World, Writing, Wealth discussion
All Things Writing & Publishing
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What's important and what's not for sales and discoverability
The first suggestion seems OK, provided you have friends that actually buy books. Only too many of my friends seemingly don't read ebooks, the rats!You would probably get to page 1 on a sub-genre "Russia and Former Soviet Republics" but I was unaware there was one, which means I wouldn't find it that way.
Again, I am hardly a best seller but I do make a profit (so far, anyway). The one thing that I think might have helped is my blogging. The first problem with this is also to get known, but I now get modest number of readers for my blog, and my book sales have increased.
Interestingly, the countdown price reduction strategy has sometimes led to increased sales when it is running, BUT NOT OF THE PROMOTED BOOK. I don't understand that either.
Mine don't read that much too and even less so in English. But I'm honored to have a small nucleus that keeps buying and recommending my stuff and have my sincere thanks for that...Blogging should be a good idea, more so since you speak from experience. That's surely advantageous for discoverability and may pop up better on seach engines than books. Requires a certain amount of dedication though, doesn't it?
Promotions attract attention and if it results in sales of other books then it does the job, I guess -:)
Yes, the problem with blogging is it takes a lot of effort, and I am still unsure of the benefits. However, it seems to have done something for me, and I am unclear whether anything else I have done is better ;-)
You are on the profit side and that's important. I believe in results as the best evaluation of the methods, so your system works.Can it work better? Probably, just as anything can be improved or fine-tuned. Seeing your diligent approach though, I'm sure and wish you constant progress and better sales!
Thanks for the wishes. I am sure that success tends to come with effort, so I keep on keeping on.
And here too, some new strategies and advice are most welcome-:)
Nik, you've hit on two things thathave helped me. One is my category. It is relatively underpopulated compared to dozens of other categories on Amazon so I have been able to rank much higher and for longer than if I were in a heavily populated fiction category. This fact has made me a best-seller in two categories over the past 7 months which would not have happened if I were a romance or thriller author for example. Being a best-seller has a lot of benefits so it is the gift that keeps on giving.Also you mentioned being associated with other best-seller in your genre. This has happened to me on Audible. The first time I saw that my book was being listed with a "people who bought this also bought" I was very excited and I think it has boosted sales. I've sold more books on Amazon but I make more money on Audible.
When sites associate your product with a best-seller keep this in mind before you get out the champagne. It's not as great as you think. They are using your book as bait to catch a bigger fish. They want people who are considering your book to definitely buy the more popular book being associated with yours - if they also buy your book that's great but that's actually not Amazon's goal. They want that best-seller to get even more sales. Your book still has to earn its keep. If you go to the best-seller's page your book will not be associated with it. Only when actual joint sales of both books rise in tandem is there a lucrative cross-promotion. But it's still advantageous because it gives your book a lot of credibility and reflected glory. But until sales come in it is still a one-way street.
You're at the cool kids table at school but you're not invited to the parties yet. Or being hired as the official limo driver for the president. It can change your life but it is only 1/1000th likely to affect his. So if you have a friend buy your book along with another popular book it only works if you have several (probably quite a few) friends who are willing to do the same thing with the exact same books. Otherwise the effect is null because of dilution.
Thanks, Tara, for your input. Good to know. These are important considerations...
Hi Nik, we're told reviews are important, yet to get them you need to sell copies of your book (or give them away) and the strike rate for someone to take the time to review is said to be poor. I don't know how effective they really are. I do wonder about Kindle Unlimited though. I haven't gone down that road as I have heard this is where most books are ripped off from - true or not? I don't know, but I'm a little cautious I guess. It does interest me though. Paid per page read generates some authors more than sales and I think more people are likely to borrow than purchase, which gets your name out there. Word of mouth has always been the best sales tool for me, I would rather buy something that has been recommended by someone I trust. So I am considering this more and more.
I should clarify that I think reviews on this platform could work wonders (getting them is the hard part). I follow a few reviewers and when I read their comments it does make me either want to read the book or steer clear of it. I'm not sure about the effectiveness of Amazon reviews though.
