James Bailey's Blog, page 9

The six people I want to have to dinner

I’ve been deliberating most of the day on one of those fun exercises, choosing the six people you’d most want to have to dinner. Or have dinner with. I’m not sure they’d all want to come to my house, though that would make it a little more special in a way. But, man, that’s some pressure to grill the meat just perfectly. I’m not really sure on the rules on this. Do we get to be friends with them from the dinner on? Can I later text them or ring them up to chat? That might actually change my lineup a little.

Another rules clarification: As I interpret this, it’s a ticket to meet people I wouldn’t normally be able meet. So I’m not picking anyone I know, even though I have a ton of friends spread all over the country that I would love to see. I would totally dig a Guy Smiley, This Is Your Life meetup with all of the great friends I’ve made over the years. But I’ll assume they’re all planning to come to my 50th birthday party and I won’t include them in this exercise. (Though it goes without saying that I will become such good pals with these dinner guests that they, too, will show up for my 50th, so I can’t really lose there, I guess.)

So, without further ado, here are my six dinner guests:

Ricky Gervais – Comedy genius. Second funniest man on the planet. Capable of dropping into David Brent at any moment. Hope he doesn’t drop into Derek too frequently, because I’ll start to wonder if it’s appropriate to laugh after a bit.

Karl Pilkington – Funniest man on the planet, if perhaps inadvertently so. There’s way more wisdom here than meets the eye. Plus I want him to tell the story of how his dad left the Forrest Gump kid in the wheelie bin. And I’ll credit him for limiting my selections to living folk. As he once so eloquently put it, why would you want to invite dead people to dinner?

Harry Kane – I admit it. I have a man crush on him. He’s brilliant. I spend way too much time thinking about how he does what he does. I’ve probably been this fixated on an athlete before, but I can’t recall who or when. Maybe Ilian Evtimov or George Foster, but they never dominated quite the same way. I just love watching this dude play. And he seems like a genuinely nice bloke. I don’t actually think he’d mind coming to dinner, but if he did he’d be too polite to ever let on.

Gary Lightbody – I became hooked on Snow Patrol 4-5 years ago. It’s not the rockingest music I’ve ever been addicted to, but I never shook it off. I probably went a solid 2 years without listening to much else, from 2011-13. I never got sick of it. But more than that, Gary seems like a top bloke. Like he would be fun to hang out with and wouldn’t keep reminding you that he was only there because you won some kind of miracle dinner contest.

James Corden – He’d be the guest that really tied everyone else together. Plus he’s Smithy. I could spend most of the night talking Gavin & Stacey with him. And a little bit of remaining time talking The Wrong Mans. Wouldn’t likely bring up Horne & Corden. No point rubbing that one in. We all make mistakes.

One spot left, and so many candidates to fill it. I’m painfully aware about now that all five of my guests are white males from the United Kingdom. Not a lot of diversity there, though we do have a lot of different conversation topics covered. Comedy, music, football, world travel with Karl. I’m thinking here that it would be great to chat for a while with Nick Hornby, a brilliant author and feverish Arsenal fan. I’ve long admired Dave Grohl, who just seems like a regular dude and must have so many fascinating stories to share. I’ve been a huge Michael J. Fox fan for 30 years, dating back to Family Ties and the original Back to the Future movie in 1985. I make a point of watching Jon Stewart every day, and have for years. His “offspring” John Oliver is even funnier, with a better accent. But to balance things out slightly, at least genderwise, I’m going with …

Ruth Jones – Okay, Gavin & Stacey is full on now. But I’d also be talking a lot of Stella. Where the hell did Rob Morgan disappear to in Season 3? Thanks for bringing him back at the end of Season 4, but really, he’s the one we all wanted Stella to wind up with. Not Neil from Swindon. (Though credit where it’s due, he did grow on me a bit.) Will Dai be coming back? Was Paula’s return only for a couple of episodes? What the hell ever happened to Stella’s parents? So much to discuss, this dinner will run all night.

In the end, it all leans very British. I didn’t really intend that, and maybe six months from now it would come out differently. Of course, if I wanted to pick Americans I would focus on my friends. And you know who you are, all six of you. (There’s way more than six, but let’s let them all think they made the cut.)

