Now that understand that the blurb's job is to convince a customer to buy our book. We now have to construct the second most important part of your passive marketing strategy. The book's cover is the most important part of selling your book. If a customer doesn't click on your thumbnail sized cover, they will never see your blurb. Your blurb won't even get a chance to do it's job.
Step one: Identify your main character. Identify your plot/conflict. Identify your setting. But SB Jones, I have more than one main character. No you don't. One of these characters is reacting, growing and changing as a character in reaction to the other. That is your main character.
Many authors can't identify or describe their own books. It's like asking a parent who has a 30 year old son/daughter to describe them in a few short sentences. Do you talk about them in broad strokes or try and cram in all the minute details of their life? Remember part one? We need to get customers to click the buy now button. If your describing your son to someone in hopes of seeing them settle down, taking about how they wet the bed isn't going to help.
If you still struggle with what the blurb is supposed to do. Hop over to YouTube and watch the movie trailers for this year's blockbusters. These are exactly what your blurb is trying to do. Get people excited about your book so they have to click the buy now button.
Step two: Outline and structure. We need to take a few minutes and look at some technical aspects of your blurb. Amazon and other retail websites limit the display area for blurbs. Amazon keeps it down to 4000 characters, but what you really need to watch out for is number of lines. If you have a large five paragraph blurb with four blank lines in-between. Your blurb will get cut off and a customer will have to click a link to expand out the blurb. Anytime you put a click between the customer and the buy now button. You WILL lose sales. Some retailers only give you a line or two before they cut it off, so you really need to remember this.
https://supervillainsomeday.wordpress.com/tag/blurbs/
This link is a collection of good blurb writing articles. When it comes to plotting your blurb. You need to setup your characters, your conflicts and your setting. Like the movie trailers, often they will start with the main character talking while at the same time they are giving you the setting. Vin Diesel's scratch voice, while you see fast cars, big explosions and crazy stunts. Then it shifts to the conflict and you see other stars, quipy one liners, more explosions and rocking music until at the end of two and a half minutes you are standing with a fist full of dollars yelling "Take my money!"
That's what your blurb has to do.
At minimum. You should have a character, conflict blurb structure. Other structures include character, character, conflict. Or Setting, character, conflict. There are any number of workable paragraph structures for blurbs. The genera is also important. What works well for a Star Wars blurb isn't the best for a Rom-Com.
My personal preference is a Character Conflict structure and I weave in the setting. I also leverage the most important marketing point of my book in my blurbs: the cover.
Monday, March 30, 2015
Part One: What is the job of the blurb? Blurb writing 101 for self published authors.
I re-branded my Gateway Trilogy earlier this year. It was a transition that took about six months to complete. Editing, New Titles, New covers, New Blurbs; the works. Most of this re-branding was work I paid someone else to do. The blurb however I did on my own. I spent almost an entire month working on three blurbs. This involved dozens of rewrites, hours of research and weeks of bouncing the results off of other Authors and volunteers for feedback.
Today I want to explore the blurb writing process and my goal is to condense down what took me a lot of time to understand in my own effort to pay it forward for all the help I received.
First question: What is the blurb?
This is an easy answer to a question that every author seems to know, but in reality don't understand at all. When you upload a book to Amazon, Amazon calls it the "description" and asks you to describe your book. They then recommend that you look on the back cover of other books for examples.
If you're like me, the first book I picked up off of my shelf, the back cover had no description. It was covered in truncated quotes by people and marketers that what lay inside was "stunning", "author name does it again". A couple of books later I found one that had a description. It wasn't very good so I kept looking until I had about six books with decent descriptions.
I tried following some of the styles, but each blurb I came up with for my own books just looked crappy. A few self-help web pages later and I started to develop a theory about blurb writing. This stems from an earlier concept that I believe in that writing is an art, but publishing is the business of selling that art. Selling is completely different than creating.
My new question is: What is the job of the blurb?
Many may jump back to the first answer. It describes the book. This is where the common thinking is wrong. The job of the blurb is to get a customer to click on the "buy now" button. To help explain how I got here, we need to take a quick look at the customer buying experience.
In a book store, the buying experience is completely different from buying online. You have new shiny books up front to catch your eye. Better sellers on the shelf sit with the cover facing out and older books if they are even present, only have the spine facing you. The cover of the book is still king. It's what catches your eye. It's what has the authors name on it. It's what instantly tells you the genera and what the book is probably about in a single glance.
Next if you pick up a book, you might glance at the back, but odds are it's just got the same "this book is stunning... again" chop quotes that every other book has. So you get to thumb through it. Feel it in your hands. You can tell how long it might take you to read it because you can see how many pages there are. All of this factors into your choice to buy a book or not. Buying an e-book... You get none of this.
The e-book buying experience is night and day different. You have a cover, that is the size of a large postage stamp. That's it. If your cover catches someone's eye, they get taken to your books landing page. Here they are presented with a lot more information. A larger sample of the cover. Prices, format, reviews and your blurb. But the MOST important part of your landing page is the "buy now" button.
Up front and center of the landing page is your blurb. It has only one job. Getting the customer to click the buy now button. Anything else the customer clicks on is one click that is not spent on buying your book. Now that you understand the difference in buying experiences, treating your e-book blurb like the back jacket of a print book is flawed.
