Monthly Archives: April 2013

Don’t judge a book by its author.

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Writer’s blog: stardate: 26.04.2013

Part 1

I’ve quit my job!

I’m experiencing such a decent knock-on with sales at the moment on the back of my Amazon free listing that I have taken the plunge and quit my job – one of them, anyway.

This morning, I told the newsagent in the village to stuff his Sunday papers where the sun don’t shine – I’m not doing that paper-round ever again. Naturally, he demanded that the company vehicle be returned immediately. No problem – I was too big for that bike anyway and I hated the colour and the tinsel streamers that hung from the handlebars to dance in the breeze. I let the tyres down before I left.

I only took the crummy job to pay for luxuries for my family – things like bread and milk. But with the sales that I’m accruing in the Romney and Marsh series we’re necking gold-top till we puke and toasting sliced organic wholemeal loaves every morning for fun and frisbees.

Onwards and upwards.

­Part 2

I’m very excited about the forthcoming self-publication of my two Acer Sansom novels. I have the cover art, which I’m thrilled with. Knowing these two books very well indeed (I should do; I wrote them) I feel that the covers do a great job of simply, effectively and appropriately suggesting something of what the reader should expect from them, while also making it obvious that they are related to each other in a series. If they don’t then that’s your problem. I love them.

My over-riding concern with self-publishing these books under my own name is that people who may have read a Romney and Marsh File or three and enjoyed them enough to look out for something else from me might notice them and download them under the impression that they will be similar reads. They are not. They are so much better! Not really. But in their own way, I honestly think that if the reader will give them a chance then they won’t be disappointed, providing that said reader has some idea of what to expect. That’s where my job gets a little difficult.

I’ve got the Amazon blurb written and I like it, but I’m still not sure what category to list them under. They are sort of thrillers, but not white-knuckle, page-tearing, big-toilet-inducing thumpers. They are sort of action adventure, but not shooting up jungles of pygmies armed with blow-pipes, arrows tipped with lethal poisons. They are sort of crime novels, but not in a Romney and Marsh whodunit way.

I wonder if I should try to make all this clear on the book summary page when I list them. The very last thing I want is for people to feel miffed because they weren’t what they were looking for or expecting. Actually, the very last thing that I want is to die a slow and painful death in abject poverty surrounded by cats that are waiting to chew on my warm corpse.

Hope or train?

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Writers blog: stardate: 19.04.2013

Ten days ago Amazon price-matched my book Rope Enough – The First Romney and Marsh File – to zero. It is now a free book and I will keep it that way – forever. Despite this book having cost me a good chunk of time and effort to create – not to mention the blood, sweat , tears and hundred quid for the cover art – I cannot think of a better  means of constant, free and easy self-promotion. I cannot think of any other means of self-promotion that would see me – an unknown, newcomer to self-publishing – get my book in front of the people who I want to get it in front of – the people that matter: ebook readers.

In the ten days that it has been a free ebook it has had over eleven-thousand downloads through Amazon.co.uk. Yesterday, it was at number three in the Kindle free-download chart for all ebooks, and in the last twenty-four hours it was downloaded over one thousand, seven hundred times. That book is now on the reading devices and in the homes of eleven-thousand readers. How else could I possibly have achieved that?

A big chunk of the people who downloaded it won’t read it; I know that. But a good number probably will at some point. Maybe not this week or this month, but it’s on their device. In a year they might give it a go. They might like it and they might look for the second in the series and that’s where I realise I have inadvertently done myself and my self-publishing venture the best turn that I could – I already have the next two in the series available for download.

If I had just one book available and I gave it away for nothing I might get thousands of people download it. But what then? Those that read it and enjoyed it and wanted to find something else by me would soon be disappointed and move onto the next free book. I would. I do. By the time that I got around to writing and publishing the next book, I would have to start all over again. I would have missed my window of opportunity.

