Ereader News Today promo results (hurrah!)

I'm still pretty new to the ebook self-publishing world, and I've been picking up information and advice as I go along. One common bit of advice is this: promote your book. Seems pretty obvious, right? But it's not necessarily as simple as it seems.

First of all, as I mentioned in my last post, I spend plenty of time struggling with self-doubt, and it's hard to work up the confidence to try to let people know about your book when you're already sure no one wants to read it. Fortunately, I've recently had a few indicators that there are people out there who want to read my writing, and I've been faring slightly better in the self-doubt struggle since then.

The second thing that complicates the self-promotion efforts is this: there are so many options, it's hard to know what's worth the time and effort. Despite my crippling self doubt, I have actually tried a few different things--from setting up this blog to paying websites for promotion. Many of those efforts have been mentioned in other posts on this blog, and none of them have proven very effective. In fact, it would be pretty accurate to say that none of them have been effective at all!

And so the lack of results from those efforts, coupled with my own lack of confidence, have sort of kept my foot on the brakes regarding self-promotion.

But a few weeks ago I signed up for the Kboards Writer's Cafe forum, and I've come across plenty of authors who have found promotion opportunities that actually produced results. I read their posts, I took notes, and I figured I'd give it another try. (Because I'd already tried doing nothing, and I'd seen the results that brought--none.)

The first promotional website I signed up with was Ereader News Today (also known as ENT). Yesterday they included Blood Brothers as one of their featured Bargain Books (I dropped the price to 99 cents for a temporary sale, in order to qualify), and the results have been excellent. Yesterday turned out to be the best selling day in Blood Brothers six month history. I sold more copies than I had on the day of the book's launch, when I guilt-tripped all my friends and family into buying copies. And selling a lot of copies in one day resulted in the book climbing the rankings at Amazon. Here's a screenshot I took of the book at it's peak.



I'm hoping that rankings boost results in a little more visibility for Blood Brothers, at least temporarily, and a few additional sales because of it. If nothing else, I consider it a success because it's shown me that promotions can work, if you're going through a good provider. And Ereader News Today is definitely a good provider, in my experience.

So now I'm looking at other promotion opportunities, and starting to lay out a strategy. Here's hoping I'll be able to keep stoking the flame, until Blood Brother's has a steady fire burning beneath it.

Hurrah! Moving forward in 2014

Whenever I've looked at the sales information on my Smashwords account, I've seen reports of a few sales directly through their website, and a bunch of zeros for all the other places they distribute my books. I assumed this meant that the books weren't selling any copies anywhere else. And then, yesterday, I realized there was a little 2013 button showing up on the page. I clicked that button, and saw that copies of the books have been selling, especially Zombie City, especially through Nook. It was a wonderful, and significant, surprise.

See, I'm a pretty insecure guy, and even though I've been writing for almost 20 years now (since I was 15), I still sort of tend to think that no one out there is going to want to read my stuff. It hasn't stopped me from writing--indeed, writing seems to be a sort of compulsion that I can't stop doing, no matter what--but it has inhibited my self-promotion efforts, and impacted my motivation.

Up until yesterday, I'd figured the Zombie City series was a failure. I'd sold about a dozen copies through Amazon, and just a few more than a dozen through Smashwords, in the three months since I'd published the first episode. I figured people weren't that interested in it. I didn't try to promote it, or to find any reviewers willing to rate it. I'd even decided to put it on the backburner for a while, to see if I could come up with a different story that people might want more.

But yesterday I found out that people have been buying it. There have been about 55 Smashwords affiliate sales for Zombie City, mostly through Nook.

I know, I know: 55 sales is pretty small potatoes. Still, I was excited, especially by the third episode sales. I reason that if people are going on to buy the third episode, they're pretty invested in the story. Not everybody keeps going, but more than half of the people who bought the second episode also went back to buy the third.

For me, that's validation I can use to beat back the paralysis my insecurities had given me about that project. It tells me that there are some people out there who want to read what I write.

So here's my plan:

1) I'm going to jump back into the Zombie City series. I hope to finish Episode 4 before the end of January, and maybe wrap it up with a fifth episode sometime in February.

