Kevin Hardman's Blog, page 17

Useful Twitter Hashtags for Writers

If you're an indie author, odds are that you already have a Twitter account. As most of you no doubt know, Twitter is a powerful form of social media. And if you're anything like me, you've probably used it heavily for promoting and marketing your books at one point or another.
However, aside from being a part of your marketing plan, Twitter is also a tremendous resource in terms of obtaining information.  Using hashtags (which are words or phrases preceded by the pound sign, "#"), you can locate tweets about almost any subject under the sun.  For authors, however, there are several hashtags that may be particularly valuable.
The first hashtag I'll mention, #MSWL, came to me via my editor, the fantastic Faith Williams of  The Atwater Group  (and in the form of a tweet, ironically enough).  It stands for "ManuScript Wish List," and to be frank - until I saw it in Faith's tweet - I had never heard of it. In essence, this hashtag is used by agents and publishers to identify the type of material they are currently interested in: fantasy, mysteries, romances about love between mutated fish and amnesiac zebras, what have you.  Great for those interested in being traditionally published, but even if you aren't it's a way to find out what the industry is looking for at any particular juncture.

Next, there's #askagent.  This one is practically self-explanatory: you ask questions that you may have about agency representation and related subjects, and someone (or multiple someones) will [hopefully] answer. There are also similar hashtags, like #askpub and #askauthor, that serve an almost identical purpose.

Finally, there's #99c. This is a hashtag that you can use as an author to announce that your book is on sale (for 99 cents, of course).  However, it's also a useful search mechanism for readers who are on the prowl for affordable books. In short, you can use this hashtag to fine-tune the parameters of any special pricing promotions.

Needless to say, there are dozens - if not hundreds or thousands - of other hashtags that are useful to writers.  Naturally, you shouldn't go overboard when incorporating them into your messages, but judicious use of these tools can clearly help you in your journey as author.

New Book Release: Warden (Book 3: Attack of the Aswang)

I'm proud to announce that Warden (Book 3: Attack of the Aswang) has been released. (In truth, it was released a few days ago, but I'm only just getting around to noting it here.)

As is evident from the title, this is the third book in the Warden series. This time, I tried to show a little foresight and actually had a cover reveal a few weeks ago. (In essence, I'm starting to do things like a real author!)
In line with the previous entries in the series, I tried to focus on a non-traditional supernatural creature. Thankfully, there are myths and legends about all kinds of creatures out there - a wealth of information, in fact - and I had a great deal of fun writing about the aswang.
As usual, Amazon's estimate of the book's page length is a little off. Amazon estimates the page length at 150 pages. However, it's actually more than 200 pages. That's really about 50 pages more than what I had intended, but - as I always say - the story tells itself.  
Anyway, with this one out of the way, it's back to work typing the next novel.  For me, that's simply the best form of advertising and keeping readers interested. You have to get the next book out. And the next, and the next....

Reflections on My First Year of Self-Publishing

If I remember correctly, yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my career as a novelist.  (Or, more specifically, when I put my first novel on sale.) It's hard to believe how fast time flies and how quickly things have changed - all for the better, in my opinion. Bearing that in mind, I thought it was worth a quick look back to see what a difference a year makes.
Books Published
The natural assumption is that I started off with one book published. In truth, I published two books -  Warden (Book 1)  and  Sensation  - in such close proximity that it's almost like I started off with a double bang.  (This was more by accident than design: I used the service Amazon offers on CreateSpace to format my first book for Kindle, but it took about 6 weeks. By the time the first book was ready for Kindle, I had finished the second and had it ready as well.)

Anyway, fast-forward a year and I've got 7 books under my belt: four in my Kid Sensation series (plus a boxed set) and two in the Warden series.  Not bad in my opinion, not to mention the fact that I'm on the verge of publishing the third Warden book. (I did a cover reveal  here  recently, which is something new for me.)

