Alison Ripley Cubitt's Blog, page 10

Is this the end for KDP Select Free?

 

The days of the indiscriminate downloading of free KDP Select books, if my recent promotion is anything to go by, seems to be well and truly over.  KDP Select is now 18 months old (and that’s a long time in this ever-changing digital world) and the novelty factor for readers has worn off. Of course, that’s had an impact on writers, as Select was pitched to us as a product designed to help us sell more books and become visible on Amazon. While Select was new it worked brilliantly, for some writers, at least, particularly those with a backlist, who reported not just downloads in the thousands but an important spike in sales afterwards.

 

But last year Amazon made some changes to its Amazon Associates program, which meant that Associates could no longer promote free books in quite the same way. And now it seems, even the most successful indie authors are feeling the effect of the changes Amazon made, as writers are reporting a downturn in downloads and subsequent sales.  To test out this theory, I went free, choosing Wednesday to Friday 24th-26th July, just before the summer holidays in the UK.

 

Because Revolution Earth isn’t mass market fiction that appeals to BookBub’s mainstream US readership, I knew that I would have to work extra hard to find readers, so for $40 I paid for eBookbooster to push the book to their 20 plus promotion sites. The sites that did feature Revolution Earth were: Awesome Gang, Author Marketing Club, Book Goodies, EBook Lister, eReader Perks, Free Book Dude, Frugal Freebies, Indie Book Bargains (UK), Indie Book of the Day, It’s Write Now, One Hundred Free Books, Pin Your Book and Sweeties Picks.

 

I had contacted Indie Book Bargains (UK) prior to the promotion, after a tip-off from a fellow indie author, as I was keen to recruit more UK readers. I also let readers on the UK Kindle Users Forum know as well as at Amazon Germany, as New Zealand is a popular destination for German travellers. If you have a book that might appeal to German readers here’s the link: www.amazon.de/forum/englischebücher­ on the thread: We Can Get a Book for Free?

 

Despite this extra help, we had a big drop in downloads in the US, where we managed only 676, when the three day promotion held on 31st August 2012, yielded 2842. And in Germany, when last time round we had 134, this time it was only 20. Of course, if we’d been picked up by one of the big freebie sites such as Pixel of Inx, the results might have been different but as they only feature a handful of freebies every day (as do BookBub), our results, I think, represent the reality of Select for the majority of writers. The power of these sites is enough to propel you into the top 100 in free Kindle books. Getting into the top 100 free list is crucial for visibility. The highest ranking we managed was #589 in the US on the 25th July and #577 in the UK free list. 

 

This doesn’t make me despondent because I never believed the hype around Select in the first place. I have had similar ups and downs in my writing career and this is merely one in a long line of many.  I thought I had it made back in 2006, when I got a book deal for two non-fiction travel and lifestyle titles, which I had high hopes of updating every couple of years.  But two major events completely out of my control stopped all that: My publisher retired and sold his company in the same year that the books were published. And I only found out I’d been dropped as an author when my bio no longer appeared on my new publisher’s website. The second reason was, ironically the digital book revolution, which I’m now a part of, affecting the travel and lifestyle market. Suddenly travellers no longer wanted to lug around heavy guidebooks any more and if I ever do republish, (as I have got my rights back), it will be as an app.

 

So you see, I never had unrealistic expectations or get too excited about how much money I would make from Select in the short term. What benefits there are to writers like me, who haven’t had any increased sales as a result of their recent promotions, to stay in Select remains unclear, unless it is to recruit more readers, who might just leave reviews?  I’m keen to hear your opinions and what you think indies should be doing to promote their work, so do let me know what you think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gone Girl – Gone Toxic

 

The American dream goes sour Amy & Nick are two cool New Yorkers, working in dream jobs, being paid to write. Amy is a Cool Girl and the heroine for a succession of best selling books written by her parents. Who wouldn’t envy them? And then the economy falls apart and “the once plentiful herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled – by the Internet, by the recession, by the American public”. So sadly for Nick and Amy they both get made redundant and soon they can no longer afford to pay the mortgage on their trendy Brooklyn townhouse. Life can be cruel for losers in the City That Never Sleeps and the couple are forced to sell up, and retreat to somewhere affordable – in this case, back to Nick’s Midwest home town, in nowheresville, Missouri.  