2) I'm going to try to get Episode 1 to price-match for free on Kindle. Right now it's free everywhere else, but Amazon hasn't price-matched it yet, and I haven't really made any effort to get them to do it (cause I figured no one wanted to read it anyway).

3) I'm going to start trying to promote the series. Most importantly, I'm going to start contacting reviewers, in hopes that I can get a few ratings to show up for it. Right now, none of the episodes have any ratings, and I get the feeling that people are much less likely to try a book if they don't think anyone else is reading it.

4) I'm going to get more active in my efforts to build a mailing list. So far, the only thing I've done to get people to sign up is post a widget link on this blog, which hardly anyone reads. I'm planning on including a link to the sign-up in the books themselves.

Basically, in general, I'm planning on working harder at this whole self-publishing thing. There's definitely a lot more effort I could put in, and seeing that there are people out there who want to read my writing has motivated me to try harder.

studying Howey's story

Have you heard of Hugh Howey? He's one of the biggest success stories in self-publishing. One of his stories was optioned by Ridley Scott for a potential feature film. He's turned down seven-figure offers from major presses wanting rights to his ebooks, and eventually negotiated a print-only deal with Simon and Schuster (keeping his ebook rights for himself).

My brother told me I should read Hugh Howey's blog to try to find out the secret to his success. So I started at the beginning, and read a bunch. I don't know if I discovered Howey's secret, but I did learn a few things.

Howey started out pursuing traditional publication, and succeeded in signing a deal with a small press for his first novel. After the first novel, he quickly (in the course of the next year) wrote three follow-up novels, but he published them by himself, on Kindle. During this time he also cranked out a novel for NaNoWriMo 2010 called Half Way Home, which was also self-published.

Throughout the buildup to his small-press release, and after it too, Howey seemed to do all of the right things. He wrote the aforementioned followups, he worked at spreading the word about his books, he worked at building an online presence and developing himself as a "brand." His efforts resulted in some success, but it was limited.

And then he broke out with Wool, a novelette that he made no efforts to promote, and which he never really expected to go anywhere. For some reason it did, getting hundreds, and then thousands, of sales, building more and more interest, all on its own. Wool created the snowball effect I mentioned in a previous blog.

Howey didn't seem to understand why Wool was having the success it was. But that didn't stop him from making an effort to capitalize on it. Once he realized Wool was becoming a break-out success, he cranked out 3 followups in the course of a month, and they helped to blow that break-out into one of the biggest book success stories of 2011. Eventually he published a total of nine Wool-related titles. They have sold more than a million copies, and have been translated into at least 24 languages.

So, what's the main thing I learned from the above?

Howey's success came as a surprise to him. It wasn't a novel-length work, it wasn't part of a series when it first started selling, and he wasn't putting effort into promoting it. It seemed to take off all on its own, but when it did, he seized the opportunity it presented.

What kind of strategy can I come up with after studying Howey's story?

Give up on self-promotion. Give up on spreading the word, and building a fan-base. Give up on "professional cover design and formatting." Give up on writing novels. Give up on writing series. Instead, focus on writing and publishing short, self-contained stories. Keep cranking them out. If fortune hits, be ready to turn the lucky story into a series. And do it quickly.

the fussy librarian

It's been almost five months since I self-published Blood Brothers, my first full-length novel, on Amazon. The book has gotten good reviews (15 reviews at the time of this post, with an average of 4.7 out of 5 stars), but it hasn't managed to build a significant audience, and it's lost most of the momentum from its initial release launch. Chances are, if I leave the book on its own at this point, it'll probably fade into total obscurity.

With that in mind, I've been looking at different promotional opportunities. I've heard of other indie authors paying for advertising, but I'm trying not to spend any more money on Blood Brothers until the book has earned back what I've already spent on formatting and cover design. Fortunately, I've stumbled across a promising-looking advertising opportunity that isn't charging for its services... yet. The Fussy Librarian is an email service promoting free and bargain books to ebook readers--you give them your email address, and they email you recommended titles. There are other websites that offer similar services, but as far as I know, The Fussy Librarian is the first to let people choose not only the genre of books they want to get announcements for, but also the levels of violence/sex/profanity that they're comfortable reading--from none to plenty. Here's how they announce their services:

Readers: Did you know you can get your very own librarian, for free. It’s true! Choose from 30 genres, select content preferences and she’ll send you daily ebook recommendations. www.TheFussyLibrarian.com

They've agreed to include Blood Brothers in their November 3rd email for Fantasy readers who don't shy away from depictions of violence. Here's hoping their service helps my book connect with some new readers!

