Elle Casey's Blog, page 9

2 Book Signing Events! Will you be in South Florida soon?

I’m going to Florida to take care of my momma, and while I’m there I’ll be doing two book events.  I’d love to see you there and give you some free swag stuff and shoot the breeze!!

August 1, 2013, 6:00 pm:  the Liberty Book Store in West Palm Beach.  This is a Thursday, y’all, and coinciding with Clematis By Night.  Should be tons of fun!  Books will be offered for sale or you can bring the one you already have to be signed.  I also sign Kindles, postcards, and just about anything else.    Address:  330 Clematis Street.

 

August 5, 2013, 5:00 pm: the North Palm Beach Public Library at 303 Anchorage Dr.  This is the library I book-wormed in for a few years when I was tiny.  I’ll be giving a talk on self-publishing and signing books and selling them too.

Let’s party, y’all! Time to celebrate my entry into the Best Seller ranks!

For those of you who are failing in your stalking duties, the latest news is that

I’m a New York Times Best Selling Author now!!
and a USA Today and Amazon best selling author too.

And to celebrate, I’m giving cool stuff away to my readers.  So go here, sign up, follow the instructions, and GOOD LUCK.

Thanks for all your support.

http://bit.ly/199AK0M

Had some fun changing covers today…

And the awesome continues…

Goal = reached.

Dreams DO Come True

I set this goal a few months back and here I am at the meeting of it.  I wish I could express what this feels like, but I can’t.  Here’s a pic or two of my life right now.

The Law of Diminishing Awesome: Why (I think) Review Averages Go Downhill

I noticed a trend with pretty much every book I’ve seen that hits the Top 100 best seller list on Amazon or some of the sub-genre best seller lists.  If the book is good, the first wave of reviews are all five and four stars.  Then after the book has received a lot of attention, the review averages go down, down, down.  I wondered what was at work there and considered a few reasons why this might be happening:

It’s just a math thing, the law of averages and statistics.
Expectations are set unreasonably high by other reviews.
Critical people are motivated to automatically be harsh towards things others are excited about.

Because I pretty much suck at math, I took at look at the things I could evaluate without hurting my brain.  Those were numbers 2 and 3 above.

It’s not just a math thing…

I believe that when a reader comes to a book after reading many glowing reviews, she has very high expectations for the book, perhaps higher than she might have had if she had not read the reviews first.  My theory received support recently when I read a few later reviews of my book Shine Not Burn, where the reviewers specifically said that they’d expected something that would blow them away based on the excitement they read in other reviews.  One even said she probably would have rated the book higher if she’d just come to it without having those set expectations.

Books that don’t “measure up” to expectations will receive lower reviews.  That makes sense.  But what should the book be measuring up to?  Standards set by reviews or something else?  My answer is that a book should measure up to what the reader hopes to find after checking out the blurb, the cover, the sample, and the feeling the reader gets when introduced to the “bare bones” of the story.  If you’re a reader and you want to truly enjoy a book from your own perspective, un-colored by someone’s review of it, focus on the bare bones before you read.  Don’t read a bunch of reviews first and hope to recreate their exact experience.  Reviews are important for sure. But at some point, they go from being important to affecting the enjoyment of the actual story and that’s not a good thing.

Critical people can be doubtful and unreasonably harsh…

I also believe that once a book receives a number of great reviews, there are certain people out there who have this natural inclination to just be critical of things others are enjoying.  Maybe they don’t even realize they’re having this reaction; I don’t think it has to be a conscious process or effort.

If I were to guess as to the psychology behind this (taking into account that I have zero qualification to do that), I’d say that they do this because it makes them feel like they’re a more critical or discerning reader.  Some people, when reading a dearth of 5-star reviews with glowing recommendations, will read the same book with the main goal of picking it apart rather than just reading to enjoy the story.  They start on page one with this idea floating in their minds:  “A hundred glowing 5-star reviews?  Well … we’ll just see about that.”

Another reason we may be seeing this kind of overly critical reaction is because of all the fake reviews that are out there.  It’s not as prevalent as it once was, now that Amazon has gotten smart about it, but it’s frequent enough that some people are automatically suspicious of any book that has a lot of good reviews.  They therefore go into the reading searching for clues of false satisfaction on the part of possible sock puppet reviewers, instead of having the goal of reading to enjoy the story without playing detective.