 

Despite their money worries, Nick has to find a way of making a living so borrows off Amy’s inheritance to open a bar, as playing barkeep is something that he’s always dreamed of doing.  But pretty soon Nick and Amy are arguing over money and once couples start doing that, it’s a sign that love don’t live there any more and all that’s left then is the division of the spoils. Hardly the stuff of young love’s dream, is it?

 

Told from the points of view of both Nick and Amy, Gone Girl, is a psychological thriller, a War of the Roses for the 21st century. It is the tale of love gone toxic in a world where even the malls have closed down.  The big question at the heart of this book though is just who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist as by the end of the novel you may be none the wiser.

 

This is writer Gillian Flynn’s third novel. An experienced journalist, she is an assured writer and has done a particularly fine job with the characterisations of both Nick and Amy.  Nobody in Gone Girl is let off the hook, even Amy’s parasitic parents who have made a living out of creating a perfect Amy for public consumption. It’s no wonder that the film rights were snapped up so quickly as one this is for sure, Gone Girl is a book for its time, a cynical take on the reality of shattered hopes and dreams for one particular Generation X couple.

 

Top of the Lake – Episode 1

If You Go Down to the Lake Today You’re Sure of a Big Surprise

 

After the opening episode of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, I wish it had been the insufferable GJ (Holly Hunter) who had ended up face down in freezing Lake Wakatipu. GJ is the guru who has led a group of vulnerable (and gullible) women running away from their lives and has set up “a half-way recovery camp for women in a lot of pain,” all of whom are hoping to find paradise in, well, instead, a place called Paradise. Their biggest pain, that I can see, is GJ herself, a controlling, humourless, self-important, guru-like figure who all the women revere. 

 

Top of the Lake deals with some unpleasant subject matter, when a pregnant twelve-year-old goes missing but this is not a thriller or even a crime drama.  It is a slow, (sometimes too slow) unravelling mystery that features as light relief the group of daft, flaky, misguided women who came to seek spiritual enlightenment in a place called Paradise and who promptly spoil Paradise by littering it with shipping containers.  My favourite so character so far has to be Anita, (played deadpan by Outrageous Fortune lead, Robyn Malcolm).  Anita has come to the camp because of “chimp issues.” I liked watching the reaction of the Kiwi blokes as Anita delivers a monologue about having to get the chimp castrated after it attacked a friend and then when it still didn’t behave itself, having to have it put down.  The young bloke looks at her, exasperatedly and asks, pointedly, “was he your boyfriend or your pet?” and by Anita’s lack of response, confirming that she and the chimp were indeed getting jiggy.

 

Top of the Lake is the latest example in the New Zealand gothic genre, or ‘cinema of unease,’ (a term used by the actor and film-maker Sam Neill) to describe the kind of film-making in a country that on the outside looks like a perfect paradise, but scratch the surface and you find child abuse, domestic violence, murder and suicide.  From the works of film-maker Vincent Ward to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, the New Zealand gothic is very much a force in New Zealand cinema (and now television).

 

The idea that There is Something Wrong in Paradise is a view of New Zealand that may come as a shock to eager visitors as it is, understandably at odds with the one peddled by the tourism industry. But for locals, it’s an accepted part of living in this little corner of the world.  If you hang around long enough to admire the view at many a tourist spot, stay there long enough and a friendly local may sidle over to you and then proceed tell you the story about the bloke who was pushed over the falls because he owed money to the local biker gang leader and when his body was finally washed up further down the river he was wearing a three piece suit and had an orange stuffed in his mouth.