If I had one book available and I was asking money for it as an unknown, I doubt strongly that I’d see many downloads. And again, those that enjoyed the read would have nothing to go on to by me. See above.

I’m no expert in self-publishing, but I’ve learned some things about it. And if there is one bit of advice I would give anyone who is looking to make money from self-publishing it is this: my self-publishing formula for a modicum of success – or better.

  1. Write a series in a popular genre.
  2. Get professional cover art that clearly links the books in a series and identifies their places within in it.
  3. Make the first in the series free to download. Just swallow.
  4. Have at least one more title in the series available to download for those who enjoyed the first  – three is better. (Look around – commercially successful series are like buses.)
  5. Make the second in the series attractively cheap to purchase.
  6. Make the third in the series still cheap for a novel but up the price a little.

I can’t claim to have invented this formula and, like I said, it is simply good-fortune that I had already written three in a series before I got around to self-publishing. Others are doing it, have been doing it, or something like it, and doing well out of it, for some time.

Example: Alan McDermott has his Tom Gray trilogy out at the moment. I understand that it’s been out a while. The first in the series is a free download. It has been at number one on Amazon’s free download chart ever since I’ve been looking. If I can crawl up to number three with seventeen-hundred downloads in a day, how many does he shift in a day? and how many has he shifted in the months that he’s been self-published? A conservative estimate would be hundreds of thousands. It could be more. Book two in that series is in the top one hundred Kindle downloads for paid books. Book three is just outside the top one-hundred. Take it from me; he’s selling shed-loads and he is making some serious money. Best of luck to him.

Part 2

I have finished what I feel strongly will be my penultimate edit of Dirty Business – The First Acer Sansom Novel. I shall now email this new version to Amazon and it will be almost immediately pinged back to my Kindle reading device where I shall then give it the final proof-read. I’ve blogged before about how useful I find it to read through my books in a variety of formats: computer screen, hard-copy, Kindle. Each new reading experience brings with it a novelty factor that provides me the opportunity for a fresh perspective to spot errors. It’s what my circumstances have reduced me to. And I think that I’m getting better at it. In fact I’m feeling so confident about my abilities these days that I might even offer a reward for any typos spotted. Then again, maybe I won’t.

Yesterday, Kit Foster, the nice fellow who did the covers for the three R&M’s, sent me some ideas for Dirty Business and Loose Ends. I was very happy with elements of them and he is going to combine these into a couple of covers that I think will be effective, strongly suggestive and representative of the genre and story.

I’m still not sure about where to pitch the price on these two. The three R&M’s are priced on a sliding upwards scale – free, £1.53 and £2.05 (I wanted £1.49 and £1.99 but Amazon did something to the numbers that I still don’t understand.) The three R&M’s are all around the eighty-thousand word mark. The two Sansoms are one-hundred-thousand words each. Should that extra twenty-thousand words justify a higher price?

I’m drawn to list them at £1.99 each and it’s not because of the extra bulk. I still don’t think that that is expensive for a decent read, which I have to hope people will think of them. I do. I also think that I’ve established myself to a very small degree as a half-decent story-teller – reviews, comments and feedback lend weight to this notion – and perhaps, as it could be argued that I have let my first three novels go quite cheaply, even by ebook standards, those who have read them and enjoyed them won’t begrudge me looking to net just over a pound a book. I don’t think that looking to make one pound a book is greedy or likely to price me out of a potential sale. Time will tell on that. Of course, if people start writing to tell me how awful they find them and how robbed they feel, I might have to reduce the price a bit.

With the self-publication of the Sansom’s will come more work. All the information on my various author pages relates only to the R&M books. The images on my Facebook page and blog banner are R&M covers. I’ve also got to write a couple of elevator pitch style summaries for the forthcoming Amazon listings. I’m not complaining – I like all that stuff. It makes a change and I’m doing it for me.

