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If you don’t have anywhere else to send people, send them to your mailing list.
I did both — sending people to our mailing list and pitching our other lines
SO WHAT’S NEXT? It sucks finishing a series, doesn’t it? Reginald’s journey (as I wrote it, anyway) is now complete, but there’s plenty more great stuff to read. And you can get that great stuff FREE. Just go here to get your next read for free: realmandsands.com/free/
and/or thrillers, or Unicorn Western if you like stuff that’s really, really epic … and has the same basic serious/funny vibe as Fat Vampire. But hey, it’s ALL good stuff! Thanks so much for reading!
It’s also worth noting that we have specific versions of our manuscripts for each bookseller platform, all with different CTAs. We want the version we upload to Kobo to link to the Kobo version of that title, and we want the Amazon version’s CTA to link to the books on Amazon. It’s a bit of extra work, but it’s worth it. The Internet makes people lazy, and if you can give them one-click access to what you want them to do, you absolutely should.
Making a book free is a bit tricky. You can upload a book to Kobo and set the price as free, but can’t currently do the same to Amazon, Nook, or Apple. To cover those other marketplaces, the best option as of this writing is to upload your book to Smashwords.com, set the price as free, and set Smashwords to distribute that book to Nook and everywhere else (except Kobo and Amazon) for you. Upload to Amazon directly, set the price to whatever makes sense (they won’t let you make it free), and wait. If you do everything right and don’t get rejected by Smashwords’s meat grinder, your book will
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Amazon and hope they lower their version of your book to match the free price tag. It’s hit or miss, and the details in this paragraph could change at any time. But even with all of this said, free can be dangerous. You do want to give people a way to taste your product, but definitely don’t want to train people not to pay for your stuff.
lists. If they’re never going to buy, the relationship isn’t equal. They want to take and take, so if they’re not telling their friends and leaving you reviews — basically, giving back — then how is that fair?
you don’t have a good reason to make your
book free, don’t.
Short Stories in Your Story's World
You might be able to write multiple short stories to exist within your story worlds, and if you do, you’ll be able to steer people to your upsells through several avenues.
Offering Free Books on Your Website Our default is to offer books and stories for free on the major sellers, but you can also offer the files (.mobi for Kindle, .epub for other readers, and PDFs for just about anything) for download on your website. We also use them as an enticement to join our mailing list. If people join the Realm & Sands mailing list, they can choose any of our $4.99-or-less books as a thank-you.
We simply e-mail the file after they do.
Online Reading Sites Wattpad.com, for instance, is a popular website where people can read free books uploaded chapter by chapter by the authors using apps available on their computers or various mobile devices. Wattpad readers typically like their content in nuggets, and they may follow a book’s posting live, reading a chapter or two per week as it’s slowly uploaded. You can upload your free funnel-starter to sites like this to expand your reach, then include a link at the end of the chapters (or at the end of the larger work) to get the rest of the series.
The original intention was to follow television’s model one step further (Sean and Dave had introduced the idea of episodes and full seasons to the e-book world a year earlier), so we created “pilots” for all six of our ideas. The theory was that some of those pilots would be green-lit by our readers and be written out fully while the others would die and live their lives as smaller stand-alone shorts. We asked our readers to vote with their reviews.
Here’s where free comes in: Because we’d already structured all six projects to have pilots, we kept the pilots online and made them free, with the upsell being the completed first season or bundle. Namaste’s pilot became a part of the larger novel, but the original pilot worked as a self-contained story within a story, so we released it as a free prelude. You can always try stories out this way, seeing how well the pilot lands with readers before deciding whether to flesh it out. If the pilot does well, you can then write the larger work and leave the free pilot as the entry point to your
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You can make your funnel a simple series of novels or novellas introduced by a free first book if you want to. We actually like this structure for our Future of Sex serial with Lexi because if readers get hooked on the series (which they do; the cliffhangers between books are killer), they’ll gobble new installments as they’re released. One significant advantage to this model — especially for people like the three of us, with many projects on our plates — is that it allows you to take your time. Once you have two books, you have a rudimentary funnel, and although that funnel will improve with
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before we publish the pilot.
The nature of conversion (whether or not people buy an upsell through a CTA) is such that you’ll lose people if they can’t act instantly. We didn’t want to have Adult Video 1 out there for free, gaining fans eager for more of Heather’s hilariously slutty antics, without having our upsell available for immediate purchase. If we’d done that, most of those people eager to pull the trigger would have lost their urgency, moved on, and forgotten the series (as hilarious as it might be). Because of this, we always feel some
The new year is approaching, and January is typically a very big month for e-book sales.
connects with readers, be a human being. That’s it. Once you understand that you need to add selling to the mix, the rest is writing e-mails like you would to a friend. “Hey Joe, you asked what I was up to, so let me tell you about some cool things.” Like that. No magic. If anything, you may need to un-learn some of the crap you’ve heard about e-mail marketing. The best e-mails are personal, funny, engaging, even vulnerable. The best thing you can do in your e-mails is to be honest, especially when you wonder if you shouldn’t be. Level with your readers. Shoot straight. People can smell crap,
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worth paying close attention to because they represent a new way of communicating with your fans, and making the middleman wait in the corner where he belongs.
books priced at $4.99 or less for free as a
thank-you, and they’ll get that as soon as they sign up and e-mail us back with their choice. They also get first crack at our new books, often at a discount, and will receive an ongoing e-mail-only serial (Caveman Timecop) that isn’t available anywhere else.