Allan wrote: "I should clarify that I think reviews on this platform could work wonders (getting them is the hard part). I follow a few reviewers and when I read their comments it does make me either want to rea..."Unless you write in a niche it is difficult to go it alone on Amazon without being associated n KU. Not impossible but I would recommend it to a beginner. If you don't like it after three months you can withdraw. Too many other titles out there wanting attention as well.
Allan wrote: "I should clarify that I think reviews on this platform could work wonders (getting them is the hard part). I follow a few reviewers and when I read their comments it does make me either want to rea..."Amazon reviews are a big deal and yes, they are hard to get.
Thanks for your thoughts Tara. Have you had any issues with copyright theft on KU?
Allan wrote: "Thanks for your thoughts Tara. Have you had any issues with copyright theft on KU?"Never nor am I aware of such from fellow authors. Not to say it's impossible but KU is no more or no less likely to give rise to piracy than any other platform, imo. If someone is determined to rip your book they can do so just as easily by purchasing it from the Kindle store. No format is safe from piracy but I don't think it happens a lot.
Tara wrote: "Allan wrote: "Thanks for your thoughts Tara. Have you had any issues with copyright theft on KU?"Never nor am I aware of such from fellow authors. Not to say it's impossible but KU is no more or ..."
You can also check kboards.com--a longstanding community of authors focused on publishing on kindle--(which is also listed in our groups author resources spreadsheet :) )
Tara wrote: "Nik, you've hit on two things thathave helped me. One is my category. It is relatively underpopulated compared to dozens of other categories on Amazon so I have been able to rank much higher and fo..."Enlightening and logical analysis on how the bestsellers system works.
Alex G wrote: "Tara wrote: "Nik, you've hit on two things thathave helped me. One is my category. It is relatively underpopulated compared to dozens of other categories on Amazon so I have been able to rank much ..."Non logical hugs to you, Alex! You're always so encouraging :)
The first 49 days... My debut novel eBook went on pre-sale on November 1st on Amazon. It was released on November 25th on Amazon and Smashwords and the paperback released on December 8th only on Amazon. I havent done any payed or free ads or tweets by book promo companies. I havent sent the book out to any bloggers. I havent even started tapping into the traditional book marketing methods.
That starts this week. Tomorrow I have a GRs giveway starting.
All of my sales so far have been from my own social media and website traffic (approximately 20,000 social media followers between FB, Twitter and LinkedIn). Im averaging 2-3 book sales a day on Amazon. Until December 8th it was all eBook and now its all been paperback sales. Prior to the eBook release I was consistently in the Top 5 of Hot New Releases for Historical Italian Fiction Kindle (small category) and now for the last 2 days Ive bee in the Top 50 of Hot New Releases Historical Thrillers Books (much larger category). But I dont think either has helped sales. I believe that being a "Best Seller" on Amazon might be the only helpful tag to have. Smashwords (Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble) has only accounted for a few sales.
I have 14 reviews with a 4.9 avg. 13 are 5 stars and 1 is 4 star. I honestly do not think those reviews have resulted in any sales though. I think with 14 reviews people will at least think "well this book doesnt suck." But I dont see the reviews selling books at this point.
So I cannot complain. 100 total sales was my goal for the first 30 days from release date and I think I might hit it or at least get close.
Im not sure if this helpful for anyone but I figured I would share in case it could be.
My takeaway is to blog early and often. Be interesting. Get your social media going early as well. Engage your followers. Talk to them, make them part of the process. I have several followers that are really trying to help me, even though I only know them online. One guy is going to get me (fingers crossed) into several libraries in several smaller US states from his connections.
No one ever becomes successful without the help of others. I am truly humbled and honored by someone who wants to read my book. To give me 8 hours of their life is a gift that I take seriously and appreciate.
Tara wrote: "Allan wrote: "I should clarify that I think reviews on this platform could work wonders (getting them is the hard part). I follow a few reviewers and when I read their comments it does make me eith..."The ever-elusive review is like the story about the fish that got away. That story is so much better than the 50-lb sturgeon that my dad caught b/c the fish that got away always gets bigger every time you tell the story.