So what’s the point of this post?  My goal in presenting my theories is to help readers enjoy books without the influence of reviews coloring their reading experience.  The side benefit would be that book reviews would reflect a true reader experience and not one influenced by things that have nothing to do with the book.

Book reviews only work to help us find good reads when they reflect the actual content of the story.  There are other things that influence reviews beyond what I’ve mentioned here, but those are topics for another post.  I’ll be covering “reader assumptions and misunderstandings” in my next post on this subject!

Is this a glitch, Amazon? Or a permanent change?

Since my novel Shine Not Burn made it onto the Top 100 Best Seller list at Amazon, I’ve been watching my rankings like a hawk. And when I saw ‘hawk’ I’m talking like one with a set of tiny bionic eyeballs in its itty bitty head. I’m refreshing every hour to catch the new and improved ranking, all damn day and night long. I think I only miss 4 hours while I sleep fitfully, and during those 4 hours, I have readers around the world checking for me. To say this is a big deal to me would be a colossal understatement.  Obsess much?  Why, yes.  Yes, I do.  Being on this list has been a big goal of mine for over a year now.  I’m soaking up every minute of it because it could end at any second.

It’s no surprise at all that when something went wacky over at Amazon, I noticed right away.

Now, before I go any farther down this road, I just want to say that this could be a glitch! It could be that the sky is not falling, Amazon is not making a change, and I’m getting my panties in a wad over nothing. But then again, maybe it’s not a glitch.   Only continue reading if you care to know my thoughts on possible changes at Amazon with the best seller lists.

First thing I saw: all the rankings on all the books on the best seller list disappeared. Poof! No more rankings for anyone.

Then, about twenty minutes later, rankings came back, but they were missing something. Instead of showing my ranking on the Top 100 Best Seller list for the Amazon book store, it only showed my ranking on the Top 100 Kindle Store. For the last few hours at least, this has not changed.  I’m beginning to think it’s permanent, hence this blog post.

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Search by “BOOKS” or “KINDLE BOOKS”

Before I get into the details, here’s a screen shot of the two different searches you can do as a reader:  First, you can search on BOOKS (orange word, left column) > BOOKS (black word right column).  Makes sense, right?  I want to find a book, I click on … BOOKS.  But you can also search by BOOKS (left column)> KINDLE BOOKS (right column).  I own a Kindle, but most of the time I don’t bother scrolling down to KINDLE BOOKS.  I just click the first link: BOOKS.  Once you click there, you can click on “BEST SELLERS” and see the Top 100 books on that list.

What does this mean?

Well, assuming it’s a permanent change at Amazon, it means this to me:

First, now my books are no longer visible side-by-side with traditionally published books that are selling a lot of paperbacks. That’s going to hurt my sales.  It’s going to hurt my visibility.  It’s going to hurt my chances of ever getting on the NY Times or USA Today best seller lists.

Why do I think this is the case? Because I believe the reason my book (and those of many other authors) were pulled off the main list (i.e., search by: BOOKS>BOOKS>BEST SELLERS … I’m calling this BBB) is because they were only selling in good quantities as ebooks, not paperbacks.

So before, my book was for example #64 on Amazon’s BOOKS>BOOKS>BEST SELLERS [BBB] and #62 in the BOOKS>KINDLE BOOKS>BEST SELLERS [I'll call this: BKB] and showed just the BBB ranking on my book’s product page (even though the book was present in both places, BBB and BKB.) Now, instead, it shows the book in the Kindle store (BKB) and it’s only present in the Kindle store. I searched the whole BBB list and my book was no longer there.  Anyone searching the overall BBB for best selling books will not see my book or other indie best sellers at all. Only if readers go to the BKB will they see those books selling well in ebook format.

That sucks.  It sucks for my sales, and it sucks for the readers, because if they pick option number one, BBB, they are not truly seeing the best selling stories!  They’re just seeing the best selling story in a single format. Paperback.  And if they don’t realize they’re being limited to seeing books that sell well in paperback, they’ll miss a HUGE amount of books, mostly indie titles, that they might enjoy.

Second issue:  Amazon is making a more clear distinction between paperbacks and ebooks.

