Martin Pond's Blog, page 11

So what do you think?

Alongside the never-ending novel-in-waiting, I've been working on a short story lately entitled Cold. It's nearly ready to go, and will be coming to a Kindle near you soon. Maybe other formats and outlets too, I haven't decided yet.

But anyway. Have I mentioned before that I do my own covers? I have a lot of fun with these - whilst it's safe to say I'm no graphic artist or designer, it's amazing what can be achieved with some free software, royalty-free stock images and an understanding of layers.

Here's what I'm thinking of going with for Cold. What do you think?

Draft artwork for Cold

So what have I learnt?

As you might know, I recently ran a survey with the intention of getting to know my readers better. Except it didn't really work out that way. I was getting a low response rate, so publicised the survey anywhere and everywhere I could. This pulled in a lot more responses but not from my readers, just readers in general. So it became a "trends in reading" survey rather than just a "my readers" survey.

I offered a prize too, an e-book copy of Dark Steps. Congrats to Dara England on winning that.

Okay, enough pre-amble, here are the results.

Q1: gender?
Male : 27.3%Female : 72.7%What does this tell us? Nothing, other than women are perhaps more inclined to respond to surveys and/or try to win prizes?

Q2: age?
0 - 18 : 3%19 - 35 : 18.2%25 - 55 : 63.6%56 - 75 : 15.2%76 + : 0%What does this tell us? Nothing, apart from the fact that I was most successful at publicising the survey to people in my own age bracket.
Q3: where do you live?
UK : 24.2%Europe (other than UK) : 9.1%USA : 60.6%Other : 6.1%What does this tell us? That Kindle Boards, which generated most response traffic, is very popular in the US. The "other" countries were Australia and South Africa.
Q4: which e-readers do you own?
Kindle : 69%Kobo : 0%Nook: 3.4%Sony : 3.4%iPad / iPhone / iPod : 31%None : 20.7%Other : 10.3%What does this tell us? The Kindle predominance was expected, partly because we all know it dominates the market and partly because Kindle Boards generated most response traffic. I'll be honest, I hadn't expected almost a third of respondents to have an e-reading Apple device. The "other" devices were an Entourage Edge, Android smartphone and Google pad. I wonder if there would be a swing towards more Android devices if I were to repeat this survey in 18 months time?
Q5: how do you PREFER to read?
"Real" book : 39.1%E-book : 60.9%What does this tell us? That I got a lot of stick for using the phrase "real" book to mean a physical print book, and should have included a "no preference" option. Given that this question was only asked of respondents who had indicated owning an e-reader in Q4, maybe I shouldn't be surprised to see such a clear result. But I am, because I own (and love) an e-reader... but still prefer holding, and reading from, a print copy. Maybe it's just me.

Q6a: what's a fair price for an e-book novel?
99p ($1.59) : 3.4%£1 - £2.99 ($1.60 - $4.79) : 44.8%£3 - £5.99 ($4.80 - $9.59) : 51.7%£6 - £8.99 ($9.60 - $14.39) : 0%£9 - £11.99 ($14.40 - $19.19) : 0%What does this tell us? That people don't want to pay a lot for e-novels, maybe figuring that they should be cheaper than print editions. And that someone thinks I should be giving away 85,000 words and three years of effort for 99p...

Q6b: what's a fair price for an e-book short story?99p ($1.59) : 82.8%£1 - £2.99 ($1.60 - $4.79) : 17.2%£3 - £5.99 ($4.80 - $9.59) : 0%£6 - £8.99 ($9.60 - $14.39) : 0%£9 - £11.99 ($14.40 - $19.19) : 0%What does this tell us? Short stories and "singles" should be cheap. I agree.
Q6c: what's a fair price for a paperback novel?
99p ($1.59) : 0%£1 - £2.99 ($1.60 - $4.79) : 3.4%£3 - £5.99 ($4.80 - $9.59) : 58.6%£6 - £8.99 ($9.60 - $14.39) : 31%£9 - £11.99 ($14.40 - $19.19) : 6.9%What does this tell us? That people understand, and are accepting of, the need for a physical product's price premium. And that someone thinks I should be giving away 85,000 words and three years of effort for no profit whatsoever...

