John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 30

An Author’s Decision to Enroll in KDP Select

Regular readers of my blog know I’ve been experimenting with Amazon.com’s KDP Select program. I published my short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” exclusively through KDP Select and have used its free days program to attempt to build an audience for it.

STATE OF GRACE is moving to KDP Select

My results have been mixed, but they have shown some promise. In four free days, I’ve given away nearly 700 copies of “Sleeping Beauty.” The book had been fairly stagnant before I started experimenting with giving it away. Since then, I’ve been selling a few copies a week. It’s also helped sell copies of State of Grace, and this week “Sleeping Beauty” was borrowed through KDP Select’s Kindle Owner’s Lending Library for the first time.

“Sleeping Beauty” is a short story. State of Grace is a novel, and its sequel, Red Dragon Five, launches on November 20. The promotional opportunities are a lot broader.

For that reason, I’m enrolling State of Grace in KDP Select. That means, of course, I’ll have to pull it from Smashwords  and Barnes & Noble. I’m a little regretful of that. Smashwords has been good to me. I’ve gotten some sales there. B&N, not so much.  Regardless, I hate reducing the size of my distribution channel.

But that’s exactly why I’m doing this. The promotional opportunities KDP Select offers are too great for me not to expand my experiment. A buy one, get one free sale is an opportunity to find readers. I can offer State of Grace for free and suggest people buy Red Dragon Five at the same time. Moreover, I can put a teaser chapter of RD5 in the back of SoG, with a link to buy it.

I’m also of the opinion that linking KDP Select free days with a Facebook ad campaign, could be a hugely successful event. And since the novels feature James Bond-style action, I have the opportunity to market directly to Bond fans slavering over this week’s U.S. release of Skyfall.

If this is a mistake, I can disenroll the book after 90 days. I may do so even if this is a wild success. I’ll have to evaluate then what my best options are.

It boils down to this: my business started growing once I began experimenting with KDP Select. It is logical, therefore, to expand my use of KDP Select to see if it grows my business more. And the risk is relatively low, since sales through the other channels have been low for the last few months. I don’t believe I’m going to have a negative impact on my reach to consumers.

As usual, I’ll continue reporting my strategy and results here, so other writers can benefit from whatever knowledge I’m able to glean from my relationship with KDP Select.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in purchasing the eBook version of State of Grace from Smashwords or BN.com, you have until November 16, 2012. After that I’ll be taking it off sale at those locations and enrolling it in Select. The print edition will remain available through wide distribution.

Here’s a link to the BN.com page for State of Grace.

And here’s one for Smashwords.

Pulling Threads: Editing Unravels Problems in your Writing

Sometimes, editing is like pulling a thread. You give it a little yank, and everything starts unraveling.

So it was for Chapter 16 of Red Dragon Five, the next novel in the Wolf Dasher series that premieres in a mere two weeks. While working through the book’s fourth draft, I noticed Wolf hadn’t used my favorite of his powers: his postcognitive vision. It was an easy fix. There was a nice, logical place for it to happen. I added the sequence, liked what I had, and moved on. Everything was great.

Or so I thought.

As my editor and I were working on the fifth draft, I discovered my nifty, little fix created a logic problem. There’s a minor character in Red Dragon Five named Dark Dagger, a Phrygian Shadow. I’d never established any powers for him, because his part is small enough he doesn’t get a chance to use them. When Wolf first meets him, Dark Dagger threatens him with a crossbow.

But when I wrote the new passage in the fourth draft, I gave the Phrygian agent the ability to form knife-shaped Shadoow weapons and throw them at opponents. Hence, his codename. Well, if you fling daggers of dark, otherworldly energy around that are capable of killing people, you don’t need to carry a crossbow. You’re going to rely on your special power instead.

This seems like an easy-enough fix. Just don’t give him the crossbow. Change the encounter so Wolf is threatened with the Shadow weapon instead.

The problem was Wolf turns around and uses the crossbow in the very same scene. If Dark Dagger doesn’t bring it, Wolf doesn’t have it to use.

Now what?

Well, that required me to rewrite some more, and I didn’t like what happened. It looked to me like I had a plot hole. So I had to get out my literary drywall and patch it. Even more writing was required.

Once I finally had the crossbow conundrum solved satisfactorily, I was getting ready to move onto Chapter 17. Then another logic problem occurred to me.

After the encounter, Wolf poses as Dark Dagger to further infiltrate the bad guys’ operations. Since Dark Dagger is from Phrygia, I had Wolf adopt a Phrygian (i.e., Russian) accent to maintain the cover. Consequently, all of Wolf’s dialogue for the better part of 10 or so chapters was written in phonetic dialect.

