M. Louisa Locke's Blog, page 9

Time for a Pivot? Kindle Unlimited and Marketing in 2015

Everywhere I hang out as an author, I see blog posts discussing the effect of the introduction of Kindle Unlimited (KU) on authors’ sales. For those authors just waking up to this discussion, Kindle Unlimited is the subscription service Amazon introduced in July. Subscribers pay a monthly fee and can borrow all the books they want that are in the KU library. For most books by indie authors to be part of that library, the book must be enrolled in KDP Select.

If you have ever read my blog before, you will know that I found that enrolling the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series in KDP Select was very rewarding—even though it meant accepting the terms of enrollment that prohibited me from selling my ebooks in other stores. If you are interested, click here for a list of the posts I have written on that subject.

In fact, last winter I announced that my strategy for 2014 was to keep my books in KDP Select and use the new promotional tool called the Kindle Countdown as my major form of marketing.

Which I did, quite successfully.

However, when Amazon announced the introduction of the Kindle Unlimited program, I, like many authors, was very interested in how this new program would affect my income.

Now, after using the KU program for five months, I have come to a conclusion. The overall impact of the introduction of Kindle Unlimited has been negative for my books.

As a result, I decided to remove my series novels, Maids of Misfortune, Uneasy Spirits, Bloody Lessons, and my short story collection, Victorian San Francisco Stories, from KDP Select.

However, my experience may not be representative of what is happening for all authors, so I would like to share how I came to that decision. To that end I will:

1) Briefly evaluate why the strategy of keeping my books in KDP Select and using the Kindle Countdown promotional tool worked for most of 2014 (and might still work for your books.)

2) Describe what happened to my books when Kindle Unlimited was introduced.

3) Describe why I think the program had a mostly negative effect on my income.

4) List what strategies I intend on pursuing for 2015.

1) KDP Select and the Kindle Countdown promotional tool:

Last February, 2014, I wrote a post called Is Kindle Countdown the New Free? Keeping Books Visible in 2014. I analyzed the promotions I had recently done on my books that were in KDP Select. I compared the results of two strategies: using the free promotional option (where you can make a book free for any 5 days during the three month contract period); and using the newly introduced Kindle Countdown option (where you can discount a book below $2.99 for up to 7 days consecutively during the three month contract period—while still getting the full 70% royalty rate). When I used the Kindle Countdown strategy, I usually priced my books at 99 cents for the full seven days.

My conclusions were as follows:

KDP Select Free promotions, particularly when advertised with BookBub , were still a very effective way to increase sales after the promotion, get higher visibility in category lists, and increase the number of reviews.


But it was more difficult to achieve a successful free promotion because of increased competition with traditionally published books, changes in how free books are listed in the Kindle Store, the limitation of only one BookBub ad per book every six months, and the increased competition and cost of getting a BookBub ad. (I have been extremely fortunate in getting Bookbub ads for my books—but it is important to realize that most books don’t get these ads—and not everyone can afford them.


While KDP Select Kindle Countdown promotions were not yet as effective as KDP Select Free promotions, they did offer an alternative for those authors who had their books in KDP Select and didn’t want to use the free promotional option.


I also speculated that, as more readers discovered the Kindle Countdown page, a Kindle Countdown strategy would become more effective.

Based on those conclusions, I decided that my strategy for 2014 would be to run a Kindle Countdown promotion every month for a different book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series.

As stated earlier—this strategy proved successful. Between October 2013 and August 2014, I ran nine Kindle Countdown promotions––cycling through my three novels, Maids of Misfortune, Uneasy Spirits, and Bloody Lessons. For those Kindle Countdown promotions with a BookBub ad, I averaged $1.359 in profits (counting sales of the promoted book minus marketing costs.) For the Kindle Countdown promotions without BookBub advertising, I averaged $888 in profits. And, perhaps more significantly, the improved visibility in the Kindle store resulted in a consistently high number of regular sales and borrows for all my books and short stories. So, between October and August 2014 I averaged $4700 a month in sales. (I have 3 novels, 3 short stories, a short story collection, and a boxed set of my novels—not a lot of product compared to many successful indie authors.)

In short, my strategy worked. Doing Kindle Countdowns for a different book every month (and getting the higher royalties on the discounted prices) resulted not just in profit, but, even more importantly, it resulted in continued visibility for my books, which translated into decent sales.

2) Then in July 18, 2014 Amazon introduced the Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscription service.

For most indie authors this meant that if our books were in KDP Select––they were automatically enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. As with every change in KDP Select policies in the past four years, this caused a lot of controversy among authors. Some authors took their books out of KDP Select (you could un-enroll before the usual 3 month contract was up). Others put their books in KDP Select to see if having their books available in KU would increase a book’s sales and visibility (because, for ranking purposes, Amazon apparently counts a borrow the same as a sale).

Initially, I wondered if people would stop buying my books if they could get them for free as part of their KU subscription. I was also curious to see how much Amazon would pay for each borrow of a book. If the amount was significantly less than what I was making on each sale of a book at full price ($4.99), would an increase in sales and visibility compensate for the lower rate of return on borrows?

I hoped that these concerns would be unwarranted because similar concerns about the effect of the Kindle Owners Lending Library (where members of Amazon Prime can borrow one book a month) had proven unfounded for my books.

So I decided to keep my books in KDP Select and see what happened.

Initially, I saw a sharp increase in borrows. In July (when KU started) and August, my borrows more than doubled from their normal level. Sales also remained high. This was primarily because I did Kindle Countdown promotions that were supported by BookBub ads in both months—making my books highly visible within the regular Kindle Store and the Kindle Unlimited browsing categories.

In September, however, when I didn’t do a promotion of any of my three novels, my sales dropped to the lowest level in a year. And, while the number of borrows were still higher than normal, they also started to drop. So, without a promotion to keep my books visible, sales and rankings of my books were falling. This meant that, when readers browsed the Kindle Unlimited list of books, the books weren’t showing up high enough in the ranked categories for readers to find them there.

An additional problem was that the amount Amazon paid for each borrowed book began to drop. For most of 2014, the average amount for borrows was around $2 per book. In September the amount dropped to $1.52 and in October and November $1.33 and $1.39 (which is less than half what I normally got for my $4.99 books.) That was another blow to my total income.

October introduced a new wrinkle. Author after author reported that their most recent Kindle Countdown promotions that didn’t have BookBub ads behind them had failed miserably. They sold so few discounted books that — even with the higher royalty rate — they barely broke even after deducting marketing costs, and they saw little discernible bump in sales or borrows after the promotion.

This is exactly what happened to me. In October, 2014 I had a Kindle Countdown promotion for Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my series (which has always performed the best in promotions). After subtracting marketing costs I only made a profit of $82. Even worse, there was no discernible increase in sales or borrows of this book or my other books after the promotion ended, so my overall income dropped drastically.

In October, I made only a third of my average income from the eleven months before, and it appears that, in November and December, I will make only a fifth or less of what I was averaging for the earlier, pre-KU, months of 2014.

3) What do I think happened?

What I think happened was that the voracious reader — the person reading multiple books a week who is also the smart bargain hunter — has at least temporarily deserted the Kindle Countdown lists for Kindle Unlimited. Why would someone look for my book at 99 cents in a Kindle Countdown list on Amazon when they can get the book for free as part of KU? In fact, if they were subscribed to KU and they happened to click on my book as part of a Countdown promotion and saw the book was in KU, why wouldn’t they then decide to download it that way rather than buy it at 99 cents?

I don’t blame Amazon for this; I suspect it wasn’t what they hoped would happen because they want high quality, successful self-published books to remain in KU. That is probably why Amazon has started offering bonuses to the authors (All stars) of the highest selling books in KU.

I have always accepted that Amazon’s support for indie authors was, in part, a response to the unwillingness of traditional publishers to embrace ebooks and experiment in the new online/ebook environment. Just as I have always accepted that they are going to put the needs of their consumers (the reader) over the producers (authors or publishers.) And it is therefore my responsibility, as an author, to figure out how best to respond to that fact.

At the start, Amazon needed enough Kindle ebooks to attract readers. They needed authors who were willing to price those books within the range that Amazon has determined will get readers to buy these ebooks. And they needed authors who were willing to experiment with things like free promotions, bundling print and ebooks, and offering their books as part of subscription services. All of that means that, for much of the past five or six years, Amazon needed self-published authors.

Amazon also wanted indie authors to sell exclusively through Amazon in order to remove the competition for those books with other bookstores. So, in exchange for exclusive contracts, Amazon offered self-published authors tools like free promotions and the Kindle Countdown, which they believed (correctly) would help us sell our books.