 

I like the way that feminist Jane Campion has intentionally made members of the women’s camp funny (I certainly hope that was intentional and that I’m not the only one laughing here) but oh dear, I just wish, especially after the success of a book like Gone Girl, that she would, for once, be a little bit less predictable with the gender politics, and have a half-way decent, sympathetic bloke in there somewhere?

 

The woman you really have to feel sorry for though, is visiting detective Robin Griffin (Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss). Not only does Robin have a difficult mother to deal with, she has to negotiate with GJ, Creepy Queen of the Sisterhood, deal with the missing girl’s wholly dysfunctional father Matt Mitcham (Peter Mullan) and a bunch of sexist colleagues.  Oh, and her boyfriend is putting pressure on her to finish up the case as soon as she can – presumably so that she can get home and cook him his dinner. 

 

If you’re heading off for a holiday in and around the Queenstown lakes, be wary of accepting offers of fishing trips from strangers. Because whichever direction that Top of the Lake takes in the next six episodes, you can be sure that the iconic Queenstown Lakes region will never look so sinister again.  

 

Books on the Underground

Books on the Underground is an imaginative scheme to help ease the pain of the London commute.  We’re thrilled to be part of it.  So in case you’re travelling on the London Underground in the next few weeks.. look out, a copy of Revolution Earth could be lurking!

http://booksontheunderground.tumblr.com/post/55103466479/revolution-earth-by-lambert-nagle-is-making-its

 

Goodreads and LibraryThing Giveaways

 

I did a paperback giveaway of Revolution Earth on Goodreads and LibraryThing back in March 2013. LibraryThing has one slight advantage over Goodreads, in that you can offer ebooks as well as print books for free, which of course means that you don’t have the additional expense of postage and packing.  Let’s hope that one of the improvements that Amazon makes, as the new owner of Goodreads, will be to extend their giveaways to include ebooks.

 

I offered four copies of the book on Goodreads and two on LibraryThing.  The giveaway on both sites ran for a month and on Goodreads alone 1074 people requested a copy.  When they didn’t win the book, two of the readers who wanted one messaged me directly; one was from for a literacy charity and the other from an interested reader, who promised a review in return for a free book. And because he was so enthusiastic and asked me so nicely, I couldn’t resist sending him a copy.

 

I am not one of those writers that restricts their giveaways to readers living in the USA or UK.  I can understand why it might be tempting, as postage and packing can become quite expensive when you send out eight books and the winners are scattered across the globe. But as this book is an international thriller, with characters from Bangladesh, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand the UK, it was important for us to see how the work was received by readers, in as many different countries as possible. 

 

The book was sent out to winning readers in India, Dubai, Canada, the U.K. as well as the USA. We received one two star rating from a winner on Goodreads, two five star reviews as well as one four star review on Amazon from a LibraryThing reader.  The LibraryThing giveaway resulted in one very good review, not bad when you consider the return rate of reviews was 50%, compared with around 35% on Goodreads.

 

One of the more frustrating aspect of the Goodreads giveaway is that you know that you have hundred s of potential readers out there who added your book to their ‘to read’ shelf, but it’s hard to reach them.  At the London Book Fair Patrick Brown, Director of Community at Goodreads advised writers against friending the many readers who may have entered the giveway. Prior to the end of the giveway, Goodreads sends out a message to  all the entrants, inviting them to buy your book. If they didn’t take up the offer then, the argument goes, they’re not going to be all that receptive to a further approach from the author, as let’s not forget that Goodreads is primarily a site for readers.

 

If I do another giveaway on Goodreads I might, in fact exclude readers from the UK and the USA this time round, only because many readers seem to enter every giveaway, regardless of genre and aren’t necessarily going to review the book once they receive it. Besides, you can buy a bestselling paperback in a UK supermarket these days for under £5 – making a free book no longer much of a novelty.  Other territories though, where books are relatively expensive, could be just the place to find a willing reviewer.