But after four drafts, it finally occurred to me that Dark Dagger’s original mission was to penetrate Wolf’s Urlish (i.e., Anglo-American) organization. He wouldn’t be able to do that very well if he spoke with a Phrygian accent. Thus, to imitate a Phrygian trying to sound like an Urlander, Wolf would need to speak in his natural accent.

So I spent the next 10 or so chapters changing all of the Phrygian-accented dialect back to its original (i.e., regular English) form.

All this because I pulled one thread in Chapter 17 and had Wolf use a power he hadn’t used.

This is, of course, why you edit, and why you go through multiple drafts. No matter how hard you work or closely you pay attention, it is still possible to miss something until late in the process.

Red Dragon Five is a better novel now. It’s tighter, more logical, and more satisfying.

But it just goes to show you that editing your novel is a critical part of writing a good book. Find an editor you trust and have him or her help you pull threads, so if anything unravels you can fix it before it gets out to readers.

Otherwise, things come apart in ways you won’t like.

How to Have a Successful NaNoWriMo

RED DRAGON FIVE is my latest excuse for not participating in NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month is nearly upon us. Sadly, I will once again be unable to participate in this annual event. I keep meaning to, but it never seems to fit my schedule right. I’ll be launching Red Dragon Five on November 20, and that means I’ve got a lot of production work to do in the 19 days leading up to it. Maybe next year.

But Red Dragon Five is the second novel I’ll publish and the sixth one I’ve written. So I would like to believe I have some advice I can offer to those trying this for the first time (or even the second or third time). Unsolicited, here is my advice for how to hit your 50,000-word goal in the 30 days available.

Have a plan: Writing a novel is a tremendous undertaking. You need to plan in advance for how to accomplish it. That means writing down character sketches, outlining the plot, and making any other notes you need to, so that you know where the story is going as you write it. Inspiration doesn’t always strike when you want it to. Having a plan will help you write on those days when the creative juices are stubbornly refusing to flow easily.
Write at the same time every day: Human beings are creatures of habit, and we use habit to train ourselves psychologically to do things. If you sit down to write at the same time every day, your brain will quickly learn, “It is writing time,” and automatically turn your thoughts towards creating your story. I write mid-day. I’ve had time to eat and take care of my correspondence, and it’s before I pick the kids up from school. Starting at around 10am, my mind shifts into “writer-mode.” It stays there until around 2-2:30. I have successfully written at other times of the day, but it is harder to make that transition.
Establish a work environment: You should also write in the same place. It doesn’t matter where, as long as it is a comfortable place where you can be productive. I write at my couch or my dining room table. My brain knows that, when I am in one of those places with my computer in front of me, I am in writer-mode. You want to give your mind the same training. When it’s time to write, go to your writer place, so your brain knows it is time to focus on work.
Just get it down: Do not worry about how good your words are while you are writing. That’s important enough for me to repeat: Do not worry about how good your words are while you are writing. Just get them down into the computer. You need to average 1666 words a day to hit your 50,000-word goal. Don’t waste your time obsessing over turns of phrase or thinking your story or your prose isn’t good enough. That’s all for the editing process. Right now, you just need to write. The hardest part about finishing a novel is actually writing it all. Getting there in satisfying style is something to work out when you edit and rewrite. Right now, just get it down. I made a lot of changes to Red Dragon Five between the first draft and the second. I’m working on the fifth draft now. This is the time for me to shape and craft and worry about whether it’s any good. For that first draft, I just needed to get from the opening sentence to typing, “The End.” That’s your goal too. Write it now; fix it in December.
Keep it in perspective: Writing a novel is work. There’s no question about it. It requires hours of time and mental energy — time and energy you could be spending on something else. Writing requires sacrifice. But it’s also fun. As much work as penning a novel is, it beats every other job I’ve ever held. So remember while you’re slaving away in November that you’re doing it for fun. Maybe you’ll create a bestseller. Maybe you’ll author something no one wants to read. But it doesn’t matter. Have fun with it. Enjoy the creative process and the sense of accomplishment that comes from getting your ideas out of your head and into a manuscript.

I wish every NaNoWriMo participant the best of luck. May you all write the novel of your dreams. Maybe next year, I’ll actually be able to join you!

If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, leave a comment. I’d love to hear about your adventure!

Facebook Advertising: Does It Work for Indie Authors?

Advertising is a key component of most business models, and, like it or not, it’s critical to the success of an indie author. People have to know about your book before they can buy it, and, with who knows how many million books available on Amazon.com, the odds that someone is going to just stumble across your book and buy it are really, really low.

Of course, advertising requires a budget, and that’s something (as well as time) most of us indie authors don’t have a lot of. So it’s important to spend your ad dollars effectively.

Regular readers of this blog know I’ve been experimenting with various promotional tools for my short story, “Sleeping Beauty.” The book is enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select program, so I have twice given it away for free. I’ve also advertised through Digital Book Today, The Kindle Book Review, and World Literary Cafe with varying degrees of success.