Q6d: what's a fair price for a paperback short story?
99p ($1.59) : 34.5%£1 - £2.99 ($1.60 - $4.79) : 44.8%£3 - £5.99 ($4.80 - $9.59) : 17.2%£6 - £8.99 ($9.60 - $14.39) : 3.4%£9 - £11.99 ($14.40 - $19.19) : 0%What does this tell us? That four fifths of respondents don't understand the cost of producing a print edition. Selling a paperback at £2.99 is just about the break-even point for me. I can safely say that the only way you'll be seeing short stories from me in paperback form is in a collection, where I can justifiably charge enough to cover costs.
Q7a: how many e-books have you BOUGHT in the last 12 months?
0 : 4.3%1 - 10 : 30.4%11 - 20 : 21.7%21 - 30 : 8.7%31 + : 34.8%What does this tell us? That e-books have really taken off. And that someone has bought an e-reader but no books for it...
Q7b: how many FREE e-books have you added in the last 12 months?
0 : 8.7%1 - 10 : 21.7%11 - 20 : 17.4%21 - 30 : 8.7%31 + : 43.5%What does this tell us? That free is a popular price point, but that some people just don't bother with freebies. Perhaps there's an assumption that free = rubbish. Further investigation is required, I suppose.
Q7c: how many e-books have you SAMPLED without buying in the last 12 months?
0 : 30.4%1 - 10 : 30.4%11 - 20 : 8.7%21 - 30 : 13%31 + : 17.4%What does this tell us? Either that "try before you buy" isn't as popular as I had expected, or that people usually buy what they end up sampling.
Q8a: how many "real" books have you bought in the last 12 months?
0 : 17.2%1 - 10 : 48.3%11 - 20 : 6.9%21 - 30 : 13.8%31 + : 13.8%What does this tell us? That people are buying fewer paperbacks than e-books? At least the respondents to this survey are.
Q8b: of these, how many were by authors you hadn't read before?
0 : 34.5%1 - 10 : 48.4%11 - 20 : 10.3%21 - 30 : 3.4%31 + : 3.4%What does this tell us? That people are less willing to invest in print books by authors new to them than they are e-books, presumably because of the price differential? Although I'm guessing the pleasure of holding a beautiful print edition in your hand from an author you love may also be a factor.
Q9: have you read anything written by me?
Yes, "Dark Steps" : 0%Yes, "Turn Around Where Possible" : 3.7%Yes, in "Unthology No. 1" : 7.4%Yes, in "Streetcake" magazine : 3.4%Yes, in "Alliterati" magazine : 0%Yes, in "Artillery of Words" magazine : 0%No, nothing : 92.6%Other : 0%What does this tell us? In general that I need to sell myself more but also that, given this adds up to more than 100%, some people have read more than one thing by me. Am I acquiring Constant Readers...?
So there we have it. Interesting? It was for me, even if I didn't learn about my readers per sé. I promise two things: firstly that these findings will shape my future output, even  if only in terms of pricing, format and markets; and secondly, I won't do another survey like this for a good long while, okay?

Help me out, and you could win Dark Steps!

I want to understand my readers better and, to that end, I've put together a little survey. If you need an incentive, one lucky respondent will win an e-book copy of Dark Steps. I know, I spoil you!

The survey will run until 12 noon (UK) on May 11th, so hurry, hurry, hurry. Here we go...

The great Twitter experiment is, mercifully, over

Last month, I wrote about my great Twitter experiment - a somewhat cynical attempt to gain more followers. I felt a bit uncomfortable about doing it, but at the same time it seemed a viable way of attracting new readers.

Because I felt uncomfortable though, I decide I would only actively hunt followers in this way for a month, and that month ended at midnight last night. As the clock struck twelve, I had amassed 1,361 followers - and increase over the month of 1,254. Not too bad, I guess. On the downside I was following 1,995 people (as opposed to my usual 77), leaving me vulnerable to spam DMs and making my timeline so hectic as to be almost worthless.

The month's up now though, so (nearly) all bets are off. I have already dispensed with all the new people I followed who did not follow me back, making my timeline marginally less frantic. Beyond that, I've decided:

if you tweet anything I find offensive, I'll unfollow you.if you tweet predominantly in a language I do not understand (i.e. not English, French or pigeon-Russian), I'll unfollow you.if you spam DM me about weight loss programmes or the fact that someone is spreading bad rumours about me (spammers, you can think of something better than this, surely?), I'll unfollow you.if you don't tweet for a month, I'll unfollow you.if you tweet anything about Bieber or One Direction, I'll unfollow you.Seems reasonable, doesn't it?
You can find me on Twitter here.

