that specialize in reviewing the genre they, they look for lists on line (Cozy Mystery List or Historical Mystery Fiction), they "like" the facebook pages of their favorite author or favorite subgenre (Mystery Most Cozy), they follow twitter #tags, they join reader sites like GoodReads, and they subscribe to blogs and groups that cater to Kindle owners like KindleBoards, Kindle Forum, Kindlechat, or Kindle Nation Daily.
As an author you need to go to these sites, sign up, become active, and participate in the conversations. Most of these sites let you put up a profile picture, and if people begin to see your face, they will begin to feel like they know you. Your voice in a comment or a guest blog post or a Goodreads review will tell a potential reader if they think they will like your perspective on the world. Your customized signature, with links back to your author website and or blog, and small pictures of your book covers, linked to your Amazon product page, play the role of your business card. The more times a potential reader runs across your name and your book titles, the more likely they will decide to put that name and book title into their search bar when they are looking for new books to download.
Tip #3: Besides having a well-written and edited book, your cover design, interior design and formatting are the most crucial elements to success. If you are going to shell out any money out front-this is where to spend it. If the cover looks home made, or you can't read the title and author in a small thumbnail, or if the cover doesn't convey the type of book it is (thriller, cozy, etc), then the reader isn't going to make the effort to find it, look at, it or buy it. If the book is hard to read and has lots of formatting errors in the excerpt, they will also take a pass. If you have the technological expertise or design experience, you can do this yourself, but if you don't, this isn't where to skimp. There are lots of freelancers out there with reasonable rates. See a recent post on do's and don'ts of cover designs or the blog by Joel Friedlander, The Book Designer
Tip #4: Make sure your book is ready for prime time before you start to promote. Your product description needs to be well-written, your excerpt must be available, and you should have at least 4-5 reviews written by professional reviewers (not just friends and family members). There are more and more websites, blogs, and enewsletters that are willing to review ebooks, and with Kindle gift certificates you can easily send a free copy to a reviewer. Most professional reviewers will then go on and put their reviews on Amazon. However, it is a good idea to have a print edition (POD) to send to those reviewers who insist on this.
Tip #5: Make your pricing competitive. Go to the specific categories in which your book will show up and look at prices of your competitors. If you aren't a big name with a new release, $2.99-3.99 is probably the safest price point for genre fiction. While 99 cents is ok for an initial offering, in order to get a bump in sales to send you up the rankings, you really have to sell a lot to make up for the loss of the 70% royalty Amazon gives for books between $2.99-9.99. For example, if you look at the vast majority of other books in the historical mystery category, they are $6 and above, often for books that have been out for five or more years. This means there is a good chance they have either already been read by the buyer, or simply seem too expensive for an ebook, when the paperback or hard cover book may be only a few dollars more (or sometimes even the same or a lower price than the ebook. What are those traditional publishers thinking???) No wonder I am out-selling those books.
Tip #6: Don't make your big promotional push prematurely. Banners on Kindle sites, promotional packages on Kindle Nation Daily, paying for an ad blitz, or promotional contests, can cause a temporary bump in sales. But only if everything else is in place (see tip #4. If the book ranking is too far away from them top 100s in the rankings of any sub-category, a temporary bump isn't going get the book up high enough in the rankings to self-perpetuate the sales. One of the wonderful things about self-publishing is that you have time. Time to tweak your cover or book blurb, time to get those book reviews, time to correct errors in the text, time to build your readership and your rankings. Then spend the time and money on the big promotional push.
Tip #7: Use Amazon's browsing capabilities effectively. If you were selling your book in a traditional bookstore, you would hope that the buyer would find your book by browsing the bookshelves. They would have the best chance of finding your book if it was on one of the bestseller or bargain tables at the front of the store, or had a little "staff recommends tag" on the book on the shelf. What would be awful would be if your book wasn't shelved in the right place, so the potential reader looking for a good mystery to read, didn't find your book there because it was shelved in general fiction, or romance.
What is truly wonderful about publishing on Kindle, is that your book will be recommended or find its way to the bestseller table along side the traditionally published books at no additional cost or personal contact with the bookstore.
First, when a buyer goes to the Kindle store, if they have purchased book in your category, your book may show up in the list that says "Recommended for you." Or, your book can show up on the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" list at the bottom of the screen. I'll never forget when I went to look for an Anne Perry book–the star of Victorian mysteries—and found my book on that list!! If you sell enough books, Amazon will actually send out little emails to targeted customers saying that they think they might like your book. Talk about free promotional support!
Finally, if your book sells enough and has good enough reviews, your book can make the over all top 100 ranked books on Kindle (I have made it to the 200s, so I have hope) or more likely, it will make it to the top 100 in a sub-category (as I have in historical mysteries) and be called a best seller. Readers browse through those best sellers looking for books to buy. If you make it into the top 10-20 books in a specific sub-category, this means if someone browses in that category that your book will pop right up on the screen, ready and waiting for an impulse buy.
But none of the above is likely happen if your book can't be found in the right browsing categories. As an indie author, this is your responsibility. When you upload your book you have five choices of browsing paths. Think carefully, but inventively. If I had just listed my novel in the main category, "mystery & thriller," Maids of Misfortune would be competing against 32,000 other books in the Kindle store. But if I instead chose the sub-category of "mystery," my book would then be competing in a group of 8000. Better odds, but still not great. When I went even further, and chose an additional sub-category, "women sleuths," my book now is in a category with 5300 other books, giving it even better odds of being found. However, when I put in the right tags on my book as well, for example the tag "historical," and the buyer puts that tag into the search box, because 5300 books is still too much to for them to browse though, my book becomes one of only 446 books listed. Bingo! In fact if you do that today, Maids of Misfortune comes up number one.
Check to make sure that your combination of five browsing categories and sub-categories and the tags you have listed gives you the most competitive advantage. Initially, because of a computer glitch, Maids of Misfortune didn't show up in the historical mysteries sub-category. I still sold books, but not that many of them. Once I got this fixed and got my reviews in place (tip #4) and lowered my price (tip #5), I did my one big promotional push-got my short story on Kindle Nation Daily shorts (tip #6), and Maids of Misfortune ran to the top of the historical mysteries category, where it has been ever since, my sales success began.
So, time, patience, persistence, attention to my 7 tips, and, of course a well-written book, and the Kindle store can be a great place for indie authors to sell books.
Check out Guest Post: 7 Tips on how to sell books on Kindle
7 Tips on how to sell books on Kindle.
Feel free to comment on the post and give us all a few tips of your own.
M. Louisa Locke
