Brian McClellan's Blog, page 25
April 12, 2016
Escape Your Taxes Multi-Author Sale
Happy Tax Season everyone! This week I'm participating in a big, multi-author ebook sale. You can pick up a ton of great fiction for stupid cheap, including a free powder mage novella either on Amazon or my website. Here's the full list of authors and their discounted titles:
To the Towers of Tulandan , a Lays of Anuskaya novella – FREE! The Winds of Khalakovo (ebook) – $1.99 The Straits of Galahesh (ebook) – $2.99 The Flames of Shadam Khoreh (ebook) – $2.99Also offering 25% off of the trade paperback and limited edition versions The Woken Gods (ebook) – $2.99 Plague Year (ebook) – $1.99 Plague War (ebook) – $1.99 Plague Zone (ebook) – $1.99 Long Eyes (ebook) – $1.99 Brave New World: Revolution (ebook) – $2.99 Hard Times in Dragon City (ebook) – $2.99 Dangerous Games: How to Play (ebook) – $2.99 Murder at the Kinnen Hotel , a Powder Mage novella (ebook) – FREE! Ghosts of the Tristan Basin , a Powder Mage novella (ebook) – $1.99 Forsworn , a Powder Mage novella (ebook) – $1.99 Servant of the Crown , a Powder Mage Novella (ebook) – $1.99 The Powder Mage Novella Collection #1 (ebook) – $5.99 The Death of Dulgath (ebook) – $2.99Also offering 30% off the paperback, hardcover, and limited edition versions Wheel of the Infinite (ebook) – $1.99 City of Bones (ebook) – $1.99 Blue Blazes (ebook) – $2.99 Hellsblood Bride (ebook) – $2.99
April 5, 2016
Ebook Store
I've lately had a lot of people requesting to buy my older novella ebooks directly from me via my web store. I've only kept the most recent one up there because frankly, they don't get a ton of sales after the first two weeks, and the "commerce" feature in Squarespace (where I host this website) has pretty limited functionality. So organizing the store can be a pain.
I finally gave in, however, and created an ebook store. You can get all my novella ebooks there in epub, mobi, and PDF. Have at it!
March 23, 2016
Upcoming Event: Budapest
I will be in Budapest next week on Tuesday, March 29th. I'll have a Q&A session where I talk about writing, fantasy, and the Powder Mage Trilogy followed by a signing. The schedule is below:
- 29 March 5 pm: Panel and Q&A.
- 29 March 6-7 pm: book signing and meet and greet opportunity for fans.
Location: Rácskert pub, Budapest, VII., Dob street 40.-42.
Really excited to meet my Hungarian fans. Look forward to seeing you there!
Facebook Ads for Authors
This is the latest of my essays about being an author, brought to you by my Patreon page. If you'd like to get announcements, coupons, news, and more, sign up for the Powder Mage Newsletter!
For this essay, I've changed things up a bit by running an experiment in marketing. As far as the "behind the scenes of being an author" thing goes, you're watching me throw crap at the wall to see what sticks. Warning: there will be lots of numbers. Hope you find it interesting.
There's a lot of literature out there extolling the virtues (or more often, the lack thereof by companies like Priceline) of using Facebook ads to help grow your business. I've always wondered whether these ads could be used to help spread the word about my self-published novellas, and upon doing some research found that "Facebook ads for authors" have some very loud proponents out there. Being someone who likes to wade into the nitty gritty of the business of publishing when I can, I was intrigued.
One of the loudest of these proponents I found was an author named Mark Dawson. Mark is a self-pubber who has found great success writing mysteries and thrillers. In this interview, he attributes his success to leveraging a combination of newsletter lists and Facebook ads. His method is straight-forward: run FB ads promising a free book with a newsletter signup. Once you have that email address, tailor newsletters to that person offering to sell them more books in the series.
I'm always a skeptic. Mark claims that the ads way more than pay for themselves for him and several of his colleagues. He buys the ads, the ads bring him subscribers, the subscribers buy his subsequent books, he re-invests profits in ads to get more readers. It's a solid theory, but the success of it sounded suspect, and I figured if it worked as well as he said I would have heard of far more authors using Facebook ads. But I was willing to do a small-scale experiment.
Disclaimer that I'm not trained in marketing or a statistician or anything else. I'm just an author trying to figure out how to expand my audience.
My setup was this: using my Facebook Author Page, I purchased $10 worth of ads for each of seven days, for a total of $70. I targeted people who showed interest in Brandon Sanderson and Brent Weeks, two authors I share a lot of readers with, and offered a free powder mage novella to anyone who signed up for my newsletter. I don't have the newsletter-fu of a guy like Mark, but I set up a separate list on my Mail Chimp account to keep track of things. Here's my ad:
The results were... underwhelming? There are two different sets of numbers, one of which is "paid" and one "organic," meaning the people who would have seen the ad on my author page regardless of any money I spent on it. I'm going to just look at the "paid" results, which you can see below:
67 link clicks (people who decided to take a look at my newsletter signup)29 page likes (people who now (might) see what I post to my author page in the future)57 post likes (which means pretty much nothing except that they clicked "like")
My new list wound up with 34 newsletter subscribers, roughly a 50% conversion from people who bothered to click on the link at all, which is pretty decent. It's hard to tell whether page and post likes are actually worth anything, but 29 and 57 weren't exactly thrilling numbers even if they are. (It should be mentioned here that FB has been accused in the past of farming out purchased likes to "clickers" in third-world countries)
Considering all that, let's focus on the newsletter subscribers. If you saw my essay on newsletters last month, you'd remember the subscriber-to-sale rate for that one particular email was .6%. I've had higher and lower, but let's run with that number and see where it gets us, assuming that those 34 people are the right audience for future novels and novellas.