Creating a blurb that says your book is fun filled, action packed and if you like this other series, you might like this one too, is the wrong way to approach writing your blurb.
Today I want to explore the blurb writing process and my goal is to condense down what took me a lot of time to understand in my own effort to pay it forward for all the help I received.
First question: What is the blurb?
This is an easy answer to a question that every author seems to know, but in reality don't understand at all. When you upload a book to Amazon, Amazon calls it the "description" and asks you to describe your book. They then recommend that you look on the back cover of other books for examples.
If you're like me, the first book I picked up off of my shelf, the back cover had no description. It was covered in truncated quotes by people and marketers that what lay inside was "stunning", "author name does it again". A couple of books later I found one that had a description. It wasn't very good so I kept looking until I had about six books with decent descriptions.
I tried following some of the styles, but each blurb I came up with for my own books just looked crappy. A few self-help web pages later and I started to develop a theory about blurb writing. This stems from an earlier concept that I believe in that writing is an art, but publishing is the business of selling that art. Selling is completely different than creating.
My new question is: What is the job of the blurb?
Many may jump back to the first answer. It describes the book. This is where the common thinking is wrong. The job of the blurb is to get a customer to click on the "buy now" button. To help explain how I got here, we need to take a quick look at the customer buying experience.
In a book store, the buying experience is completely different from buying online. You have new shiny books up front to catch your eye. Better sellers on the shelf sit with the cover facing out and older books if they are even present, only have the spine facing you. The cover of the book is still king. It's what catches your eye. It's what has the authors name on it. It's what instantly tells you the genera and what the book is probably about in a single glance.
Next if you pick up a book, you might glance at the back, but odds are it's just got the same "this book is stunning... again" chop quotes that every other book has. So you get to thumb through it. Feel it in your hands. You can tell how long it might take you to read it because you can see how many pages there are. All of this factors into your choice to buy a book or not. Buying an e-book... You get none of this.
The e-book buying experience is night and day different. You have a cover, that is the size of a large postage stamp. That's it. If your cover catches someone's eye, they get taken to your books landing page. Here they are presented with a lot more information. A larger sample of the cover. Prices, format, reviews and your blurb. But the MOST important part of your landing page is the "buy now" button.
Up front and center of the landing page is your blurb. It has only one job. Getting the customer to click the buy now button. Anything else the customer clicks on is one click that is not spent on buying your book. Now that you understand the difference in buying experiences, treating your e-book blurb like the back jacket of a print book is flawed.
Creating a blurb that says your book is fun filled, action packed and if you like this other series, you might like this one too, is the wrong way to approach writing your blurb.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
It's been a while since my last blog entry discussing the world of self publishing. I'll be honest, other things got in the way like new seasons of my favorite shows on Netflix and an overall vein of lazy.
There is something I wanted to bring to new authors attention. It's something that gets repeated every month or two on other blogs and forums. That question is what to write. Often the answers to this question end up in the, "Write what you love," pile. It makes sense; why would you write something you don't love? The easy counter answer is, "Write what will make you money." Yes the bah-humbug from those dinosaurs from traditional publishing. They truly are sorry that your billionaire leprechaun meets unicorn shape-shiftier time travel children's book doesn't have a market. And the entire love crowd will call you a sellout, a get rich quick scumbag, a hack and all kinds of nasty names.
I have said it before and it needs repeating. Writing is an art. Publishing is a business. One sells the other, not the other way around. Traditional publishers know this. If you are going to self publish, you need to know it too. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against someone trying to make a living off of publishing leprechaun unicorn books, but I do take issue with people who have their heads stuck in the sand, believing a lot of the self published crap that gets talked about and refuse to acknowledge that it really is all their own fault that their book isn't selling.
So when you sit your writer self down with your publisher self, you need to decide what it is you're going to do. This is very important because it takes a lot of time to write something that is worth selling. Even when that is done, it takes a lot of money and more time to get it edited, proofread, covers, formatting etc etc done before you even see a dime. If you skip this meeting, you may end up with nothing.
Climbing the ranking ladder. It sounds exactly like that. Amazon is the big store right now. They have some 50 million unique hits a day and the better your book's rank is, the more eyes will see it. There are a lot of categories on Amazon these days. Some of these categories are broken ladders, dud genera, and filter traps. I write steampunk, I love it, I still am writing it with my new series (The War of Antiquities), but it's a dud genera.
As of this writing the number one steampunk book has an overall rank of 3572. For many of us, that would be awesome. But the reality is, it's dead. Steampunk's parent genera is Science Fiction. The number 100 book is ranked 1624. The list won't show you any lower unless you browse Amazon a specific way and get off the best sellers list and into the searches or apply filters.
So even if you have the best steampunk book out there, you're not even listed in Sci-Fi. This is a dead ladder. Unless someone is specifically looking for steampunk books, they will never see it. If they never see it, they will never buy it.
Going back to the book that is ranked 100 in Sci-Fi, we can also see that it's ranked number 20 in Dystopian and 31 in Post-Apocalyptic. This book isn't even at the top of it's sub-genera. It's not even on the first page of its sub-genre. But it gets the visibility of general Sci-Fi, Dystopian, and Post-Apocalyptic.
These sub-genera's are not broken. As these author's books climb the ranks, they graduate into higher tiered categories. This gets more random eyes on their books. More eyes mean more opportunities to make a sale.