The Snowball Theory

Why do some books sell like crazy, and others... don't? A lot of people have spent a lot of time pondering this topic, myself included. One idea that people seem to come up with is: book sales are like a form of mass. The more sales the book has, the greater its mass becomes. The greater its mass, the greater the gravity it exerts, pulling even more sales its way.

Take The Da Vinci Code as an example. It's one of the bestselling books of all time. It reached a sales momentum that actually seemed to propel itself forward to greater sales. Everyone was talking about it, and because of that, even people who don't normally read felt motivated to buy a copy, just so they could participate in the conversation.

That was back in the days of mega-bookstore dominance, when every town of notable size had at least one Borders bookstore and/or one Barnes & Noble, and the mega-bookstores fueled bestsellers sales. They offered bestsellers at significant discounts. They arranged the store displays in ways to maximize bestseller visibility.

Things have changed a bit since then. Book sales are no longer overwhelmingly channeled through the megastores. Borders went bankrupt, and rumor has it that Barnes & Noble is hurting too. Online sales, of both print books and ebooks, have claimed a growing portion of the pie. How will that effect the bestseller-phenomenon?

I think it'll make it even more pronounced.

From what I've seen, online booksellers tend to exacerbate many of the factors that feed into the bestseller-phenomenon. Mainly, they give more visibility to titles that are selling more copies. An online store is sort of like the old mega-bookstores, but instead of displaying books on tables and shelves, they're displaying the books on a screen. The more copies a book sells, the more likely it is to appear on the screen. And instead of dealing with a few dozen--or even a few hundred--people walking into a physical store on any given day, we're dealing with hundreds of thousands--even millions--of people looking at a screen.

Some readers might point out that there isn't one specific screen that all people see. Online booksellers like Amazon customize the screen to the viewer--if you like Fantasy fiction, they'll make sure that some of the books on your screen are Fantasy books. But I think that the underlying factors are similar. Not every Fantasy book you see on your screen will be seen by other people who like Fantasy, but there will probably be some titles that are shown to every reader of Fantasy books. And the more copies those titles have sold, the more likely it is that you'll see them.

More sales mean greater visibility. And greater visibility leads, exponentially, to more sales. I call it the Snowball effect.

What this means for self-published authors, in a practical sense, is that you're facing obscurity unless you can generate sales. If a month goes by without a title moving any copies, that book will receive none of the benefit of greater visibility. People won't see it unless they go looking for it, and since there are more than a million self-published books on Amazon alone, people are going to have to look pretty hard to find your book.

It's like your book is a pebble sitting on top of a snow-covered mountain. If no one buys a copy, the pebble just sits there. As the hours and days and weeks go by, your pebble sinks into the snow, and more snow falls on top of it, and pretty soon it's lost. What you need to do is prod at the pebble--try to get eyes on it, try to generate sales--and keep prodding until you can get it to move. If you only get it to move a little--sell only a few copies--the pebble loses its momentum and stops moving and starts to sink. But if you can give it a good jolt and start it sliding, it's more likely to have snow stick to it. And if it starts rolling down the mountain, and keeps picking up snow as it rolls, you've got the chance for it to become something big.

So, the initial efforts are the greatest. There are millions of pebbles out there--they're small and hard to see. Once a pebble starts rolling and taking on snow, you won't have to be as diligent to keep it rolling. It'll start to roll on it's own, at least for a little while.

And the good thing for self-published authors is the fact that we don't have such a strict time limit to get that forward momentum started. Physical books get taken off the shelves after a few weeks if they don't sell. Ebooks are still there, still available. We can keep trying to get the snowball rolling. Our main limitation is our own energy (which is a very real limitation).

Of course, that's how things look to me now, with Blood Brothers an inert pebble. I've never really got a snowball rolling, so I don't even really know if there is a snowball. Maybe I'm totally wrong about all of this.

Blood Brothers now on Nook and Smashwords

Blood Brothers is now available on Barnes & Noble Nook, and on Smashwords.

Click here for Nook.

Click here for Smashwords.