This week, I decided to experiment with Facebook advertising.  I had heard from several people that it was both affordable and effective. I thought I would see for myself.

Methodology

Facebook has a number of very cool features for advertisers. First, it lets you specifically target users by their interests. When I bought an ad on Digital Book Today, it was up on their pages for everyone to see. That meant that my potential customers saw it, but so did people who would have no interest in that kind of book. Not so with Facebook. The ad only appeared on the pages of the people who had specifically said they were interested in the things I determined.

In my case, I chose people who are fans of ABC’s Once Upon A Time. The Sunday-night drama supposes that the evil queen from “Snow White” has brought all the famous fairytale characters to our world and wiped them of their memories. Like the show, my version of “Sleeping Beauty” features a familiar tale retold in a modern setting. People who like Once Upon A Time are a natural fit, so I specifically targeted Facebook users who were fans of the show.

Facebook also tells you the size of your potential audience. As soon as I selected fans of Once Upon A Time as my target, Facebook said my ad would reach up to 1.8M users. That’s a lot of people! Had I added other criteria (like for example fans of Amazon’s Kindle) I could have increased that reach, and I also could have narrowed my focus by selecting, for example, only female fans the show.

Finally, Facebook charges on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. That is, you only get charged for the ad if someone clicks on it to learn more. Facebook offers a bid range, where you set the price you’re willing to pay per click. You also get to set a budget, wherein you establish the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per day or for the lifetime of the ad campaign. I used the minimum bid of 68 cents per click and set a lifetime budget of $100.00.

Facebook also asks you to tell them when the ad campaign will run, and you can set that down to the minute. In my case, I began the campaign at 7:00pm CDT Sunday night — right when Once Upon A Time was coming on the air for East Coast audiences — and set it to end at 11:59pm Monday night. My thought was this would best capitalize on people discussing the show as it aired and for a day or so afterward.

Expectations

Never having done this sort of advertising before, I set my hypotheses based on some basic advertising rules. A two-percent return is considered good for a direct-mail campaign, so two percent of 1.8M is 36,000. At 68 cents a click, that would be 147 clicks before I’d exhausted my budget. I figured I would do much better than a two-percent return on sales, because people who actually clicked through were fish on the line, so to speak. If they clicked, they were interested in reading the book.

Now, here’s the thing. “Sleeping Beauty” retails for 99 cents. My royalty from Amazon is 35 cents per unit. At 68 cents a click, I was going to lose money. My thought, though, was to treat this campaign as a loss-leader. If I sold 50 or 100 (or more!) copies of “Sleeping Beauty” through this ad, that would cause the book to rocket up the Amazon.com Bestseller lists. That would get it higher visibility on the site, which would lead more readers to it. Plus, anyone who buys the book might review it. I’ve got five four-star reviews for it. Assuming I could maintain that average, that would help make some sales too.

So, invoking the old business adage, “you have to spend money to make money,” and setting my total budget at a very affordable rate, I launched my first foray into Facebook advertising to see what sorts of results I could get.

Results

Like my other advertising efforts for “Sleeping Beauty” this one was mixed. The best thing I can say about it is Facebook provides a lot of data for you to measure your ad’s efficacy. I have a much better picture of what happened than with any other promotional effort I’ve made thus far.

My total reach was 180,277 unique impressions. That’s only about 10% of what Facebook claimed was the total audience size for my ad, but it’s also a really big number. I don’t know how many people saw my giveaway offer on Amazon or my ads on the other websites I used, but I bet it wasn’t as many as the Facebook ad.

Facebook also tells you the average frequency with which a user saw your ad. At the end of my campaign, that number was 2.7. So, of the people who saw it, they viewed it more than once — almost three times. Unsurprisingly, this number grew steadily over the course of the campaign. It started at .5 during the East Coast run of Once Upon A Time. Thus, to meet another business assumption of making seven impressions to make a sale, you have to let your campaign run for a bit.

I got a total of 284 clicks, which is a click-through rate (CTR) of only .059% — way below the two percent I was hoping for. However, it is more clicks than I was expecting. That’s because the CPC fell steadily over the course of the event. At the end, it was 35 cents. I’m not sure why this was. I did use a $50 ad credit Facebook gave me, so that may have been factored into the CPC given my $100 ad budget, but the CPC number changed several times over the life of the campaign. I don’t know why that was.

So, with 284 click-through’s the big question is how many of those turned into sales. That’s where the campaign was most disappointing. I sold five copies of “Sleeping Beauty.” That’s a 1.7% rate of return — close to the standard two percent for direct mail. It seems the leads that click through aren’t quite the fish on the line I was hoping for. They were only fish in the pond. (That’s too bad too, since 284 clicks for $100 works out to 28.4 cents CPC, which would have made the campaign profitable if they’d all bought.)