You can buy your way out of the basement with advertising and clever marketing, but at the end of the day when your book slips back, it really has no fair chance of climbing out on its own. When you have that sit down meeting with yourself and you are honest about your goals. Put on your business had and realize that your great story just might not have a market but you might be able to turn the leprichaun into a sparkly vampire and the unicorn into Jack Bauer and find success with a paranormal thriller romance. If you pick a broken ladder, be ready for a long hard climb.
There is something I wanted to bring to new authors attention. It's something that gets repeated every month or two on other blogs and forums. That question is what to write. Often the answers to this question end up in the, "Write what you love," pile. It makes sense; why would you write something you don't love? The easy counter answer is, "Write what will make you money." Yes the bah-humbug from those dinosaurs from traditional publishing. They truly are sorry that your billionaire leprechaun meets unicorn shape-shiftier time travel children's book doesn't have a market. And the entire love crowd will call you a sellout, a get rich quick scumbag, a hack and all kinds of nasty names.
I have said it before and it needs repeating. Writing is an art. Publishing is a business. One sells the other, not the other way around. Traditional publishers know this. If you are going to self publish, you need to know it too. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against someone trying to make a living off of publishing leprechaun unicorn books, but I do take issue with people who have their heads stuck in the sand, believing a lot of the self published crap that gets talked about and refuse to acknowledge that it really is all their own fault that their book isn't selling.
So when you sit your writer self down with your publisher self, you need to decide what it is you're going to do. This is very important because it takes a lot of time to write something that is worth selling. Even when that is done, it takes a lot of money and more time to get it edited, proofread, covers, formatting etc etc done before you even see a dime. If you skip this meeting, you may end up with nothing.
Climbing the ranking ladder. It sounds exactly like that. Amazon is the big store right now. They have some 50 million unique hits a day and the better your book's rank is, the more eyes will see it. There are a lot of categories on Amazon these days. Some of these categories are broken ladders, dud genera, and filter traps. I write steampunk, I love it, I still am writing it with my new series (The War of Antiquities), but it's a dud genera.
As of this writing the number one steampunk book has an overall rank of 3572. For many of us, that would be awesome. But the reality is, it's dead. Steampunk's parent genera is Science Fiction. The number 100 book is ranked 1624. The list won't show you any lower unless you browse Amazon a specific way and get off the best sellers list and into the searches or apply filters.
So even if you have the best steampunk book out there, you're not even listed in Sci-Fi. This is a dead ladder. Unless someone is specifically looking for steampunk books, they will never see it. If they never see it, they will never buy it.
Going back to the book that is ranked 100 in Sci-Fi, we can also see that it's ranked number 20 in Dystopian and 31 in Post-Apocalyptic. This book isn't even at the top of it's sub-genera. It's not even on the first page of its sub-genre. But it gets the visibility of general Sci-Fi, Dystopian, and Post-Apocalyptic.
These sub-genera's are not broken. As these author's books climb the ranks, they graduate into higher tiered categories. This gets more random eyes on their books. More eyes mean more opportunities to make a sale.
You can buy your way out of the basement with advertising and clever marketing, but at the end of the day when your book slips back, it really has no fair chance of climbing out on its own. When you have that sit down meeting with yourself and you are honest about your goals. Put on your business had and realize that your great story just might not have a market but you might be able to turn the leprichaun into a sparkly vampire and the unicorn into Jack Bauer and find success with a paranormal thriller romance. If you pick a broken ladder, be ready for a long hard climb.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Book signing at Barnes and Noble wrap up.
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On April 6, 2013 I had a book signing event at Barnes and Noble here in Twin Falls, Idaho. It was the second signing with them. The first was shortly after the release of my first novel Requiem back in 2011. I didn't have one for book two, Guardian but now that the trilogy is finished I set one up for it.
There are a lot of things that went on with this signing that I want to touch on for anyone who is interested in doing book signings. I have done other book signings in the past other than Barnes and Noble. When I first walked in and found where they had set up the table, I was nearly floored. The signing was at noon and I was about ten minutes early, what I wasn't expecting were the people waiting, book in hand, for me to sign their copies. It wasn't a big line, just two people, but it was a line none the less and they were waiting for me. So right off the bat, I had four books signed and sold before I even had time to take off my jacket.
Right after that, I still had not had time to set up my display, a news crew from the local TV station showed up and thrust a microphone in my hand for an interview. This was another first. People waiting for me to show up and now TV. They asked me several questions about myself, the books, the process I went through to finish them and what other projects I was working on if any. The spot made the nightly news and you can read about it and see the spot on their website here. http://www.kmvt.com/news/local/Local-author-releases-final-novel-in-sci-fifantasy-trilogy-201776831.html
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After all that more than an hour had gone by and I was able to finally get my display set up and the book signing took on a more regular tone. If you're not a superstar author with a blockbuster book, book signings can be intimidating. From what I have been told, most signings don't do well especially for the "local author" types. Often they sell less than five books and sometimes they don't even sell any. I have had a book signing in a restaurant and sold 7 books, and I sold 9 at a flea market so I honestly have no idea how you could sell 0 at a book store, but I'm told it's not uncommon.