 

I’m also going to offer just one book at a time and run a second giveaway a couple of months later. Giveaways are a useful tool for creating buzz for a new release and it’s a cost effective way to promote a paperback, without breaking the bank.

 

 

 

Getting the Best out of Goodreads as an Indie Author

According to Patrick Brown, Director of Community at Goodreads, there are 17 million readers on this site worldwide. Yes, you read that figure right.  17 million.  That’s practically the population of Australia.  And if that wasn’t incentive enough to get your work on Goodreads, then how about this statistic? There are only 70,000 authors on there.  That figure nearly had me leaping out of my seat during Patrick’s presentation at the London Book Fair.  And that was all the encouragement I needed to engage with the site a whole lot more.  Before I got too carried away, I did know that Goodreads is, as it says in the name, primarily for readers and they, quite rightly take a dim view of writers indulging in inappropriate self-promotion.

 

I joined Goodreads as both a reader as well as a writer just under a year ago and like many a user of a new social networking tool, I spent the first few months stumbling around, joining so many groups that I didn’t have time to engage with more than two at any one time.  I now only really actively participate in two groups, both of which have proved to be the source of some very useful reviews. 

 

One of these groups that I belong to, Book Loving Kiwis chose Revolution Earth for their June 2013 read, which was a great honour.  For a while now I had wanted to put the book in front of a group of New Zealand readers to seek their opinion, but as we now live in the UK and only make it back to NZ every couple of years, I had no real way of doing that – until now.  New Zealanders really do love their books and Book Loving Kiwis is one of the few sites on Goodreads that provide active support for authors – indie as well as traditionally published.

 

What I admire about the readers who took part in the June read is that they read a book that might not be their usual sort of read.  It’s been a very interesting exercise as some have disliked the story told from multiple points of view.  We didn’t set out to deliberately annoy readers by doing this, it was just the way I had always written screenplays and it never occurred to me that it was something that readers might dislike.

 

Of course, just as some readers might not enjoy this way of telling a story, there are others, who must think visually, as I do, who have quite enjoyed seeing a story from different angles.  But one thing’s for sure  – I wish that I had this group of readers as beta readers as their feedback has been invaluable.  And one thing is for sure, I am making notes of these comments so that we can incorporate any suggestions into Nighthawks, the second book in the series featuring Stephen Connor.

 

We’ve been lucky, I think to have found a niche group willing to give our book a go, as it’s hard for a book set in Australia or New Zealand to be found on the mega site, Amazon.com, competing as we are against all the output from American authors.  And what I like about Goodreads is that it’s a truly international site– with niche groups writing and discussing books in dozens of different languages.  

 

In a forthcoming post I’ll be discussing the results of our Goodreads giveaway, so stay tuned!

 

Chez Tulips – Stories & Recipes

Chez Tulips Stories and Recipes is an inspired set of short stories with accompanying delicious sounding recipes set in and around a fictional restaurant in the US state of Minnesota in the twin cities of Minneapolis-St Paul.

Sandra Rector’s characterisations are her strength and reading her bio I can see that she has drawn on her first-hand experience from living and working in the restaurant business. The characters in her stories are ordinary folk, who for one reason or another ended up waiting tables or cleaning grease traps. Illegal immigrants, guys who’ve been in and out of prison, addicts, the mentally ill, or those who were too poor to get a decent education: this is the reality behind the scenes in the restaurant business and it is these sorts of people that populate Rector’s story world.

The first story, Bugged is a magic-realist comedy where a woman who has an affair with her brother-in-law after her husband dies is consumed by guilt as she imagines being spied upon by an all-knowing spider. This story isn’t as strong as the others and as it’s the first in the collection it really does need to be as a reader might get the wrong impression that the writer doesn’t know her craft as it starts with exposition – telling us rather than showing us the two brothers both in love with Elizabeth. A short story has to get right on with the story and doesn’t have time for exposition and for me the story began at: ‘One drizzly, gray spring day, when the yellow daffodils and purple hyacinths had begun to bloom…’ If you really need that exposition just weave it in to the rest of the story on a ‘need to know’ basis.