Books Sold
I've been blessed in that my books started selling almost immediately. Readers seemed to enjoy my work, and I was fortunate to find a number of fans early on.  The first month, I sold a couple of hundred books, which was quite a shock (in a good way).  As of yesterday, I had sold almost 23,000 ebooks and almost 400 paperbacks during my first year. (This is not counting borrows from when I was in KDP Select or returns.)  Altogether it came to a total of over 23,000 books sold over the past 12 months. (I had been shooting for 25,000 books sold, but you can't have everything and I'm super excited about the volume I did have.)


Lessons Learned
Needless to say, I feel like I've learned a lot over the past year - so much in fact, that I don't think I could possibly reduce everything down to written words. Nevertheless, I'll mention a few of the things I found to be most important.

Lesson #1: It's a Volume Business
There are some people who will write a novel and immediately hit it out of the park, selling tens of thousands of copies of a single tome in just a month or two.  I haven't been fortunate enough to be one of those people (yet), but not being in that rare stratosphere has taught me something: the number of books you write affects your long-term success.

A few months back, I wrote a post about  Making a Living Selling 3 Books Per Day . The premise of the post - and you can run the numbers - is that if you could write twenty books and sell about 3 copiess of each of them per day, you could earn in the neighborhood of $50,000 per year.

Moreover, I've found that each time I publish a new book, my overall sales typically increase. That, in and of itself, is another reason to keep producing new material. In short, always stay focused on getting the next book out.

Lesson #2: Get Professional Help
Despite the ease with which you can now get a book on the market, publishing is still a professional endeavor and you should treat it as such. That means getting quality help with all phases of your novel, starting with editing/proofreading.

Simply put (and I've probably said this a hundred times), it's almost impossible to edit your own work. You really need to have it done by a professional - not just to catch typos and such, but to see the amount of value that they can add. Personally, I use Faith Williams at The Atwater Group, and she has been worth her weight in gold.

Likewise with my cover artist, Isikol (whose gallery  of work is on deviantART). I know the limits of my own skill, so I set out to find an artist who could capture my vision. Isikol did that and more. Thus, if you're terrible in terms of cover art, don't try to do it yourself thinking that the great story you wrote will overcome the shoddy cover. It won't. Bottom line is that if your cover is the artistic equivalent of a leper, then readers will treat it that way and keep away out of fear that they'll contract something vile.

In short, you wouldn't give yourself a root canal or open heart surgery just to save a few bucks; you'd turn to the professionals. Not that a book rises to the same level of importance, but you need to be willing to get expert help if you need it (and let's face it, most of us do).  Needless to say, hiring professionals will cost you.  However, in my opinion, you'll be far happier in most instances with the end product you get from them than something you got on the cheap or put together on your own.

(In addition to Faith and Isikol, you can find other useful links for publishing here .)


Lesson #3: Write What You Love
I know that we all want to make a living as authors, so it's only natural to feel the temptation to write in the popular genres, like romance.  My personal feeling is that writing is not only hard, but also a highly personal endeavor.  There are some novelists who write only for money and are very successful (the great Jack Vance was one, for example), but I think that most people in my position (those who are indies) are writing because they have a story to tell.  Thus, I think you need to focus on telling that story - not the one that you think will sell a million copies, but the one that's been rattling around in your head, making noise, dying to get out. The one that you have to write.

In short, write what you love. If you have to write other stuff for commercial or fiscal reasons, there's nothing wrong with that, but somewhere along the way you have squeeze in the stuff that you want to write about.


Lesson #4: Treat Writing Like a Business
Like lots of indies, I have a day job. However, since I'm trying to become a successful author, I have to treat my writing just like a business, with me as the owner.  Thus, I've got to keep regular hours, work at a steady pace, and keep manufacturing products for my clients.

In essence, it is a tough row to hoe, but that's what you have to do if you want to be successful.  The most obvious complaint in adhering to this principle, of course, is the lack of time.  However, in my experience, people can generally "find" additional time by cutting back on one thing: the amount of television they watch.

I recall reading that the average American watches something like 34 hours of television per week - almost the equivalent of a full-time job. Even if someone could just cut that number in half, that would be an additional 17 hours per week that could go towards writing.