There were a few encouraging numbers from Amazon. I hit new highs for “Sleeping Beauty’s” rank in the paid store. It got up to 50,000 at one point, and I peaked as the 1036th bestselling author in the Fantasy category. That surely raised the book’s and my visilibility, although not to levels that would have a significant impact on sales.

Analysis

There’s no way not to look at this experiment as a failure. My return on investment was minimal. Five sales isn’t very many at all, considering the exposure I got and the amount of money I spent for it. Advertising “Sleeping Beauty” on Facebook to Once Upon A Time fans for two and a half days (I hadn’t spent my full budget when the campaign was shceduled to end, so I extended it for 24 hours) wasn’t a good idea.

However, I did glean some useful data from it and an hypothesis about the book. First the data.

Return on Investment: Advertising a 99-cent eBook probably isn’t a good idea. The potential return (35 cents per copy sold) just doesn’t justify the expense. Even with the CPC at a final rate of 35 cents, I’d have had to sell a copy to every person who responded to break even. That would be fine if the rate of sales to those who clicked was pretty high, but it wasn’t. It was at the standard, two-percent return. So the potential exposure from a sales bump just wasn’t there at an affordable rate.
Time is a Factor: Also, you have to give Facebook some time to work its magic. I saw my total number of impressions, my average number of views, and my CTR all rise over time, while my CPC went down as the campaign went on. Advertising on Facebook requires a long view. It’s interesting to note that my sales went up over time too. The first night — the night I thought would be best given that the show was fresh in people’s minds — resulted in zero sales. I made two the next day, and three the following. Who knows how long that trend would have continued, but it seems clear you need time to build momentum on Facebook.

My hypothesis on the book is that my blurb may not be good enough. I have five four-star reviews, I gave away over 650 copies of the story, and I’ve pushed it to the moon in various advertising venues. But sales are sluggish. It could be I’m getting people to the book’s page but not convincing them they should buy it. Afterall, 284 people clicked on the Facebook ad, but only five of them decided it was worth spending a dollar to buy. It may be I need some better copy.

And that leads me to my thoughts on future advertising on Facebook. I think it may be a good move in conjunction with a KDP Select giveaway. If 284 people thought “Sleeping Beauty”  was interesting enough to want to learn more, how many of them would have downloaded it if it hadn’t cost them anything? I bet it’s a lot higher than five.

I also think it might be useful for a higher-priced book. If the book was $3.99, that’s a 70% royalty rate, which translates to $2.79 per sale. With the same $100 budget, I’d have to sell 35.8 copies for the investment to pay off. Obviously, I didn’t do that last time, but it’s possible I didn’t run the campaign long enough or that my marketing copy wasn’t good enough. Both of those things are changeable.

At any rate, this particular experiment failed, but it produced some interesting information I can apply to future attempts. If you’re contemplating Facebook advertising for your eBook, remember that the ROI can be tricky.

If you’ve tried Facebook advertising, I’d love to hear about your results. Please leave a comment.

Indie Book Advertising: An Initial Analysis

As part of my ongoing examination into my promotional efforts for “Sleeping Beauty” here’s another blog on my sales results.

After my last free event with KDP Select, I engaged in layered advertising — the idea is to run some ads in conjunction with other promotions to maximize momentum. I ran three separate campaigns.

WLC Book Buzz: On October 4, the day after my free event, I was a featured sponsor on the World Literary Cafe’s website. Not only was “Sleeping Beauty” featured on the site with a 1500-word excerpt, WLC marshalled an army of volunteers to tweet the daylights out of the book. “Sleeping Beauty” was being tweeted hourly for 23 hours.
Digital Book Today Silver Sponsorship Package: I purchased a two-week ad campaign on digitalbooktoday.com wherein the cover of the book was featured on DBT’s website, and they tweeted it once a day. This campaign ran from October 3 (second day of the giveaway) to October 17.
The Kindle Book Review HOT Title of the Day: On October 9, “Sleeping Beauty” was featured as “Today’s HOT Title” (it had to average a four stars in reviews on Amazon to qualify). In addition to the feature on KBR’s website, I bought a package that got it tweeted. Tweets were sent by KBR and its owner, Amazon besting author, Jeff Bennington on a daily basis (and continue through the end of this month).

This is easily the most amount of promotion I’ve done for anything I’ve published in my very short career as an indie author. So what sort of returns did I get? At least in terms of hard numbers, not much.

The last free event saw me give away 128 copies of “Sleeping Beauty” in the US, and 17 in the UK. Since it ended, I’ve sold six copies in the US, and one in the UK. I gave away two copies in Germany but have garnered no additional sales there. France, Italy, and Spain were total washouts on giveaways and sales.