After your signup page, you will need to create an automatic reply message (sometimes called an autoresponder) so that readers who join your list will get an e-mail from you immediately. This is important for PR reasons (everyone likes being thanked and welcomed), but you’ll also need it to deliver any bonuses you’ve promised for joining, such as a link to a free book, instructions on how to contact you, and so on. Write this e-mail in a casual tone — one person e-mailing another. Don’t try to be “professional,” because for most people, professional equates to dry and boring.
Hey there, Outlaw! We're so glad you're here with us. We appreciate you reading, and want you to love our words. There are two ways we want to thank you right now (plenty more later). First is with our e-mail-only serial, Caveman Timecop. You can catch up with Caveman Timecop here: http://realmandsands.com/caveman-timecop Second is with a book from our catalogue. Please pick anything from this page priced $4.99 or less: http://realmandsands.com/books Just hit reply to this e-mail with your choice, and we'll get it to you as soon as possible. Thanks!
Think of your reader, who’s just finished your book. What do you need to tell them to make them want to go to your site right now and sign up for your list? Be sure to make the link in your CTA clickable. Few people will walk to
computer and type your URL into a web browser. Many more will click a link in an e-book to open their e-reader’s browser and sign up on the spot.
Optional: Using Placeholder Pages This one is a sorta-ninja trick I’m proud of.
At the end of each episode of The Future of Sex, there’s a significant cliffhanger. They’re the kinds of cliffhangers that have fans of the series clawing at their readers because they’re so eager to see what happens next. At the end of each episode, we capitalize on
that enthusiasm by including a CTA pointing to the next book. The CTA includes something specific about the cliffhanger, then tells the reader that the thing they want to know about will be resolved in the next episode, and then we give them the link. That works great for finished books with
To solve the problem, we had Lexi install a plug-in called Pretty Link on her website. Pretty Link lets you create links (leximaxxwell.com/fos5a for the Amazon (“a”) version of FOS 5) and then determine where those links send readers.
Pretty Link
released, we make sure that link points to the FOS 5 sales page on Amazon. But before that time, the same link is directed to a generic e-mail opt-in page on Lexi’s site that indicates that the book they’re looking for isn’t out yet, then gives them the
e-mail form they can use to jo...
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“Oops! You came too early!”
The beauty of this method is that it doesn’t require changing the book files at all.
The link itself stays the same; Lexi just goes into the Pretty Link control panel on her site to change where it sends people. It also makes the CTA itself more compelling, because they’ve clicked the link before they see if the book is available yet or not.
The best way to get people opening your e-mails is by using intriguing subject lines. Don’t be deceptive, but try to write something curious that a fan couldn’t help but check out. When I released Fat Vampire 5: Fatpocalypse, the subject line was Are you ready for the fatpocalypse? When we were building anticipation for Unicorn Genesis, we sent the cover we’d had made with the subject line, Now THAT’S a pretty cover! At Realm & Sands’ launch, when we debuted the Unicorn Western Full Saga, our subject line was the unicorn pun, Are you horny? Make your e-mails worth opening. “Worth
announcement, you can probably keep things brief. Visuals are powerful, and we’ve already argued how vital a professional cover is to a book’s success, so go ahead and show off the cover if you’re sending an HTML e-mail — something that’s easy via any professional e-mail service provider. Then include direct, clickable links to the major places where readers buy your books. For us, that’s Amazon U.S., Amazon U.K. (yes, separate links), Kobo, and Nook. We
always also say something awesome about the book to sell them on it and get them salivating. Sometimes, that just means cutting and pasting the product description into the e-mail.
Using Free Books as Lead-Gen This strategy piggybacks on the one before it. You need good CTAs in the back of your main product lines, but you can also put them in the back of works that are out there solely as lead-gen.
Wattpad, and other ways of using free to find new readers in the last chapter. Those are also potential lead-gen sources. If it’s pure lead-gen rather than a focused product funnel, you can
You could give a character a Twitter account. Be careful, because this could be stupid. Or it could also be awesome if you have 1) a character that is popular enough to warrant the account, who has a strong enough personality to fuel it, and 2) the ability to maintain the account.
“Change your car horn to sound like gun shots. That’ll get people the fuck out of your way,” and “Fucker asked me if he could use my
phone to call his sister. I said sure, then told him to hit redial.”
Boricio is very quotable, and if his online presence grew he would likely earn reTweets often. His bio could lead to an e-mail opt-in with a free book of Boricio quotes.
PopUp Domination,
My friend Jon Morrow, who runs BoostBlogTraffic.com and who is a certifiable genius, compares guest posting to being the opening act for a popular band. The other band has the audience you want to reach, so if you go out there in front of that audience and give a truly bravura performance, some of them are going to buy your albums and generally move into your fan base as well. The metaphor is
Second, you must wow the crowd. Some bloggers who try guest posting opt to save their best posts for their blog and use their lesser posts as guest posts. Don’t do this. Put everything you have into giving a stellar performance when you step in front of those new readers, and write the very best, most helpful, or most interesting post you possibly can. And lastly, you need to give the people a compelling and obvious call to action.