Of course, it's not television for everyone in terms of where you can cut back or find time. For some people, it might be working in their garden. For others, it might be happy hour with friends a few nights per week. Regardless, we all typically have something that we can trade in order to get the time we need to write. One you know what it is - and are willing to make the sacrifice - you'll be surprised at how productive you can become.


That's about everything I can think of off the top of my head. All in all, this last year has really been a thrill ride. I haven't had a Harry Potter-esque runaway best seller, but I'm fortunate to have enjoyed a modicum of success and count myself lucky. Hopefully, as I continue to write, I will be able to build on the number of readers and fans I have such that the next 12 months are even better than the past 12 have been.

My Passive Income Earnings from Online Articles

One of the great things about being an author, from a  pecuniary standpoint, is the fact that your writing has the potential to produce passive income. In essence, you do all of the work - the writing - on the front end, and then, with any luck, your efforts will go on to produce income indefinitely with little or no active involvement from you. I suppose it's kind of like recording a hit song, and then getting paid every time it's played on the radio.
Just about anyone who has been writing for a while (or contemplating the prospect of doing so) is well aware of the fact that there are a ton of online sites where you can post your work - usually in the form of articles - and, depending on various factors (like web traffic) earn some moolah. Prior to writing novels, I tried my hand at this, with mixed results. Here are a couple of the more prominent places where I was writing:
InfoBarrel This is an article-writing site with 75% revenue sharing (authors get 75%), which isn't bad at all. I believe I wrote a couple of dozen articles, but I never earned more than a buck or two per month, maximum - and probably not more than $10 overall. (I checked just a few minutes ago, and I've got a few pennies in my account there so I'm still earning - go passive income!) Back when I was active, I think the top earner on the site made close to $3K per month.
HubPages HubPages is a 60% revenue-sharing site where you build web pages called "hubs" on whatever topic suits your fancy. I made scores of hubs (which are basically articles), and some of them even made decent money. At my peak, I was probably earning an average of $50 per month on the site.  (Top "hubbers" on HP made a couple of thousand per month, if I remember correctly.) These days, I'm earning about $5/month, which is great when you bear in mind that I do practically nothing to promote my writing there (or on any of the sites I note in this post).
Squidoo As I recall, Squidoo is a 50% revenue-sharing site.  In my opinion, it's essentially another version of HubPages, except the web pages you build are called "lenses" on Squidoo (and I built dozens of them). That said, there are people who will swear that one of them - either Hubpages or Squidoo - is infinitely superior to the other, so be careful about getting sucked into those conversations/comparisons. At present, I'm probably earning something like $1/month on Squidoo, although my historical average is more akin to something like $5/month.  (In my prime, I think I was earning roughly $40/month.) Again, though, I seem to recall top earners on the site earning several thousand dollars per month.

Squidoo, however, is wickedly competitive in the sense that only the top 85,000 lenses earn anything from ads on the site.  The lenses are divided into 3 tiers, with the first being for lenses ranked 1-2000 (and the bulk of the money goes to these, naturally); 2nd Tier is lenses ranked 2001-10,000; and the third Tier consists of lenses ranked 10,001-85,000.  If your lens is one of the millions ranked below that, you can go pound sand with respect to getting a share of the ad dollars (although you can still make money from affiliate sales on places like Amazon and eBay). Moreover, there were ways to game the system to make your own lenses rank higher.  (I'm not saying that anyone did or that it's happening now - just that it was, and probably still is, possible.) Surprisingly, despite the fact that I only even visit Squidoo once every blue moon, I have a handful of lenses with decent rankings.  Go figure...
WebAnswers WebAnswers isn't really a passive income site. You essentially get paid to ask and answer questions. However, there's a participation component to the algorithm that determines how much you earn. In essence, WebAnswers requires that you remain active on the site - even if it's just asking/answering one question per day.  (FYI: you can skip a few days with noticing a drop in earnings.) In spite of all that, however, I thought it was a great place to earn money - not to mention being a lot of fun - and when I was active (which, in my book, means answering just a couple of questions per day), I earned around $50/month. In fact, WA is undoubtedly one of the quickest, easiest ways I found to make money online, since you start earning within days; I just had trouble participating at a level that would allow me to achieve scale (ie, make more $$$). These days, I rarely even visit the site.