Ebook sales eating print sales for breakfast

I won’t pretend for a moment that my sales are reflective of book sales in the wide, wide world of literature. I am but a wee bit player in the market, a mere grain of sea salt in the ocean. That said, there is a clear trend in my sales figures over the past three years. When I released The Greatest Show on Dirt back in 2012, my sales were relatively even between print and ebook. The paperback version was priced at $12.95 and probably discounted a buck or so on Amazon, where most of the copies were sold. The ebook version (mostly Kindle, though I did experiment back then with other channels) was mostly priced at $2.99. Even so, with the electronic version nearly $10 less, sales broke down 44.6 percent print, 55.4 percent ebook.

As you can see by the bar graph, those numbers have shifted dramatically in just two years. With the release last February of Nine Bucks a Pound, I had two books available for most of 2014. Of the 598 combined copies sold (including borrows in either the Kindle Lending Library or through Kindle Unlimited), 93 percent were ebooks. And aside from a couple of 99-cent promotions, the Kindle version of The Greatest Show on Dirt sat at $3.99 for most of the year. Nine Bucks a Pound was most often listed at $2.99, with a $13.95 price on the paperback.

I suspect there is a lot more to it than price, though that is likely a significant factor. Amazon’s “Also Boughts” (Customers who bought this book also bought these books) are a huge discoverability booster. Over time, with enough sales, those connections multiply. Once they reach a certain critical mass, sales trickle in at a somewhat steady pace. I reached that plateau for the Kindle version of The Greatest Show on Dirt sometime in 2013. It’s safe to assume I have yet to reach it for print.

But there has to be more to the story, as I’m no where near that magical threshold for either format of Nine Bucks a Pound. Yet my ebook to print ratio was nearly 9-to-1 for it last year. Much of that was due to the promotions that were run, lowering the ebook price temporarily. But I’ll guess a bigger factor is there are a lot of readers out there who will more willingly plunk down $3-4 on a new author than $12-13. I do the same, so I very much understand that approach.

Will I see the same breakdown with book #3, Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed? It seems likely, though with the print yet to release (getting close, should be ready before the end of the month), there are no numbers yet to compare.

How do your purchases break down? Do you read more ebooks than print these days? Does it differ for novels vs non-fiction books? And how much does price factor in?

Because you can't spell dysfunctional without F-U-N

Fourteen months ago, I started writing novel #3, working off my disappointment in the worst display of free-throw shooting ever witnessed, in N.C. State’s collapse against St. Louis in the NCAA Tournament. Three hours later I had a solid start on Chapter 1 of what became Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed. It is now available for the Kindle. (Print to follow, when the cover is ready.)

This book is a bit of a departure from my first two novels, which both centered around baseball. C.J. Neubauer, the protagonist this time around, is not a baseball fan. Not much of a sports fan at all, outside of his passion for broomball, a bastardized version of floor hockey played in the living room of his boyhood home. He’s not passionate about much, which is why, ten years out of college, he’s underemployed, constantly broke, and spends most of his nights flicking cigarette butts out the front window after yet another quarrel with his girlfriend.

The story begins on an average Friday evening, which unfolds like so many others in C.J.’s life, up until the point he receives a rare phone call from his father. Here’s the description posted on Amazon:

Ten years ago, C.J. Neubauer fled his family, trading coasts to provide himself three time zones of buffer space. Random email and social media posts yield all the contact he needs. Until a late-night phone call from his wistful father. Unaccustomed to hearing his dad say “I love you,” C.J. freezes, vowing instead to reciprocate the next time they speak. But when the phone wakes him the following morning, it’s his older brother informing him their father has committed suicide.

Sporting a nagging conscience and a chip on his shoulder, C.J. books a flight home on his girlfriend’s credit card. All he wants is to bury his father and try to make sense of what led him to take his own life. All he has to go on is a note that reads, “Sorry I wasn’t what you needed.” Was it intended for C.J. and his siblings? The mother who walked out on them twenty-five years ago? Or someone else altogether?

Alternately heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny, Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed explores the familial bonds that obligate us for life—and beyond.