(Smashwords is currently reviewing the book for Premium Catalog inclusion, whereupon it'll be available on Kobo and the Apple ibookstore and pretty much everywhere else.)



I also want to mention that I've been pleasantly surprised with Smashwords so far. I'd never used the company before--my approach to D.I.Y. is usually to try to do everything myself, directly, and Smashwords is sort of a middleman service. But I'd heard of other authors like Lindsay Buroker using Smashwords, and I figured I'd give it a try. I'm glad I did. I like their orientation toward keeping things simple, and I appreciate the efforts Mark Coker (founder of Smashwords) makes to provide support to indie (self-published) authors. Among these efforts, Mark has written two different books about how to self-publish more effectively and have better success doing so. The books are titled Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, and The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, and they're both available for free (click the title of each book to go to the Smashwords page for it, though you can also find them on Kindle and elsewhere). I've read through both books, and while I've already come across some of the strategies and information they offer, I've also found a lot of new ideas in both. Here are a few things that come to mind:

1) Mark stresses the importance of making your books as easy for your readers to find as possible. That sounds obvious, but he gets specific about things I'd never thought of. For example, he doesn't recommend using initials in your author name (like, for instance, M.F. Soriano... whoops!), because it makes it harder for people to search for you. They might put "mf soriano" in the search bar instead of "m.f. soriano", or maybe they'll mix up the letters, and your books won't necessarily show up in the search results. (And what "mf" in particular will get you can be pretty eye-opening; I was actually contacted by a reader who'd tried to search for me on Kobo, and the "mf" brought up all sorts of crazy titles. Try it for yourself and you'll see.)

Also related to this: if you have more than one book in a series and they're already all written, put them all out at once. Don't try to release them on an ongoing schedule. If a reader has to wait for the next title to come out, they might not ever remember to buy it.

2) Although Mark goes to lengths to give indie writers hope, and to make them feel valued and supported, he also states pretty plainly that selling books is very hard, and that the vast majority of books (either independently or traditionally published) never sell very many copies. Because of that, he recommends spending as little as possible in self-publishing ventures--preferably nothing. I've pretty much come to that conclusion myself. I decided to contract professional services for Blood Brothers, and although I feel like the price was good (total cost for cover design and formatting for both ebook and print editions was $460) and I'm happy with the work I got... it takes a lot of sales to earn back even $460 when you only earn a buck or two per copy sold.

3) And speaking of money, though it is an obvious goal in most publishing, Mark stresses that there are other factors that are more important to a writer's career: namely, finding readers. If you're likely to earn the same amount of money at two different price points, Mark recommends choosing the price point that will move the most copies. If that means selling your book for half as much, but selling twice as many copies, that's what you should do.

4) Another little aside about money. Usually, selling a book directly through the store (like uploading it yourself to Barnes and Noble, for example) will get you more money than you'd earn if the book passes through a middleman like Smashwords. But in one important case, that's not true. If you upload the book yourself on Barnes and Noble, and set a 99 cent price for your book, you'll earn 40 cents a copy. If you put it up on Smashwords with a 99 cent price, and they distribute it to Barnes and Noble, you'll earn 60 cents per copy that sells there. This only works at the 99 cent price point, but it's something to consider.

There's a lot more to learn, and a lot more to be said about Smashwords. I'm still waiting for Blood Brothers to be approved for the Smashwords Premium Catalog. When that happens, I'll have more to share.

Blood Brothers Kindle exclusivity ends, & other news

When I put Blood Brothers up on Amazon I enrolled it in their Kindle Select program, which meant Amazon had exclusive rights to the eBook for three months. Yesterday, that exclusive period ended. I'm now in the process of making it available elsewhere--starting with Nook (which I uploaded to today) and planning on Kobo and the Apple store and maybe Smashwords.

Before the Kindle-exclusive period ended, I made Blood Brothers available for free download on two additional days--Monday and Tuesday of last week. Amazon gives you five free-download days when you make a book exclusive, and I'd already used three days shortly after the book went live. The book got a lot more interest this time, with about three times more copies being downloaded and a high-ranking of #6 on the Epic Fantasy bestsellers page (and this despite the fact that I didn't pay for any sort of promotion, like I did the first time). I'm guessing the greater interest resulted from the number of positive reviews the book has received.