There are probably a dozen other article-writing sites like these that I was active on, but I won't go through the trouble of listing them all. Frankly speaking, I didn't make a particularly large amount of money from my efforts, and some of those articles required extensive research. The truth of the matter is that, like a lot of things online, you generally needed traffic in order to generate earnings, so you had to devote time to those efforts and success wasn't likely to happen overnight.  
In addition, it seemed like every few months Google would tweak their search-engine algorithms so that just when you were building up steady traffic, it would get decimated. You'd go from a decent number of page views to almost nothing in a heartbeat. (It also didn't help that Squidoo sort of went on the warpath, declaring lenses to be unfit for publication almost at random it seemed. Squidoo's actions, which I wrote about here , were reportedly a response to a Google algorithm adjustment.)
At some point, it occurred to me that with all the writing I was doing for various sites, I could have written a book.  That wasn't the only reason for the shift in my focus from articles to novels, but it played a part.  Also, I like to think that all the article-writing I did helped me in terms of books.  For instance, writing articles taught me that volume - your level of output - matters.  Right now, of the sites I mentioned, I don't think it's a coincidence that Hubpages - where I wrote the most articles - is also the one that currently makes the most money, followed by Squidoo (where I have the second-most articles, I think) and then InfoBarrel, where I've posted the least. (WebAnswers is a different kind of beast, but I think I'm still earning a few bucks there every month.) Likewise, I've found that my earnings as a novelist seem to move up a notch with every new book that I publish.

In short, aside from simply writing novels, there are a number of venues that authors can take advantage of in order to generate income. These can be particularly appealing if you just need to take a break from writing your next book, or if you simply want to see if cranking out, say, an article a week can tack on a decent amount of income. (When I was hitting on all cylinders, I was earning $100-$150 per month from my article writing - a lot more than the $5-$10 I'm earning from it now, but I also had to constantly promote back then as well.) And there's always a chance, of course, that you'll be one of those people who manages to hit a home run in terms of articles and become one of the top earners on one of those sites. Needless to say, there's nothing wrong with that.


*If I didn't state it already, earnings for the sites mentioned above typically are the result of Google AdSense and affiliate sales.  Also, I think I note it in my Disclosure statement but it bears mentioning again - particularly in light of this article - that several of the links on my blog are affiliate links.

Warden (Book 3) Cover Reveal

Up until now, probably the first indication that I was anywhere near finishing a work-in-progress would be the message to my email list that I had just published something new.  And with each publication, I would generally declare that I would make a better effort next time in terms of things like a cover reveal. Well, I have finally made good on that promise.

I'm including in this post the cover for the third book in my Warden series.  In keeping with the spirit of the previous books, I have tried to shy away from the "normal" monsters and write about creatures that typically don't get a lot of air play.  In this instance, the primary focus is on the aswang, which is a legendary monster from the Philippines.  
As usual, the cover art was done by Isikol. Needless to say, I'm very attached to his work at this point, and I think he did an excellent job here.
The big question, of course, probably revolves around publication. Frankly speaking, I don't have a hard-and-fast publication date in mind. Right now, the manuscript is in the hands of my editor, Faith Williams (of the Atwater Group). When she finishes, I'll look over her changes and suggestions (and incorporate them) before reading everything one or two more times.  It's only after the end of that process tha publication will occur.
Bearing everything in mind, I'm assuming that I'll probably publish early next week, barring any unforeseen complications.  Of course, we all know Murphy's law: "If anything can go wrong, it will." Thus, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly.

A Thinning of the Herd in Indie Publishing?

Per Wikipedia, there were over 1800 automobile manufacturers in the U.S. from 1896-1930. Over  a 34-year period, that averages out to almost 53 new car manufacturers a year - over one a week!