I had about a dozen people ask me where the bathrooms were after they entered the store. I expected that from the last time I had a signing. One lady barged into the store on a mission to ruin someone's day and found me sitting behind a table and demanded that I fix or replace her Nook. After pointing her towards a manager she had some unkind things to say to me even after I explained that I was not an employee, but doing a book signing for my trilogy. Even an hour later when she left, she gave me a nasty look on the way out.
The antique green tapestry I use for a table cloth received several offers for purchase. This wasn't unexpected as it happened last time I had a signing, though the offers were not as high as the flea market signing was. You can see it in the photo there of my display when I had it set up. Note that it's missing in the TV interview.
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I had a full set of postcards printed up for each book. I used this promo item at my other book signings and have found it to be a successful way to promote the book to people who are hesitant in buying a new book they know nothing about. I also took the whole trilogy and burned it to CD's in e-book format. If anyone bought a book, I offered them the CD for free. This helped sell several copies. It's a hard sell to get someone on the spot to plop down $15 a book let alone $45 for a full set. When people were told they got $15 worth of e-books for free, it was much easier to close the sale. There were two customers who bought books from me that did not want the disk. Their reaction was almost like I was trying to give them a disk of cancer or something. They also let me know what they thought of e-books in general and their utter disdain for them. I agreed with them as much as I could. I personally don't buy e-books or even have an e-reader and still buy mine in physical form. However, they are simply holdouts to the changing publishing world. What they don't know is that in my three years of selling books, I sell and easy 150 e-books to every 1 physical book. E-book's is simply where publishing is at.
One odd observance that I thought was noteworthy. When I offered to sign a postcard for people who didn't buy a book. I asked them if they had a cover preference or what card they wanted. Universally, everyone took the postcard for book two. A couple of people opted for book one and no one took book three's postcard unless I just signed it and gave it to them without asking for their preference. I still don't know why everyone wanted the card for book two.
One older gentleman spent about 15 minutes talking about Scientology. I'm not sure if he was trying to convert me, or borrow money so he could join the church... It reminded me of the Dell days when people would call support because it was a toll free number and they simply wanted to talk to someone.
When it came time to finally pack up and head home, I had sold out of book one. Sold out of book two, and there were only a handful of book three left. In total, 32 books were signed. Most people picked up the first book. Only four people picked up the entire set, and once book one was sold out, sales came to a halt, even with the CD that had them all. Several people asked when the books would be in stock again, but from my experience, it's rare for anyone to remember to come back and buy one even if they took home a signed card or not. It might be different this time with the number of books sold, cards handed out and the TV spot.
Now for the lessons.
If you have an introverted personality, book signings are going to be tough. You have to be a salesman. Simply sitting there hoping someone will see you and your books isn't going to work. Having something to give to people is a must. But it has to something they are going to want to keep and not toss on the floor, into a garbage bin, or shoved into the bookshelf somewhere for an employee to clean up later. A lot of authors use bookmarks and when I talk to the people who work at B&N, bookmarks seem to be the least bothersome ideas. They still get dropped and shoved into the shelves by people who don't want them but nothing like paper flyers do. If you hand out 300 paper flyers and the employees spend the next week picking them up and out of other books, they are going to hate you.
Don't be this guy.
I haven't had any complaints about the postcards. They are larger than a bookmark, made of heavy stock, look great and when a person sees me sign it for them it instantly gives the card a perceived value so they are not thrown away, littered, or crammed into the shelves.
The e-book on CD idea I feel was a success and I will continue to do that going forward. It costs me nothing other than 25 cents for a CD and it helps sell books. It would have been nice if they had a printed label with cover art or something instead of a memorex disk and a sharpie, but I don't have the equipment to do something like that and when I looked into services that offered them, the cost per disk was unreasonable. $1.50-$5 a disk and order requirements in the low hundreds to thousands.
The only other advice I can say if you are looking at having a book signing is to engage as many people as you possibly can. You are basically getting impulse buys so almost everyone is going to turn you down. My first signing at B&N for Requiem sold 18 copies and it was a much busier day than this one was. I averaged about one book sold for every 15 to 20 people that I managed to greet and engage. That's about 5-7% sales rate, so don't get discouraged.
Friday, February 8, 2013
Pro's and Con's of Choosing to use Amazon's KDP Select program.
I've had the idea to write a blog post about the pro's and con's of being exclusive to Amazon as a self publisher for a while now and I have a small break in my writing to get it down. I do have to add a disclaimer that these are my opinions and should no way be taken as an etched in stone way for you to do things. Every author's experience with what works is different from another. Luck plays a huge role in self publishing. Also the speed of change can make this information inaccurate and obsolete and by the time you finish reading it, anything could have happened.
For those who are not familiar with KDP Select, it is a program that an author can choose to opt-in/out when they upload a manuscript to Amazon. The benefits are five days out of each ninety day period that you can set the price of your book to $0.00 for promotional reasons. Select also makes your title available to the Kindle Online Lending Library where Amazon Prime members can choose to download and read your book at no cost to them. The author is compensated for these borrows from a monthly pool of money and it tends to average around the $1.80-$2.00 range per borrow. The last major benifit to a book being in the Select program is that it allows an author to collect 70% royalty rates instead of 35% in the emerging markets that Amazon has been expanding since the launch of Select. Namely, India, Brazil, and Japan.