So, yeah, quite different from the first two. More fun to write in a sense. I wouldn’t want to be in a family like C.J.’s, but they provided no shortage of drama to propel the story along.

‘Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed’ now available for the Kindle

A little less than 14 months ago, I started writing novel #3, working off my disappointment in the worst display of free-throw shooting ever witnessed, in N.C. State’s collapse against St. Louis in the NCAA Tournament. Three hours later I had a solid start on Chapter 1 of what became Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed. It is now available for the Kindle, as of early this morning.

This book is a bit of a departure from my first two novels, which both centered around baseball. C.J. Neubauer, the protagonist this time around, is not a baseball fan. Not much of a sports fan at all, outside of his passion for broomball, a bastardized version of floor hockey played in the living room of his boyhood home. He’s not passionate about much, which is why, ten years out of college, he’s underemployed, constantly broke, and spends most of his nights flicking cigarette butts out the front window after yet another quarrel with his girlfriend.

The story begins on an average Friday evening, which unfolds like so many others in C.J.’s life, up until the point he receives a rare phone call from his father. Here’s the description posted on Amazon:

Ten years ago, C.J. Neubauer fled his family, trading coasts to provide himself three time zones of buffer space. Random email and social media posts yield all the contact he needs. Until a late-night phone call from his wistful father. Unaccustomed to hearing his dad say “I love you,” C.J. freezes, vowing instead to reciprocate the next time they speak. But when the phone wakes him the following morning, it’s his older brother informing him their father has committed suicide.

Sporting a nagging conscience and a chip on his shoulder, C.J. books a flight home on his girlfriend’s credit card. All he wants is to bury his father and try to make sense of what led him to take his own life. All he has to go on is a note that reads, “Sorry I wasn’t what you needed.” Was it intended for C.J. and his siblings? The mother who walked out on them twenty-five years ago? Or someone else altogether?

Alternately heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny, Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed explores the familial bonds that obligate us for life—and beyond.

So, yeah, quite different from the first two. More fun to write in a sense. I wouldn’t want to be in a family like C.J.’s, but they provided no shortage of drama to propel the story along.

Nine Bucks a Pound “humanizes the demonized”

There is nothing more gratifying as an author than reading a review by someone who really gets your book. Though it’s been a little more than a year since Nine Bucks a Pound was released, reviews are still slowly trickling in, including one this week from Benjamin Hill of MiLB.com. And Ben captured Del Tanner’s motivations as well as anyone has in a very positive review.

Nine Bucks a Pound follows Del’s career from 2003 through 2010, as he transitions from Minor League roster filler to top prospect to Major League success story. Steroid use plays no small role in his unexpected ascension, but throughout the book the question lingers: Was it worth it? His lies, and the paranoia that accompanies them, place a dark cloud over all that he has accomplished.

And later:

As a former Baseball America correspondent (and book reviewer), Bailey is well-qualified to tell such a story. He is familiar with the Minor League locales through which Del ascends, as well as the various personalities — agents, scouts, host families, coaches, players and assorted hangers-on — that populate the landscape. Additionally, Bailey did his research, speaking to (unnamed) former players about the drug testing process and to trainers about workout regimens. Nine Bucks A Pound, though a work of fiction, seems real.

Hill took the time to understand not just Del’s motivations, but that of his co-conspirators, Ryan Edsell and Ian Wicker. Having reviewed many books myself, I know it’s not always easy to really flesh a book out. He did so, and I definitely appreciate the effort he put forth. Now if only everyone in America would log on and read the full review.

Channeling Charlie Brown for the Local Author Extravaganza

Book signing events are usually better in concept than reality. It’s nice to imagine that long line of readers, queuing up for the chance to purchase one of your books, you personalize a short message, pose for a photo, keep the line moving. Then you wake up and realize you’ve nodded off at the table because no one has approached for the past 20 minutes.

I was fortunate enough to be invited out to the Lift Bridge Book Shop a couple of times back in 2012, the year The Greatest Show on Dirt came out. Sales were modest, but it’s nice to be asked all the same. The first time it was just me, at one of their Saturday Author Salons. I think I sold two copies in two hours. Mildly humbling. The second time was for a multi-author event during the Brockport Arts Festival. I had to park a good half mile away because Main Street was blocked off and there were tons of people there. I, optimistically, hauled a rather large box of books from my car to the store, wishing at some point that I’d brought a wagon to pull it in.