Needless to say, that's far too many, especially for a fledgling industry. Thus, it's not a surprise that few of them were able to endure the test of time.  
In fact, a large number of them practically withered on the vine, lasting no more than a few years. (The Acme Motor Car Company, whose ad is shown here, actually lasted 8 years, from 1903-1911, which is surprisingly lengthy compared to many of its competitors.)
In a similar vein, there are some who say that the world of publishing is undergoing a comparable expansion. Basically, with anyone being able to publish whatever they like at the push of a button, we now have millions of books being produced outside of traditional channels. However, just like the auto industry couldn't support almost 2000 manufacturers, there are some who think that the current number of indie authors will eventually lead to a shakeout - a thinning of the herd - because it's simply not possible for every indie author to earn a living writing books.
Personally, I'm not convinced that there's an exact parallel. For starters, not everyone who publishes a book does it for profit or with the intent or hope of becoming a full-time writer. For some, it's simply an item on their bucket list, like climbing Mount Everest or going skydiving; for others, it's just that one story that they have to tell. (I suppose it's a lot like a person who works in their garden or goes to the gym every day - they do it because they enjoy it, not because they're looking to grow a prize-winning rosebush or be crowned Mr. Olympia.) Frankly speaking, these are people who may be one-and-done, but as soon as one leaves someone else with the same one-book desire steps in to replace them.
Of course, there are other people with a profit motive who will publish and ultimately abandon the idea of being an indie. A number of them will decide that it isn't profitable for them. Many may find that they hate the process or that it's too time-consuming. Still others will decide that they only want to be traditionally published. As before, though, as soon as someone in this category departs, there's another individual waiting in the wings to fill the void created by their exit.
Bearing all this in mind, it's easy to see how some might feel that there's a glut of books flooding the market. In retrospect, I suppose the ultimate question is: Can we have too many writers (or at least, too many indie writers)? While it's not on par with asking if we can have too many doctors or too many teachers, I certainly don't think so - especially not when everyone's motive for writing is so different. That said, I think there will be a shakeout in the sense that there are people who are publishing today who may not be doing so - for various reasons - two years down the road. However, self-publishing these days is a business with very low barriers to entry (for which I am grateful), so I believe that there won't be a significant net loss, if any, in terms of the overall number of people who consider themsleves indie authors. And that's a good thing, in my opinion.

Building Your Self-Publishing Empire

Recently, I was flipping channels and happened to come across a dramatized documentary on the History Channel called The Men Who Built America . It's a mesmerizig account of the early titans of American industry, and is hands-down one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.
It tells the story of men like Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller, who built massive business empires (and mindboggling fortunes). Setting aside their sheer ruthlessness in many instances, the men in the documentary display certain characteristics that I believe are necessary for success in just about any business endeavor, whether it's a Fortune 100 company or simply your own self-publishing business. 
Passion You have to have passion for what you're doing. It should incite and excite a fervor in you. Thus, if you're an author, the thought of writing a book - having a finished tome out there - is something that should get your blood pumping. I'm not saying that every part of the process is going to be fun - some of it will be hard and downright frustrating - but writing should be something of a thrill.
Vision I believe that vision doesn't just mean having an idea of where you want to end up; it also means seeing the possibilities. For instance, when Rockefeller got into the oil business, it was a fractured industry with numerous competitors. However, Rockefeller realized early on what it could be and set about consolidating the industry, ventually bringing something like 90% of the U.S. oil business under one roof. (Yes, it became a monopoly that the government eventually busted up, but Rockefeller saw the potential and worked to make it happen.) As another testament to his vision, rather than discard petroleum by-products that came out of the refinery process (like many did back then), Rockefeller invested in R&D to find ways to use them.
Likewise, authors should try to be visionaries. For example, we need to be able to see all the possibilities that extend from our writing - e.g., publishing in print, audiobooks, etc. 
Drive One of the things that really impressed me about the men in the documentary was their unceasing motivation. They simply refused to be thwarted in terms of their goals. When Andrew Carnegie was commissioned to build a bridge across the Mississippi River, most people said it couldn't be done. (I believe the tensile strength of iron, which was typically used for such projects, was too weak.) Carnegie thought it the project would work using steel, but it was incredibly expensive to make. However, Carnegie wouldn't give up, and he hunted around until he found a viable steel-making process.
Frome the stance of being a writer, I view drive as simply pushing on towards your goal, even in the face of adversity.  Maybe you aren't selling a lot of books. Maybe you want to be traditionally published and can't find an agent.  Maybe you just can't finish what you started in terms of writing projects. Regardless of those things, you should keep on writing, keep pushng through and trying to find success.