The downside to select is the e-book version must be exclusive to the Amazon store. This means you can't sell the same e-book or even portions of it on other web sites like Apple, Barnes and Noble or even your own website. Now you can make available promotional material like blurbs, excerpts, or a sample chapter or two as long as it doesn't exceed a certain amount. What that is, I can't tell you because I have not heard of anyone getting in trouble for this and there are different numbers being tossed out from 5% to 30% of your book. However you cannot offer a short story for sale in other outlets and then include that same short in a bundled book that is opted in for select. This works the other way as well. You can't have a short in Select and include it in bundle on other sites. The content has to be exclusive. This does not apply to print options. Print is a separate deal when it comes to KDP Select. The other growing downside is that since Select has launched, all new markets default to the 35% royalty option instead of being able to collect 70%. For most authors, these markets represent little to no income, but as time goes on, the list of restricted markets will grow as will their impact.
Exclusive with Amazon:
Exclusivity has some advantages. Especially for new authors working with shoe-string budgets and Amazon offers some very nice perks. First, they are the shark in the tank of fish when it comes to online publishing. All other companies combined don't equal the amount of e-books sold compared to Amazon. So when it comes down to where you're going to spend your time and money, it's going to be with Amazon.
When you get around to promoting your work, it's very beneficial if you have the ability to point everyone to the same place. This means that every sale counts towards the same ranking, every review received is collected on one site. If you're spread out among five or six different retailers, then your sales, ranks, and reviews are also diluted. What's better? A hundred sales split five ways leaving you book in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands on the ranks, or all one hundred sales on Amazon that puts you onto the top 100 genera lists where the discoverability of your book jumps explosively?
Accounting is simplified. You get a check from one place, you manage your whole digital library from one dashboard, you deal with one specific file format. At first these might not seem like they would be an advantage, but once you start branching out and one web site takes one file type, and another requires a third type, and finally in Apple's case you need to use a system running a mac OSX to upload your work, it quickly becomes a lot of work. This compounds exponentially when you start releasing more books, or if you're going back to earlier works and adding back end material. This will either cost you time, to learn how to create these file types, or increased costs to whomever you pay for formatting.
Free promotion days. This is the honey for joining Select. The ability to pre-schedule when your book will be available for free is arguably the most powerful marketing tool you will find. The only other way to get your book free in any market place is by using a 3rd party distrubutor like Smashwords who has a negotiated thing with Barnes and Noble to make books free on their site, and Apple. Apple allows for direct uploading and pricing $0. Everywhere else you have to use some price matching scheme to get your book free and it is whimsical at best. It can take weeks to months for a book to get price matched and it can take that long again for the price to revert. In other words, you have lost control of your pricing. There are horror stories out there of books stuck in free limbo because each website is price matching the other and none of them will change. Having complete control of your pricing allows for you to effectively promote your book how you see fit. You can change the price and it will instantly take effect, offer free days without worry and more. This is a major benefit to deal with only one company.
KOLL. I don't have much to say about the lending library. When I have been enrolled in Select, the amount of borrows I received were negligible. I had roughly one borrow per every 300 full priced sales. I also price my books at $4.99 and receive $3.10 per sale and that's significantly higher than the $1.80+ that I would get from a borrow. However I have read plenty of posts from authors who receive a considerable amount of revenue from borrows. I do know that if you are offering your book for 99c. you will make much much more money per borrow than you would for a sale. A 99c book will only bring in 35c in royalties. Going from 35c to $1.80 is a five fold increase in royalties. That's right you can get paid $1.80 when someone borrows a 99c book. This could be where they are favoring the lending library over others.
So in summary, consolidation of payments, sales, rankings, and reviews. One website you need to promote. Complete and timely control over your pricing, increased royalties in new markets and a lending feature that can pay out significantly increased royalties in certain price ranges. Last but not least, your on Amazon, no one is bigger.
Non Exclusive:
There are whole economic college classes that are dedicated to the dangers of exclusivity. If Amazon is 60% of the market, why would you cut yourself out of the other 40%? Each marketplace is it's own ecosystem. If you don't thrive at Amazon, you may very well succeed at Barnes and Noble. Also shopping demographics are different. B&N dominates when it comes to the romance genres and erotica. Apple... I'm not sure what they dominate but a lot of authors report success from the iTunes Bookstore over Amazon and others.
The luck factor. One of the driving factors for selling books is word of mouth. It's not uncommon for a book to take off on one retailer, and it spreads to others as word of mouth kicks in. If your only available on one website, you give up those chances to break out. Mark over at Smashwords has released data that clearly shows books taking off at one website and having it increase sales across all platforms shortly after. Each website also offers their own features and if you're not on their site, they can't pick you to feature you. The more places you are, the more you increase your luck.
The market place is shifting. Kobo and Apple are making significant strides in reaching out to authors. Amazon's dominance is shrinking and the days of a dedicated e-reader are already gone. Now its the time of the tablet that can do it all and e-reader apps. Having a device exclusive to a vendor is dangerous. Apple and Amazon saw this very quickly. B&N seems to be a wait and see then follow years late kinda company that does not leverage it's one asset that none of the others have, a real bookstore.