For those of us who had books that large numbers of readers wanted to read and who were willing to experiment, the rewards of working with KDP and putting our books in KDP Select and using its promotional tools have been substantial.

I also suspect that Amazon hoped that the success of self-published books would nudge traditional publishers to use similar tactics. And I believe that has worked to a degree. The main category my books are in––historical mysteries––is much more competitive in pricing than it was in former years because many traditionally published books are now offered at various discounts.

However, I think that when Amazon decided to offer its Kindle Unlimited subscription service (a service similar to Oyster and Scribd), they knew that it might be a hard sell to indie authors—just as KDP Select has been a hard sell to many indies. The evidence for this supposition is that they offered a special deal to selected indie authors in order to keep their books in KDP Select; Amazon paid them the same amount for each borrow as for each sale.

But I don’t think that they anticipated that KU would have such a drastic negative effect on many authors’ incomes or on the effectiveness of Kindle Countdown promotions. If they did foresee this happening, maybe they hoped that the benefits of increased borrows would make up for the losses in sales. Personally, I haven’t seen evidence of increased borrows making up for lost sales—at least not for those authors who had previously been successful. There is, however, some evidence that putting a book in KDP Select may give some needed visibility and more sales to those authors those whose books have not yet sold well.

But who knows what will happen in the next year?

It could be that enough indie authors will see their incomes increase when they enroll a book in KDP Select to keep a decent number of self-published books enrolled. Or, perhaps Amazon will increase the amount paid for each borrow. Or, perhaps some of the people who subscribed to KU will leave and go back to browsing the Kindle Countdown lists, making it an effective tool for authors again. Or, maybe authors will discover tactics that will make KDP Select and KU work better for them.

Or, maybe Amazon will make it possible to have a book in Kindle Unlimited without having to enroll it in KDP Select (with its exclusivity clause.) Something that authors like Hugh Howey have recommended.

But my immediate concern is not what Amazon will or will not do in the future or what the benefits of KDP Select and KU are for other authors. My immediate concern is how to continue to get my books discovered by readers so that those who like the cover, the blurb, the genre, and the sample chapter, will continue to buy them.

In short, once again it is time for me to makes some changes.

Which brings me to the title of this piece. Recently, a number of authors started to use the word “pivot.” Hugh Howey, in a piece called the Tankers are Turning, compared indie authors to traditional publishers saying self-published authors “are nimble. We can pivot on a dime and publish at the drop of one. If we have an idea, we can implement it the same day, see how it works, share our result’s and at the same time learn from others.”

A few weeks later, in a piece entitled Don’t Wait for Permission: Why Authors Should be Entrepreneurs (on David Gaughran’s blog), Joanna Penn said, entrepreneurial authors “act, they experiment, they see what happens and then they pivot if necessary, adapting to the new situation.”

And, a few days later, Kevin O. McLaughlin applied this idea specifically to the strategy he was using in response to KU. He has started writing short serials for KU because works priced at low rates like 99 cents can generate more income from borrows than sales. Yet he has built-in his ability to pivot quickly: planning on bundling these short pieces into a longer piece that he will take out of Select if the short pieces aren’t being picked up by readers.

4) So, I’m pivoting; and here is my strategy for 2015:

I have taken my longer books out of KDP Select and made them available in a wide range of ebookstores. If you have followed my blog posts for the past few years you know I have done this before but found that the sales I picked up in other bookstores didn’t compensate for the sales (and borrows) I lost on Amazon. Right now, my sales on Amazon are so low that I am assuming this will no longer be true.


Since the fourth book in the series, Deadly Proof, will be out in a few months, I am also trying the strategy of making the first book in the series a semi-permanent loss leader. To that end I have made Maids of Misfortune free. And in January I will do a BookBub promotion of Maids with the goal of achieving better visibility in all bookstores.


I am continuing to offer audiobook versions of my books. This is the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry. The audiobook version of my second book, Uneasy Spirits, should be out within the week. I am delighted with my current narrator and we will be working together to produce Bloody Lessons by the end of March and Deadly Proof by June.


I will continue to write my historical fiction short stories since these are easy to write and they funnel readers into the longer books in the series. However, I will keep my short stories in KDP Select because they make four times as much for each borrow in KU as they do for each sale.


I am starting to work on a new collaborative science fiction project (about which I will post more shortly) and my strategy will be to publish the first part of the work in short story or novella-length chunks. Each story will be a stand-alone that I will put in KDP Select and in KU. Once the series of shorter-form works are complete, I will put them together as a full-length book. I will make a decision at that point whether or not to enroll that full-length book in KDP Select—depending how my sales have been going and whether or not the negative effect of KU on sales and income is still occurring for other authors.

In summary: While KDP Select has worked very well for me in the past (and may still be working well for others), once again it is time to take advantage of being an indie author with the ability to pivot quickly in response to external changes. While the current drop in my income is distressing—particularly at holiday time—I can’t help but look forward to the next year with a fair degree of hope and excitement—hence the rather joyful photo at the top of the post!

Some Questions:

For those of you who are primarily readers—have you subscribed to Kindle Unlimited, or Scribd, or Oyster? If so, do you feel you are buying fewer ebooks?

For those of you who are authors––do you have books in KDP Select and if so, do you feel the effect of KU has been positive or negative on your income?

What are your plans for the coming year?

I do appreciate feedback on these subjects—shared data is the possibility of shared success!

M. Louisa Locke

December 18, 2014

P.S. For those of you who might have been waiting for my books to go off KDP Select: You can now find the following books in the following venues!

Maids of Misfortune (Book 1) is now Free in  Kindle Nook Apple Kobo GooglePlay Scribd Smashwords 

Uneasy Spirits (Book 2)  Kindle Nook Apple Kobo GooglePlay Scribd Smashwords 

Bloody Lessons (Book 3)  Kindle Nook Apple Kobo GooglePlay Scribd Smashwords

Celebrating Five Years of Self-Publishing with a Giveaway

When I read Marie Force’s recent blog post celebrating four years as a self-published author, it occurred to me that I should celebrate my own anniversary since I self-published Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, on November 28, 2009––FIVE YEARS AGO.

While Force’s success as one of the most prolific and high selling hybrid authors of today is truly remarkable––it struck me that I should honor the fact that when I self-published (with no traditionally published books under my belt, no fan base) I was doing something a little risky––a little ahead of the curve. In 2009, the pundits were still saying ebooks and self-published books were the route to failure, and J.A Konrath and April Hamilton were voices in the wilderness. So, when I clicked publish on that first ebook edition, I was taking a leap of faith. The first of many. And some of the most gratifying lessons I’ve learned from self-publishing have been to continue to take risks, not take no for an answer, and to enjoy controlling my own destiny.

Not that the success was over night. I just looked back and saw that at the end of six months I had sold 284 books copies of Maids of Misfortune in ebook and print, vastly more than I expected but certainly not something that promised an end to my day-job. I also had four very nice reviews on Amazon (three from complete strangers) that pleased me no end.

Yet, today, five years later, I have sold over 120,000 books (which includes just Maids of Misfortune, Uneasy Spirits, and Bloody Lessons, a boxed set of those novels, and a recent collection of my short stories––a far cry from Force’s 27 self-published books), and the first book, Maids of Misfortune, has over 740 reviews and has recently been issued in German by AmazonCrossing.

And I have also gained innumerable friends in the writing community and discovered fans of my series who love my characters as much as I do, perhaps the greatest reason to celebrate there is!

So in celebration, I am doing my first Raffle Copter Giveaway, just one more experiment in this world of self-publishing, offering copies of my boxed set, and collection of short stories and $25 Amazon gift cards to five winners. I hope you will enter, help me celebrate, and get some new books to read for the upcoming holidays! Just click here for a Rafflecopter giveaway starting Thursday, 11/20-2014.

Fun Halloween Ideas from the Past

Hallowe’en.

The night wind whispers — Ghosts !

They are waiting for their hosts;

The waning moon is weary and will not be up till late ;

Already there are shadows at the gate.

A word, half heard, that is whispered in your ear,

And a presence that is felt when no one else is near.

Have you been along the corridors alone — all alone —

And listened to the wind up yonder making moan?

Have you thought about it all,

The footfall in the hall

That comes and goes — comes and goes —

With the measure of a heartbeat of a life that ebbs and flows ?