In retrospect, there are actually a lot of traits that people like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and the like displayed: they hired top talent. They believed in themselves. They never stopped trying to move forward.  I think these  qualities are applicable to business in general, but certainly to writers trying to build a self-publishing business (or empire).

Books-to-Movies and the Hollywood Formula

Back when I was an undergrad in college, I came across an absolutely incredible fantasy novel called Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. 

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, it's set in ancient China and is actually one of the very few books that I have ever read twice. According to rumor, when Hollywood came calling to option the film rights, one of the producers purportedly made a comment along the lines of, "Does it have to have all these Chinese people in it?" No joke - for a novel set in Ancient China! (Although the producer did allegedly add, "Maybe we could set it in America.")
True or not, the statements attributed to the producer reflect a common attitude in Hollywood regarding films - namely, that movies generally stick to a particular formula. For instance, think of how many cop movies you've seen where, early on, the protagonist gets called on the carpet by his superior, declared a loose cannon, and so on? That's the formula at work; in fact, the formula is virtually the same for all movies. (It's also that same formula that makes filmmakers want to take a movie set in another country and transplant it to America.) In my mind, that's not really necessary when it comes to film adaptations of books - especially those that are huge bestsellers.
First of all, popular books already have a built-in audience. From my perspective, that's an incredible advantage for a film to have because some of the marketing/promotion has already been done for you (and will hopefully continue to work in your favor as fans get excited about the movie's release).  
Next, if it ain't broke don't fix it. There's a reason why people fell in love with the book, so it seems counterintuitive to make material changes just to make it fit the Hollywood mold - like proposing that a film about China be set in America (I know, I know: I just keep coming back to that.)
To be fair, though, I understand the logic and mentality behind sticking to a formula. If a book sells a million copies at, say, $8 each, then it's quite likely to be considered a phenomenal success. However, if a film based on that book only attracts the same one million fans (who pay an average of $8 per movie ticket) then the film will probably be considered a monumental flop. Thus, I understand that some tweaking may be necessary, if only to broaden the audience base.  (Moreover, you often can't transform novels containing hundreds of pages into a 2-hour movie without leaving something on the cutting-room floor.)
That said, I can't help feeling that something has gone wildly awry when immensely popular books have very poor outings as films. For instance, the film Beautiful Creatures (based on the novel of the same name) could only scrape together a worldwide gross of about $60 million - roughly the same as its production costs. The film version of The Host by Twilight author Stephenie Meyers only pulled in $48 million globally (which is probably better than Creature's haul, relatively speaking, when you consider that Host had a $40 million budget). Compared to those, the $90 worldwide gross by the film version of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones looks like a solid home run - but that's before you consider its $60 million price tag.  Again, those are not numbers to make studio fat cats greenlight a sequel.
Part of the problem, of course (in addition to chopping the novel down so that it can be made into a 120-minute film), is that much is inevitably changed from the book to the movie. Important scenes are excised, major characters become almost non-existent on the screen, and so on. In additon - and this is probably as big a reason for a flop as anything else - the movies are often marketed poorly. 
By way of example, I read Orson Scott Card's captivating novel Ender's Game a long time ago, and then tore through the next 2 or 3 books in the series. (I know I stopped after Children of the Mind, but can't remember whether that's Book 3 or 4.) I was happy when I heard that a film version was in the works, and while I wanted it to do well financially the movie flopped at the box office, bringing in only $112 million against a production cost of $110 million. Personally, I blame the marketing campaign; despite my love for the book, I found the trailers for the movie to be ho-hum, to put it mildly. Although I wanted to see the film (and still do, which should tell you something), the trailers didn't really get me excited about the movie and make me want to plant my butt in the theater on opening weekend, the way I would with something like a James Bond movie. (Speaking of Bond, there's a formulaic series if ever there was one, but it works: suave leading man, hot chicks, cool gadgets, catchy theme songs and aptly named characters - 50 years after Goldfinger, I dare anybody to come up with a more memorable moniker for a female lead than Pussy Galore.)
In retrospect, I think Hollywood certainly has the right idea in terms of pursuing bestsellers with the intent to turn them into movies. I think the problem lies in the execution (eg, knowing what is and isn't essential for the story) and marketing. If you can get those two right, you'll end up with a Gone with the Wind. Screw them up, and you'll end up with something that's simply blown away like tumbleweeds and quickly forgotten about.