Price matching is a very powerful tool for self-published authors to use if you're brave enough to accept its flaws. Did your five free days on Amazon not produce results? Too bad you're stuck for the 90 day period before you can try again. Did it actually do well and your doing a happy dance with your 25,000 free downloads that resulted in hundreds even thousands of sales on your other books? Good, but you do realize you will not be able to do this again in the next 90 day period right? Those websites like E-reader News Today and Pixel of Ink won't feature the same books twice. So your next 90 day promotion period is already guaranteed to suck. I shudder when people have back to back promotion periods that do not perform well. That's half a year locked into a program that leaves you with no other avenues to explore or new options to try.
If you have a book you're willing to offer for free, price matching can be your Ace of Spades. Instead of 5 days out of 90 to get your book out there. 90 of 90 days it can be free. And not just on Amazon. Free downloads from Apple, Kobo, Sony, Deisel, Barnes and Noble and even at Amazon. You can still submit your book to the promotional websites and if they don't pick your book among the thousands that are submitted, you can try again, and again, and again until they do. You're not limited to the 5 chances Amazon gives you then your out of luck. Luck is important and limiting it is bad.
Conclusion and advice:
Both Select and non-exclusive to Amazon have their advantages. I have been a part of select for 15 months and have had excellent periods, and crappy periods. Dealing with only one vendor has the advantages already stated but it has it's disadvantages too.
My advice if you're new to self publishing would be to go with Amazon's Select program. It's the perfect playground to get your feet wet in the world that is self-publishing. If it doesn't work out, just opt out. 90 days isn't all that long, but it can seem like forever if your books are doing poorly. Two or three bad periods can really crush an author as their book fallows and due to the terms, there is little you can do but wait. Many an author has given up from this.
Once you have a feel for things, start to branch out. Test the other markets, you can always go back. Several authors have a mix of books in and out of Select. A strategy that is often used is to put a book in Select for it's first 90 days. Capture those early reviews all in one place, have a free run to get it out there, then release it to the rest of the markets. Or taking older books that haven't found an audience and give it the same Select treatment to jump start it again.
After two years of being self published, I will be opting out of Select. Only Requiem remains and it's contract will expire at the beginning of March. I have reached a point in my career where exploring new markets is something I want to do and now that the trilogy is complete, I can market it as a set instead of one or two books with an unfinished story-line. I have a new series coming out shortly as well so it's the perfect time to try.
I hope you have found this information helpful.
For those who are not familiar with KDP Select, it is a program that an author can choose to opt-in/out when they upload a manuscript to Amazon. The benefits are five days out of each ninety day period that you can set the price of your book to $0.00 for promotional reasons. Select also makes your title available to the Kindle Online Lending Library where Amazon Prime members can choose to download and read your book at no cost to them. The author is compensated for these borrows from a monthly pool of money and it tends to average around the $1.80-$2.00 range per borrow. The last major benifit to a book being in the Select program is that it allows an author to collect 70% royalty rates instead of 35% in the emerging markets that Amazon has been expanding since the launch of Select. Namely, India, Brazil, and Japan.
The downside to select is the e-book version must be exclusive to the Amazon store. This means you can't sell the same e-book or even portions of it on other web sites like Apple, Barnes and Noble or even your own website. Now you can make available promotional material like blurbs, excerpts, or a sample chapter or two as long as it doesn't exceed a certain amount. What that is, I can't tell you because I have not heard of anyone getting in trouble for this and there are different numbers being tossed out from 5% to 30% of your book. However you cannot offer a short story for sale in other outlets and then include that same short in a bundled book that is opted in for select. This works the other way as well. You can't have a short in Select and include it in bundle on other sites. The content has to be exclusive. This does not apply to print options. Print is a separate deal when it comes to KDP Select. The other growing downside is that since Select has launched, all new markets default to the 35% royalty option instead of being able to collect 70%. For most authors, these markets represent little to no income, but as time goes on, the list of restricted markets will grow as will their impact.
Exclusive with Amazon:
Exclusivity has some advantages. Especially for new authors working with shoe-string budgets and Amazon offers some very nice perks. First, they are the shark in the tank of fish when it comes to online publishing. All other companies combined don't equal the amount of e-books sold compared to Amazon. So when it comes down to where you're going to spend your time and money, it's going to be with Amazon.
When you get around to promoting your work, it's very beneficial if you have the ability to point everyone to the same place. This means that every sale counts towards the same ranking, every review received is collected on one site. If you're spread out among five or six different retailers, then your sales, ranks, and reviews are also diluted. What's better? A hundred sales split five ways leaving you book in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands on the ranks, or all one hundred sales on Amazon that puts you onto the top 100 genera lists where the discoverability of your book jumps explosively?
Accounting is simplified. You get a check from one place, you manage your whole digital library from one dashboard, you deal with one specific file format. At first these might not seem like they would be an advantage, but once you start branching out and one web site takes one file type, and another requires a third type, and finally in Apple's case you need to use a system running a mac OSX to upload your work, it quickly becomes a lot of work. This compounds exponentially when you start releasing more books, or if you're going back to earlier works and adding back end material. This will either cost you time, to learn how to create these file types, or increased costs to whomever you pay for formatting.