The poem above was the first item in a nearly 200 page book, Hallowe’en Festivities  by Stanley Schell, put out in 1903, that was devoted to giving suggestions on how to celebrate Halloween. It includes everything from examples of invitations to the party, decorations, songs, a play, pantomimes, costumes, dances, and twelve ghost stories. There are also recipes, like the following. (Notice the 1 gold ring)

FORTUNE CAKE.

One lb. butter, 2 lbs. sugar, 3 lbs. flour, 1 lb. currants, 1 lb.
raisins, 6 eggs, 3 teaspoonfuls powdered saleratus, 1 teaspoon-
ful ground cinnamon, \ nutmeg, 1 gold ring. Beat butter to
a cream; add sugar after rolling it fine, add well-sifted wheat
flour, well-beaten eggs. Dissolve saleratus in little hot water,
add it. Also add cinnamon and grated nutmeg. Wash and
dry currants thoroughly and stone and cut raisins in two;
flour them all together with the ring and work them all in
the dough. Put into large buttered tin and bake in moderate
oven.

or:

HALLOWE'EN PIE.
Consists of upper and lower crust of dough and looks like
any large deep pie. Dish is deep and round. Bake under
crust and upper crust. When cool, fill with sawdust and
dainty knick-knacks. Have knick-knacks evenly scattered
throughout sawdust. Then put on top pie crust and sprinkle
with powdered sugar. Knick-knacks should consist of things
pertaining to occasion, as witches on brooms, tiny jack-o'-
lanterns, ghosts, apples, etc., — souvenirs of the occasion.

It also lists 60 different Games to play at your party. Here are just a few:

HIDING RING, THIMBLE AND PENNY.

Hide ring, thimble and penny in room. To one who finds ring speedy marriage is assured; thimble denotes life of single blessedness; penny promises wealth.

JUMPING LIGHTED CANDLE.

Place lighted candle in middle of floor, not too securely placed; each one jumps over it. Whoever succeeds in clearing candle is guaranteed a happy year, free of trouble or anxiety. He who knocks candle over will have a twelve- month of woe.

SECRET TEST.

Float in tub of water a half walnut shell with tiny sail made of a tooth-pick and slip of paper. On paper each one writes his initials and another’s ; revealing name to no one. Boats are all launched at same time; water is agitated to make miniature waves; those whose boats are overturned will not win their lovers and sweethearts, but owners of boats that override the troubled seas will get their hearts’ desires.

PUMPKIN ALPHABET.

Hostess enters with small round pumpkin on old pewter platter. On pumpkin are carved all letters of alphabet. One guest is blindfolded and given a hat-pin, then led to pumpkin, where she is expected to stick pin into one of the letters on the pumpkin, thus indicating the initial of future life-partner.

SNAPDRAGON.

The dragon consists of half a pint of ignited brandy or alcohol in a dish. As soon as brandy is aflame, all lights are extinguished, and salt is freely sprinkled in dish, imparting a corpse-like pallor to every face. Candied fruits, figs, raisins, sugared almonds, etc., are thrown in, and guests snap for them with their fingers; person securing most prizes from flames will meet his true love within the year.

CANDLE AND APPLE.

At one end of stick 18 inches long fasten an apple; at other end, a short piece of lighted candle. Suspend stick from ceiling by stout cord fastened in its middle so that stick will balance horizontally; while stick revolves players try to catch apple with their teeth. A prize may be in center of apple.

RAISIN RACE.

A raisin is strung in middle of thread a yard long, and two persons take each an end of string in mouth; whoever, by chewing string, reaches raisin first has raisin and will be first wedded.

BARREL-HOOP.

Suspend horizontally from ceiling a barrel-hoop on which are fastened alternately at regular intervals apples, cakes, candies, candle-ends. Players gather in circle and, as it revolves, each in turn tries to bite one of the edibles; the one who seizes candle pays forfeit.

HALLOWE’EN SOUVENIR GAME. Suspend apples by means of strings in doorway or from ceiling at proper height to be caught between the teeth. First successful player receives prize. These prizes should be Hallowe’en souvenirs, such as emery cushions of silk representing tomatoes, radishes, apples, pears, pickles; or pen-wipers representing brooms, bats, cats, witches, etc.

DUMB CAKE.

Each one places handful of wheat flour on sheet of white paper and sprinkles it over with a pinch of salt. Some one makes it into dough, being careful not to use spring water. Each rolls up a piece of dough, spreads it out thin and flat, and marks initials on it with a new pin. The cakes are placed before fire, and all take seats as far from it as possible. This is done before eleven p.m., and between tha.t time and mid-night each one. must turn cake once. When clock strikes twelve future wife or husband of one who is to be married first will enter and lay hand on cake marked with name. Throughout whole proceeding not a word is spoken. Hence the name “dumb cake.” (If supper is served before 11.30, “Dumb Cake” should be reserved for one of the After-Supper Tests.)

♦♦♦♦

If you are planning a party and want to look at all the suggestions-this book is free from the  Open Library.

By the way, If you want something to read to put you in the mood for the holiday–Uneasy Spirits, the second book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, (with spirits, seances, murder and  a Hallowe’en Party all its own) is Free on Kindle October 30-31.

Introducing Katja Blum, translator for my German Edition of Maids of Misfortune

I am very pleased to introduce Katja Blum, the person who did such a lovely, professional job translating Maids of Misfortune into the German edition: Dienstmädchen im Unglück.

She graciously answered some of my questions in my quest to get to know her, and I think you will be as charmed as I was with her answers.

1. Please tell the readers about yourself and how you got into translating.

I began working as a translator (English into German) while I was studying at Hamburg University in Germany – sheesh, that was almost twenty years ago. My major wasn’t translation, by the way, but American Literature and Women’s Studies. For my first job, I translated Harlequin romances into German. I’m fluent in English, I’m a writer – how hard can it be? The answer: Very. I learned many important things from working with those romances and my extremely strict editor – listening to the author’s voice and reigning in my own, being disciplined about deadlines (tough one) and writing to meet specific market requirements, while still creating a natural, flowing text in German.

After a few years working solely as a literary translator, I felt that I needed a different challenge and went into marketing and corporate communications for luxury brands. I was able to use many of the skills I had learned, because I was still dealing with fairy tales for adults, just that the perfect guy was being replaced by the perfect pair of very expensive shoes.

One of the very best parts of my job is that I can work in my pajamas. I don’t usually, but I could. Freelance work also allows me to make my schedule around spending time with my three-year-old son. Sam has a condition that makes it hard for him to learn speech, so in working, playing and learning with him, I now get to approach language, communication and storytelling in a whole new way.

Apart from family and books, the fiber arts are my greatest passion. I study textiles through the ages and how to make them today using the old techniques from spindle-spinning flax to tatting lace. The knowledge comes in handy when I translate historic fiction. Not only do I have a pretty good idea what people are wearing or making, but the study of textiles also comes with a lot of social history, which to me is as fascinating as it is useful.

Today, I mix it up in my job with marketing translations, usually time-sensitive, and bigger book projects (fiction and nonfiction) with longer deadlines. All parts of my job inform the others and continue to shape my understanding of the languages I work with and – hopefully – my skills as a translator.

2.  What are some of the specific difficulties in translating novels from English to German?

One problem that all English to German translators have to wrestle with is the form of address. English has one (you) with the degree of formality being expressed through the language and by using a person’s first or last name. German has two – formal (“Sie” with last name) and informal (“du” with first name). In English, it is appropriate to address a business associate with their first name, even if the relationship is somewhat formal. In German, you have a choice between making the language of that relationship much more formal – a problem if the source text doesn’t give you the person’s last name – or much more informal than it really is.

Naturally, wordplay, jokes and metaphors work very differently in English and German. Sometimes I can translate a funny phrase as it is, but often I have no choice but to write a straight sentence. Since that could drastically change the tone of a book, my motto is “you win some, you lose some”. If I do have to skip a pun or other humorous line, I pay special attention to passages nearby where a similar line might be possible and appropriate in the German text.

Literary translators in any language need to work on cultural transfer. My goal is to make the setting, time and culture of the original novel accessible to German readers within their frame of reference, so that they can live in, say, late 19th century San Francisco without too many moments of “huh?”, which tend to snap them out of the story world.

One famous example of cultural transfer is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. While peanut butter is now widely known and available in Germany (it wasn’t when I started), grape jelly is not. ‘My’ novel characters eat their PB with strawberry jam.

The same goes for sports metaphors. If translated literally, baseball phrases like “stepping up to the plate” or “throwing a curveball” make no sense to Germans. Good thing I like soccer.