Still, I don't think the free days helped me. There wasn't any bounce-over to the paid bestsellers list, there haven't been any greater than normal sales, and there haven't been any new reviews. If free-download days have the potential to help boost sales, Blood Brothers must not be in a position to benefit from it yet.

In other news, I've noticed that the price discount Amazon had been offering on the print version of Blood Brothers has slowly began to shrink away. At it's best, Amazon was selling the book for nearly 20% off the cover price. As of this post, that discount has dropped to about 13% off. If you're interested in buying a print copy, you might want to do it now--the price might keep going up. Click here to go to the Amazon page.

Also, I'm almost ready to start publishing my next project, a zombie-horror story set in San Francisco. Originally I'd planned on releasing it as a novel, but the story ended up developing in a way that made it work as a series of novellas. I've been rewriting it to fit that format, and plan on releasing the first part of the series sometime in the next two weeks. The working title is Zombie City, and here's a cover I've put together, using a picture taken by Gianluca Ramalho Misiti.

my experience with eBookBooster

My book Blood Brothers has been out for a little over a month, and I'm trying to spread the word. To that end, I recently paid for the services offered by eBookBooster, an ebook promotion website that I found out about through J.A. Konrath's blog. I figured I'd write about that experience here, to let other self-publishing authors know how it went for me.

If you go to eBookBooster's webpage, you'll see it's a pretty simple affair. Basically, the website offers to "Submit Your eBook to 45+ Sites for Only $40!" The thought is that you fill out a form once, on eBookBooster's webpage, and then eBookBooster uses that information to submit your book to a group of websites that feature bargain and temporarily-free eBooks. The websites in question are listed in a separate column on the left side of the page.

It sounded good to me, and J.A. Konrath--a guru of self publishing--recommended it. So I paid the $40, entered my book's information, and crossed my fingers.

When the first day of my promotion came around a few weeks later, I went back to eBookBooster.com to follow the links on the left-side of the page. I wanted to make sure that mention of my book had appeared on those sites. I got about halfway through the list, and I started to notice a few things.

First of all, almost none of the sites had mention of my book on their homepages. I dug a little deeper, clicking through to other pages or sometimes doing a site search for "Blood Brothers", and in the end only 6 sites (of the first 20+) had any sort of mention of my book, at all. (And frankly, the value of a mention that you have to search for seems pretty minimal. If it isn't on their homepage, it probably won't be seen by very many people).

Second, a few of the sites seemed to have almost nothing to do with books. Freebies 4 mom, for example, is mostly a listing site for moisturizer samples and coupons for Pampers.

In the end, I've had better results with previous promotions without using eBookBooster or any other promotion company. I suppose it's possible that my superior results with past promotions relate to the possibility that free-download promotions don't really work nearly as well as they used to. There's no way to really know.

But one thing I do know: I'm not planning on using eBookBooster again.

Blood Brothers in the U.K.

I'd never really thought about it before, but publishing a book on Kindle makes it available to a global audience. And other countries don't use the same Amazon.com website--there's a different website for each country. Recently I noticed a little drop-down menu on the sales-reports page of my Amazon site. I scrolled through some of the other countries and saw that copies of Blood Brothers have been downloaded in Germany, Italy, Brazil, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Cool!

Further investigation revealed that someone using the name "mpfc" has posted a review of Blood Brothers on the amazon.co.uk. Here's what they wrote:

Couldn't put it down...I loved this book, I got pulled in from the start and finished it in about three days. Really well written, excellent characters, I even cried a bit! Looking forward to Mr Soriano's next work.

I have no idea who mpfc is, but I definitely appreciate the review. Knowing that someone enjoyed the book, related to the characters, appreciated the writing--it means everything. So thanks!

Stages of an Indie Writer

Here's a link to a great article by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. One of the most interesting things in it, for me at least, is the comparison of "new" and "old" publishing, and the idea that writers accustomed to traditional publishing don't often recognize what success looks like in self-publishing. She writes:

In the old [world of publishing], books had to sell fast because they’d be off the shelf in three months (or less). In the new, the book is just starting to get noticed a year after publication. It might have its best sales month 29 months after publication.

If you're interested in publishing, I highly recommend you read the rest of the article.