At first, the sales in the US were worth monitoring. I was getting about one a day, so it was fun to update my sales reports to see if anything had happened. But it’s been a couple days without a sale now, so I’m thinking the momentum, such as it was, it pretty much over. I do know that at least one sale was directly due to my promotional efforts. One person retweeted Jeff Bennington with the comment that the story sounded great and then announced she’d purchased it. Beyond that, though, I don’t know whether buyers came to the book through my network (I’ve been tweeting it too), or whether it was a result of my reaching new people through advertising.

So far as intangible results are concerned, there are some measureable benefits. First is the extension of my brand. Between the enormous number of tweets sent out by the volunteers at the WLC and those sent to the large network of followers by Bennington and DBT, a lot more people saw an ad for “Sleeping Beauty” by John Phythyon than ever had. In terms of raising top-of-mind awareness for my brand, the advertising definitely helped.

I also earned two more four-star reviews on Amazon. Both were very complimentary and spoke not just to their enjoyment of the story but of its technical excellence (editing, story construction, voice, and cover). That will help sell some books down the road.

I also sold a copy of State of Grace on Smashwords. I have no idea if that is related to this promotion at all. There is a teaser sample of State of Grace in “Sleeping Beauty,” but you would think if that sold a copy of the novel, the sale would have occurred on Amazon. It’s possible, I suppose the buyer found my website through the advertising I’ve been doing and then made the purchase at Smashwords.

Analyzing all this data is difficult. I remain, a new and largely unknown author. It is hard to know what I should be expecting in terms of sales, even after advertising. One also gets the sense that the market is shifting. Has the size of the potential pie shrunk? I don’t know.

As the son of a scientist, I know that you cannot conduct an experiment one time and reach conclusive results. I am certain I will advertise again. I haven’t explored Facebook advertising yet, and, with Once Upon A Time airing again on ABC, there is a lot of potential crossover there. Moreover, the advertising that I didn’t wasn’t terribly expensive. The most expensive campaign was $50.

However, the return in the investment this time is dubious. Hopefully, I am laying a foundation for future success and not just throwing money away. I’ll blog on this again in the future, when I have more information.

RED DRAGON FIVE Cover and Release Date Announced

I’ve been writing about Red Dragon Five — the sequel to State of Grace — for some time now (albeit not much recently, since it’s been in editing). I am very pleased to make two big announcements about it.

First, the book is due out Tuesday, 20 November 2012. I plan to have it available in print and eBook formats that same day. I don’t have a whole lot of print sales, but there are those who prefer old-fashioned books, and I found proofing the print edition of State of Grace helped me find a few typos.

The release date allows me to do three things. First, I hope to ride the wave of excitement over the release of the new James Bond film, Skyfall. With Bond in the forefront of pop culture next month, I believe I can grab some ancillary sales.

It’ll also get the book on sale in time for Christmas shopping season. Since that’s the biggest sales time of the year, it’ll be good to have something brand new available.

Finally, I released State of Grace the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in 2011. Thus, I’ll be able to get the next book in the series out exactly a year later. I’d have preferred much sooner, but I do appreciate the symmetry.

The other big announcement is that I have a cover. I’m pretty happy with it, and I think it has a very dynamic look. Check it out:

RED DRAGON FIVE — Due out November 20th!

When the top-secret Red Dragon Project is sabotaged and one of its agents disappears, only Wolf Dasher realizes who is really behind it: the sinister terrorist organization, the Sons of Frey. But when the trail leads across the border of Alfar and into Jifan, Wolf must leave behind his new love, May Honeyflower, and go undercover on a dangerous and unofficial mission with no backup. Deep inside the terrorists’ operation, Wolf searches for the missing Red Dragon. And when Wolf disappears, May abandons her post as Captain of Alfar’s Elite Guard and goes off on a desperate search for him. Can she find him before the Sons of Frey discover his true identity, and can either of them stop the terrorists from unleashing an apocalypse on Alfar?

Red Dragon Five is the second book in the Wolf Dasher series of fantasy-thriller mashup novels blending magic, super-spies, and politics in an exciting brew of action and adventure. A story of love and family set against a backdrop of betrayal, revenge, and terrorism, Red Dragon Five is a page-turner you won’t want to put down. Read it as a stand-alone novel or as a sequel to State of Grace.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Balancing Writing and Editing as an Indie Author

Over the past month, I’ve been engaged in two separate writing projects. I’m writing a brand new novel, tentatively titled Calibot’s Revenge, and I’m moving the sequel to State of Grace, Red Dragon Five, through the editing process. I’ve become increasingly convinced that having a broad catalog is a key component of publishing success (if they like one of your books, you should have another available for them to buy immediately), and, here in the early stages of my career, expanding my list of published works doesn’t happen quickly.