A novella makes me $2.05. Those 34 people at .6% conversion made me 20% of a single sale. So $.41. That means I spent $70 to make $.41. I'm not great with math but that seems less than fantastic.
Some of you might point out (and I'm sure Mark Dawson would), I'm grabbing these subscribers so I can send them newsletters ad naseum, which is totally fair. Let's say that percentage holds true across every release-announcing newsletter I send for the rest of my career. It would take 170 releases for me to make back that $70.
As you saw in my newsletter essay, I'm pretty optimistic about the powers of "spreading the word" and recognize that there are impossible-to-measure factors when it comes to simply getting your books out there in front of people. Ten of those "page likes" I mentioned above could turn into wild fans that buy every one of my books and tell all of their friends and makes it so I can die happy in a pile of money. Statistically, however, that seems pretty unlikely.
Needless to say, I'm not thrilled with the results of my Facebook ad experiment. I was ready to follow the Mark Dawson technique and drop $100/day into FB ads. If they worked. Unfortunately, that won't be happening. I am willing to concede a few points: 1) that I just don't have right combination of mojo/genre/ad wording/etc to really make a FB ad succeed. 2) that a novella in an existing world might not be as tempting as a full-length first novel as a freebie. 3) That FB ads might work a lot better in scale, and that if I had the money to put $1000/day into them I might get amazing results.
Regardless, I'm not going to be advising my author friends to try out Facebook ads any time soon.
March 21, 2016
Upcoming Event: Dutch Comic Con
I'm going to be a guest at Dutch Comic Con this coming weekend (March 26th and 27th) in Utrecht in the Netherlands. How dang cool is that? This is going to be my first international trip as an author (AND as a civilian) and I'm very excited for it. Here's my schedule:
Saturday
13:30 – 14:30 The Business of Writing – Fantasy & Horror Editie15:45 – 16:45 Worldbuilding – Making the Fantastic RealisticSunday
11:00 – 12:00 Fantastic Action – Writing Action Scenes in Fantasy and ComicsI don't have any dedicated signings, but the convention bookstore will have my books for sale and a spot for me to sign and chat with fans. I'll probably try to be there as much as I can on both days, and tweet when you can find me.
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
March 19, 2016
Kindle Daily Deal
Today Promise of Blood is a Kindle Daily Deal at $1.99! It's a great place to start a completed trilogy, or a good gift for that friend you've been trying to get to read the Powder Mage books. Spread the word, because the sale is only going for today (Sunday, March 20th).
Silicon Valley Comic Con Schedule
Hey Bay-area friends! My schedule for this weekend in San Jose is such:
The First Word: Getting Started as a Writer on Saturday at 11:00 AM
It's one thing to want to be a writer, but quite another to type out the first words. Our panel of published authors and seasoned editor will talk about strategies and ways to start a book, and more importantly, how to keep yourself going until the bitter end. Working with editors, coping with draft revisions, and how to know when it?s done and time to send out of the nest will all be discussed.
The Brave New World of Publishing on Saturday at 2:00 PM
The road to publishing has splintered into many twisty paths. Options have never been greater for aspiring authors, but navigating the choices has never been murkier. Where do you start? Indie? Traditional publishers? Or the bumper crop of small presses? What about Amazon and Kindle Unlimited? A panel of authors from indie to Big Five publishers and everything in between maps the routes and outlines the pros and cons of each path in the brave new world of publishing.
The best way to find me is to catch me after one of these panels. I don't have anything scheduled the rest of the weekend, or an official signing, but if you want to get something signed and drop me a message on Twitter Saturday or Sunday, I can try to meet up with you!
March 15, 2016
Tristan Basin Hardcovers
The hardcovers for the latest powder mage novella have arrived!
And I've got a special treat for those of you who order one! I've commissioned symbols to use in the next powder mage series from the talented Isaac Stewart. The first one arrived late last night, and I was able to get it turned into a stamp before the local office supply store closed. From here on out, I'll be stamping all signed books that take place in Fatrasta with the crest of the Mad Lancers.
The hardcovers will be shipping over the next couple of days. You can still order them here!
March 11, 2016
Powder Mage Wallpapers
A couple months back, I asked on Twitter if anyone could whip up a desktop background using one of the cool symbols Isaac Stewart did for the Powder Mage Trilogy. Lo and behold, Chanh Quach delivered with these:
I've been using the dark one ever since. It occurred to me recently that others might enjoy them too, so I got both Isaac and Chanh's permission and now, if you'd like to use them yourself, you can download them right here. I'm not sure what sizes these will look best in, only that they look great on my own computer, so feel free to experiment. Enjoy!
March 8, 2016
Upcoming Event: Silicon Valley Comic Con
If you're in the San Francisco area, I'm going to be a guest at Silicon Valley Comic Con! That's March 18th, 19th, and 20th (a Friday, Saturday, Sunday). I'll post my panel schedule here as soon as I can, but I'm sure I'll have signings and all sorts of ways for you to stop by and say hi if you're so interested!