In a similar fashion, the more often we say and hear how important reviews are to increase sales, the larger that importance grows until it's a 1-ton whale looming over your little paperback. Then, there are the deniers who say that reviews will fall out of the sky, or that as you get more sales you'll get more reviews, or don't worry about getting reviews (the rationale being that writing another book is the best advertising. As with most things, the true reality lies somewhere in the middle. Review and sales are mutually supporting.
Then, how do you get reviews? Not through casting a wide net--for what net could cover the Seven Seas--instead, you find a school of fish that would love to eat your book (aka "targeted advertising"). Perhaps I'll write a post on that.
Sounds like a pretty decent starter and initial sales! Hope the sales will keep up and further increase.Thanks for sharing and it's definitely helpful. According to New Year resolution's thread many plan further publications soon and any successful experience provides some ideas and benchmark.
Michael wrote: "The first 49 days... My debut novel eBook went on pre-sale on November 1st on Amazon. It was released on November 25th on Amazon and Smashwords and the paperback released on December 8th only on Am..."Awesome story! Congrats on your hard earned success :)
Alex G wrote: "Tara wrote: "Allan wrote: "I should clarify that I think reviews on this platform could work wonders (getting them is the hard part). I follow a few reviewers and when I read their comments it does..."I'm starting to think reviews are like lightning strikes lol.
Thanks Nik and Tara - I dont know if what I've done is success. I was just sharing experiences. I have a long way to go to be a "successful author." I would place that bench mark at 1000-1500 sales per month total. Someone told me that if you can hit an author rank between 5000-10,000 consistently, you can consider yourself successful and if you can get it below 5000 consistently, then you can quit your day job. I think reviews can be helpful but they arent the end-all-be-all. For me the best "advertising" is word of mouth. I think when you hit the "middle ground" of authors reviews then become important. When you are a best-selling author, I dont think many people care about them. They buy because they have probably read your books before. And when you're new, people just assume your friends wrote most of your reviews anyway. So its when you are trying to get to the level of 1000-1500 sales a month that people will read the reviews to see if they want to take a chance. Anyone who's reading my book knows me or at least has interacted with me on some level.
Michael wrote: "Thanks Nik and Tara - I dont know if what I've done is success. I was just sharing experiences. I have a long way to go to be a "successful author." I would place that bench mark at 1000-1500 sales..."Since you mentioned sales rank in relation to # of book sales, here's a graphic from authorearnings.com that I shared a few months ago. So , to figure out your target sales rank,
(1) take your target gross income
(2) assuming that you price your book at the minimum 70% royalty rate, $2.99--then divide that target gross income by $2
(3) divide result (2) by 365 to get the target number of daily downloads
(4) cross-reference the graph below.
(http://authorearnings.com/2016-digita...)
Alex G wrote: "Michael wrote: "Since you mentioned sales rank in relation to # of book sales, here's a graphic from authorearnings.com that I shared a few months ago."Interesting chart, Alex!
Michael wrote: "The first 49 days... My debut novel eBook went on pre-sale on November 1st on Amazon. It was released on November 25th on Amazon and Smashwords and the paperback released on December 8th only on Am..."
Well done on your launch! Wow :)
I added some instructions on how to calculate the number of daily downloads and subsequent sales rank based on your desired gross income. I also added the link to the graphic 's contexxt
Marie Silk wrote: "Well done on your launch! Wow :) "Thank you. I just signed up for AskDavid based on your recommendation so I will see how it does for me...
That graph seems to be online with what I was told. Seems like a 5000 rank would equate to 50-60 sales a day or 1500 to 1800 per month. And a 1000 rank would equate to 100 a day or 3000 sales per month.
Well let's see how paid traditional book promo works...Just paid for an AskDavid.com package - Book Promo and Twitter Promo for $25 total. (30 Tweets to 54,000 followers)
http://askdavid.com/for-authors
And a BarginBooksy.com email blast to 133,000 subscribers on 12/16.
https://www.bargainbooksy.com/sell-mo...
I have a GR giveaway starting tomorrow so I will push the Tweets 5 a day for 6 days whenever it starts.