Making A Killing

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Actually, I’m not – making a killing that is, not in the money-coming-out-of-all-orifices kind of way, like some outrageously gaudy and crude Las Vegas naked-human-shaped novelty slot-machine jackpot. But on free downloads? Crikey, I looked this morning and a little bit of wee came out. And that’s not normal for a man of my age.

Look, before I get going on this second blog in two days, please, you have to bear in mind at all times that a long time ago (in blogging terms) this blog’s main purpose became far-and-away most importantly an online record of my journey from total and, some would say, deserved literary obscurity to… well I just want to leave a mark. DC Grimes in that little-known but superior British police procedural, Joint Enterprise, that should be on every mystery reader aficionado’s bookshelf put it best, “We’re all going to die. Most of us will leave no mark of our existence behind what-so-ever. Not a stain or a smudge or a smear on the face of history. I think that’s sad.” I agree with him, even if I can now see that the punctuation sucks. I’m not perfect.

I’m blogging for me, for nostalgia, for anyone who wants to know something of the process that I went through to self-publish – there are some things to learn from – and then how that pans out. With that understood, this post should be viewed as a follow up to yesterday’s: an update on the development discussed. I’m making it because it’s important to me and it might also provide some figures that other self-publishers might like to know. There doesn’t seem to be a wealth of information out there and when I was stumbling about cyber-space at the beginning, looking for anything helpful, I was pretty disappointed.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, approximately thirty-six hours ago Amazon price-matched Rope Enough, the first book in my series of British police procedurals. They price-matched it to zero making it a free download. I was happy – see previous post. In that thirty-six hours the book has been downloaded 394 times on Amazon.com and a staggering 1431 times on Amazon.co.uk. (I wrote ‘Fucking hell!’ after that but decided to delete it.)

The immediate upshot of that is that the book currently sits at #27 in the Kindle store Best Sellers chart for free books. It was at #22 earlier. To my limited way of thinking that has got to be a positive thing. OK, I’m not making a penny out of it, but I do have two other titles that could see a knock-on from this. And I feel great.

Yeah, I know, people are just downloading a freebie; 95% of them probably won’t even read it; just ‘cos it got downloaded, doesn’t mean that it’s any good. I’m quite capable of pissing on my own chips, thanks.

There has been no discernable knock-on for sales of the other two books, yet. I’ll have to wait and see what happens.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about two days – Saturday and Sunday – where I listed the second book in my three on the KDP Select programme for £0.00 to download. I managed 351 downloads through Amazon.co.uk there. I thought that was OK. So, perhaps, it makes a little more sense just how bowled over I am by getting four times that number in less than two days.

That’s all from me to me. Now, I really should get some work done.

The Loss-Leader Strategy.

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Writer’s blog: stardate: 10.04.2013

WARNING: This blog contains some big numbers to crunch.

Part 1

It’s Wednesday. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning and it’s the holidays.

Normally, for reasons explained previously, I’ve come to be a Friday-morning-blogger. So why today? Well, as mentioned, I’m on holiday and so I’ve got some time to update my self-publishing diary aka my blog. And I have an interesting development for an entry.

I say it’s the holidays but I’m at work.  My current-future-ex-wife has started to complain about me loitering around the place. I’ve only been on holiday for two days. I told her I’m on holiday – I don’t have to go to work for the week. She said that the house smells different when I’m there during the day. She implied that this was not in a good way. She suggested that if I want to write, why don’t I go to work where it will be quiet? So, I’m at work in the holidays. I’m writing and I quite like it. It’s peaceful. I can pick up a good coffee on the way in. There is still free food in the staff canteen at lunch-time. I’m living the life of a real author for a week – the kind that don’t have to juggle jobs and writing (writing doesn’t seem like a job to me, but maybe that’s because I don’t need the money.) And I can smell how I like without people complaining.

I can’t complain about the way things are going for me as a self-publisher – especially when one factors in that I have done no self-promotion worthy of the label. Since my promotional weekend with Amazon’s KDP Select programme I have noticed a marked increase in sales of all three titles. I’m still not making enough money to re-roof the dog kennel but I’m encouraged.