Once I finished the second draft of Red Dragon Five and sent it to the editor, I had a good chunk of time that wasn’t being used for creative purposes. So I started another book, with the plan to always be working on a new publishing project for the foreseeable future. I’d like to be publishing two books and a short story a year for the next few years.

I got 16 chapters into Calibot’s Revenge when the edits came back on Red Dragon Five. So, as planned, I stopped writing and shifted gears into editing/rewriting mode. I spent a week going over all the edits and making changes to the manuscript. Then I sent it back to my editor for another dissection. With Red Dragon Five back off my plate, I returned this week to writing Calibot’s Revenge.

That’s where I ran into trouble.

It was easy enough to shift my mind out of one world (the one I was creating) to the other (the one I’d already created and was now fine-tuning). But going back again was a lot harder.

With a fully developed novel in front of me (a novel that is a sequel), it was a simple matter to put my mind into that world. I read what I’d written. I read my editor’s comments. I made adjustments.

But the world of Calibot’s Revenge is still taking shape. I’m creating it from scratch, and, even if this is a reworking of an older project, it’s still not completely formulated.

Editing and writing, I’d forgotten, are two entirely different skills. They both require a strong command of language and are both critical to a satisfying, well constructed read. But writing requires you to fabricate something from scratch, while editing is working with existing material. Neither is more important than the other, but they aren’t the same thing. Put something on my desk and ask me to tinker with it, and I can go to work almost immediately. But ask me to start from nothing, and that requires preparation.

Another part of the issue is the nature of how I write. I blogged earlier that it took me awhile to warm up for Calibot’s Revenge. I write most successfully when I do it at roughly the same time every day, churning out about the same number of words. Once I hit that rhythm, I can crank out chapters pretty regularly and successfully. But I’ve got to get into the mode first.

I’d hit a rhythm with Calibot’s Revenge. The story was pulsing through my mind, and I had found the sweet spot was 1500- to 2000-word chapters. I got one out at day on average.

When I took a week or so off to work on Red Dragon Five, I disrupted that tempo. Now I have to get it back.

This week has not been as productive as I’d like with Calibot’s Revenge. I’ve written just over two chapters as of this morning. It’s been clunky getting going again. I’ve written scenes instead of chapters.

But yesterday, I wrote an entire chapter from stem to stern, and I’m excited for what I’ll be writing today. I’m finding the pace again.

Of course, next week, I’m supposed to get the next draft of Red Dragon Five back, and that will disrupt the rhythm again. That’s okay, though. I’m staying on target. I’m using my work time to craft a book, so I can expand my catalog. Red Dragon Five is due out in November. I’d like to have Calibot’s Revenge published in February. If I keep this up, I’ll stay on target.

But flipping that mental switch between writing and editing, between Calibot’s world and Wolf Dasher’s, is a continual challenge.

Going Free with Amazon.com

One of the lessons I’ve learned from my recent experiments with Amazon’s KDP Select is that “free” can get you some nice publicity.

As my most recent giveaway was winding down last week, “Sleeping Beauty” landed on a couple of bestseller lists. It ranked as high as #1842 in the Free Store on Amazon (maybe higher, since I didn’t notice I was on these lists until almost the end of the day). Better, it came in on two Amazon Top 100 lists. It was #38 on World Literature: Mythology and #46 on Contemporary Fantasy.

Of course, as soon as it went off being free, it disappeared from those lists and wandered back into the obscurity of a five- or six-figure standing in the Paid Store.

But that got me thinking. What if it was possible to stay in the Free Store, thereby raising the visibility of the story? What if you could stay in the Top 100 on one or more lists?

Well, in terms of rankings and visibility, that would be great. But it sure wouldn’t make you a whole lot of money.

Unless the free story was a loss-leader for a paid book.

One of the reasons I experimented with KDP Select was to see what sort of visibility I could get for the Wolf Dasher series. I put an excerpt from State of Grace in the back of “Sleeping Beauty.” Over the four days of free events, I gave away 650 copies of “Sleeping Beauty” (and therefore 650 excerpts from State of Grace) in the US.

There’s a small problem with that: “Sleeping Beauty” and Wolf Dasher do not share quite the same audience. There is some crossover, but “Sleeping Beauty” is a dark, urban fantasy with a few elements of romance. The Wolf Dasher series is high fantasy, spy-thriller action-adventure.

But, if I had a loss-leader story for the Dasher series I could give away free and keep it in the Top 100 of several Amazon bestseller lists, that would raise the visibility of the whole series. That would be, essentially, a 5000-word ad.

If only “The Darkline Protocol” were free on Amazon.com

Well, as it happens, I’ve got just such a thing. Last year, I wrote “The Darkline Protocol” for the specific purpose of giving it away for free to create interest in State of Grace. I published it to Smashwords and listed it for free, and then published to Amazon and B&N, expecting them to price match.