*FYI: My numbers for film grosses all came from Box Office Mojo.

Indie Advertising: BookBub Results

At this juncture, almost everyone who's interested in self-publishing knows about BookBub. They're generally acknowledged as the the 800-pound gorilla of book advertising (especially among indies), and getting an ad with them is as close as you can get to guaranteed sales.  Needless to say, everyone wants a BookBub promotion, so it's probably surprising that I resisted the urge to submit a book to them until very recently.
To be perfectly honest, "resisted" is probably the wrong word.  Truth be told, from everything I'd heard, BookBub was a powerful tool if you could get accepted (everyone agrees that they're very selective), and I was looking to get the most bang for my buck.  Thus, rather than try to get an ad with them as soon as humanly possible, I waited until I released the third book in my Kid Sensation series and then tried to get an ad.  Apparently the stars were aligned just right, because I was approved for an ad for Sensation, the first Kid Sensation book.  Per BookBub's terms, I dropped the price of the book from $3.99 to 99 cents (it has to be at least 50% off). At the time of the ad, Sensation was ranking at about 4,000 in the Kindle Paid Store. The results were as follows:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #329 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Superhero#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Romance#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Coming of Age

Needless to say, I was quite pleased. More than pleased, actually. In fact, my mood was a lot like the lady here:



I shelled out $180 for the ad, which meant that I had to sell approximately 514 copies of the book in order to break even. (That's based on getting a 35% royalty for every 99-cent copy purchased.) I sold well in excess of that so it was an all-around great day. BookBub is clearly fantastic, and well worth the price of admission. 
My BookBub ad ran on January 23, roughly two weeks ago. Since then - and with the reversion back to its regular price - the book has slipped back down in the rankings again. However, the power of BookBub has been proven, leaving me in awe. The only bad news is that now I'm terrified of getting rejected by them the next time I want to do a promotion.  But I'll worry about that later; at the moment, I'd rather just be thankful for how well the promotion turned out and bask happily in the moment:

New Book Release: Kid Sensation Series Boxed Set (Books 1 - 3)

I'm feeling a little giddy because I've finally reached the point where I can put out a boxed set. It's for the three full-length novels in my Kid Sensation Series :

It feels a little surreal to me. A year ago I hadn't even started writing the first book in the series, Sensation, and now I've got three of them. (Not to mention a stand-alone short story, Extraction, that's a companion to the series.)
Of course, Amazon is treating it as a "new" ebook and listing me as having an additional work on my Author Page. Needless to say, I'll accept the designation, even though its "newness" is actually artificial.
Like most authors with series, I already knew that at some point I'd do a boxed set. The only question was when: do I do it at three books? Four? Five? Whenever the series is complete (which may be never if readers continue to show enthusiasm for it)? It's the type question for which there is no easy answer. Still, three books seem like a good point at which to bundle the existing novels in the series.
The end result is something that I'm rather pleased with. Now its time to get out there and write the next three.
***FYI: On the subject of price, the boxed set is available for $7.99 (which is a substantial discount to the $12.97 that the three books would go for individually).