Hello, 2013!
This is probably the first time I've ever attempted to write a blog for a new year AND take a look back at the year previous. Not that I haven't thought about it, but I just never felt I had anything, really, to look back on. Personal, professional, or otherwise.
So, here goes.
On the publishing front, 2012 was a year of experimentation for me. It was the first full year, my collection, THE MONSTER WITHIN IDEA, was self published. Originally, the collection was published by Hugo Nominated publisher Apex Publications. In August of 2011, I received an email letting me know they were dropping the book from their roster. It was a bit devastating, to say the least. I was proud of that publisher and I was damn proud of having had the chops to be published by them.
Don't get me wrong, I hold no ill will towards Jason Sizemore and Apex Publications. They made a business decision, and it was nothing personal.
I retreated and licked my wounds, bitched and moaned to some close writer friends about how unfair it all was. Nearly all of them, told me to suck it up and self publish the damn thing.
I finally listened.
Here are the numbers, with Apex Publications (a little over a two year period) the book sold a grand total of 216 copies (ebook and trade paperback). Both of us beat our heads against the wall in that two year period, trying every scheme we could think of to sell the book. The book got great reviews from multiple respected bloggers and reviewers, one of the stories got an honorable mention from the esteemed Ellen Datlow for her Best Horror of the Year antho series, but it just didn't sell.
I've thought long and hard about why it didn't sell and it may have been just the wrong book for the Apex readership, seeing as they tended to publish more fantasy and hard sci-fi, rather than horror.
The first few months on Amazon Kindle, the book didn't sell very many copies. I blogged about it, begged and prodded author friends to mention the book, but it didn't start selling until I did a free giveaway promo via Kindle Select. Yes, it was a calculated move, as I wasn't too comfortable with putting the collection exclusive to Kindle and narrowing my other potential revenue streams.
That first giveaway, landed the book at #1 across all free books on Amazon and did 12, 405 downloads...and then didn't sell one single copy for the next week and a half. It didn't even generate one review, either. I came away from my first giveaway experience feeling defeated. Yes, there were potentially 12,000 readers that may have been exposed to my work, but if you've done this long enough, you realize readers that download free ebooks hardly, if ever, even read them. Do a quick google search, you'll see, they even brag about loading their kindles up and never reading the books.
So, I went back to the drawing board, so to speak. Did a ton of more research and realized the first giveaway was over a weekend. I started finding threads about doing giveaways at certain times of the month and certain days of the week. This seemed to make sense, so that's what I did.
I ran another promo, this time with some blog sites contacted to spread the word, and did a middle of the week giveaway. That giveaway ended up with nearly 20,000 downloads, and once again, landing at #1 across all free books on Amazon. This time, there were a grand total of 3 reviews generated, all 4 and 5 stars and positive. The book continued to sell after it went back to paid and sold 210 copies over the next month at $2.99. I was ecstatic. Now, I know, in the scheme of things, 210 copies selling isn't much and nothing to quit my day job over, but running the free giveaway over different days "seemed" to work. Not to mention, I'd sold more copies than I did during the entire two year period with Apex.
I did more research. Seeing a pattern here? Research, research, research. It was starting to bite into my writing time. Hours and hours of reading blog after blog, do this, do that, this is how you get a bestseller. If you're not careful you'll disappear down that rabbit hole and never emerge.
I tried one more giveaway after the sales dried up and the book didn't sell a single copy over a 2 month period. This time, I tried a new cover. I went with Elder Lemon Design, run by my good author friend Kealan Patrick Burke, again on a different time of week and time of the month. The giveaway ended with nearly 17, 000 downloads. High visibility on the free charts and got picked up by a number of bots for free kindle sites. After the free period, the book sold 50 copies at $2.99. I did something that may sound counterintuitive, I raised the price to $4.99. Yes, I did this even though the book was selling 1 or 2 books an hour. And you know what? It started selling even more. Why? Because there's a pretty big faction of readers on Amazon that actually believe that a book priced at $2.99 isn't a good book. They're actually looking for books priced higher. Yeah, go figure that one out? It seems that that $2.99 price point has become the new "free" somehow.
This year, I did my last free giveaway. There will be no more and this is a conscious decision. I've given enough copies away, for better or worse. This time I did a full 5 days and the book, once again, surged to #1 on the free charts (again doesn't mean all that much, other than visibility). The final tally was 7, 810 copies.
Then, the book started selling after the free period at $4.99 and for the first time as a self published book (or traditionally published for that matter) the book broke the top 100 of Paid sales in the Horror category. And stayed there for a few days. And borrows took off, for some reason. Was it the free period, was the book listed on some list somewhere? I really can't say for sure.
Then, like a light switch, sales flatlined. No idea why, or the reason for it. And I'm back to where I started :) So it goes, I guess, and that's my experience to date with selling on Amazon, I gave away a TON of copies, I ended up on the Top 100 in paid sales, made some dough, and then went back to obscurity.