Total invested $75. I highly doubt it will return $75 even in gross sales. This is more for discoverability/branding then marketing/sales but hopefully I can get 5 sales out of it.
Michael wrote: "Well let's see how paid traditional book promo works...Just paid for an AskDavid.com package - Book Promo and Twitter Promo for $25 total. (30 Tweets to 54,000 followers)
http://askdavid.com/fo..."
Not to mention SEO benefits. Also look into Goddess Fish Promotions.
Michael wrote: "That graph seems to be online with what I was told. Seems like a 5000 rank would equate to 50-60 sales a day or 1500 to 1800 per month. And a 1000 rank would equate to 100 a day or 3000 sales per month."at the 50 sales/day (and a 5,000 sales ranking) that would be gross annual sales of $54,750 (at the minimum 70% royalty rate, $2.99) for a net annual income of $38,325 royalties - expenses - income taxes. now do that for 2 books.
Hm, my book's best rank in the paid store was around 3K but it dropped to 10K then 15K pretty fast. It seemed like it was after a steady trickle of sales for 3 months that I got the high rank, but during that time, the most the book sold in one day was 44 units. A few months before that, it sold over 80 units in one day but the highest the rank would go was 7K in the paid kindle store. It's really hard to keep those ranks but I think that steady sales day after day will help a book rank higher than sporadic sales of high numbers some days combined with days of no sales.The book I just released had 110 pre-orders (which basically all count on the release day) but the book's rank never went better than like 25K.
Alex G wrote: "Michael wrote: "gross annual sales of $54,750 (at the minimum 70% royalty rate, $2.99) "Depending on what your day job is or where you live that might be enough... lol
But yes I think if you can get your author rank under 5000 or do that with 2 books, most part time writers can become full time writers.
Marie - those are solid ranking numbers and sales. Very well done.
What was the best author rank you have ever had ? Those are the numbers we were talking about not the rank of the book.
Michael wrote: "What was the best author rank you have ever had ? Those are the numbers we were talking about not the rank of the book. "oh right. good point. i myself wasn't clear on that, but on a second read, i believe that the infographic's x-axis is the author's "Amazon overall kindle sales ranking". (i left a question on the website.)
Oh I see. My best author rank was 5500 but it usually sits somewhere around 15K :) My approach to book discovery is to look for every way to expand my reach. Giveaways, author interviews, social media, blog features, promotions, reviews.
Michael wrote: "Well let's see how paid traditional book promo works...Just paid for an AskDavid.com package - Book Promo and Twitter Promo for $25 total. (30 Tweets to 54,000 followers)
http://askdavid.com/fo..."
Good luck! Did you create a booklinker link? It's so helpful when determining which of your tweets are getting the most response (in the form of clicks) :)
Marie Silk wrote: "Good luck! Did you create a booklinker link? It's so helpful when determining which of your tweets are getting the most response (in the form of clicks) :) "Not yet. I still havent heard back from AskDavid. I will do it though. Whats nice about Twitter is that they give you that stat in your profile so its easy to see which tweets work the best. Obviously the one Tweet where I mention porn, sex and an Evil Pope did the best. lol
Marie Silk wrote: "Oh I see. My best author rank was 5500 but it usually sits somewhere around 15K :) "
Thats tremendous! Congrats! An author rank of 15k is something that most of us can only dream of. I felt lucky to break 100,000 for a week or so. lol
I heard similar projections also elsewhere about correlation between books sales and ranking on Amazon.com:http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-things...
Heard that for UK site you need to roughly divide by 2
Hi Marie,Does Booklinker automatically resolve to the correct country URL?
I.e. If I was in the UK, it would resolve to the amazon.co.uk site.
Just created myBook.to/ASubtleAgency which goes to the US site.
That's my understanding of it, Graeme :)
Michael wrote: "The first 49 days... My debut novel eBook went on pre-sale on November 1st on Amazon. It was released on November 25th on Amazon and Smashwords and the paperback released on December 8th only on Am..."Hi Michael, that is a great result, and an excellent foundation on which to build future sales.