The two strongest stories for me were Cremains and Mother’s Day, both of which feature Blossom the waitress. In Cremains, Blossom learns forgiveness, despite the behaviour of her errant husband, a man she never really knew. In the second, Mother’s Day, Blossom, like many a mother, believes that her adult son no longer loves her. She’s relieved that she won’t have to spend Mother’s Day at home alone, hoping in vain that her son will call her, as she’s rostered to work at Chez Tulips that day. There she observes another son who appears to detest his mother but has forced himself to take her out because that’s what’s expected of him. Although it starts off as a rather sad story of love and loss, there’s an unexpected twist at the end and Blossom emerges from her experience with a deeper understanding of human nature.

The last recipe – the diet-busting Crème Brulee French Toast ought to come with a government health warning – with ingredients including corn syrup, half cream – half milk and five eggs and French bread – a concoction not dissimilar to that British staple – bread and butter pudding.

Although I read this for review as part of a non-reciprocal reviewing group, I was immediately drawn in by these stories as they are not only inhabited by well-researched characters but because of the ability of the writer to weave original stories with surprising twists and turns.

Australia – still the lucky country?

Australia with Simon Reeve, a three part series screened on BBC2 in May revealed a side to the ‘lucky country’ that was a long way from the usual sun, sand and surfing clichés of the average travelogue. Yes there’s a shot of Reeve driving over the Sydney Harbour Bridge but in the rest of the series if there is any spectacular scenery it’s put firmly into a context that not everything is as it might seem. For the segment on venom hunting off the coast of Cape York that means – don’t be fooled by these idyllic-looking waters because if you venture in without a protective ‘stinger’ suit – if the box jellyfish doesn’t kill you, a hungry salt-water crocodile will.

The paradox is, of course, that although Australians’ love to scare the bejesus out of British visitors to Oz – where there’s usually a competition for which state has the most deadly creature that the hapless tourist is going to encounter – the truth is that Australia is one of the world’s most urbanised societies and the closest that city dwelling Australians have been to a salt water crocodile is either in a zoo or on a television programme.

Up on the Gold Coast in Surfer’s Paradise tourists go for sun, surf – and casinos and most visitors are too busy enjoying the hedonistic lifestyle to notice what goes on behind the scenes here.  There’s a seamy side to Surfer’s and that is the organised crime scene, run by what appear to be renegade motorcycle gangs. Violence fuelled by drugs, alcohol and gangland rivalry – it’s all there – something I expect the tourist industry would rather you didn’t know about.

There’s another side of Australia that the tourist industry is keen to cover up and that is the scandalous paradox of the amount of poverty and suffering that still exists in one of the world’s richest countries.  If there is any mention of indigenous culture at all to tourists it is packaged as the promise of some sort of entertainment when visiting Uluru or Ayers Rock as it was previously called.

This series isn’t afraid of getting stuck in to the darker side of Australia – and exposes the way that the dominant white culture and the indigenous one lead vastly different lives. The programme takes the viewer into the heart of an isolated (as most of them are) and highly dysfunctional aboriginal community and showed the shocking housing and living conditions. There are no easy answers here as any Australian will tell you, as it’s not as though the State and Federal governments haven’t pumped money into trying to improve Aboriginal people’s lives.  It’s just that so far there still seems to be a vast cultural gap between the two sides about the way to go about it.

Although this aspect of the programme was shocking for many of us watching, even for those of us who have travelled into these remote communities, Reeves does provide an example of one feel-good story in the indigenous community as he interviews an entrepreneurial Aboriginal woman in the Cape York area who is actively involved in the resources boom, hiring out diggers to a mining company.

Although it may come as a surprise to the rest of the world, the resources boom is the greatest driver of the Australian economy and is the one reason why Australia largely escaped the global recession.