Neither has yet. It’s still at the 99-cents minimum price. I’ve sent Amazon a notice four times in the past week, notifying them of the lower price at Smashwords. So far, nothing.

Which is really frustrating me for two reasons. First, I’ve heard from other authors how easy it is to get this thing done. Why Amazon isn’t listening to me I don’t know.

Second, because I’ve got this plan, and I can’t really execute it until Amazon is willing to give the book away. If it were free, I could list it on the many different Kindle-supporting groups and sites that tell readers about free eBooks. I could tweet it as being free and give a link. I could push it to the moon the way I did “Sleeping Beauty.”

And, because it would stay free, once I got it onto some Top 100 lists, it wouldn’t fall off just because it went back into the Paid Store. It would stay there as long as it could sustain enough downloads.

And that would raise the visibility of the Wolf Dasher line. That would help sell more copies of State of Grace and, when it releases in November, Red Dragon Five.

But it’s gotta be free first. And, as though they somehow know what I am plotting, Amazon is refusing to play along.

So the first step in the plan is to keep hammering Amazon.com until they’ll list “The Darkline Protocol” for free. Then I can start getting the word out about it, so as to raise its “sales.”

If you’ve got suggestions on how to get Amazon to make a book free, please leave a comment below. I’ll post more updates here as the situation develops. In the meantime, if you want to get “The Darkline Protocol,” you can download free from Smashwords here. Or, if you want to give me 35 cents, download it now from Amazon. While you’re there, tell them it’s free somewhere else.

 

Taking another Crack at KDP Select

I’ve just concluded my second experiment with KDP Select’s free program. Time to look at the results.

Methodology

At 99 cents, “Sleeping Beauty” is “Unnerving, haunting and well worth the purchase price.” –RunningInHeels, Amazon.com reviewer

Once again, I offered my short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” for free for two days — Tuesday, 2 October, and Wednesday, 3 October. I publicized the event the same way I did last time. (For a complete breakdown of my promotional efforts, read the first blog I wrote on this subject here.) I also bought some advertising from the Kindle Book Review, which resulted in them tweeting the free event several times a day, thereby widening the network I could tap.

Just like with the first free event two weeks ago, I had no idea what to expect. I was hoping for similar results (522 free downloads and nice rises in my Amazon bestseller rank for “Sleeping Beauty” and my novel, State of Grace), but I didn’t know if that would be realistic. The little anecdotal research I’d done suggested a falling off. But if the results were smaller, how much smaller would they be?

Hard Numbers

Midway through the first day, it was apparent this event wasn’t going to result in the same numbers of downloads. I didn’t watch the hour-by-hour numbers the first time (because I hadn’t figured out how yet), but I could tell this time that adding only one or three books per update wasn’t going to result in the kind of participation I saw two weeks ago.

I ended up with a total of 128 people taking advantage of the free offer over the course of the event. That’s about 24.5% of the “sales” I got the first time. Given that I was promoting over a larger network this time, that was pretty disappointing.

But, in the last few hours of the event, I noticed something I hadn’t before. I updated the book’s page to see if there were any new reviews, and there was a whole set of statistics I hadn’t seen. “Sleeping Beauty” was ranked #1842 in the Kindle Free Store. That’s a four-digit number on the bestseller list — easily the smallest I’d ever gotten.

And there was more good news. “Sleeping Beauty” was #38 in the “Mythology” category and #46 in “Contemporary Fantasy.” Hokey smokes! I was in the top 50 on two different lists!

I’m kicking myself for not paying greater attention to this sort of thing. Did “Sleeping Beauty” ever rank higher than #1842? Once I started refreshing regularly, it fell down to #2077. Was it on any of the other Top 100 lists earlier in the day? Did it rise or slip on the two it was on?

There’s a wealth of data that was available at some point during the day I didn’t track, because I didn’t know it was there. And my other question is: do the 522 copies I gave away last month count towards those ranks, or is it just the ones from the current event?

Interpreting Results

As usual, it’s hard to know what it all means. I’ve gotten one sale of “Sleeping Beauty” today, and, unlike last time, I’m following the free event up with advertising events to try to sustain the momentum I built. We’ll see if I do better than the four new sales I made last time.

Here’s what I think. First, I put my brand in front of another 128 people. So in the last two weeks, 650 readers downloaded my book and got a good example of the kinds of stories I write. They also got a free sample of State of Grace and links to my website, Twitter account, and Facebook page. I successfully raised my brand awareness, increasing my readership to a number that dwarfs my previous sales. That’s a good, good thing.

Second, my results appear to be similar to those of some other writers — strong first event, more modest second event. That tells me that KDP Select is indeed a good tool, but that it has it limits and has to be used properly.

