Marie Silk’s Comments (group member since Jan 03, 2017)

Marie Silk’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

I think they call that a non-response. Just terrible :(.

It's usually frowned upon for authors to rate and review their own books. An alternative is using the review space to write a note to your readers or maybe explain your inspiration for writing the book (without a rating).

Faith wrote: "I got invited to a webinar which aimed to show indie authors how to 'trick' (wrong word - in a friendly way) reviewers of whatever their genre is into reading their book and reviewing it. The hiccu..."

Wow that's awful!

Sorry Carole, it has to be a mistake :(. Hope you get some answers.

Hi Alex, just curious who you contact to price match. I haven't personally tried it with my own books, but from what I've read from other authors, the soonest results come from contacting "author central" directly, not using the price match function. Have you tried author central? I hear they are getting more reluctant about price matching though. Hope it happens quickly for you. I was sorry to hear about your experience after pronoun announced their closure :(.

I prefer Ingram Spark in some ways, but the royalties take forever.

Good point, Amy. I haven't personally tried vanity publishers but I have heard that they don't actually promote the books and may even do a poor job on editing and cover, so you could end up worse off than if you went DIY on everything.

Congratulations on your audio book! Exciting! <3

Looks awesome :) well done!

L wrote: "Can anyone comment on whether a first novel is likely to justify these costs? Or will it languish in low-ranked Amazon obscurity?
"

The figure I've heard for the average # of books sold for a self-published author is about 1000 units in the lifetime of the author, with 100-250 of those sales being in the first year. I know some authors who have exceeded these numbers, but some struggle to sell 50 in their first year.

A lot of the answer to your question will depend on your royalty rate and how much marketing effort and dollars you put into it, as well as your genre, audience size, and story. My ebooks are priced at 2.99 and my paperbacks priced at 9.95. I get approx $2 per ebook sale and $3 per paperback sale. This could give you some idea of how many sales it takes to cover the initial costs.

No one can really tell you if you will recoup your publishing expenses, but you also don't know until you put your book out there :).

Here is an article with interesting figures on both traditionally published and independently published books:

"One publisher of an independent press told me that most indie press books sell ...about 1,500 copies, with 3,000 being good sales. "

"...most fiction books published by a traditional publisher garner somewhere between 500 and 500,000 sales. Sometimes less, sometimes more."

narrowed down:

"...most novels published by a big publisher BookScan somewhere between 2,000 and 40,000 books."

https://electricliterature.com/everyt...

Hope this helps :).

All but one of my book covers came from SelfPubBookCovers dot com. They have a great selection of professional pre-designed covers in every genre and most are under $100. Sorry but I would not recommend paying much more than this for a first novel. Once the book is published, there are so many more expenses for marketing, website, etc., so keeping the costs as low as possible at this stage is ideal imo.

Thank you again for the opportunity, Carole!

Just wanted to put this out there for anyone who might not know:

If your books are published for expanded distribution through Ingram (and possibly Createspace), your books are likely available on a website called the Book Depository. The nice thing about this is you can get worldwide free shipping to *almost* any country in the world. So if you order your own books and send them direct from The Book Depository, you are only paying the retail price (which you will get royalties from) and no shipping cost. This is how I am able to open my Goodreads Giveaways to other countries too.

Glad to see you made it through the storm all right, R.L. ♥

Scary times :(. Wishing peace and safety on you R.L. and Lyra.

Annabelle wrote: "Thanks, Marie! Are there any FB groups you would recommend joining?"

Here is one:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/10845...

Hey Annabelle, I sent you a friend request on Facebook :).

Most of my Facebook friends are authors, so I use it to talk about random stuff happening in life or about what is happening in writing life. You can scroll down your newsfeed (or "Home") to see what your friends are up to and "like" or comment on their status. For me it is like a support group of authors who help and encourage each other at whatever stage they happen to be in with their writing.

It is also popular to "share" interesting or funny pictures.

There are Facebook "groups" that are specifically there for posting about books. I've joined some of these and post regularly about my books.

Carole wrote: "Thanks, Marie- Hope you listen to our radio show, we named your book as one of our picks of the month!!!"

I really appreciate that! Thank you!

Carole wrote: "We write and it leaves a permanent mark that we were here. It's a lasting monument to our thoughts and our culture. It is a gift we leave for the next generation. AND, if we would learn to all help each other, maybe we can change this corporate climate of apathy and greed! "

Aw love this ♥

I understand the urge to reply, but it's never advisable. A 2-star review on goodreads is better than a 1-star, so in the grand scheme of things, it's really not that bad. I understand the frustration, though!

My books are priced at 2.99. I have thought about raising them to 3.99 but I would rather them be affordable since there are seven to buy in the series, and also they are "shorter" novels, averaging 45K words. I worry that people would be disappointed to get this size novel at more than $3.

I've seen it said in various places on goodreads, by both readers and authors, that UK readers aren't as inclined to pay more than 99p for a book as readers in U.S., CA., or AU might be. I see a good amount of UK traffic but still nothing in comparison to .com traffic. A lot of it is due to promotion sites that reach the UK audience. I also post regularly to Facebook groups and tweets via AskDavid which have more of an international reach.

@Alex, whoa! Awesome job on the sales! :)