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Publishing and Promoting
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The Numbers Thread - What Works and What Doesn't
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As for ENT, the price for a promotion is reasonable ($20) and I'm guessing their promotions work; I've seen several books listed more than once, although I think they restrict listings to once a quarter. But why would someone pay $20 a second time if they didn't get sales, especially collateral sales of other books?
I think they also want a book to be 'professional' in quality and have good reviews. There may be a minimum number of reviews too. But once you begin working with them, get through the inevitable first-time glitches, I think you can keep going. There are other promoters too; how effective they are I don't know.
If you intend to offer your books free for a set time, I'm reasonably sure you can do that through D2D. I won't; I've downloaded books, then dumped them when I didn't have time to read everything that sounded interesting. But dropping a price to $0.99 for a day or two? I'm OK with that. I mention this because at least one promoter won't carry your ad unless the book is free.
Jack wrote: "More FWIW:According to the Amazon Author's Forums, the price Amazon pays authors when one of their books is 'borrowed' has dropped to $1.31 or so.
The promotions aren't working, the price for bor..."
You don't have to use D2D for your Amazon listing. I use D2D for all non-Kindle digital and it works fine. That is one thing I think I've done right. :D
Update on my promo data from earlier on this thread: After my not-so-stellar promo experiences here is a little side benefit that appears to have come up from Amazon. I broke even on one promo and a week later got some sales but didn't break even on the second. For the past week, since the second promo, average sales have been up. I was starting to wonder about that until I went and looked at my Kindle listing. It turns out that it is still listed at 99 cents. I thought, "Crap, I forgot to put the price back up and all those sales are next to nothing but advertising." I went back to the dashboard and the price is up. So, it is actually one of those things where Amazon is paying me the higher rate but offering the book to readers for less. They're allowed to do that by contract. They can offer your book for less than your list price. It's their choice. My paperbacks are almost always "on sale" by Amazon's choice rather than my own, which is awesome, as long as I'm getting paid. Lessons learned: A. Amazon might reward some little promo sales spikes with things like this. B. 99 cents may be better than I thought. I'm not sure at this point if the slightly better sales are due to my previous intensive marketing efforts and a new release or if they are due to the 99 cent price staying put for a week. I suspect the later because the data doesn't show the downward slope associated with the end of a promo or post-new-release halo. I'm still a bit leery about 99 cents as a price because I do think it encourages the ebook culture of low value that is making it so hard for authors to recoup cost but I am more than happy to have a few more readers.
Jack wrote: "It's an aggregator, Draft To Digital (D2D). You can sign up with them and send them your Word file (there may be other formats too) and a cover photo. They'll process it through their various forma..."Thanks, this is all good to know as I look at how best to increase book sales.
Better to send them Epub though. Their formatting of Word files into Epub isn't great.
Here's my regular update for the week:I actually ran two book giveaways this weekend, one for a two day giveaway Fri-Sat and one for just Sun. The results were a bit interesting to me:
Nov 14(Fri)-15(Sat): 20 - book had no reviews
Nov 16 (Sun): 39 - book had two reviews
I consider this interesting because the one-day giveaway gave away almost twice as many as the two-day promotion even though it was only half the length! There are three possible explanations (discounting random noise).
1) Sunday has radically greater readership than Friday or Saturday.
2) One-day promotions are inherently better than two-day promotions and result in more books given away.
3) A book with just a few reviews gets significantly more attention than a book with no reviews at all.
I consider all of these to be plausible. Any thoughts?
You're talking number of free downloads, right?
I'm not sure this is the right discussion for this topic, but I think it applies. My novel HOOKED just received a very good review from Publisher's Weekly. Because of this, I've gotten a few emails from production companies interested in the film rights, etc. But many of these "interested parties" are actually scams. Well, not scams, per se, but things to avoid. In particular I'm speaking of rightscenter.com. They claim to be a database for books where film producers, etc., can find info for getting film rights. But they ultimately charge money for listing on their database, which is insane, and anyway, any real producer or production company would easily know how to find that info without a database. Just a warning.
Arie wrote: "You're talking number of free downloads, right?"Yes.
Andrew - it's also possible that your first giveaway set up the market a little bit for the second giveaway. People have heard/seen your name more, so they automatically give you more social credit, they find out that you have another book that's available... People who downloaded the first giveaway may also have received an e-mail from Amazon notifying them of the second giveaway. Amazon does sometimes send out notifications when an author you have 'bought' recently puts another product 'on sale'.
Your author rank will also go up slightly with the first giveaway, making the second more discoverable.
I have heard of authors doing 'rolling giveaways' to trade on what you are noticing, doing three or more giveaways in a row to pick up visibility.