I say “optimistically,” but it was more like, well, I better bring a bunch, just in case. I didn’t really expect to sell 25 copies, or whatever the box held. It was like Charlie Brown bringing a briefcase to the Valentine’s Day party, to hold all the cards he didn’t get. And then after Violet and Lucy show up a couple of days later and give him a used Valentine, he decides he’ll need two briefcases the following year. Dream big, right. I sold four copies that afternoon, including one to a neighbor and one to a co-worker.

Sunday I’ll be heading back out to Brockport, to participate in Lift Bridge’s Annual Local Author Extravaganza. I’m going to keep it real this time. Well, within reason. I’ll bring 10 copies of each book. I’ll probably return with eight copies of each, but you never know. Maybe something crazy will happen and there will be a crowd of baseball novel lovers on hand. It could happen.

If you’ve still got shopping to do, stop on out Sunday afternoon between 1 and 4 and say hello. Books make great Christmas gifts.

Enter to win a book just by joining my mailing list

Like to win stuff? Win a copy of either Nine Bucks a Pound or The Greatest Show on Dirt just by signing up for my mailing list by Dec. 12. Already read both? You could give it away as a gift and cross someone off your Christmas shopping list.

Details: One mailing list subscriber will be randomly chosen Dec. 13 as winner of a paperback copy of the book of their choice. The book will be mailed in plenty of time for Christmas.

This is a private list — your email address will not be shared. And you won’t be bombarded. Emails will be infrequent. I promise. Subscribers will receive advance information via e-mail about my new books, events, and special offers. Be the first to learn about the release of my third novel, Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed, when it’s ready to go next spring.

Baseball reader on your gift list?

Got a baseball fan on your Christmas gift list? Books are easy to wrap. Get them a copy of Nine Bucks a Pound or The Greatest Show on Dirt. Or both. Include their name and a brief message in the comments field when you pay via PayPal and I’ll sign and personalize their gift. All books will be shipped USPS Priority Mail, and I’ll knock part of the shipping cost off to make the prices comparable to what you would pay on Amazon (for an unsigned copy). Buy both books and save three bucks.

Did you know you can send Kindle books as gifts? If your reader prefers to read on their Kindle, head on over to Amazon.com and look for Nine Bucks a Pound or The Greatest Show on Dirt. Just $3.99 each, no postage, no wrapping.

Paperbacks


Nine Bucks a Pound $13.95 USDThe Greatest Show on Dirt $12.95 USDBoth books $23.95 USD

Reflections on a mostly successful group promotion

When I went to bed Monday night, my first novel, The Greatest Show on Dirt, ranked No. 3 on Amazon among all Kindle baseball books. That’s rarified air for me, and I stayed up a bit too late checking my sales, enjoying an unusual night when they came in at a 4-5 per hour clip. If not for an all-day glitch on Amazon Tuesday, I might have enjoyed a moment at the top of the heap, at least long enough to capture a screen shot of Dirt nudging ahead of the Derek Jeter books and Moneyball, which seems to haunt the top 5 for reasons I can’t understand.

Aside from the ‘Zon’s technical difficulties, things were soon back to normal. My one-week sale blitz was complete, the frenzy over. It was a fun ride while it lasted, and, boy, did we move some units. Okay, it may not be NY Times bestseller pace, but for me, moving 85 books (between my two novels) in seven days was dizzying stuff, even at 99 cents a pop.

Amazon Kindle Best Sellers in Baseball at the end of the promo.

I’ve done 99-cent price promos in the past, with much more modest results. My hope this time around was to generate enough sales to see a carryover effect once the books went back to regular price. (The jury is still out on that, but early returns are not promising.) So this time I wanted to do something totally different. I read David Gaughran’s book, Let’s Get Visible, which is all about marketing books, particularly ebooks. One idea I came away with was a World Series group promo.

I kicked it around with a couple of writer friends, both authors of good baseball novels (Russell Rowland’s High and Inside and Jeff Gillenkirk’s Home, Away). They were both into the idea from the start. I reached out to a number of other authors, some I’ve interacted with before and others I hadn’t. I figured we needed at least five books minimum to make a credible stand. With two of my own, we were nearly there early on, but I wanted more.