Free promotion days. This is the honey for joining Select. The ability to pre-schedule when your book will be available for free is arguably the most powerful marketing tool you will find. The only other way to get your book free in any market place is by using a 3rd party distrubutor like Smashwords who has a negotiated thing with Barnes and Noble to make books free on their site, and Apple. Apple allows for direct uploading and pricing $0. Everywhere else you have to use some price matching scheme to get your book free and it is whimsical at best. It can take weeks to months for a book to get price matched and it can take that long again for the price to revert. In other words, you have lost control of your pricing. There are horror stories out there of books stuck in free limbo because each website is price matching the other and none of them will change. Having complete control of your pricing allows for you to effectively promote your book how you see fit. You can change the price and it will instantly take effect, offer free days without worry and more. This is a major benefit to deal with only one company.
KOLL. I don't have much to say about the lending library. When I have been enrolled in Select, the amount of borrows I received were negligible. I had roughly one borrow per every 300 full priced sales. I also price my books at $4.99 and receive $3.10 per sale and that's significantly higher than the $1.80+ that I would get from a borrow. However I have read plenty of posts from authors who receive a considerable amount of revenue from borrows. I do know that if you are offering your book for 99c. you will make much much more money per borrow than you would for a sale. A 99c book will only bring in 35c in royalties. Going from 35c to $1.80 is a five fold increase in royalties. That's right you can get paid $1.80 when someone borrows a 99c book. This could be where they are favoring the lending library over others.
So in summary, consolidation of payments, sales, rankings, and reviews. One website you need to promote. Complete and timely control over your pricing, increased royalties in new markets and a lending feature that can pay out significantly increased royalties in certain price ranges. Last but not least, your on Amazon, no one is bigger.
Non Exclusive:
There are whole economic college classes that are dedicated to the dangers of exclusivity. If Amazon is 60% of the market, why would you cut yourself out of the other 40%? Each marketplace is it's own ecosystem. If you don't thrive at Amazon, you may very well succeed at Barnes and Noble. Also shopping demographics are different. B&N dominates when it comes to the romance genres and erotica. Apple... I'm not sure what they dominate but a lot of authors report success from the iTunes Bookstore over Amazon and others.
The luck factor. One of the driving factors for selling books is word of mouth. It's not uncommon for a book to take off on one retailer, and it spreads to others as word of mouth kicks in. If your only available on one website, you give up those chances to break out. Mark over at Smashwords has released data that clearly shows books taking off at one website and having it increase sales across all platforms shortly after. Each website also offers their own features and if you're not on their site, they can't pick you to feature you. The more places you are, the more you increase your luck.
The market place is shifting. Kobo and Apple are making significant strides in reaching out to authors. Amazon's dominance is shrinking and the days of a dedicated e-reader are already gone. Now its the time of the tablet that can do it all and e-reader apps. Having a device exclusive to a vendor is dangerous. Apple and Amazon saw this very quickly. B&N seems to be a wait and see then follow years late kinda company that does not leverage it's one asset that none of the others have, a real bookstore.
Price matching is a very powerful tool for self-published authors to use if you're brave enough to accept its flaws. Did your five free days on Amazon not produce results? Too bad you're stuck for the 90 day period before you can try again. Did it actually do well and your doing a happy dance with your 25,000 free downloads that resulted in hundreds even thousands of sales on your other books? Good, but you do realize you will not be able to do this again in the next 90 day period right? Those websites like E-reader News Today and Pixel of Ink won't feature the same books twice. So your next 90 day promotion period is already guaranteed to suck. I shudder when people have back to back promotion periods that do not perform well. That's half a year locked into a program that leaves you with no other avenues to explore or new options to try.
If you have a book you're willing to offer for free, price matching can be your Ace of Spades. Instead of 5 days out of 90 to get your book out there. 90 of 90 days it can be free. And not just on Amazon. Free downloads from Apple, Kobo, Sony, Deisel, Barnes and Noble and even at Amazon. You can still submit your book to the promotional websites and if they don't pick your book among the thousands that are submitted, you can try again, and again, and again until they do. You're not limited to the 5 chances Amazon gives you then your out of luck. Luck is important and limiting it is bad.
Conclusion and advice:
Both Select and non-exclusive to Amazon have their advantages. I have been a part of select for 15 months and have had excellent periods, and crappy periods. Dealing with only one vendor has the advantages already stated but it has it's disadvantages too.
My advice if you're new to self publishing would be to go with Amazon's Select program. It's the perfect playground to get your feet wet in the world that is self-publishing. If it doesn't work out, just opt out. 90 days isn't all that long, but it can seem like forever if your books are doing poorly. Two or three bad periods can really crush an author as their book fallows and due to the terms, there is little you can do but wait. Many an author has given up from this.
Once you have a feel for things, start to branch out. Test the other markets, you can always go back. Several authors have a mix of books in and out of Select. A strategy that is often used is to put a book in Select for it's first 90 days. Capture those early reviews all in one place, have a free run to get it out there, then release it to the rest of the markets. Or taking older books that haven't found an audience and give it the same Select treatment to jump start it again.
After two years of being self published, I will be opting out of Select. Only Requiem remains and it's contract will expire at the beginning of March. I have reached a point in my career where exploring new markets is something I want to do and now that the trilogy is complete, I can market it as a set instead of one or two books with an unfinished story-line. I have a new series coming out shortly as well so it's the perfect time to try.