3.  Do you do anything special to prepare for a translation job?

I read ahead. I don’t read the entire novel before I start, because my translations tend to be better if I’m curious about how it all ends. But I keep reading at least a few chapters ahead to make sure that my translation decisions (e.g. formal vs. informal address) are going to make sense all the way.

I also read what I can about the author. Having been entrusted with the result of their passion and hard work, I like to get to know them a little.

4.  Were there any particular challenges to translating Maids of Misfortune into German?

In Maids of Misfortune, the biggest challenges were the voices of “Lizzie” and Mr. Wong. Translating the cultural or ethnic characteristics of a person’s speech is one of the hardest tasks for me. Literary dialogue is always about making it sound natural, even though people in real life don’t usually speak in so many coherent, complete and grammatically correct sentences. If you add dialects or other peculiarities of speech into the mix, the translation becomes a balancing act of getting the person’s voice, ethnicity and social standing across without sounding stilted and annoying. In the German version of “My Fair Lady”, Eliza Doolittle’s Cockney is brilliantly transformed into the dialect of working class Berlin, because it is as widely recognizable and familiar to Germans as Cockney is to the English. In the German Maids of Misfortune, Lizzie doesn’t speak dialect, but her attempt at sounding naïve and ignorant was great fun to play with in the translation.

5.  Do you have any tips for authors who are looking for translators, how to find and evaluate a good translator, what to look for in the process?

 Unless you speak the target language of the translation project very well, my advice is to go through a translation agency or publisher like Amazon Crossing. You need a translator who understands both languages and your work very well. And you need an editor with the same qualities, maybe even more so.

If you do want to find and evaluate a translator/editor team on your own, you can reach them through several reputable job portals for translators or industry associations in most countries. Candidates should be willing to provide a sample translation – you can ask for a very short unpaid sample, but consider offering payment, because you can ask for a longer one. Working as an editor as well, I know that pretty much anyone can keep it together for a couple of hundred words of a free sample, so a longer one is well worth the investment.

6.  Do you have any advice for someone who would like to become a successful translator?

Get the best language and or translation education you can, read a lot in both languages. Take feedback from editors and clients as a chance to learn, own up to your mistakes and fix them. Respect the author. Above all, love language. If you are passionate about language and communication, if you spend rather a lot of time thinking about why there is no English word for “Schadenfreude” and why “oblivion” is really hard to translate, this might just be the job for you.

7.  Is there anything else you would like to add?

I would like to mention how important it is for any novel translation to be read by a good editor. Once I am done with the first draft of a novel and a couple of revisions, I know the text inside out, front to back. Given the production schedule, I often don’t have the time to let the novel sit for a few weeks to read it again with fresh eyes. Eventually, I lose the distance necessary to find my own mistakes and goofy passages. A good editor makes a translation shine. Maids of Misfortune had an excellent one. She edited the book with great care, attention to detail – and with zero tolerance for any of my shenanigans.

Thanks Katja!  And, for anyone who would like to read or gift the new German edition of Maids of Misfortune (Dienstmädchen im Unglück), it is now available as an ebook or print on Amazon.de!

 

Maids of Misfortune in German

Notice that Victorian woman on the cover? She looks almost exactly as I picture Annie Fuller, the main protagonist in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. Which is lovely, since this is the cover of the new German translation of Maids of Misfortune, the first book in that series. Available now for pre-order, this edition is coming out in print and ebook in exactly a month, on September 2, 2014.

So how did this happen?

As an independent author, I knew that getting my books translated into foreign languages would be more complicated than if I had a traditional publishing contract and/or agent. And, while I knew of other indie authors, like David Gaughran and Joanna Penn, who were working to find translators on their own (often using a royalty splitting agreement), or using a distributor like Babelcube, which matches up authors and translators, this seemed time-consuming and therefore was not something I put high on my “to-do” list. It was more on my “someday maybe I will do this” list.

Then I was contacted by AmazonCrossing.

AmazonCrossing is the second imprint that Amazon launched (after AmazonEncore), and it was set up in 2010 with the stated purpose of finding and translating foreign language works into English. One study that tracks translations of foreign language books into English found that by 2012, AmazonCrossing had become the second largest publisher of translated books in the US. AmazonCrossing’s list of books by publication date reveals that in 2012 they also began to put out German language editions of some of their own Amazon imprint books, including Kindle Singles.

Then, in late 2013, AmazonCrossing began to reach out to indie authors who published through KDP––authors who had books they thought would sell well in German. I was one of those fortunate authors.

In December of 2013, I accepted this offer, and in a few weeks a translator, Katja Blum, was hired (I will publish an interview with Ms. Blum later this month). Late in March, 2014, the translation was complete and the book moved into the review and copyediting phases (with input from me––for example I asked for a change in the translation of the title). In the beginning of July, I received the above cover to approve, and the book went up for pre-order two weeks later, to be available September 2. Nine months from offer to publication. With virtually no effort on my part. Smile.

While I know personally of one other independent author who is also having her book published in German by AmazonCrossing, if you look at the list of German editions coming out under this imprint in the past few months, it is clear we are not alone. The day when Maids of Misfortune comes out, for example, there are four other German translations of indie books being published as well (all contemporary romances.)

What this will mean in terms of sales, I don’t know. I can only assume that Amazon did its research ahead of time and they wouldn’t have gone to the expense of translating Maids of Misfortune if they didn’t think it would sell. My hope, of course, is that the Germans will enjoy the Dienstmädchen im Unglück as much as readers have enjoyed it as Maids of Misfortune and that this German edition will be a wild success, with a German public clamoring for Uneasy Spirits, next book in the Victorian San Francisco mystery series.

To help that happen, if you should know anyone you think would like to read the German edition, do pass on this information. Better yet, if you know someone you think might like a free copy of the ebook in exchange for an honest review, let me know!

Meanwhile, stay tuned for my reports back on how my German adventure plays out.

M. Louisa Locke, August 2, 2014

The three reasons I have fallen in love with writing short stories

I am the last author you would think would be writing short stories. As a writer who tends to be prolix, the short form wouldn’t seem a good match for me. I don’t write anything short––not emails, not blog posts, not books. Twitter, forget it––the most I can do is retweet those of you who are good at being succinct. I don’t even read many short stories, (except by 19th century writers like Alcott, Wharton, and James).

Yet, this spring I took time off from doing the research for Deadly Proof, the next book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, to write my third and fourth short stories, which are now part of a collection, Victorian San Francisco Stories, that I just published on Kindle, and I have every intention of putting out more short stories in the coming year.

So what happened?

Dandy Detects, my first short story happened. Three months after the publication of my first book in my series, Maids of Misfortune, I started to write a short story about the Boston terrier I had introduced in the book. I had read that publishing an inexpensive short story was a good way of introducing potential readers to your work, so my reason was completely pragmatic. Maids of Misfortune was selling less than one ebook a day, and I wanted to feel like I was doing something to help gain it some visibility. I was only producing about two blog posts a month (remember my tendency to be long-winded), and writing a short story and putting it up on Kindle seemed like manageable activity.

Dandy Detects ended up doing more than I could have thought possible to boost sales. Stephen Windwalker picked it as one of his earliest Kindle Shorts on Kindle Nation Daily (probably the first site to effectively promote ebooks) over the weekend of July 4, 2010. This prompted so many people to buy the full-length book that Maids of Misfortune raced to the top of the historical mystery category, where it stayed for over two years.

But even more significantly—writing this story turned out to be great fun, and the readers enjoyed it. Dandy Detect also was less than 8000 words—a triumph for me since I swear I have blog posts longer than that!

While I didn’t write the next story for another two years (in this case after the publication of my second novel), during that time I started keeping track of short story plots I wanted to write. By the time I had written my third story, I had concluded that writing short stories is about more than providing a loss leader to sell other books. In fact, I believe that, particularly for authors of series, short stories can be one of the most effective methods of building and maintaining both the readers’ and the author’s enthusiasm for a series.

Reason #1: Short stories permit me to expand on events, places, and, most importantly, characters from my longer novels.

As an author of historical mysteries, I constantly struggle to maintain an adequate balance among the competing demands of character development, historical detail, and plot momentum, while keeping my novels to a reasonable length. Writing short stories that help me develop back-story, expand the roles of minor characters, and provide more historical context, have been crucial to helping me keep that balance within the novels, while satisfying my creative impulses.

For example, historical fiction readers love to read about the details of day-to-day life in the past, and they are interested in how character development provides insight into social relationships and behavior in other times. So they expect the historical fiction novels they read to be fairly long.