It proved harder than I figured it would to reach critical mass, but when we did we got there in a hurry, courtesy of Summer Game Books. A baseball-only publisher, SGB responded to my email with definite interest, offering up three books that were perfect for our promo. In 1999 Casey Award winner, Slouching Toward Fargo, we had a headliner. They also pitched Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide and Pat Jordan’s The Suitors of Spring into the mix. Author of A False Spring, one of the most revered titles in the baseball library, Jordan is a name familiar to many baseball readers. Suddenly we were nearly to 10, a round number we hit when David Martinez threw The Book of Baseball Literacy into the sale.

And then we were down to nine again, with the loss of one of our originals. Gillenkirk’s publisher informed him just days before the sale that it had placed a moratorium on price changes until November. (Though they did offer the paperback version up at a special price of just $4.99.) There went my “10 books for less than 10 bucks” slogan. But not for long, as The Permanent Press, publisher of Jenny Shank’s novel, The Ringer, contacted me to inquire whether we’d be interested in adding a second title to the pot. Howard Owen is a mystery writer, who just happened to set his newest title in a minor league ballpark. And Parker Field put us back in double figures.

Unfortunately, the “10 for 10″ euphoria was washed away the night before the sale kicked off, fairly late in fact. Summer Game Books hit a snag in altering the price of Slouching Toward Fargo and the Sol White Guide. Heavy on images, both were too large for Amazon to let them drop the price to 99 cents. SGB offered up a couple of other titles in their place, to keep things in line pricewise. I begged them instead to keep the originals in the lineup at the slightly elevated price of $1.99, which they did. Perhaps in light of that, The Permanent Press requested their two titles be pushed to $1.99 the morning the sale began (they offered no reason, so I’m only guessing). Instead of “10 for 10″ we were now at “10 books under $2 each.”

Those burps aside, the sale got off to a strong start. Traffic to our site, The Baseball Reader (a Google Blogs page I cooked up a couple of weeks before the sale began), hit 255 page views that first day. No telling how many of those were me, checking and adjusting the text, but enough were interested buyers to push us all well up in the Amazon sale rankings by nightfall.

I sold 16 copies between my two titles that day, a solid, yet disappointing, number. I knew it was likely to be our best day, and that was well shy of the goals I had set. I was hoping to average 10 sales of each book per day, 70 per over the course of the week. And when things fell to five (combined) both Wednesday and Thursday, I was resigned to accept this promo was not going to go where I wanted it to. Not even close.

But a funny thing happened on Friday. Checking the page views on the site’s dashboard I found the numbers had shot up. Turns out a friend with a Twitter following near 38K retweeted one of my updates. I contacted another friend with a large following and asked for a hit. The traffic spiked again. I worked a few more contacts. By 8:00 in the evening (when for whatever reason Google’s traffic calendar turns to a new day) we hit 596 page views. My sales nearly matched Tuesday’s. We had hope, and I had a plan: work Twitter strategically for the final three days, calling in favors to as many friends as I could without crossing the line to pest.

It worked, particularly on Monday, when retweet after retweet shot our traffic over 1,200 page views. Not exactly ESPN.com to be sure, but for a small operation that treasured every visitor, it was huge. I sold a combined 31 books Monday, staying up way too late refreshing my sales numbers. The days when they climb so visibly are truly rare, indeed. In fact, in two and a half years since my first book came out, I’d never had a day like Monday. I did a couple of free promos on Amazon back in 2012 that saw the numbers skyrocket, but there’s a huge difference between giving books away (most of which will never be read) and selling them, even at a 99-cent discount. And we sold a lot, combined. By the end of the sale, seven of our books claimed spots in the top 20 Kindle baseball books on Amazon, with an eighth cracking the top 50.

In the end, Twitter made this promo for us. Which I didn’t expect. One of the first things I learned in book marketing was tweeting “buy my book” not only doesn’t work, it can cost you followers. It’s annoying and completely counterproductive. But having a sale with 10 strong books to advertise is a different beast. We had something to offer readers, and they responded. Twitter drew them in by the bunch.