I cannot fathom why they’d do this. Anyone using Amazon for even a minute or two will see that when they search for a book they might want, both format options are usually there right on the same page (ebook or paperback) just a hyperlink click away. Why distinguish at all? Why two separate stores/lists in the first place? I get that maybe Amazon was trying to make a clear division; if you want to only buy a paperback, you only want to see paperbacks. But don’t readers want to see the best selling STORY and not just the best selling paperback story?  The way ebooks are outselling paperbacks, you’ll end up with a really skewed best seller list; it’ll have only books that sell a ton of paperbacks.  Those are traditionally-published books, not indie books.

I hope this is just a glitch.

I don’t really see the point anymore in having two different stores, BBB and BKB.  Why not just publish all the best sellers in one place and let the readers find out if it’s in both formats or not once they get there?  Or they could click a button to exclude books not available as paperbacks.  Most books are available in both formats, and as time goes on, the few who aren’t will be a smaller group.  Certainly most best sellers are available in all formats.  Not having paperback sales obviously doesn’t hinder overall sales, since up until now, indies were either side-by-side with or outselling their traditionally-published peers’ books being combined on the same list.

I don’t know the answers yet, but I hope eventually this works out to the benefit of readers finding good stories.  To me as a reader, it shouldn’t matter whether the book sells well in one format over another.  That’s just distribution more than anything these days.  It matters whether the story is good.  No matter what Amazon does, I hope they make it easier for readers to find those good stories with minimal confusion and fuss.

Enter to win some books and $$ Amazon Gift Cards!

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I want to bookmark this moment in my life…

It’s 12:53 a.m. on July 7th.  Yesterday was my firstborn’s 18th birthday.  My first baby is officially old enough to leave the nest.  And today, my novel Shine Not Burn, is sitting at #116 on the Amazon Best Seller list, for the entire bookstore, all genres.  I need to try and express what this means to me as a writer and a reader too, because I don’t know when the next time will come that I’ll feel this way.  Maybe never again.  It’s one of those defining moments that I want to capture and tuck away in a little box to take out once in a while and re-live.

When I was a young girl, I had a really close relationship to my mom’s mom, Grace.  We used to say nursery rhymes to each other as we fell asleep together – when we visited or she visited us, I always shared a bed with her.  It was a fun ritual.  I still know them all today (Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub.  A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker.  Knaves, all three.)  She was the first one to share romances with me.  She was a romance reading fiend.  She read at least one romance a day, often two or even three. Avon, Harlequin, whatever she could afford on her fixed income, she read it.

I was always a big reader, and I read fast.  I swallow books whole.  My mom let me start reading my grandma’s romances at age 9.  Nine years old!  Can you imagine?  I think their thought process was that they didn’t care what I read, so long as I was reading.  I feel the same way about my own kids.

Over the years I communicated with Grandma Grace through letters.  She would always write back and tell me I should write a book. She found my stories about family life entertaining.  She said she would laugh out loud reading them.  Other people who I wrote letters to said the same thing.  Unless it was an angry letter; then they’d save the letter for twenty years and use it against me for the rest of my life.  I’ve always been a passionate writer.

Fast forward many years… my grandmother died.  I kept reading romances.  I started writing late in life and began with YA titles.  But this year, when several of my writer friends started really taking off with their careers writing romances, I thought maybe I should give it a shot.  “What do I have to lose?” I asked myself.  Maybe I’ll suck and then I’ll know I should just stick to the other genres and leave romance to the experts.  But a piece of me, the one listening to Grandma Grace’s spirit, said, “But you’ve read hundreds of romances and you’re a huge fan.  Maybe you can write something you’d love as a reader.”  So I said what the hell and did it.  And planned out two other books to follow, just for fun.  Just for the challenge.  Just to see what would happen.

Fast forward to now… Shine Not Burn is sitting at #116 on Amazon’s Best Seller list.  That means that right now, in the entire known universe, there are only 115 books that are more popular than mine.  Can you wrap your mind around that?  Because I can’t.  This is blowing my mind.  I don’t think I ever knew what that meant until now.

I wish my Grandma Grace was alive right now.  I’d be on the phone with her and we’d be crying together.  And she’d tell me, “I told you so!  I always knew you could write a wonderful romance!”  She’d probably even figure out how to leave me a review on Amazon.