Mystery readers, on the other hand, tend to be partial to speed. They are generally looking for fast-paced, suspense-driven plots. They certainly want to know enough about the characters to understand their motivations, but their expectation is that every scene and every conversation is going to move the mystery plot forward by dropping clues, introducing red herrings, etc. For an example, the advice on word count for traditionally published books is that mysteries should be under 100,000 words while the top limit for historical fiction can go as high as 140,000 words.

If you add in light romance to the mix, as I do, you have a third set of expectations to meet. I need to weave in the push and pull of the romantic relationship between my protagonists, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, making sure there is some sort of satisfactory resolution of that relationship along with solving the crime.

To meet all those expectations and not end up with a mammoth tome that tests the patience of the reader (particularly the mystery reader) means that I often have to sacrifice minor characters and historical detail. I suspect I am not alone in being frustrated about making this sort of choice.

Writing a series is one way I deal with this dilemma. I console myself with the promise that I will get to expand the roles of these minor characters or introduce more historical places and events in future books in the series. For example, in my second book, Uneasy Spirits, I gave the boarding house maid, Kathleen, a starring role, writing a number of chapters from her point of view. In my third book, Bloody Lessons, I sent some characters off to spend more time at Woodward’s Gardens (a fabulous place in San Francisco that was a cross between a zoo, art museum, and county fair) that I had introduced briefly in my first two books.)

Another way I satisfy my urge to expand, however, has been to write short stories where these minor characters get to have center stage and where I can provide even more historical detail about Victorian San Francisco. In The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, I took two characters that barely had speaking roles in my novels and gave them a whole adventure to themselves. This meant I could develop their distinct personalities (and some of the back story that explained those personalities), throw in detail on women’s fashion (they are dressmakers) and spend a whole scene describing the interior of the famous Palace Hotel.

In Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, I was able to explore more of the history of Chinese immigrants in this era, including the precarious position of Chinese women and the hostile attitudes of the Irish to this ethnic group—something I had only been able to hint at in Maids of Misfortune, the novel that introduced Mr. Wong.

In my latest short story Madam Sibyl’s First Client (only found in the new collection), I was even able to write a prequel to the series. In earlier drafts of Maids of Misfortune, I had had a complete backstory for why Annie Fuller, my young widowed boarding house owner, decided to supplement her income by pretending to be the clairvoyant Madam Sibyl. But after lots of input from various people over the years, most of that back-story was cut in the interests of introducing the murder earlier and expediting the plot. In Madam Sibyl’s First Client, I was finally able to tell that story and introduce some economic detail about San Francisco in 1878 that would have never made it through the editing process with my full-length mysteries.

In fact, except for Dandy Detects, my short stories aren’t really mysteries at all, and as such are designed to satisfy those who are reading my books more for the historical setting than the mystery plot. Since I was a professional historian before I shifted to my career to writing fiction, this satisfies me as well.

Reason #2: Short stories help build and maintain the interest in my series in between books.

I am a relatively slow writer. Part of the reason for this is that I do write relatively long books (my shortest is 110,000 words and my longest nearly 140,000-––not long for historical fiction—very long for the mystery genre.) Doing the extra research needed for an historical mystery also takes time—before starting out as well as during the writing.

Added to the time spent on research and just writing these books, there is the amount of time I spend staying connected with both fans and other authors, which is the biggest part of the on-going marketing of my books. These connections are incredibly rewarding, but they still represent time taken away from working on the next book.

Finally, since I am in my mid-sixties––I spend a good deal of my time just maintaining my body in working order (smile) and visiting my grandchildren.

The result is that each book has come out about two years after the previous one. Two years is a long time to leave readers waiting. Therefore, my short stories are my way of thanking my fans for being patient and helping maintain their interest in the series in the interim.

These stories keep my enthusiasm for the series going as well. I find that my motivation to write tends to flag during the months I spend marketing a book when it first comes out and then during the months doing the basic research for the next book. I know I am not alone in this pattern. I suspect this is one of the reasons that some authors have more than one series going at a time or why they get tired of their series after a few books and move on to something else.

But I love my characters and the world of Victorian San Francisco, and I have lots of stories about them I still want to tell. I am reminded of that love when I start a short story. A day that I spend with my minor characters, hanging around the kitchen of the boarding house or moving across the city with Annie Fuller, is just what I need to rekindle my enthusiasm for the series—something I hope happens for readers as well.

And the rewards are almost immediate. I can write, edit, and publish a short story in a month’s time, and I immediately start to get feedback, in terms of sales and reviews, which is terribly motivating. Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong came out three months ago, and it has already sold 1595 copies and had twenty reviews with an average rating of 4.3.

Also, these stories don’t require much investment in time or money on the part of the reader, which brings me to the third reason I think writing short stories is good for series authors.

3. Short stories provide an inexpensive (in terms of time and cost) introduction to a series, and that can attract new readers.

This may have been the primary reason I wrote my first short story, but for me, personally, it’s now the least important reason for writing them. If I discovered that everyone who bought one of my individual short stories was already a fan of the series, I wouldn’t be disappointed. I expect that most of the people who buy my new collection will be people who have read at least one of my novels, and one of the reasons I did the collection was to provide a print edition for those fans that still prefer print.

However, when Dandy Detects was published in April of 2010, short stories were still viewed as something authors sold to magazines and traditional publishers were still successfully keeping ebook prices high—often higher than paperback print prices. April Hocking had just published her first 99 cent book, KDP Select with its free days wasn’t on the scene, BookBub and other marketing sites weren’t sending us emails every day listing every discount, and no one was talking about perma-free books as loss leaders. Therefore, a 99 cent or free short story was still a pretty big deal.

Fast forward four years to 2014. Readers now can find long lists of books for free and even boxed sets of five or more books for 99 cents. The fact that a short story is free or 99 cents is no longer as much of an incentive to buy.

That doesn’t mean that short stories can’t still be an important marketing tool for those authors who are either unwilling or unable (perhaps because they don’t control the price of their books) to discount their full-length books. In this case, publishing a free or 99 cent short story is one of the few ways these writers can attract the reader who isn’t willing to shell out much money for a book by an author they don’t know.

In addition, giving away a short stories is an effective method of encouraging people to do things like sign up for a newsletter, subscribe to a blog, or like an author’s facebook page. I have now given away two of my short stories through my newsletter. This has helped grow my email list of people who want to hear when my next publication comes out.

Perhaps more significantly, short stories and novellas are beginning to appeal more to readers because they are perfect for the person who has short bits of time on their hands and a mobile device. Anyone who been traveling recently, or spent much time on public transportation, or in waiting rooms, has witnessed the rapid integration of mobile phones, tablets, and ereaders into everyday life.

Amazon, never a slouch about anticipating the desires of consumers, has responded by creating a number of features that emphasize the short form: Kindle Singles, Kindle Worlds, DayOne, and StoryFront. Just last month they introduced a new Kindle feature called Short Reads that lists selected short stories by the length of time it takes to read the story.

Summary:

For authors who write series, whether they are writing historical fiction, science fiction or fantasy, or contemporary literature of any sub-genre, I am confident that they might find writing short stories or novellas that use characters and settings from their series as rewarding as I have, for many of the same reasons.

The intricate world building that goes into creating a dystopian future or alternative universe can just as easily come into conflict with moving the plot forward or adequately developing a romance. Or, a contemporary cozy mystery series can have secondary supporting characters that readers want to know more about. See this interesting blog post and series of comments by Elizabeth Spann Craig for an example. Any author can use a short story from their series as a way of enticing new readers or rewarding existing fans. And every short story can enhance the enjoyment by both the author and the readers of the imaginary world that has been created.

So, readers: Do you have any examples of series that you feel have benefited from having short stories connected to them? Authors: Have you written or contemplated writing short stories—with or without a series connection? I would love to know.

M. Louisa Locke, June 12.2014

Summer Kickoff: Update and Uneasy Spirits Sale

It has been 3 months since I wrote a substantive blog post. So you might be wondering, what have I been doing? The answer is simple, I actually started taking some of my own advice, and I have been concentrating on writing and getting more work out there and available rather than spending so much time marketing or giving everyone else advice. Did you miss me?

Mostly, I have been writing short stories for my Victorian San Francisco series. If you want to see my most recent one, Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, you can buy it for 99 cents here. The story I have almost completed, Madam Sibyl’s First Client, is going to be available for free in June for a limited time to those who have signed up for my newsletter. Additionally, I am working on bringing my short stories together as a collection with an extended historical essay. This way I can make them available at a reasonable cost in print for those who prefer this method of delivery.