Of course, it’s not a sustainable strategy to keep begging friends and passing acquaintances to do your bidding. Once or twice a year you can push your luck. Beyond that, you’re just pissing people off. So a top priority going forward is to build up both my personal list (@James_L_Bailey) and the one for The Baseball Reader (@TheBBReader). As of tonight that one stands at 80, a relatively pitiful number, but not so horrible considering I only created it two days before the sale.

Would I do it all again? I think so, but I would do some things differently. First off, I would plan it further ahead. With this experience to draw on, I would look to lure some bigger-name authors into the mix, some folks who could pull in some traffic. Some of our books this time around literally came from authors who didn’t know their books were in it (or who have been dead for half a century, in the case of Sol White). None of the rest of us had particularly large followings. That does make things more difficult. But having done it, having some reasonable idea of what I can offer to an author or publisher, I believe I could sell a more visible author on the benefit of participating.

I would also try to hold the line on the pricing, if at all reasonably possible. The two Permanent Press titles lagged behind the rest for most of the week, and I would guess that was mainly due to the pricing. Slouching Toward Fargo did just fine at $1.99, but your headliners can get away with things that others may not. The whole point of a sale like this is to get your book in front of as many readers as possible. Sure you’re sacrificing quite a bit off of each sale in terms of royalty. But with enough sales, you make up for that, and hopefully lay the ground for more sales down the road.

That is essentially the goal. Without any carryover effect, it’s hard to justify the effort that goes into a group promo like this. It’s premature to really sum things up, but thus far I have to say there hasn’t been much carryover. I sold 85 books (both titles combined) in seven days. Since the price went back to normal ($3.99 for both titles) yesterday, I’ve sold three copies and had two more sales/borrows through Kindle Unlimited. That is better than I was doing earlier in the month (my sales are always strongest in the spring, when people are gobbling up baseball books), but it’s not what I was hoping for.

So will I do it again? Maybe. It took a lot of time to plan and execute. Time I could have spent revising my third book, which I hope to have ready to release by next spring or summer. Many authors will tell you your best marketing is writing the next book. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. But there’s part of me that can’t give up on promoting the first two. So I’ll keep my options open and see where things take me. Maybe next spring I’ll get the itch to put an even better lineup together and set the wheels back in motion. By then perhaps everyone will have gotten through the books they bought this time around and need more titles with which to fill their Kindles.

World Series promo aims to buck fall sales trend

Two and a half years after releasing The Greatest Show on Dirt, I can say from my experience that sales of baseball books are cyclical. They rise about the time pitchers and catchers report to spring training and slide as the season wanes. I’ve compared notes with several other authors, who have reported similar findings. And it makes sense on a couple of levels. Every spring there’s a buzz when the new crop of baseball books hits the shelves, virtual and literal. Readers gobble up the new books, and on Amazon, where most of my books a purchased, the activity drives sales through the Also Boughts (“Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”). It’s like a rising tide every spring, lifting up all the baseball books to a new level of visibility.

Which is nice in the spring. And not so nice by fall, when readers’ attention has turned elsewhere.

To combat this dropoff, I’ve gotten together with a number of other independent authors and publishers on a special promotion during the World Series. We will all be dropping the price of our books in Kindle format to 99 cents on Amazon for seven days, starting Tuesday, October 21, the first day of the World Series. At present count, there will be 10 books in the promo, neatly split between novels and non-fiction offerings. And there are some heavy hitters involved here, including Slouching Toward Fargo, the 1999 winner of the Casey Award, baseball literature’s answer to the Pulitzer.

Here’s the lineup:

The Book of Baseball Literacy, by David Martinez

The Greatest Show on Dirt, by James Bailey

High and Inside, by Russell Rowland

Home, Away, by Jeff Gillenkirk

Nine Bucks a Pound, by James Bailey

The Ringer, by Jenny Shank

The Rules Abide, by Jim Tosches

Slouching Toward Fargo, by Neal Karlen

Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide

The Suitors of Spring, by Pat Jordan

Learn more on our site, The Baseball Reader. Our slogan: “It’s a long offseason. Load up your Kindle.” And for 99 cents a shot, why wouldn’t you?