In the first nine days of this month’s sales figures I sold ninety-two copies of Rope Enough (The First Romney and Marsh File). That’s more than I sold in the whole of last month with the promotion. Factors of knock-on sales from said promotion and some good fortune with an Amazon sales algorithm – I doubt whether even God knows the mathematical equations involved in those – are likely reasons for this figure. The second and third books in the series are doing better than normal also. As usual I will share those figures at the end of the sales period.

Last evening I had settled down to watch Real Madrid thrash Galatasaray (good job I’m not a betting man) with one eye on the laptop when something in the Kindle download figures of my books caught my eye. It hadn’t been there an hour earlier. Kindle had made twenty-two price-match sales of Rope Enough ie given away twenty-two books for free. I checked on the Amazon.com site: thirty-four books price-matched. Initially, I was a bit peeved. Sales had been going well and I was netting 26p a download. But as I took the development on board, I became rather pleased.

I have seen it blogged by many successful self-published authors that giving away books as loss-leaders was a real boost to the spreading of the word, raising their online profile and, if they have other books available – especially in a series – good for knock-on sales.

Mindful of this, when I originally uploaded Rope Enough I tried and tried to get Amazon to list it as a free ebook – I have had it for download through Smashwords and their outlets for free since it was first published in December of last year. I notified Amazon of the availability of the book for free through B&N and Kobo et al (can you say et al for companies or is that reserved for people?) but they still wouldn’t adjust the price, so I had to plough on with it at 77p – the minimum that I could list it for.

I can only guess that now someone else, or the plural of someone else, has/have let Amazon know about a cheaper price and they have knocked it down to zero in line with their policy. I’m happy with that. It’s like having a full-time promotion going. I was only making 26p a download anyway, which is essentially nothing.

Rope Enough has finally become the loss-leader that I wanted it to be and I hope that it is going to attract attention and sales for the other two in the series. In fact I had trouble sleeping last night when I thought about this. Here’s the first reason why: in the first four hours of the change there were over two hundred downloads of the book on Amazon.co.uk and the same for Amazon.com.

Here’s the second reason why: when the book went live for free I, naturally, checked out the competition in the free category – Amazon’s top 100 chart. The book at the number one slot was called The One You Love by Paul Pilkington. I looked at his Amazon page for this book. He claims to have had over one-and-a-half-million downloads of this book since publication in July 2011. That is a shitload of downloads by anyone’s standards. And looking at the reviews a lot of people think that it’s shit (fitting). He has a sequel for sale. It’s a thirty thousand word novella (probably falling over himself to try to get something else published to capitalise on his fifteen minutes of fame before the freeloaders forgot who he was). It’s listed at £1.92. If he is on the 70% royalty scheme then he is netting @ £1.30 per download for that second title. If just ten percent of the people who downloaded his free book pay for the download of the second – and let’s face it, why wouldn’t they if they were happy with book one? – he is making a shitload of money (double-fitting). Good luck to him.

If Rope Enough can get one tenth of the downloads he got for his first book and then one tenth of those people go on to part with the meagre sum of £1.53 and £2.05 for the other two books in the series – both of which are better than the first (I would say that wouldn’t I?) then I might be able to give up my evening job at the petrol station – at least. Maybe even re-roof the dog kennel.

See why I’m in a fairly good mood today? That’s right – I’m a dreamer.

Part 2

This week, I’m really getting stuck into my two Sansom books. I’m editing like a battlefield surgeon in the Crimean War. I feel that there are a couple of half-decent stories in these books somewhere if I can tease them out. I’ve emailed the guy who did my book covers for the R&M trio and I’m waiting for his thoughts.

When these are done and out there I’m going to write the third in that series. It’s going to be focussed on Iran and their nuclear weapons programme. I have never been to Iran (I’m not likely to either) and I don’t know anything about plutonium enrichment, so, this is going to have to be a book that I need to do some research on before writing. That will be a novelty. I might even try planning the book beforehand for a change, just to see what that’s like. Another novelty.