Congratulations.
After a three years long hibernation, I guess it would help to hear new ideas or share some accumulated experience
No sales, no movement regardless of advertising and sales locations. I have withdrawn all ebooks to Kindle, i.e. stopped Smashwords. Paperback are mostly still with Lulu but will probably move all to Amazon. Recent ones are there. Still have Babelcube for a couple of translationsMy dreams of bestsellers are gone - now I write for fun a sale is a rare blessing
I still have some sales, but not huge, and mostly from Amazon. I have found that the books I also put on Smashwords sell hardly any on Amazon, and it is difficult to promote them on the sites that aggregate from. But sales are not that great from Amazon either for those that are select. I guess I just don't have what it takes to be a best seller, but since I always guessed I was writing for a small niche, it is not that surprising. The problem is, that niche is not well-defined, and worse, I have discovered that people that I am writing for are seemingly uninterested in buying ebooks. Ouch.
Nik wrote: "Mine don't read that much too and even less so in English. But I'm honored to have a small nucleus that keeps buying and recommending my stuff and have my sincere thanks for that...Blogging shoul..."
What is the best way to start blogging? Obviously, a blogger has to start somewhere but how/where to begin? Does it have to be controversial to draw attention? Where does a blogger attract an audience? Advice please.
I usually have spikes in sales when one of my books is reviewed positively by a reviewer who has a healthy following. There is an important differentiation between a casual reader who reviews and a reviewer with 1k or more followers through all of their media outlets though. If a casual reader reviews, It rarely results in short term sales for me. Not implying that those reviews aren't important, because I believe they are over the long term: the more reviews you can amass over time, the more sales will result. Having said all of that, reviews (for me at least) are extremely difficult to come by, even from my titles that are selling a reasonable amount of copies.
Blogging is an interesting problem in that it seems almost as hard to attract readers there as it does to get books sold. I have been at it for some time, and I now have gradually attracted a number of readers. The key, as you might guess, appears to write something that is interesting, and at least some of the time your opinion is worth reading, which means you have to know what you are writing about. The odd opinion piece where you have simply a personal opinion is probably OK, but don't make a habit of it. I do not encourage you to blog about writing - there are too many doing that already, but if you want it to help promote sales, you should blog about something that roughly corresponds to what you write. I write SF, and scientific non-fiction, so many of my blogs involve something scientific. I always announce discounted books, but otherwise try to steer clear of "Buy my books". I would be interested to hear what others who blog think.
I'd be interested to know if anyone has had any success with AskDavid as it didn't work for me. Author interviews are another avenue of promotion. I've been interviewing a different author each week since 2013 on my website www.ritaleechapman.com. Always looking for new authors so if anyone is interested please contact me through the website.
It always amazes me how my ranking can go from 2M to 200,000 odd with one book sale! I've recently started using AMS ads but so far haven't found them very successful either. It's just a tough market with so many free books available. I'll get back to my writing - maybe the next one will be the one!
Michael wrote: "I usually have spikes in sales when one of my books is reviewed positively by a reviewer who has a healthy following. There is an important differentiation between a casual reader who reviews and a..."There are a lot of silent readers out there.
I, in my turn, want to highlight 2 aspects that look important to me.
First, there is 'also bought' feature on Amazon which groups your book with those purchased by the same customers. In my opinion, it's a powerful tool because your book gets that 'moment of glory' right beneath another (likely similar) book and it's big and visible. If your book pops up on the purchase page of a bestseller, it's not a bad springboard. I'm almost inclined to ask my friends, who purchase my books, to buy them together with some best-selling hard-boiled thriller, so my book would end up in a 'good company' and they would enjoy a decent read, if my modest masterpiece wasn't sufficient -:)
Another thing - categories/genres and sub-genres. A 'small' author, as I am at the moment, with a few sales, I've no chance to appear high on popular categories like "Thrillers", but I can get pretty high on narrower niches like 'Political thrillers' or 'Russia and Former Soviet Republics'.
None of the above are probably decisive per se, but I think they are important parts of the puzzle...
What do you think? What else?