P.S. None of those bulletpoints apply if you're one of the original 77. You know who you are.

I'll take that!

As you may know, when you look at an author profile on Amazon there is a sidebar that shows you other authors whose books were bought by customers who bought work by the author you're looking at. I know, that's not a very elegant sentence but my point is this: today, I took a quick look at my UK author profile and that "also bought" sidebar showed this:


Yes, a whole load of authors I've never heard of, but Dean Koontz and Stephen King at the top of the "a bit like me" list? I'll take that!

Turn Around Where Possible goes free

I've made my little "don't go in the woodshed"-style short story Turn Around Where Possible available for Kindle now - look, it's here.

One downside of doing this is that I can't make it free by default - still, I've given away nearly 100 copies free already, via Smashwords and Lulu, so that's not so bad. But it did give me an idea.

The only way you can give a book away for free in Amazon's Kindle Digital Publishing programme is to enrol the book in what they call KDP Select. This means that the book is exclusively available through Amazon only. You still have to set a minimum price (and that's 99c, or about 77p) but you can offer the book for free five days out of every 90. And on those five days, your title somehow magically gets "promoted". I know, me neither, but I'm going to give it a go.

So for now, Turn Around Where Possible is no longer available from Smashwords or Lulu, but exclusively from Amazon. And it costs 77p. But my first freebie promo is coming up - on the 24th and 25th of March it will be free as a bird.

Let's see what this promo brings...

The great Twitter experiment

Before this week, I had a whole 107 followers on Twitter. I know. Stephen Fry can rest easy. But then I read one of the many "how I sold thousands of copies of my self-pubbed book" articles that indie authors cling to like drowning men. As usual, it waxed lyrical on the importance of social media as a promotional tool. What was different, though, was the strategy for using Twitter that was described.

I have always been selective about who I follow on Twitter. I like a nice, uncluttered timeline to read, full only of things that are likely to interest me, written by people I have an interest in, so before this week, I only followed 77 people. But this article suggested that was where I was going wrong. It suggested I should be actively seeking followers, specifically followers of other authors who write in a similar genre or tone to me, and that I should be following them in the hope that they would follow back.

The author I most aspire to emulate is Stephen King but he's not on Twitter (yet). There are a number of King fan/news Twitter accounts though, so I picked a popular one of those (@SoStephenKing) and went after its followers.

Now Twitter imposes limits on following, in relation to how many followers you have. For average Joes like you and me, that's 2,000... so I could add nearly 1,900 people. Not something I wanted to do manually, so I used Tweepi to do it in bulk.

At the time of writing, I now follow 1,940 people... and have a mighty 337 followers. I know, not the greatest return on my investment, but let's give the experiment time. Will an increased following (just writing that makes me feel like a cult leader, but hey) translate to increased sales? Well, it hasn't yet, but it's early days. Let's give it a month and see what happens.

One positive I've noticed already is that there is a much greater international mix in those 337, judging by the sudden spike in visits to this very website. My stats tell me they're coming in from all over the world, compared to an almost exclusively British demographic before. Again, will this translate to more sales globally? Again, we'll have to wait and see. What I can tell you is that this has led me to use Twuffer to schedule tweets for when I'm in bed and the US are doing their evening surfing...

Downsides? My Twitter timeline is crammed full and too fast-moving to be of any real use. I've had to resort to using lists to follow the people I originally followed, the 77. But that's not so bad. I can live with that. My plan, such as it is, is to treat the next month as a massive Twitter experiment. Can I use it to generate sales? In a week or so I plan to unfollow all the followers of @SoStephenKing who didn't follow me back, and then follow the followers of another author, maybe David Morrell. Then rinse and repeat for other authors for the rest of the month.

Does this make me cynical? Yes, I fear it does, twisting Twitter to my own ends like a capitalist pig-dog. But I just want to sell more copies of Dark Steps and, more importantly, build a readership ready for when Drawn To The Deep End is published. Will it all work? I'll let you know.