The snowball effect.

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Writer’s blog: stardate: 05.04.2013

Part 1

Two weeks on from my KDP Select programme promotional weekend. (See earlier posts for details). In those two weeks the month changed and so a new month’s sales record was started. In those two weeks I have seen a steady and encouraging increase of sales for all three of the books in my R&M series.

Rope Enough has performed and continues to perform well. It has only fleetingly been out of the paid  top 100 for its Amazon category since the promotion. As mentioned previously, there could be knock-on reasons from the promotion for this but I am more inclined to believe that the book’s presence in that top 100, its visibility, is responsible. It’s also cheap at only £0.77.

Last month – the month of the promotion – with Amazon.co.uk I had 84 downloads of Rope Enough. April is not five full days old yet and already I have made 43 sales. Making a Killing has sold 9 and Joint Enterprise 4.

I do no self-promotion.

Amazon.com has seen no sales of any of the titles, yet.

For anyone who is interested in these things I have collated total sales of the three books on the two Amazon sites below. No doubt in my mind that the KDP Select promotion has been a boost.

Amazon Sales Record

December

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 6

Making a Killing – 4

Joint Enterprise – NA

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 10

Making a Killing – 5

Joint Enterprise – NA

January

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 11

Making a Killing – 13

Joint Enterprise – 5

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 14

Making a Killing – 10

Joint Enterprise – 3

February

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 8

Making a Killing – 4

Joint Enterprise – 2

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 11

Making a Killing – 9

Joint Enterprise – 7

March

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 84

Making a Killing – 20 (351 through free promotion)

Joint Enterprise – 14

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 11

Making a Killing – 3 (219 through free promotion)

Joint Enterprise – 7

April (up until today – 5th of the month)

Amazon.co.uk

Rope Enough – 43

Making a Killing – 9

Joint Enterprise – 4

Amazon.com

Rope Enough – 0

Making a Killing – 0

Joint Enterprise – 0

Part 2

I am looking again at the first book that I ever wrote. It is a thriller. I wrote it about three years ago and it has been resting in a drawer at home waiting for the right time for me to sort it out. I am glad that I have waited. The overall plot, characters and progression, I don’t find particularly horrible to experience again, but the writing needs a substantial amount of attention. Reading it has demonstrated to me just how much, to my own way of thinking, I have grown as a writer – I want to write improved.

I am reading it on the computer and changing things around as I go. It’s quite nice to get reacquainted with the characters. It’s quite embarrassing to read some of my sentence structures and clichéd descriptions. It’s quite a relief that I waited before doing anything with it.

I have also written the sequel to this book, which I will go onto next. Both are around 100,000 words. Then I think that I will self-publish them.

I have posted before about the difficulty of finding titles for books and this first book has been the bane of my output to date. I have gone through at least a dozen titles that I have been temporarily keen on only to find that after a week or two, a month or two, they just don’t do it for me anymore. I have even toyed with the idea of changing the central character’s name so that I could utilise it (cleverly) in a series of titles as seems to be the fashion. I was going to change him from Sansom to Double. Then Sansom to Counter. Both words combine with others to provide a wealth of opportunities for snappy titles. But he isn’t Mr Double and he isn’t Mr Counter. He is Sansom. The character of Sansom has been a part of my life and as well as liking the name I can’t be so mercenary with it. I have an association with this character that I don’t want to corrupt; I wouldn’t be comfortable selling him out. Is that stupid, I wonder?

Anyway, the read-through has now given me a title that I like a lot, for now. I am going to call this book, Dirty Business. It’s a good fit. It’s short and suggestive. I hope that I still like it in a week. Also it will allow me to keep the title of the sequel, which I have – surprisingly – kept since writing it, Loose Ends. I need to commission the cover art soon, so I have to be sure. I’ll give it another month. By then I hope to have both books ready to go out.