I also wish I’d started writing sooner.  I’m so grateful to Amazon for making ebooks a reality.  Without Amazon and the Kindle and ebooks, I wouldn’t be doing this.  I wouldn’t be living out my dream, my destiny.  I wouldn’t be connecting with my long-dead grandmother on such a spiritual level.  I am filled to the brim with gratitude for the people who helped me get here too.  My life now is full of bone-deep satisfaction and the wonderful realization that I only succeed with the help of others: readers, bloggers, fellow indie writers, my family, friends, and vendors.  If I could give the lot of them a big group hug I would.

Who knows where my book and my career is going from here.  This could be as good as my book ever does.  I could quickly sink back into the dark where no one sees my book anymore and it just sells a couple copies a day.  OR.  Or… it could go higher.  And MAYBE.  Maybe… I could break through that Top 100 spot.

We’ll see.  We’ll see.  But I know what I’m going to be doing all night tonight.

Refreshing my Amazon page.
Writing another romance novel.
Freaking the hell out.

Spreading wings is scary but worth it.

I started out writing Young Adult titles, I think because they were the stories that had the most insistent characters shouting to be heard in my head.  I guess that makes sense because kids do tend to be louder than adults.  But after writing about 18 novels all but 2 with teens as the main characters, I decided it was time to spread my wings a little.

This decision coincided with the desire to see my name in lights.  Well, not lights, but the same kind of effect.  A few of my writer buddies were hitting the USA Today and NY Times Best Seller lists, and I was jelly.  Yes.  I was totally jealous.  Their reach was so much bigger than mine, and if there’s something I’ve learned as an independent writer it’s that without good reader support, an author cannot make a living at this business.  We need lots of readers.

It seemed to make sense to write for a large group of readers once in a while so I could expand my reach.  Romance is the hottest market and has been since the beginning of time (or a really long time, longer than I’ve been alive, and I’m old.)  I knew that to get on one of these lists, to find this many readers, I’d have a better chance in the romance genre than I would in YA urban fantasy.

I told the younger characters living in my head to shush a little so I could listen for other voices, and lo and behold, found several adults in there just waiting to be heard.  The themes they’re living with and talking about are different, but their feelings, their emotions, and their desires are mostly the same.  I was overjoyed to know I had “people” like that living in my head.

I worried, though, that I wouldn’t be able to write a romance.  Even though I’ve read hundreds of them as an avid fan of the genre, I’m an action-oriented writer, so the idea of scene after scene of just dialogue and confusion about feelings didn’t turn me on.  It frightened me, actually.  I didn’t think I could do it.  But I opened up my computer and let the voices speak anyway.

Andie Marks was the first to assert herself, so her story was told first.  She and Mack were very clear for me, and so was Mack’s brother Ian, although he’s just a side character in Shine Not Burn.  I wrote the story over 3 weeks, and hoped like hell it would be well-received.  The words flew onto the computer page, and while I had to edit more than usual, it was a mostly painless process.

Turns out, I needn’t have panicked.  I did a little promotion on Facebook and then sat back while the book went from a ranking of 12,000 to 148 in 3 days, selling almost 2,000 copies.  That’s as close as I got to the Top 100, but it was a thrilling ride.  At the time of writing this post I’m back in the 300s, but that doesn’t mean it’s over for this book in the Top 100.  The 4th of July interfered in the reading world and the weather has been great in lots of places, so readers are busy right now.  Last year July was terrible for sales for me, but this month it will be better, just because of this book.  I won’t make it onto a best seller list with this story right now, but I’m not going to count myself out of the running just yet.  The reviews are amazingly positive and it seems like the book has struck a chord with romance readers.

The point I’m making (trying to make) is that as a writer, I need to spread my wings and try new things.  Challenge myself.  Open myself up to new readers who have valuable input for me.  The result will only be that I get better, and if I can find a bunch of new readers in the process, it’s stupid not to try.  If you’re a writer and you’re looking for a little spark, or you see other writers doing something that excites you, spread your wings!  Wayne Gretzky (in hockey “The Great One”) once said: “You’ll miss 100% of the shots you never take.”  I love that motto.