I have also been collaborating with my new narrator, Alexander Haag, on getting my short stories out as audio books. If you sign up for the great new audiobook promotional site AudaVoxx, you will get a chance to win audiobook versions of Dandy Detects, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, and Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong in the coming months.

Finally, I have been doing the research and prep work for Deadly Proof, the fourth book in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, which features women in the printing industry. I hope it will be out in early 2015.

I haven’t stopped marketing altogether (after all, this whole blog could be called marketing.) But I have accepted that for my books the wild west days of huge sales bumps after a free promotion are over. I still think a well-planned (and advertised) free promotion can be an excellent tool for a relatively unknown author who wishes to get their work visible and to obtain enough reviews to convince readers to give their books a try.

However, my novels already have more reviews than I ever thought possible, I am evidently not so much of an unknown any longer, and free promotions aren’t giving my books enough of a sales bump to justify high promotional costs in time and money. In addition, with only 3 books in my series, the perma-free or discounted approach for the first book in the series doesn’t make sense. Maybe some day, after book 4 or 5?

But as I have written here before, I have found that doing a monthly 99 cent Kindle Countdown on one of my novels generates enough income to supplement the recent anemic sales of those books at full price. In addition, these monthly promotions keep the books visible enough in the main sub-categories so that those sales don’t disappear altogether.

Scheduling the promotions takes about 5 minutes (and the price drop goes down automatically so I don’t have to worry about spacing out and forgetting to do the price change.) Most of the work in getting promotional support takes about two hours a month before the promotion begins (applying for promotional ads) and about 15 minutes each day of the promotion (doing tweets and facebook announcements). In short, none of this takes away too much time from my writing.

For those of you who don’t want to put your books in KDP Select or haven’t found your books sell well on a Kindle Countdown, I would hope that you are pursuing the alternative strategy of getting your books into as many bookstores (physical and internet) and libraries (as print or ebooks.) This way, even if your sales are anemic in one venue, the total sales over all the venues should add up (particularly if you do a promotion.)

Meanwhile, I am kicking off the summer holidays with another Kindle Countdown. This time, Uneasy Spirits, the second book in my Victorian San Francisco series, will be 99 cents between Sunday May 25 and Saturday May 31 in the US Kindle Store and the UK Kindle Store.

Cheers!

M. Louisa Locke, May 25, 2014

My Main Character Blog Hop: Annie Fuller in the Victorian San Francisco Stories

Ana Brazil has tagged me in this blog hop where I will answer seven questions about my main character in my Victorian San Francisco series. Ana has a forthcoming historical mystery entitled Fanny Newcomb & the Irish Channel Ripper. I suspect my character Annie Fuller and Ana’s Fanny Newcomb might quite like each other! You can find out more about her work and Fanny Newcomb here.

♣♣♣♣

The concept behind my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series came from my desire to find a way to introduce the reading public to the women who lived and worked in the far west at the end of the 19th century (the subject of my doctoral dissertation). As a fan of mysteries with amateur detectives (Sayer’s Lord Peter and Harriet Vane) and female sleuths (this was in the early 1980s and Sue Grafton had just burst on the scene) I decided that I needed to come up with a reason why a woman in 1880 San Francisco would investigate crimes by going undercover in a series of female occupations. From that idea came my series protagonist, Annie Fuller, a widow who owns a boarding house and supplements her income as a pretend clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl. In her first case, in Maids of Misfortune, Annie goes undercover as a domestic servant to investigate the suspicious death of one of Madam Sibyl’s clients. In the process she meets the murdered man’s lawyer, Nate Dawson, who becomes her romantic interest.

Since then I have written two other novels, Uneasy Spirits, where Annie and Nate investigate a fraudulent trance medium, and Bloody Lessons, where they try to figure out who is attacking local public school teachers. I have also written 3 short stories featuring minor characters from the series, Dandy Detects, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, and Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong. The forthcoming work I am going to write about is another short story, entitled Madam Sibyl’s First Client.

Here are the 7 Questions about my character and this forthcoming work.

1. What is the name of my main character? Is he/she fictional or historical?

Mrs. Annie Fuller is my main character and she is very much fictional. However, since I drew on the extensive work I did for my history doctoral dissertation, I tried to make her representative of real women of her time and place as possible. She is a young widow who runs a boarding house. This is one of the primary occupations for married and widowed women in the 19th century because it was seen as a very respectable extension of a woman’s normal duties as a wife and mother. In addition, in most rapidly growing cities in this period in the United States, there was a voracious demand for boarding houses. Young single men and women were leaving their rural homes and flocking to the cities for the new jobs that were opening up, and they needed a place to live, where someone would take care of feeding them, doing light wash, etc.

While no one would think twice about Annie Fuller’s occupation as boarding house keeper—her second occupation, as the clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl, was not so ordinary. However, in 1880, spiritualism was very popular, and on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle were listed at least a dozen clairvoyants of one type or another, mostly women. And a number of them offered to give business advice. In fact, in the mid 1870s a famous woman, Victoria Woodhull, had gained national notice when she and her sister set up the first known female brokerage firm. Like Madam Sibyl, they suggested that the got their stock tips through supernatural means. So while this wasn’t a common occupation for women, it was certainly a possible one (and perfect for my purposes) and much more probable than setting herself up as a private detective in this era.

2. When and where is the story set?

The short story, Madam Sibyl’s First Client, is set in San Francisco, in 1878, in Annie Fuller’s boarding house. After the enormous population growth and financial successes of the 1850s and 1860s, San Francisco had gone through a difficult financial crisis. First the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869 meant San Francisco manufacturers and workers faced competition from the east. Then the depression of the mid 1870s hit the west coast particularly hard.

There are signs the economy is finally improving, and many businessmen are trying to recoup some of their losses from the depression, which is one of the reasons Annie Fuller thinks she can make money giving out business advice.

3. What should we know about her?

Annie Fuller was born in San Francisco, but she lived until she was twelve on a ranch outside of Los Angeles, and then moved to New York City with her father when her mother died. Her father was a successful stockbroker and taught her all about accounting and finances.

She married at eighteen to John Fuller, the son of a wealthy friend of her father’s. Her marriage was short and very unhappy. Her husband drank. And, after her father died, her husband got control of her inheritance and speculated away her fortune, leaving her destitute and dependent on his relatives when he committed suicide. She spent the next 4 years being shuffled around between her Fuller in-laws, as a sort of unpaid companion and nurse. She’d lost contact with her mother’s side of the family, so it was a surprise when she received notice that her aunt and uncle had died and left her a small inheritance and their home back in San Francisco.

4. What is the personal goal of the character?

At the start of the series, financial security is Annie Fuller’s main goal. She feels betrayed by men (her father, for leaving her fortune tied up in such a way that she was financially dependent on her husband, her husband for completely dismissing her financial expertise and ruining himself and her in the process, and her father-in-law for ensuring that it was her wealth—not his own–that went to pay off the debts). To her, financial independence means she never has to depend on another man, and she can make her own decisions.

5. What is the main source of conflict, what messes up her life?

In the short story, the main source of conflict is whether or not she can get San Francisco businessmen to take her seriously as a financial advisor. She doesn’t like having to pretend to read their palms or cast their horoscopes, but this seems to be the only way they will take her, as a woman, seriously. In the books, her fierce independence will be an obstacle in the romance between her and my main male protagonist, Nate Dawson, and will occasionally lead her into danger.

6. Is there a working title of this story and can we read more about it?

Since of the complaints of some fans is that they never see enough of Annie as Madam Sibyl (since Annie is always going off and investigating crimes as herself, not as her alter ego), I decided to indulge myself and my fans and do a prequel to the series, a short story that is set a year and a half before Maids of Misfortune opens, entitled Madam Sibyl’s First Client.

7. When can we expect the story to be published?

I hope to have this story ready to go by the end of June, 2014. However, my plan is to include it as part of a collection of my four short stories this summer, so this may be the only form in which you can buy it. However, for those fans of the series who have signed up, or do sign up for my newsletter, the story will be available for free for a limited time.

♣♣♣♣

I want to thank Ana for tagging me, and do go read her blog about her main character, who sounds fascinating, here. I have tagged Ann Elwood, whose work in progress is also set in the end of the 19th century, and you will be able to read about her main character here next week. To read some other tagged authors, I would recommend, Elisabeth Storrs blog about her main character in her Tales of Ancient Rome, G.S. Johnston’s blog about his main character, a 19th century Paris Police Chief.

Is Kindle Countdown the new Free? Keeping books visible in 2014

For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling.