My guess is you only get one big response to a free event per book. Subsequent events may be successful, but they won’t even approach the numbers of the first one. This makes sense to me for one very key reason — if people were going to get it free they would do so the first time. The second (and third and fourth) time, you’re asking the same people. In my case, The Kindle Book Review widened the network I was tapping, but otherwise I was trying to draw more water from the same well.

If that’s the case, it seems to me that the right approach to using Select is to enroll for the 90-day minimum, have a two-day free event early in the book’s release, then follow up with another free day every few weeks until both the five free days and the 90 days of exclusivity are used up. At that point, the book should be disenrolled and distributed widely. That would seem to capitalize on the best of both worlds — using Select to build momentum and awareness and then getting the book into as wide a distribution chain as possible.

Next week, I’ll look more closely at what being ranked in the Top 100 of the Kindle Free Bestseller list may mean for my marketing strategy. I believe there is a way to climb those rankings and then stay there, increasing my visibility.

In the meantime, thank you to everyone who helped make my latest KDP Select Free event a success. If you missed it, you can get “Sleeping Beauty” here for just 99 cents. As Amazon reviewer, RuningInHeels, put it, the book is “Unnerving, haunting and well worth the purchase price.”

Juuuust Right: Finding the Right Length for your Story

One of the things we rarely think about as writers is how long our stories should be. We know a novel should be long, and a short story should be short, and a novella should be somewhere in between.

How long is too long? How short is too short? How do we know when that literary Goldilocks will say, “This one is juuuuust right”?

As usual, it’s by trial and error. I know about the error part.

In 2006, I came across a contest wherein authors could rewrite a classic fairytale, recasting it in modern times. I’d been fascinated for years by “Sleeping Beauty,” so I immediately chose it.

I penned a dark tale wherein the titular character was put to sleep not by a jealous witch but by her overprotective father. Beth’s father Rex is obsessed with the idea of preventing his teenaged daughter from having sex, so he finds a spell to put her into a coma until she’s old enough for marriage.

In the story, Beth’s mother, Marie, battles to save her daughter, but she turns out to be just as sinister as Rex. I wanted my version to end on a disturbing note, giving the reader the sense that things were no better despite resolving the story’s central conflict.

The problem was this: I conceived a tale that was longer than the contest’s maximum length of 4,000 words. I wrote a 4,000 short story, but it wasn’t long enough to properly tell the tale I wanted to. I didn’t win (or even place in) the contest. At the time, I didn’t know why. (Nobody ever does in these sorts of things, of course.)

But this year, with my fledgling career as an independent author needing a boost, I was looking for material I’d already written to convert into something I could publish quickly to broaden my catalogue and expand my brand. I was in the process of writing the sequel to State of Grace, but I needed to put something else on my retail bookshelf in the interim.

E-readers have made short stories a viable medium for publishing again, so I went through my archives to find some stories I could clean up and publish. I thought “Sleeping Beauty” was an excellent choice and got to work on tuning it up.

But my editor kept asking questions about the characters. She wanted to know more. She wanted them to develop more. So I kept shaping and adding material.

In particular, we needed more about Marie and the Prince Charming character, Carl. to make Marie the sinister character I wanted her to be, we needed to see more of how she treated Beth before the coma. Earlier drafts only focused on her efforts to rescue Beth. Likewise, it was obvious Carl was sincere and in love, but we didn’t know much about him outside his “relationship” with Beth.

“Sleeping Beauty” feautres a number of flashback scenes to tell the story of how Beth came to be in the coma. Earlier drafts were all from Rex’s perspective. In the final version of the story, Marie gets some flashbacks too, and that helps build her character. We see what happened in the past not just from Rex’s perspective but also from Marie’s. We discover her parenting is every bit as misguided and detrimental as Rex’s, albeit in a different way.

With Carl, the key was to get him away from Beth. All of the scenes with Carl in the early drafts are at Beth’s house. In the final version, there are several that occur at school. Carl’s interaction with some of his classmates tells us more about who he is. He isn’t just a dopey, lovesick teenager. He’s a real person who knows when to stand up for what’s right.

The final draft of “Sleeping Beauty” is just over 8,000 words. It’s twice the length of its original version, but it’s still a short tale and a quick read — exactly what you want from a short story. It also has fully developed, three-dimensional characters, and that’s been reflected in a series of four-star reviews on Amazon.com.

“The characters were well described and sympathetic, each in their own way,” writes Mark Abrams.

Runninginheels notes, “Sleeping Beauty is an enjoyable short story with character development that defies its length.”

A story of any length needs to be satisfying. To make that possible it has to have fully developed characters and not go too long. You want to leave the reader feeling like he or she got something out of your tale. Finding that perfect length — the balance between too long and too short — is critical in winning over readers.

Hopefully, you’ll get yours right a little faster than I did mine.

“Sleeping Beauty” is available from Amazon.com for your Kindle here.