You mileage may vary.
So, here goes.
On the publishing front, 2012 was a year of experimentation for me. It was the first full year, my collection, THE MONSTER WITHIN IDEA, was self published. Originally, the collection was published by Hugo Nominated publisher Apex Publications. In August of 2011, I received an email letting me know they were dropping the book from their roster. It was a bit devastating, to say the least. I was proud of that publisher and I was damn proud of having had the chops to be published by them.
Don't get me wrong, I hold no ill will towards Jason Sizemore and Apex Publications. They made a business decision, and it was nothing personal.
I retreated and licked my wounds, bitched and moaned to some close writer friends about how unfair it all was. Nearly all of them, told me to suck it up and self publish the damn thing.
I finally listened.
Here are the numbers, with Apex Publications (a little over a two year period) the book sold a grand total of 216 copies (ebook and trade paperback). Both of us beat our heads against the wall in that two year period, trying every scheme we could think of to sell the book. The book got great reviews from multiple respected bloggers and reviewers, one of the stories got an honorable mention from the esteemed Ellen Datlow for her Best Horror of the Year antho series, but it just didn't sell.
I've thought long and hard about why it didn't sell and it may have been just the wrong book for the Apex readership, seeing as they tended to publish more fantasy and hard sci-fi, rather than horror.
The first few months on Amazon Kindle, the book didn't sell very many copies. I blogged about it, begged and prodded author friends to mention the book, but it didn't start selling until I did a free giveaway promo via Kindle Select. Yes, it was a calculated move, as I wasn't too comfortable with putting the collection exclusive to Kindle and narrowing my other potential revenue streams.
That first giveaway, landed the book at #1 across all free books on Amazon and did 12, 405 downloads...and then didn't sell one single copy for the next week and a half. It didn't even generate one review, either. I came away from my first giveaway experience feeling defeated. Yes, there were potentially 12,000 readers that may have been exposed to my work, but if you've done this long enough, you realize readers that download free ebooks hardly, if ever, even read them. Do a quick google search, you'll see, they even brag about loading their kindles up and never reading the books.
So, I went back to the drawing board, so to speak. Did a ton of more research and realized the first giveaway was over a weekend. I started finding threads about doing giveaways at certain times of the month and certain days of the week. This seemed to make sense, so that's what I did.
I ran another promo, this time with some blog sites contacted to spread the word, and did a middle of the week giveaway. That giveaway ended up with nearly 20,000 downloads, and once again, landing at #1 across all free books on Amazon. This time, there were a grand total of 3 reviews generated, all 4 and 5 stars and positive. The book continued to sell after it went back to paid and sold 210 copies over the next month at $2.99. I was ecstatic. Now, I know, in the scheme of things, 210 copies selling isn't much and nothing to quit my day job over, but running the free giveaway over different days "seemed" to work. Not to mention, I'd sold more copies than I did during the entire two year period with Apex.
I did more research. Seeing a pattern here? Research, research, research. It was starting to bite into my writing time. Hours and hours of reading blog after blog, do this, do that, this is how you get a bestseller. If you're not careful you'll disappear down that rabbit hole and never emerge.
I tried one more giveaway after the sales dried up and the book didn't sell a single copy over a 2 month period. This time, I tried a new cover. I went with Elder Lemon Design, run by my good author friend Kealan Patrick Burke, again on a different time of week and time of the month. The giveaway ended with nearly 17, 000 downloads. High visibility on the free charts and got picked up by a number of bots for free kindle sites. After the free period, the book sold 50 copies at $2.99. I did something that may sound counterintuitive, I raised the price to $4.99. Yes, I did this even though the book was selling 1 or 2 books an hour. And you know what? It started selling even more. Why? Because there's a pretty big faction of readers on Amazon that actually believe that a book priced at $2.99 isn't a good book. They're actually looking for books priced higher. Yeah, go figure that one out? It seems that that $2.99 price point has become the new "free" somehow.
This year, I did my last free giveaway. There will be no more and this is a conscious decision. I've given enough copies away, for better or worse. This time I did a full 5 days and the book, once again, surged to #1 on the free charts (again doesn't mean all that much, other than visibility). The final tally was 7, 810 copies.
Then, the book started selling after the free period at $4.99 and for the first time as a self published book (or traditionally published for that matter) the book broke the top 100 of Paid sales in the Horror category. And stayed there for a few days. And borrows took off, for some reason. Was it the free period, was the book listed on some list somewhere? I really can't say for sure.
Then, like a light switch, sales flatlined. No idea why, or the reason for it. And I'm back to where I started :) So it goes, I guess, and that's my experience to date with selling on Amazon, I gave away a TON of copies, I ended up on the Top 100 in paid sales, made some dough, and then went back to obscurity.
You mileage may vary.
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