However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment with the new promotional tool, the Kindle Countdown, that has been introduced as part of KDP Select.

In this post I am going to:

A.   Review how successful the strategies I pursued last year were for selling books in 2013.

B.   Address whether or not Free is failing as a strategy.

C.   Compare the Kindle Countdown promotions to Free promotions .

D.   Assess whether or not Kindle Countdown promotions can replace free-book promotions as my primary promotional strategy for 2014.

A. Last March, I became concerned by the growing competitiveness within the eBook market as the number of eBooks published soared and traditional publishers began to adopt some of the strategies of indie authors. I listed six strategies I was going to follow in 2013.

1. Have free promotions less frequently. In 2012, I had noticed that promotions too close together were less effective, so I began to space out my promotions. As a result, whereas In 2012 I ran ten free promotions, resulting in 132,552 free downloads, in 2013 I only did four free promotions, resulting in 145,494 free downloads. This meant that fewer promotions in 2013 resulted in higher numbers of downloads with each promotion—and greater effect on the post-promotion rankings and sales from each promotion.

2. Use longer promotions. I had concluded that breaking up the five free days available under the KDP Select rules into 2-3 promotions was counter-productive (more time-consuming, more expensive, less effective). So, I determined to do fewer but longer promotions. However, I soon discovered if you used a BookBub ad with your promotion—most of the downloads came within the first few days, so I scrapped this approach and kept to one short free promotion per 3 month interval.

3. Schedule promotions near the end of the month. I noticed that most of the borrows of my books as part of the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) were at the beginning of a month. It is as if all Prime Members suddenly say, “Hey, I get another free borrow,” when a new month rolls around. So, I scheduled two of my four promotions for the end of the month so that the resulting post-promotional visibility would be at the beginning of the next month. This strategy worked: In each case, the promoted book was borrowed at least 1000 times during the month following the promotion.

4. Do more 99 cent promotions. By 2013, the evidence was mounting that the one way to ensure a successful promotion was to schedule a BookBub ad. However, it costs almost twice as much to promote a 99 cent book as a free one with BookBub. Therefore, when a 99 cent sale of my second series book, Uneasy Spirits, had disappointing results without a BookBub ad, I decided not to pursue this strategy in 2013. I did, however, use a 99 cent promotion of Uneasy Spirits in conjunction with the launch of my third book, and I did begin to schedule 99 cent sales through the KDP Select Kindle Countdown option as soon as it was introduced at the end of 2013.

5. Experiment with promotions that are not tied to free or discounting. My premise here was that, if free promotions were becoming less effective, I would need to find alternative or complementary methods of making my work visible. In 2013, I did a book tour and guest posts on relevant blogs: I participated in book and Kindle Fire giveaways; I paid for banner ads and book sponsorships; and I paid to boost posts on my Facebook page. As far as I can tell, none of these alternative methods of promotion had any appreciable effect compared to the impact of a single free-book promotion on Bookbub.

6. Write more books and short stories. I published the third book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Bloody Lessons, in September of 2013, and I put together the first three books in the series as a boxed set and made it available in November. I am about to publish a third short story. 

Conclusions: Looking at the effects of these six strategies, there is evidence that three of them proved effective. Having fewer free promotions increased the effectiveness of the promotions I did, placing the promotions near the end of the month did stimulate borrows, and publishing additional works did compensate for the lower royalties brought in by the first two books in the series. As a result, I was able to maintain my over all sales for 2013 near the level of the year before.

B. While the data confirmed what others were finding, that I needed more free downloads in 2013 than in 2012 to achieve post promotional visibility and sales, I was curious about what this meant in terms of the continued effectiveness of free promotions. I decided to compare the KDP Select free-book promotions I did in November 2012 to promotions I did in May and August 2013. (In each case I had used BookBub as the primary method of promotion.)

KDP Select Free Promotions Data

Nov 21-23, 2012  Maids of Misfortune Free promotion with BookBub

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

     


Maids of Misfortune
5 books a day
56 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
6 books a day
10 books a day


Borrows
4 borrows a day
20 borrows a day

Total Downloads: 17,184

May 25, 26 2013 Maids of Misfortune Free promotion with Bookbub

  
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

    


Maids of Misfortune
12 books a day
63 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
11 books a day
27 books a day


Borrows
3 borrows a day
21 borrows a day

Total Downloads: 30,000

August 6-8 2013  Uneasy Spirits Free Promotion with BookBub

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

   


Maids of Misfortune
6 books a day
12 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
7 books a day
14 books a day


Borrows
2 borrows a day
 9 borrows a day

Total Downloads: 35,000

Conclusions: 1) Free promotions are still very effective under certain circumstances. In fact, the BookBub-backed promotion of Maids of Misfortune in May 2013 was slightly more effective than the November 2012 promotion of this book in terms of total downloads, increased visibility, and long-term increase in sales. 2) This didn’t hold true with all books under all circumstances. For example, my free promotions without a BookBub ad had no significant effects on subsequent sales, and the first book in my series consistently did better in subsequent sales (not in total downloads) than the sequel. 3) Because BookBub is expensive, doesn’t accept every book, and now will only promote a book every six months, authors, myself included, need to continue to look at alternative methods of keeping our books visible. Which is where the Kindle Countdown becomes important. 

C.  October 31, 2013, KDP announced its Kindle Countdown option for books enrolled in KDP Select. This confirmed my feeling that Amazon was systematically nudging indie authors away from depending on free as a promotional tool. I am not going to describe the details of the program, but I am going to report on the four Kindle Countdown promotions I have done so far and draw some conclusions about how they compare to KDP Select free promotions. Since I was experimenting, each Kindle Countdown I did went for a slightly different number of days and used different combinations of promotional ads. However, in all of them I kept the price at 99 cents throughout the promotion. The data also just represents sales in the US store, since my sales in the UK store remained minimal in all the promotions (even the one that was backed by BookBub).

Kindle Countdown Promotional Data

November 23-29, 2013, Kindle Countdown, Maids of Misfortune

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

    


Maids of Misfortune
 4 books a day
 6 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 4 books a day
 8 books a day


Bloody Lessons
16 books a day
12 books a day


Borrows
 7 borrows a day
27 borrows a day

Limited promotion, profit in sales of Maids of Misfortune at 99 cents, $804.18 

December 16-21, 2013, Kindle Countdown, Uneasy Spirits

Pre Promotion Sales

  
Post Promotional Sales

    


Maids of Misfortune
 6 books a day
 5 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 8 books a day
 8 books a day


Bloody Lessons
13 books a day
12 books a day


Borrows
27 borrows a day
 7 borrows a day

BookGorilla promotion, profit in sales of Uneasy Spirits at 99 cents, $137.69

January 9-13, 2014, Kindle Countdown, Maids of Misfortune 

Pre Promotion Sales

  
Post Promotional Sales

   


Maids of Misfortune
 7 books a day
16 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 6 books a day
11 books a day


Bloody Lessons
10 books a day
14 books a day


Borrows
34 borrows a day
21 borrows a day

Bookbub promotion, profit in sales of Maids of Misfortune at 99 cents, $1495.54

February 7-13, 2014, Kindle Countdown, Bloody Lessons

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   (6 day average)
Post Promotional Sales

    (18 day average)


Maids of Misfortune
 6 books a day
 5 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 7 books a day
 7 books a day


Bloody Lessons
 9 books a day
19 books a day


Borrows
31 borrows a day
 7 borrows a day

Limited promotion, profit in sales of Bloody Lessons at 99 cents, $1142.04

D. Comparisons of the KDP Select Kindle Countdown and Free promotions:

1. Based on post-promotional sales, free-book promotions are definitely superior to a Kindle Countdown 99 cent sale (at least at this point in time). Not only did the KDP Select free promotions increase the sales of the promoted book, but they also increased the sales of the other books in the series. In comparison, Kindle Countdown promotions had weaker and less consistent effects on post promotional sales of all books.

For example, the BookBub-backed free promotion of Maids of Misfortune in May, 2013 increased the average sales per day of Maids fivefold from 12 books a day to 63 books a day. In contrast, the BookBub-backed Kindle Countdown promotion of Maids in January, 2014 only increased the rate of sales per day from 7 books a day to 16 books a day.

This differential was probably because the consistently large number of downloads in the BookBub free-book promotions translated into higher post-promotional rankings in the popularity lists than occurred with the more limited sales under the Kindle Countdown promotions.