A resource boom driven economy though is nothing new.  Before Australia became a federation of its various states, the state of Victoria was for a time the richest colony in the British Empire, founded as it was in the Gold Rush. Profits from gold ensured that Melbourne could build on a scale to rival some of Europe’s greatest cities and even today there is a part of the city at its eastern edge known as ‘the Paris end of Collins Street.’

One of the most extraordinary places that Simon Reeves visited was Kakadu National Park. It is the size of Wales yet rarely visited by tourists and certainly not by the numbers who visit Uluru. Kakadu is an extraordinary ecosystem and we used the park as a setting for the prologue and the final chapter of Revolution Earth.  Another World Heritage Site it too hasn’t escaped the drive to find minerals to dig up and export to the booming economies of Asia.

The raw material for uranium has been mined for many years – it’s only in recent times that the infrastructure has been put in to mine it on an industrial scale.  As recently as the 1950s, mining uranium ore was carried out by hand (often by migrant labour) with pick axes and shovels, with not even so much as gloves for protection.  You can see how primitive these mining implements were in the photographs that accompany this piece. And contrast that to the scale of the mining now.  To research our book we posed as tourists and took a trip around Ranger Mine in Jabiru. It was certainly an eye opener to get the slick PR spiel about the benefits of uranium mining to the Australian economy and how the company was committed to employing indigenous people.

But benefits aside, we didn’t hear much talk on that trip of the environmental damage that Australia’s resources boom has caused.  In the wet season the run-off from uranium mining washes directly into the river systems in Kakadu National Park. The problem for environmental activists in Australia is that these remote places are so far away from the major cities (Darwin is five hours by jet from Melbourne) that it is very hard to monitor the environmental impact of mining from a distance.

Even though Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef is a protected World Heritage Site the need to protect the reef from the impact of environmental damage isn’t allowed to obstruct the resources boom as massive container ships are allowed to use it as a shortcut to get to port.  They do so under the guidance of highly experienced reef pilots but even so, all it takes is one small error of judgment that could have potentially deadly consequences for the wildlife.

There is one predator though that has been quietly creating havoc on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since the 1970s but in recent years the crown-of-thorns starfish population has increased to epidemic proportions.  Usually when a species in Australia becomes invasive it is because it was introduced but the starfish is native to the reef.  If you think of the word starfish you may be imagining a small, benign little creature but the crown-of-thorns is the stuff of science fiction – with multiple arms that slowly eat their way through the coral.

The problem has got so acute that the tourist boat operators, who depend on the reef for their livelihoods go out and try to kill the starfish on the parts of the reef where their boats take visitors. Although you can understand why the operators are worried, such an undertaking seems futile, as the cause of the proliferation of the crown-of-thorns is likely to have been caused by human intervention, namely pollution and the run-off from agriculture fertilisers leaching into the ocean. The fledgling starfish thrive on the algal blooms caused by the chemicals in the fertiliser.

Lest you get the wrong idea, the series finishes on an upbeat note as Reeves celebrated Australia Day in Melbourne. I do hope that an Australian broadcaster buys Australia with Simon Reeve so that locals get the chance to see the series for themselves.

Australia – the lucky country? Certainly it is for those who have been able to live and work there as a result of the resources boom it is – but sadly not for all.

The Fall – the best thriller to come out of Belfast

The BBC have commissioned a second series of Belfast-set psychological thriller The Fall – which is currently screening on BBC2 as well as streaming on Netflix.  In case you haven’t caught up with the five part series yet, X Files star Gillian Anderson plays DSI Stella Gibson, a Metropolitan police officer brought in by the PSNI to solve what starts out initially as one murder but before you can say pretty brunette, turns into a series of slayings.

Jamie Doran plays the role of the serial killer, Paul Specter, who outwardly at least, leads a normal life – married father of two young children who works as a counsellor.  He just happens to have a nasty, sadistic side to him that is played out in his targeting of professional women in their thirties who all seem to wear their long, dark hair in a similar way.