D2D doesn't publish Amazon's books. They publish Apple, Kobo, B&N, Scribd, etc. but NOT Amazon. Thought you'd want to know. D2D is great to work with.
Yeah, it is strange because you go into D2D and they want you to approve a Kindle version of your file but then there is no option to choose Amazon as a distribution channel. Just as well. I am pretty sure they did have it in the beginning. They probably dropped it because everyone avoided that box. :)
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Amazon pays 35% on domestic sales, 70% internationally (although you have to check that option, or guess what, you get 35% there too, less a negligible 'delivery fee').
Why? Because they can. And so far, none of the other publishing houses are really challenging them. Not Apple, not B&N Nook, none of them.
Better than traditional? Sure. But not where it would be if there were more competition for authors.
Smashwords is supposed to be larger that D2D, but the software they use is problematic; D2D's is incredibly easy to use.
Now if only the other publishers would come up with marketing tools for Indie authors and publishers...
Agree, Jack. I can't believe Apple hasn't stepped up. Also, love D2D
Agree, Jack. I can't believe Apple hasn't stepped up. Also, love D2D
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No need to wait; the price is just $0.99 right now! Darwin's World, first in a series; the other book is The Trek,and I just wrote Chapter 7 of Home, the third book in the series.
Sabertooth cats, mammoths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, and evil humans, oh my! :D
I did ENT a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty good. Not spectacular but the price is a lot more reaasonable than most. At least I broke even, which is more than you can say for a lot of the more expensive options.
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Most marketing efforts haven't broke even.
If...a big if...a traditional publisher was willing to publish most of us, we might actually be better off going that way, then leaving everything else to experts. I've wasted a lot of writing time editing, working on covers, and marketing, none of which really sells a book.
The real drawback to traditional is that 'gatekeeper' part; very few of us who are publishing Indie would be published by traditional publishing houses.
Think about it; if there were the same glut of titles that Amazon publishes EVERY DAY, how many books could they sell?
Simply put, like the oil companies now, we're producing more product than people need. Even quality work can go undiscovered in the huge mass of electronic verbiage being dumped on the reading world. And we're competing for entertainment dollars with television, with video games, so much more.
By concentrating on the themes we write, we also narrow a target audience. I add a touch of science to my action-adventure books, also usually a bit of humor, but I downplay sex and don't pretend that relationships are the major day-to-day theme. Those things are there, sure, but they aren't the main themes, so if you're looking for romance, you'll feel unsatisfied by my books. Ditto sex...implied, but not graphic, so the titillation factor isn't there.
In so doing, I've sliced away two huge markets. I'm guessing that as much as half of the ebook market goes to readers of romance, especially those who want a bit of spice in the tale; just look at how many covers feature a guy with a huge six-pack dominating the heroine?
But figuring things out doesn't really make a difference. Maybe someone will make a movie of Darwin's World! Or even a TV series? :D
FWIW: I dropped the price of DW yesterday, mentioned it on my blog and on FB, and sold...
Not one copy. Not even at $0.99.
Jack, yup. That is exactly my assessment. You can get sales at 99 cents through ENT, IF your cover and blurb are really good (i.e. in my experience enough sales to break even). If you have a series and your work really is good enough to grab the reader, that might be well worth it and actually matter in the long run. That's a lot of ifs but they are the ifs I'm banking on. I also agree that focusing on your specific themes and not trying to hit the whole market is a good idea. :) I see my books as having broad appeal to those outside the romance ghetto too and specific appeal to those in niches such as geocachers, people who like the Pacific Northwest, people with earth-based spirituality, fans of fantasy with some historical and scientific research to beef it up and so on.
ENT did pretty well for me with a Countdown deal this summer (sold around 70 books in a day). However, that was when they had their old pricing structure, which I liked much better: pay for performance. Now, they're a lot more like BookBub, except with lower prices.
Bobbi wrote: "I'm not sure this is the right discussion for this topic, but I think it applies. My novel HOOKED just received a very good review from Publisher's Weekly. Because of this, I've gotten a few emails..."That's a good tidbit of info. Thanks. It's amazing how often people want to get their hands in your pocket.
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And some of the sales were collateral, not only of the sequel to Darwin's World but also of my other series, Combat Wizard and the other books in that trilogy.
Just in time, too; I'd sold a humongous 20 copies this month. No idea why, but the sales just dropped through the floor. Amazon's Forum indicated that others have also had problems.
With luck, and assuming I did my job as a writer, there will be other sales related to this promotion in future. It's all about getting noticed, and that's happened. But in any case, I'll be talking to the good people at ENT again.