I need help bad, man (in which I beg or ask nicely, depending on your viewpoint)

If you're reading this, chances are you already know I have a collection of short stories entitled Dark Steps doing the rounds. It's been out since the middle of last August and since then it has sold alright, I guess, but it's not going to make me rich or help me retire early. And that's okay - getting rich off it wasn't the point. The point of Dark Steps was twofold.

Firstly, just to publish a book. Yes, I know there are those who'll argue that self-publishing isn't really publishing, and they're probably right. But that's okay too. I had more fun making my own book than from reading rejection letters, and I learnt the mechanical process of assembling multi-format ebooks in the process.

Secondly (and here's where I come unstuck), the point of releasing Dark Steps, and pricing it "competitively", was to help build a readership. This is a pretty lofty aim, I know, but I hope to publish a novel-length work later in the year and it would be nice to already have a group of people who know what, and how, I write, just waiting to buy it. Great theory, right... except the number of people who've bought Dark Steps (you're all lovely, by the way) makes for quite a small readership. I'm not going to give specifics here you understand, but at the time of writing we're talking less than 100 people. In short, I need more readers.

So I need your help, please.

Those of you with a blog or website - would you link to this site, or host an ad? (Thanks Millie and Rol, who have already done this). If you would, here's the code:

If you've read the book, would you leave a review on one or more of these outlets? Wherever you have an account would be lovely:

Amazon UK | Amazon US | Lulu | Barnes & Noble | Diesel | Goodreads | iTunes | Kobo | Sony | Smashwords | W H Smith (go on, you don't even need to be registered to leave a review on this last site)

And if you're on Twitter, why not follow me? I'm @MartinWrites, by the way. Follow me, and then occasionally retweet one of my many (and no doubt sometimes annoying) book-related promotional tweets. What's the worst that can happen?

Sad and interesting footnote: "I need help bad, man" was the message allegedly left on Chas Chandler's answerphone by Jimi Hendrix in the hours before his death. Don't worry though - I have no plans to join Jimi any time soon... but I'd still be grateful for your help. Ta.

I neep help bad, man (in which I beg or ask nicely, depending on your viewpoint)

If you're reading this, chances are you already know I have a collection of short stories entitled Dark Steps doing the rounds. It's been out since the middle of last August and since then it has sold alright, I guess, but it's not going to make me rich or help me retire early. And that's okay - getting rich off it wasn't the point. The point of Dark Steps was twofold.

Firstly, just to publish a book. Yes, I know there are those who'll argue that self-publishing isn't really publishing, and they're probably right. But that's okay too. I had more fun making my own book than from reading rejection letters, and I learnt the mechanical process of assembling multi-format ebooks in the process.

Secondly (and here's where I come unstuck), the point of releasing Dark Steps, and pricing it "competitively", was to help build a readership. This is a pretty lofty aim, I know, but I hope to publish a novel-length work later in the year and it would be nice to already have a group of people who know what, and how, I write, just waiting to buy it. Great theory, right... except the number of people who've bought Dark Steps (you're all lovely, by the way) makes for quite a small readership. I'm not going to give specifics here you understand, but at the time of writing we're talking less than 100 people. In short, I need more readers.

So I need your help, please.

Those of you with a blog or website - would you link to this site, or host an ad? (Thanks Millie and Rol, who have already done this). If you would, here's the code:

If you've read the book, would you leave a review on one or more of these outlets? Wherever you have an account would be lovely:

Amazon UK | Amazon US | Lulu | Barnes & Noble | Diesel | Goodreads | iTunes | Kobo | Sony | Smashwords | W H Smith (go on, you don't even need to be registered to leave a review on this last site)

And if you're on Twitter, why not follow me? I'm @MartinWrites, by the way. Follow me, and then occasionally retweet one of my many (and no doubt sometimes annoying) book-related promotional tweets. What's the worst that can happen?

Sad and interesting footnote: "I need help bad, man" was the message allegedly left on Chas Chandler's answerphone by Jimi Hendrix in the hours before his death. Don't worry though - I have no plans to join Jimi any time soon... but I'd still be grateful for your help. Ta.

Smashwords' Ebook Week special

Smashwords are running their Ebook Week promotion from the 4th - 10th March. During that time, you'll be able to pick up Dark Steps for half-price. I know, I know. There's no need to thank me.

Here's Dark Steps on Smashwords. Buy it now if you like... half-price for a week from Sunday though.