Nick Stephenson's Blog, page 4

Gearing Up – and Slowing Down

December is a tricky month. Usually, for me, it involves a flurry of activity to make sure all the stuff I’m promised myself and other people I’ll get done has to be finished off – often at the last minute. I’m just no good with deadlines, so I have to set myself fake ones to trick my decrepit brain into actually getting some work done. Which brings me back to my main point – what do I do with myself once all the unpleasantness of actually working is behind me?

There’s very little point in sta...

A Little Tip to Triple your Book Sales

I’m sure you’re all recovering from ruptured stomachs following Thanksgiving, so I’ve got a short post today. Here’s my top tip for anyone using free promotions – normally, following a Bookbub freebie promotion, I would expect to sell around 80 – 90 copies at full price the next day (of that book).This time, I tried something new…

I let the free promotion run for 2 days instead of 5 and manually cancelled the promotion at 6pm EST on the second day. The logic being that the book should hit the...

Crunching Some Numbers – Lessons Learned from 2013

It’s been a hectic couple of months. After finishing my latest novel, Wanted, I’ve been hard at work on a prequel to the Leopold Blake series – the new book is titled Paydown and is a 25,000 word novella that works as the perfect lead in to the full-length novels. I’ve had an absolute blast writing it – there’s nothing more fun than going back and exploring where your characters come from, especially when you throw them right into the middle of a meltdown while you’re at it.On top of that, I’...

Are free books dead? Amazon ups the ante yet again

Amazon has introduced a brand new promotional system for authors enrolled in KDP select. You can now select a “Kindle Countdown” deal which allows you to sell your book at a reduced rate for a limited period, and to automatically schedule these promos. The key point being that you continue to earn 70% royalties if your book drops below the $2.99 threshold. You can do this through the “manage benefits” tab in your bookshelf.

So for those of you getting good results with 99c promos, this option...

An Author’s Perspective – Tales from the Traditionally Published

Please give a warm welcome to Katy Walters – who’s kindly agreed to provide us with a guest post about her experiences moving from a publisher to going fully indie. Katy has made sure to remove any names and other identifying facts from the piece, but if this sounds familiar to any of you and you can figure out who she’s talking about, I hear that egg yolk stains are really difficult to clean. Just sayin’. Anyway, before anyone accuses me of inciting the masses, here’s Katy:

Hints on promoting...

How to Travel the World as an Author – An Interview with Ken Rossignol

I first ran into Ken over at the Kindle KDP forums, and I’ve been bugging him to come and do an interview feature for a while now – because his approach to marketing and selling books is so unique I just couldn’t help myself. After a couple of months, I finally wore him down and he’s kindly agreed to come and talk to us all about how he spends his days travelling the world and spreading the word about his books.Ken’s also got an audiobook and ebook to give away – details at the end. In the me...

Wanted is out Soon – Help me Choose a Cover!

I think my favourite point in the pre-publication process in any new book is getting the cover design finished. After all, it’s the first (and usually only) graphical representation of the story, and, as an author / publisher who gets full control over the cover art, it’s a very personal experience too. It probably also tells you quite a lot about me as a person, but who knows. I’ll leave that to the psychologists among you to figure out why I like silhouettes and skylines so much. It sounds...

When Authors Write Reviews

I keep getting emails from Amazon asking me to write product reviews. This seems to be happening more and more since they bought Goodreads a couple of months ago – the Goodreads model being along the lines of “we don’t care if you’ve read it, just review it!”. Still, Amazon have slightly higher standards when it comes to book reviews, which is why I’m always slightly puzzled that they keep asking me to review my own titles. Finally, I cracked and wrote the following:

Now, I’m fairly sure this...

Spotify for Books – How will you adapt?

Two new services called Oyster and eReatah will soon bring subscription-based services to the world of ebooks. Before the deafening screams of panicked authors drown out any sense of reason, shouldn’t we take the time to figure out, both as readers and authors, how this could potentially work for us?

First of all, if you haven’t read about these new startups already, here’s a comparison of the features:

http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/09/05/comparing-ebook-subscription-services-oyster-er...

Adventures in Advertising – Kickstarting Exposure for your Books

This weekend marked sixth months since my first novel was published via the KDP platform, back in February 2013. Since then, “Panic” has gone on to sell a little over 2,000 copies and I’ve released another book, “Departed”, in early July – which has sold around 1,000 copies since then. All in all, it’s been a very interesting six months – and certainly a far more positive experience than I had expected when I first jumped in.The funny thing is, only 2 of those 6 months actually saw decent sal...