Alright, here's my update for the week:Nov 21(Fri) - 21 giveaways
Nov 22-23(Sat-Sun) - 34 giveaways
I spent a lot of time scratching my head trying to figure out what was going on last week, so I did something of an experiment. Last Sunday, Death in Detail gave away almost 40 copies in one day (this is an extraordinary result for me, since my books barely get any attention). I tried to narrow down the possible causes this week by putting it up for a one-day giveaway on Friday. It only gave away 18 copies, which is if anything sub-average for a giveaway.*
This narrows down the possible reasons for the sudden spike in giveaways a bit. It probably means that Death in Detail doesn't have any extraordinary properties - ie: it's not because it's just an awesome book or has really good reviews that make people want to buy it. This also casts doubt on the idea that one-day promotions confer some special advantage.
Nevertheless, I am starting to believe there may be such a thing as a "first-day" bonus, meaning that people pay more attention to a promotion on the first day of that promotion. Interestingly, for the second promotion (the book that followed Death in Detail), I got 26 giveaways on the first day. By my standards those are high numbers for a Saturday! P.D.'s earlier suggestion that the first giveaway sets up the second is also very intriguing and credible - I will experiment more with this point in my next weekend.
I'm planning a push on my writing in December and what I learn here will probably help me plan my tactics.
Here's what I'm thinking now: if we combine these two ideas, ie: each promotion sets up the next and there exists some first-day advantage, then a series of a short one-day promotions for different books in sequence should yield better results than a single mid-length promotion (3 days or so) for a single book. This may be particularly true if, like me, you don't have any mechanism for getting the word out about your promotion. If true, this could be very useful information!
*Scientist's footnote: These aren't independent trials, however! Death in Detail could be giving away fewer copies now because people who might have wanted it already got it last weekend. Thus, all these conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt.
PS: I will take a look at ENT though I doubt I qualify.
Oops. Found an explanation above. Never mind!
Andrew wrote: "Alright, here's my update for the week:Nov 21(Fri) - 21 giveaways
Nov 22-23(Sat-Sun) - 34 giveaways
I spent a lot of time scratching my head trying to figure out what was going on last week, so ..."
Hi Andrew. I was wondering what you meant by having no mechanism for getting the word out about your promotion. Do you mean not having the budget to spend on promoting your giveaways? If so I'm sure you're aware that there are many sites which promote free Kindle or other ebook downloads without charge. I did a similar promotion in the beginning of the year and got much larger number of downloads than I could have
ever expected (the promotion was either 3 or 4 days, I don't remember). Obviously many people downloaded my book just because it was free, as opposed to being people who had actively wanted it. I would guess a lot have never bothered reading it, and have maybe even deleted it from their Kindles since then. But I did receive several reviews in the weeks after the promotion, as well as a significant spike in sales. In the end, nothing beats publicity and there are many avenues for cheap or free publicity for giveaways. There must be nothing more infuriating than writing a good book that nobody has ever heard of. A good free download promotion can at least get more people to know about your book. Once a reader gets his or her copy of the book half the battle is won. And if you get enough free copies out there, you will get reviews and even sales.
Gabriel wrote: "Hi Andrew. I was wondering what you meant by having no mechanism for getting the word out about your promotion..."Correct, I meant that I don't have a marketing budget. I also don't have any social media outlets - such as a twitter handle, etc. - that might ordinarily be used to get the word out about a promotion. May I ask what you did/what sites you found to be effective for promoting your giveaways?
Andrew wrote: "Gabriel wrote: "Hi Andrew. I was wondering what you meant by having no mechanism for getting the word out about your promotion..."Correct, I meant that I don't have a marketing budget. I also don..."
Hi Andrew,
Go to the link below; you don't have to join anything, but at the bottom of the page there are links to several sites which promote Kindle promos, most of them are free. http://authormarketingclub.com/member...
You can also find similar lists by checking out Awesome Gang and Book Goodies, as well as others that I'm not aware of. For my first novel, The Guilty, with nothing but free publicy from these various sites (and Goodreads too) I got well over 10,000 free downloads. I don't know about you, but that number freaked me out. (Of course the spike in sales, while appreciable, was no where near that. Still...)
I've been pretty quiet for the last week, mainly because I've been busy... More on that in a later post. First, I'd like to say that I've been pursuing a new strategy: giveaways every day in the month of December, and changing the giveaway book every day. I started with a giveaway last weekend (in late November), in an attempt to "set up" the December giveaways.Here's the confusing result:
Ignoring the sales line for a second, I don't really get what's going on here. I changed the book every day. Why did giveaways peak on the first and the second and decay thereafter? Does anyone have any guesses?
According to the Amazon Author's Forums, the price Amazon pays authors when one of their books is 'borrowed' has dropped to $1.31 or so.
The promotions aren't working, the price for bor..."
Jack, Please forgive my ignorance, but what is D2D? I might be looking to expand from Amazon as well.