Written and executive produced by Allan Cubitt, who wrote Prime Suspect 2, The Fall is perhaps the first drama to come out of Northern Ireland that doesn’t have politics and the Troubles as its main premise.  As well as the fine, restrained acting from Gillian Anderson and the outstanding performance by Doran as the sadistic, manipulative killer, the success of the series is down in no small part to the work of  Belgian director, Jakob Verbruggen.

Verbruggen turns present day Belfast into a dark and moody, almost menacing place.  A meeting that takes place between two senior police officers on a rare day when the sun is shining is set in the vast but empty looking Titanic quarter.

In contrast to the feeling of alienation and distance that Veerbruggen invokes in his location scenes, he takes the audience up close, too close at times, which is very unsettling, in the scenes with the killer as he watches and stalks his prey.  The camera work allows us to see every detail on Stella Gibson’s face as she reacts to the latest developments in the case.

There is a neat parallel between the way that Stella Gibson works off the stress of the case by swimming fast laps of a half empty pool and the way that Paul goes running at night through the deserted streets before he’s about to commit a new crime.

As the drama draws to a close, the question is, will Stella catch her man.  Find out on Monday, BBC2.

Paid Advertising – Kindle Books and Tips vs Book Gorilla & Kindle Nation Daily

My first paid ad this month was with Kindle Books and Tips. It cost me $50 and I did this as a bit of an experiment to find out if our book would appeal to their demographic – (women in the US between 35-55). I set the categories as Thriller with the second choice Action/Adventure and I kept the price at $2.99. I sold 25 books in the US, 1 in Canada and 2 in the UK and made my money back.

The second book ad I did was a joint ad (called a sponsorship) with Kindle Nation Daily & Book Gorilla which cost $100. This was $100 I could afford to lose as I knew that by setting the price at .99c there would be no chance that we’d break even. To do that we’d need to have sold around 285 as we’d be getting the 35% royalty rate and not the 70% we got for the Kindle Books and Tips ad. By now I’d taken the book out of the second category Action/Adventure as there was no way we could compete in such a large category as there are just too many books there…I chose Political as the second category. It’s not a perfect fit but on a Google/Amazon search I found that there were more people looking for that than they were for Conspiracy.

What I like about Kindle Nation Daily is that on their website they publish the sponsorship results so if you check it out you can see for yourselves that we rose in the rankings from 307,011 up to 7,908. We had a 3782.28% gain (Movers & Shakers formula). We made the top 100 in political thrillers in the UK just by moving into a smaller category – even though we only sold 2 books there….

In the US we made the top 100 of political fiction. Compared with the 240 or so other books with paid sponsorship in May (and we still have a few days left so our ranking could change) we came in at 180. Incidentally, also in May a certain F Scott Fitzgerald (or his estate) was plugging Gatsby Girls (categorised under Romance!?). Despite a movie tie-in he began at 62,026 but did end up in the coveted 100 – at no 100.

So how did these stats translate into numbers? So far we’ve sold 2 in the UK (that was from my efforts on Facebook) and 34 in the US and 0 in Canada. The loss then was around $88.

It was a useful exercise and far less of a risk than a Bookbub promo as although we can afford to lose $100 – $280 is another matter.... Incidentally, we were turned down by Bookbub as either our 11 reviews weren’t enough – or they didn’t think the book was right for their thriller readership. Annoyingly with Bookbub, they won’t tell you why you’ve been turned down even if you ask them so you could end up re-submitting, getting it wrong again and once again be wasting your time (and theirs).

Where I think paid ads are useful are for when you might be languishing in the lower ranks (as we were) and getting fed up with sinking ever further and perhaps needing a morale boost. Or, it might be that you sell better in the UK but can’t seem to get much traction in the US.

Would I do it again. Yes – but maybe I’ll have another crack at Bookbub again- when we’ve had a few more reviews – unless of course they put up their fees again…