I hope you have found this information helpful.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
What's new in the world of SB Jones
It has been a while since my last update. I have moved most of my updating and customer and fan interaction over to Facebook. There is a link to the Facebook page on the right there if anyone wishes to hit the like button there.
Well, 2013 looks to be an exciting year in my writing career. I launched the third book of the trilogy on Christmas. It has been an amazing experience to write one book and see it in print. Completing a series is ten times as exciting.
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Requiem also received a face-lift as well. The new cover really brings the set together as a unit. I also redid the interior layout to match the other books as well. From book one to three, I went from knowing nothing about typesetting to a whole lot. If anyone is thinking about getting their first book into print. Learn all about typesetting before you take the plunge. Take the hours, weeks, even months to get it right or hire it done.
This coming March marks a very pivotal change for me. Requiem will be leaving the KDP select program and the trilogy will be released to other online retailers. No more exclusivity to Amazon. So now people will be able to buy the e-books from Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, as well as Amazon. Statistically this should increase the market exposure of the books by a significant amount.
March also marks the tentative release date of Book One of The War of Antiquities. It is all finished and I am currently working on Book Two. The War of Antiquities is episodic with the first six episodes completing Book One. They will be released approximately a week apart with a month break after episode six before Book Two gets rolled out.
The War of Antiquities takes place twenty years prior to Requiem. It is all of the back story that surrounds the primary villain, Therion, and his relationship with the main hero's father, Duke Falconcrest. Several characters from the trilogy play major rolls including the Mastersons, Vincent, and maybe a cameo or two by our favorite time traveler, Mr. Eleazar. Also sprinkled throughout are details about Bastiana's origins as well as the woman who can fly, Angela.
I am very excited about this series, and it has been very fun to write. I also have an upcoming book signing event at Barnes and Noble. I am curious how it will do now that I have a trilogy to offer vs. a single book.
How are your plans for 2013 shaping up?
Well, 2013 looks to be an exciting year in my writing career. I launched the third book of the trilogy on Christmas. It has been an amazing experience to write one book and see it in print. Completing a series is ten times as exciting.
Requiem also received a face-lift as well. The new cover really brings the set together as a unit. I also redid the interior layout to match the other books as well. From book one to three, I went from knowing nothing about typesetting to a whole lot. If anyone is thinking about getting their first book into print. Learn all about typesetting before you take the plunge. Take the hours, weeks, even months to get it right or hire it done.
This coming March marks a very pivotal change for me. Requiem will be leaving the KDP select program and the trilogy will be released to other online retailers. No more exclusivity to Amazon. So now people will be able to buy the e-books from Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, as well as Amazon. Statistically this should increase the market exposure of the books by a significant amount.
March also marks the tentative release date of Book One of The War of Antiquities. It is all finished and I am currently working on Book Two. The War of Antiquities is episodic with the first six episodes completing Book One. They will be released approximately a week apart with a month break after episode six before Book Two gets rolled out.
The War of Antiquities takes place twenty years prior to Requiem. It is all of the back story that surrounds the primary villain, Therion, and his relationship with the main hero's father, Duke Falconcrest. Several characters from the trilogy play major rolls including the Mastersons, Vincent, and maybe a cameo or two by our favorite time traveler, Mr. Eleazar. Also sprinkled throughout are details about Bastiana's origins as well as the woman who can fly, Angela.
I am very excited about this series, and it has been very fun to write. I also have an upcoming book signing event at Barnes and Noble. I am curious how it will do now that I have a trilogy to offer vs. a single book.
How are your plans for 2013 shaping up?
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Derailed and rebuilding the tracks.
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At the start of January, I spent a week creating the most detailed notes I have ever written for a project titled "The War of Antiquities". It made it so easy to write that in the first eleven days I had written around 43,822 words. I think by anyone's standards, that is a pretty break neck speed, easily double what you need to finish NaNo. "The War of Antiquities" takes place just after the war is declared over and will end at the prologue of Requiem. It develops all of the back story and characters like Duke Falconcrest, Therion, Vincent, Rhonin and Rayne Masterson, as well as several other characters. I project the series to finish somewhere around the 200,000 word mark, spread out over 22 short stories approximately 8,000-10,000 words each. Currently the project sits with story 5 about half finished at 5,800 words.
So how did everything get derailed? It's been about 3 almost 4 weeks and I haven't written anything of substance. There were plenty of times I sat down, looked at my notes, fired up MSWord and just turned off the monitors and walked away. It's not burn out, that I can assure you. On Jan 11, my grandmother died. She was the last of my grandparents to die and had been living near my parents at their place on the river where all of the photos I like to post come from. She was in her 80's, but in fine health, so her death was pretty unexpected. There are certain things in life that we tend to ignore or take advantage of and when something happens to them, everything else becomes a lesser priority.
Aside from spending time with the family, I had a lot of time to catch up on things I had neglected these last few weeks. I read a couple of books. I have read several times that authors say you should keep reading while you write. I'll be honest and say that I hadn't read a book since I sat down and started writing Requiem back in March of 2010. I also sat down and played some video games. Another past time that I had ignored. I picked up a copy of "The Old Republic" and chopped my way to level 50 as a Sith Juggernaut. Reading, and playing a game with a very good story line feels like my creative writing gas tank just got refiled. I look at my stack of notes that you can see in the photo and it's time to start writing again. There is an excellent story that needs to be told.
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