In addition, the Kindle Countdown 99 cent promotions did not have any consistently positive effects on the sales of the other books. With free promotions, I always saw some increase in sales of the other books in the series. With the Kindle Countdown promotions sometimes there was an increase in sales (sales of Uneasy Spirits doubled after the November, 2014 promotion of Maids of Misfortune) but more often the sales of other books in the series remained stagnant or even dropped afterwards.

I suspect the difference here might simply be the result of the difference in the volume of books downloaded or purchased. If 1 percent of the 30,000 people who downloaded a free copy of Maids of Misfortune went on to buy another book, that would be 300 sales.  If 1 percent of the 3000 people who bought Maids of Misfortune at 99 cents went on to buy another book, that would be only 30 sales.

2. Kindle Countdown promotions—like free promotions––do have a positive effect on increasing the number of reviews. But again, as one would expect, the difference in volume between the two kinds of promotions will have an impact. Nevertheless, I must note that my Kindle Countdown promotions produced a greater number of reviews than I anticipated.

For example, in the month after the May 2013 free promotion of Maids of Misfortune I had 60 new reviews (which was less than .2% of the 30,000 who downloaded a copy of the book). The January 2014 Kindle Countdown promotion of Maids of Misfortune garnered 44 reviews in the first month (slightly more than 1% of the 3000 who bought the book for 99 cents). So, the Kindle Countdowns seem to be producing proportionately more reviews. I know that, for some of you, the low percentage of reviews in either case is frustrating; but if you do frequent promotions of any kind, as I do, the numbers do add up nicely and have a demonstrable effect on sales in the long run.

3. While Kindle Countdowns are not as effective at this point in producing sales after the promotion, at least you make some sales (and money) during the promotion. For people who have used free-book promotions and then had negligible post-promotional sales, this can make a Kindle Countdown a less risky proposition.

For example, let’s take my least successful Kindle Countdown promotion so far, where I had Uneasy Spirits on sale at 99 cents for 6 days. Because under the terms of the Kindle Countdown I get 70% of the royalties of those sales, I made slightly over $300 with this promotion. Deducting for the cost of ads, I made nearly $140 in profit.

However, if this had been a free promotion (with a similar low post-promotional sales  and the same cost for ads), instead of making money, I would have lost the $127 in sales that I would have made during the promotion if the book had remained on sale at the regular price. When you include the cost of advertising, this means I might have actually lost money with that free promotion.

In contrast, even with the higher cost of a BookBub ad for a 99 cent promotion for the January 2014 Kindle Countdown promotion, the risks were minimized by the money I made during that sale. The BookBub ad resulted in Maids of Misfortune showing up on the top 100 paid Kindle Book list for two days, which resulted in enough sales to pay for the ad five times over.

4. There is also the psychological benefit of selling and not giving away a book, even if the discounted book is only 99 cents.

As I wrote in the beginning of this post, I am not opposed to using free-book promotions to gain visibility for my books. I firmly believe that one of the reasons my books have sold so successfully is because I did free-book promotions. And, I would still advocate using KDP Select free promotions over Kindle Countdown promotions under certain circumstances. For example, I think KDP Select free-book promotions can help unknown genre fiction authors quickly gain readers, increase the visibility of their books, and garner a significant number of reviews.

But…I am no longer an unknown author and I was able to keep Bloody Lessons, which was published in September, continuously in several bestselling mystery, romance, and historical fiction categories without doing a single free promotion of the book. So, personally, I am happy that there is now an alternative method of promoting my books. I suspect for those who never liked the idea of free promotions, the Kindle Countdown may be a welcome alternative.

5. Finally, I believe that a good deal of the advantages that KDP Select free-book promotions have over Kindle Countdown promotions are the result of fewer readers having discovered the Kindle Countdown page. This should change over time.

In a recent post, Kristine Kathryn Rusch delineated different kinds of readers, one category being, Always Buys Discounted Books. This group has had two years to be trained by Amazon to look for free books when they go into the Kindle store to browse for their next purchase. However, Amazon has recently done a number of things to make it more difficult to find free books in the Kindle Store while at the same time they have worked to make the Kindle Countdown page a friendly place to look for discounts.

It used to be that when readers browsed best-sellers by category they saw the free books listed alongside the paid books. Now, they have to click on a tab to see the list of free books, and every time they start a new search they get sent back to the paid list.

At the same time, if a reader knows to look at the Kindle Countdown page in the Kindle Store (on the left under Daily and Monthly Deals), there are a number of factors that make these 99 cent books more enticing than if they simply discovered the books listed with the regular paid books.

The list of books is smaller, so it easier for readers to find a discounted book of interest to them. Today there are fewer than 2000 books on the entire Kindle Countdown list, and only 72 books in the entire Mystery sub-category. Conversely, if a reader went to look for a book in the Mystery popularity list, they would find there were over 60,000 books listed, and they would have to scroll down several pages to find the first book listed at 99 cents (ranked at #71). If your discounted book isn’t in the top 100 books in a regular category, it probably remains invisible—not so if your book is on the Kindle Countdown page within any category.

In addition, when a reader looks at discounted books on the Kindle Countdown page, they see the regular price of the book and how long the book is going to remain at that the discounted price (the maximum time the book is discounted is 7 days). This encourages the buyer to go ahead and buy a book that seems interesting (there is a countdown clock to add to that sense of urgency.) On the other hand, if they are looking for discounted books in the regular lists, not only does it take a lot of scrolling down pages to find them, but when they find a discounted book they don’t know if this book is a recent discount or if it is always at that price (and they can put off buying it) or if the book is at that price because it doesn’t sell well at a higher price. All of this might deter a reader from buying the discounted book.

The books on the Kindle Countdown lists are constantly changing since an author can only do a Kindle Countdown for books in KDP Select and can only do one Kindle Countdown promotion per-title in a 3 month period. In contrast, most of the books at the top of the popularity lists or bestseller lists, including those at 99 cents, stay there month after month, with only an occasional new book or newly promoted book rising to the top. This means that someone who is searching the regular lists for a discounted book is less likely to discover a new book to buy than if they searched the Kindle Countdown list.

Summary:

1. KDP Select Free promotions, particularly backed by a BookBub ad, can still be a very effective way to get post promotional sales, higher visibility in category lists, and a higher number of reviews.

2. However, the difficulties in achieving a successful free promotion have increased because of increased competition with traditionally published books, changes in how free books are found in the Kindle Store, the limitation of BookBub ads to every six months, and the increased competition and cost of getting a BookBub ad.

3.  On the other hand, while KDP Select Kindle Countdown promotions are not yet as effective as KDP Select Free promotions, they do offer an alternative for those authors who have their books in KDP Select––an alternative that has certain benefits for authors (like less risk of losing money and greater visibility for their discounted books).

4. I also believe that as more readers who always look for discounted books discover the Kindle Countdown page that the Kindle Countdown will become more and more effective.

5. For my own part, since I have found that even BookBub-supported free-book promotions were less effective for the later books in my series (and the first book in my series won’t be eligible again for a BookBub ad until July), I have decided that doing a Kindle Countdown promotion for each of my three books in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series in turn is the best way to keep my books visible throughout the rest of 2014.

Obviously, your milage may vary. Books are not widgets––every book is unique. My experiences may be unique to my books. But I do hope that, by sharing my data and my analysis of that data, I have helped those of you who are struggling with questions like whether or not to sign your books up for KDP Select, whether to continue to use free promotions, and whether the KDP Kindle Countdown is a viable way to keep your books visible in the Kindle Store.

I would appreciate hearing from those of you who, as readers, have started to use the Kindle Countdown page and whether you have found it a good way to discover discounts.

For those of you who are authors and have done a Kindle Countdown promotion, I am interested in whether you found it effective and under what circumstances you found it effective (what ads you used, how long you had the book discounted, and if you used the incremental increase in price during the sales).

With knowledge comes power and with shared  knowledge can come shared success!

M. Louisa Locke, February 25, 2014

Dandy Detects is now an Audio Book

I am excited to announce that my first short story, Dandy Detects, is now available as an audio book on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. I am trying a new narrator, Alexandra Haag, who I love, and I hope she will be able to do the rest of my work. But, ultimately it is the fans of the series who can tell me if Alexandra has captured the world of Annie Fuller, Nate Dawson, and the O’Farrell Street Boarding House.

The price for the audiobook is $3.95 (I don’t set the price and I know this seems steep for a short story—but it is cheap for an audio book—and it has already been discounted on Amazon to $3.45).

To encourage you all to give it a try I am giving out a limited number of free coupons—just send me a message at mlouisalocke@gmail.com.

M. Louisa Locke, February 22, 2014

    Buy on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes