Ebooks

This post, by Porter Anderson, originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 4/1/13. It gives an excellent overview of the facts about Amazon’s intended acquisition of Goodreads, a roundup of reactions, and some analysis from cooler heads.

To many, Amazon is an evil corporation hellbent on destroying the world. They have made these intentions clear by paying authors a shitload and fighting to lower the price of books for readers. I think we can all agree that authors and readers are scum, and this preferential treatment on the part of Amazon should be looked at with complete distrust.

Hugh Howey writes about the destruction of the world for a living. In this instance, he’s on his site, in Amazon and Goodreads.

And by Thursday afternoon, around 4:45 p.m. Eastern, he had a lot to write about. The Amazonian Apocalypse indeed was upon us. We were up to our digital derrieres in that greatest of all booky community blessings: reach out and share the hysteria.

In four sections of this edition of the Ether, I’m going to focus on this new development at length, here at Palpitating Perspectives.

The event, in and of itself, is of genuine interest, certainly. But also worthy of our attention is the fact that it’s not cause for the self-defenestration you’d think was contemplated by some of our colleagues on hearing the word.

We didn’t just get news Thursday. We also got a fever dream’s descent into alarmist indulgence.

I was reminded of a typo in the Sunday bulletin at one of my father’s churches many years ago. We were posted at the time to the Methodist church in Denny Terrace, a suburb of Columbia, South Carolina. The listing was for a parish picnic that afternoon: 4 p.m. today: Church-Wide Panic. Please be prompt. Well, here was Goodreads being acquired by Amazon. The panic surely started promptly. And now was the fimbulwinter of our discontent made glorious slapstick by such loud reactions.

Never mind Goodreads founder Otis Chandler’s statement on his site’s blog, Exciting News About Goodreads: We’re Joining the Amazon Family!

It’s important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site.

The angry faithful blew off those niceties with the ease of Amazon Certified Frustration-Free Packaging. It didn’t seem to matter what Chandler said. This man who 30 minutes earlier was thought a hero by his lit-legions now was pictured with his wife, both of them holding Kindles with Goodreads stickers on them.

Read the rest of this very lengthy and in-depth post on Publishing Perspectives.

If you write any online content, Google Authorship is something you can’t afford to ignore.

Authorship is Google’s program for verifying the identity of online writers. Once you have claimed Authorship, any time one of your articles or blog posts appears in someone’s Google search results, they will see your picture and a link to your Google Plus profile.

You can see an example linking to one of my blog posts below.

This has obvious advantages in terms of giving your posts added visibility and increasing the likelihood they will be clicked on.

In addition, though, using Google Authorship will boost your credibility and expert status with Google in topic areas you write about regularly. It will also help your original articles rank higher than sites that have (legitimately or otherwise) copied your content.

A further advantage is that if a user returns to their results list after reading an author-tagged search result for a certain period of time, Google will add three additional links to similar articles from the same author below the link they originally clicked. How cool is that?!

So far there is no evidence that articles with Google Authorship automatically achieve higher placings in search results – but as Authorship helps build your reputation, it is likely that in the longer term it will assist you in achieving higher search-engine rankings as well.

Before you can set up Google Authorship, you will need two things: a Google Account and Google Plus (also written Google+) membership.

If you use any Google services that require you to log in – Gmail being the best-known – you will have a Google Account already. Otherwise you can sign up here. It’s free and only takes a moment.

Google Plus is Google’s attempt to create its own social network to rival Facebook. Although it has failed to capture the public imagination in the way Facebook has, according to this recent article on ZDNet it now has over 343 million active users. That puts it ahead of both Twitter and YouTube (which Google also owns, incidentally).

Google Plus is already tightly integrated with other services such as Google search, which is a good reason to open an account in itself. You can check out my Google Plus page here, incidentally.

Assuming you have a Google Account, joining Google Plus is simple (and free). Just visit the Google Plus website to sign up. The Digital Unite website has detailed step-by-step instructions to joining Google Plus, if you need them.

With that done, you are almost ready to set up Authorship. There is just one more thing to do, which is to ensure that you have a good quality portrait photograph that Google can display in search results. You can upload or change this via your Google Plus profile page.

Setting Up Authorship

There are two main ways to set up Authorship. The first, and simplest, can be used if you have an email address on the same domain as the blog or website you want to claim Authorship for.

For example, if you want to claim Authorship for articles you write on www.mywebsite.com and you have an email address of writer@mywebsite.com, you could use this method.

In that case, visit the Google Authorship page and submit your email address to Google via the online form. Google will send you an email containing a link to click in order to confirm that this is indeed your account. Once you have done this, Authorship will be set up for the domain in question. The root domain will also be added to the list of items in “Contributor To” on your Google Plus profile page.

No matter how many articles or posts you publish on this domain, you should only need to do this once. For Authorship to work, however, it is essential that every article or post you write includes the word “by” (without the quotation marks) followed by your name exactly as it appears in your Google Plus account.

Note that doing this will also add your email address to the Work section of your Profile. By default this is viewable only by your Circles (people you have chosen to follow in Google Plus). You can keep your email entirely private if you wish, however, by editing the visibility settings in the Work section.

Of course, this method can’t be used where you don’t have control over the root domain, as is the case with many blogs on free hosting services such as Blogger and WordPress.com. The same may apply with blogs you have written guest posts for. In that case, you will need to use a two-step method.

First, go to your Google Plus profile page and click on “About”. Scroll down a bit and you should find a box headed Links. I’ve copied mine below…

As with all the images in this post, you can see a full-sized version by clicking on the image concerned.

Click on Edit at the foot of the box, and click on Add Custom Link in the “Contributor To” section. You will then be able to add the website concerned to the list of sites there.

That’s not enough for Authorship to work on its own, however. This is where Step 2 comes in. You will need to add a piece of code on the web page concerned that identifies you as the author. Here is the code I use:
<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/102502380222491675387?rel=author”>Nick Daws</a>

The URL in the middle is that of your Google Plus Profile page, so you will need to navigate to this and copy it from your browser’s location bar. Obviously, the reference number of your page will be different from mine, but otherwise if you are on the correct page it should look similar.

The other crucial element to include is the ?rel=author tag directly after your Profile page URL. This tells Google that you are claiming Authorship for the post or article in question. The anchor text you use doesn’t really matter. I’ve used my name in the example code above, but you could put “Google Plus” if you prefer. In that case it will render as in the following example: Here is an Authorship link to Nick Daws’ Google Plus page. Either way, it should work without any problems.

To test that you have set up Authorship correctly, go to Google Webmaster Tools Structured Data Testing Tool. Enter the website’s URL in the box and click on Preview. A results page should then appear showing whether Authorship is working or not (and how it has been verified, using email or rel=author markup). Here are the results I got for this blog when I tried doing this just now:

As you will see, it wasn’t possible for me to use the email method for my blog, so I used the rel=author method.

Naturally, with guest posts you have written in the past, Authorship won’t work unless the necessary code is inserted. You might therefore want to write to the owners of the blogs concerned asking if they would be kind enough to add a link to your Google Plus page using the “rel=author” tag.

And that’s it, really. In this post I have tried to show you all the basics you need to know in order to claim Authorship of your blog and guest posts. If you need more help, Google Webmaster Tools has pages titled Author Information in Search Results and Link your content to a Google+ Profile using “rel=author”.

Good luck setting up Authorship. I hope that in this article I have convinced you that it’s worth doing, and it isn’t rocket science!

If you have any comments or questions, please post them [in the comments section on the original post, here], and of course I’ll help if I can.

This is a reprint from Nick Daws’ My Writing Blog.

This guest post, by Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima (with an introduction by Joanna Penn), originally appeared on Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn on 3/23/13.

This week, the “father of African literature’ Chinua Achebe died, leaving behind a legacy for Nigerian authors. Today I welcome another Nigerian author Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima to discuss the outlook for ebooks in Africa.

Ebook sales are stabilizing in the US and UK, but the rest of the world is out there waiting for our books!

Those of us who can price reasonably, to take into account exchange rate differences, can potentially build a fan-base in countries that may be surprising to some.

Nigeria is one of the fastest growing emerging economies, and with the prevalence of cellphones in Africa it may become a fantastic new market in the next few years, even though there are still challenges right now.

Ebooks are outselling paperback and hardcover books in America and Europe, but not yet in Africa.

Today, Nigerian author and blogger Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima will tell you why the story is different in Africa.

Ebooks are not popular among writers and readers in my country Nigeria, and the rest of Africa, even though millions of people have been using email over the years and are now engaging in daily conversations on popular social network sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The majority of Africans are still living according to the standards of the last century, writing long hand and either paying for word processing or slowly doing so themselves on their desktops or laptops. The exception would be the African writers based in the U.S., UK and other developed societies who have to use the tools their peers are using in the 21st century. South Africa is ahead of Nigeria and other African countries in using smart phones and tablets but only got her first ebook store, Kalahari, in 2010, but the ebooks are overpriced for the rest of the continent.

Why is the penetration of ebooks challenging right now?

Generally, from South Africa to Nigeria, the two main challenges of ebooks are:

• low level of bandwidth and the low capacity of the data cables making the access to broadband expensive and unavailable to the majority of the populations.

But in spite of the low internet penetration in Africa, there is only one choice left for the majority who are still crawling and lagging behind, if we cannot beat them, we have to join them.

And that is why I give a thumbs up to David Risher who has launched Worldreader to take “1 million e-books to children in the largely English-speaking countries of Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya” and has raised a total of $1.5 million to fund his digital literature revolution in sub-Saharan Africa.

“David is pushing a fundamental conversation: How do you create a culture of reading in a place that hasn’t had one?” said Anne Marie Burgoyne, Managing Director of Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation that supported Worldreader with $300,000 last September.

Is indie publishing the future?

 

Read the rest of the post on Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn.

This post, by Farhad Manjoo, originally appeared on Slate on 3/20/13. While it focuses on consumer products like detergent, authors who use, or are considering, Facebook ads should read it.

Even if you never click on Facebook ads, they are making you buy things.

This is a story about advertising on the Web. Specifically, it’s about ads on Facebook, a hugely popular free service that’s supported solely through advertising, yet is packed with users who are actively hostile to the idea of being marketed to on their cherished social network. Considering all of this, the best place to start is with your primary concern about Web ads. This is what I hear from readers every time I write about the online ad economy, especially ads on Facebook: “I don’t know how Facebook will ever make any money—I never click on Web ads!”

And that’s not all. You’ve checked with your friends and relatives. No one you know has ever intentionally clicked on a Web ad. OK, once, years ago, a co-worker told you about a guy who knows a guy who tapped an ad on his phone. True story! But don’t worry. People close to the situation dismissed it as a one-time deal. The guy wasn’t trying to tap the ad; he just had really fat fingers. He felt really bad about it afterward, too.

So, the question persists: How does Facebook expect to become a huge business if most people you know never click on ads?

The answer is surprisingly obvious. It’s a fact well-known to advertisers, though it’s not always appreciated by people who use Facebook or even by folks in the Web ad business: Clicks don’t matter. Whether you know it or not—even if you consider yourself skeptical of marketing—the ads you see on Facebook are working. Sponsored messages in your feed are changing your behavior—they’re getting you and your friends to buy certain products instead of others, and that’s happening despite the fact that you’re not clicking, and even if you think you’re ignoring the ads.

This isn’t conjecture. It’s science. It’s based on a remarkable set of in-depth studies that Facebook has conducted to show whether and how its users respond to ads on the site.

 

Read the rest of the post on Slate.

This post, by Catherine Tosko, originally appeared on The Self-Publishing Review on 3/19/13.

I have, apparently, 539 friends. Facebook tells me so.

I have a fan page for my book, with over 1000 likes. My Twitter is a healthy 600 odd and I have over 50 mentions on Google for the title. But you see, I know that not everyone rushed over to Amazon and picked up their copy the day it went on sale. I know this because I sold 23 copies on the first day. That was it.

So how the heck do I get every single one of those people to buy a copy of my book? Glibly “liking” my book page seems to be the done thing, a nod to my efforts, and a polite if awkward obligation by passers-by, as if I am at a cocktail party handing out flyers, a scenario something like this:

“Hey guy, do you know about my book? Here’s a flyer!” I cry, with my Facebook page.

This person, an acquaintance from 1997, who mostly likes kittens and memes about feeling positive, is kind of hampered to have to respond, but takes the flyer based on me two years ago, “liking” his band page (terrible band), and says simply ” Um, I’ll check it out.”

This is how my Facebook Likes seem to manifest. They are not what you call ” convertible” , i.e. they do not equate to a sale.

In the same effort, I respond to others. I write them encouraging messages, using emoticons. I hate emoticons. But if someone I think may buy my book, even out of sympathy, if I use them, I am all for the smileys.

Then I have my real life friends and family. Probably about 100 people on there.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Self-Publishing Review.

Most of us who sell our print books through CreateSpace or other print on demand vendors, and our ebooks through Kindle Direct Publishing or other ebook retailers and distributors, usually focus our marketing online.

This make sense. A lot of business and marketing happens online these days. Many of us are also bloggers with territory staked out in the digital world, and with lots of connections on social media.

In fact, social media marketing is often the beginning and end of authors’ marketing plans. From blog tours to Facebook contests to Pinterest pin parties to online press release distribution, we digital authors attempt to fully exploit the domain in which we operate.

But are you missing something?

Going Offline for Book Marketing
If all the marketing you’re doing is online, you may be missing out on lots of excellent opportunities to market your book.

Remember that our biggest effort in marketing is simply getting our books in front of enough people to give them a chance at success. You can’t get people talking about your book and, hopefully, referring it to other people in true word-of-mouth promotion, if they don’t know it exists and have never seen it. So awareness and exposure are really our biggest goals when we launch a new book.

But there are still lots of ways people get together, network, and learn about new things in the real world.

To help you think about this and get started, here’s a brief list of offline opportunities that might work for you. Even if you only use one of these suggestions, you’ll see results you couldn’t have gotten online.

8 Ideas for Offline Book Marketing for Indie Authors

1. Print books vs. eBooks—While it’s difficult to sell ebooks at an event or book signing, many people will buy a print book if they see them stacked up in front of them. After all, a book is something you can pick up and handle, and that’s often a powerful buying incentive. Print books also act as mementos of the occasion, or a way to further explore a topic that has ignited your interest.
2. Social media vs. in-person contact—I love social media and use it every day. But it’s really quite different to have a conversation with a colleague or a reader or a prospective client in person, where the centuries-old conventions of human interaction come into play and the levels of communication are much deeper. If your aim is building trust in your readers, interacting with them at events will be helpful and instructive at the same time. For instance, just recently a friend told me about something that needed to be fixed in one of my products. But I doubt she would have taken the time to write to me about it because messages like that usually seem like complaints. In person, she could deliver the message with exactly the right intonations, smiles, and gestures so the communication was nuanced and effective.
3. Giving presentations to build your platform—If you become a subject-matter expert, you’ll start to get invitations to speak to groups within your industry or field of study. These are terrific platform-building opportunities. Not only do you get to meet people you may not have known about before, you also get the implicit endorsement of the group that’s putting on the program, as well as the positive expectations attendees at your event will bring with them. Combined with this is the name recognition and awareness you’ll get from the promotion for the event that will reach many more people than will actually attend. (Check out my own appearance schedule.)
4. Back-of-the-room sales—Did I mention you can sell books at many of these in-person events? Well, you can, and these sales may be your most lucrative. In some cases, you can sell your books for the full retail price, so a $15 book might yield you $12 profit. In other cases, event organizers or bookstore hosts will want a 40-50% discount. But they will handle the sales transactions for you, and people at these events often buy books written by speakers as a way to remember the presentation or the overall experience they had at the event.
5. Writing for print—Remember newspapers and magazines? They are still out there, and they still have an unending need for good quality content to fill up those pages. For many people, reading an article by you in a respected industry magazine may carry a lot more weight than reading the same story on your blog. Since you’re developing content, submitting story ideas to editors at local papers or trade magazines can only multiply your readers and your exposure.
6. Offline review media—You undoubtedly included those local papers and trade magazines in your review program, right? You didn’t just rely on bloggers and online media for reviews because you know millions of people rely on these print media to make critical buying decisions and to learn about new trends in culture. Don’t overlook them.
7. Repurposing your expertise—Some authors have found running live events to be highly profitable. You might write about a subject that lends itself to workshops, where you can teach the same ideas you’ve written about, or try out new ideas to see how they work in the real world. Fiction authors do this, too, leading trips abroad and organizing writing workshops in vacation destinations.
8. Developing media contacts—Part of your job as an indie publisher is establishing media contacts, too. For fiction authors, this might involve the local papers, where you can expect to find some natural interest. For nonfiction authors there are niche publications or media outlets related to your topic, and if you write on their topic, they’re likely to be open to an approach.

Notice that I haven’t mentioned book launch parties or book signings, traditional events many authors include in their launch planning and which happen offline. But I knew you would think of those yourself.

Where would your offline marketing fit in to your book promotion plan? Or do you have some suggestions I haven’t included? Leave a note in the comments to share it with other authors.

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

I haven’t posted for awhile on any topic, including on indie publishing, but that is because I have been working steadily on writing Bloody Lessons, the third book of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series (if you want an update on my progress go check out my Facebook page.) I also felt I had pretty much exhausted what I had to say on the ins and outs and pros and cons of using KDP Select.

However, with the change in Amazon’s rules for Associates, a whole discussion has erupted about what this means for indie authors. See this balanced review of some aspects of the discussion. See, in addition, this good overview of the issues around free as a selling strategy and Amazon. One result of this change and subsequent posts about it is I have had a number of requests to comment on whether or not this means that free promotions and KDP Select won’t work as well any more.

The short answer is, how in heaven’s name do I know? But that isn’t very helpful so what I am going to do is remind people what I have written on this subject already, do a brief recap of how my last free promotion went, and try to predict some of the ways in which the most recent changes might require tweaking of my own (and other’s) strategies for using KDP Select. I also decided it was time to publish a list of Promotional Links, which I will try to keep up-to-date.

Posts I have already done:

If you want to know everything I have written on this subject––put “KDP Select” in the search bar at the top of my website. Otherwise, go ahead and click on these posts I have done on selling on Amazon, the importance of Categories, and an update on this post, how to have a successful KDP Select promotion, and factors you should consider when deciding whether or not to enroll in KDP Select.

Update on my most recent KDP Select Promotion:

I put the first book in my series, Maids of Misfortune up for free through KDP Select for three days, February 23-25. This was two months since the last promotion, which was December 29-30 (where I put both of my books up for free). This time I didn’t put Uneasy Spirits up for free, although I did pay for a Digital Book Today 7-day promotion for this book for the week after the Maids of Misfortune promotion was over.

I signed up with eleven sites that promote free books (only two cost anything, Book Goodies and BookBub.) I have been trying to rotate through the free promotion sites with each promotion so as not to saturate their specific markets. Maids hit the magic top 100 Free List by noon the first day at #73. By the end of the first day I had reached #26 in the Free List and had over 8,000 downloads. On the second day, by 3:15 pm, when the BookBub email went out, the book was at #11 In the Free List and already had 22,000 downloads. By the end of day two it was #3 and had 28,000 free downloads. It stayed at #4 throughout the third day, and the total number of free downloads for the promotion was 37,086.

As you can see by the data below––the promotion was successful––in boosting my sales and borrows, even of the book that wasn’t promoted.

Maids of Misfortune / Before / After

Average sales per day (over two weeks) / 7.9 / 77.4

Overall Rank / 20,000s / 2,000s (18 days after)

Uneasy Spirits / Before / After

Average sales per day (over two weeks) / 6.1 / 22.3

Overall Rank / 26,000s / 6,000s (18 days after)

Average Borrows per day (over two weeks)

Both Books combined / 16 / 59.9

The Future of KDP Select:

While I am not clairvoyant, I often pretend I am (something I share with my protagonist in my Victorian San Francisco mysteries), and I will say with some authority that KDP Select will not go away anytime soon, and Amazon will continue to work with and encourage self-published authors. While Amazon may have turned to indie authors (first with KDP, then with KDP Select) because they realized that depending on public domain books and traditional publishers wasn’t working, it was the indie authors themselves who proved to Amazon that they were both an outstanding source of the product Amazon needed and nimble innovators in the rapidly changing world of publishing.

Indie authors not only began to produce books at an amazing rate (as backlists were republished, manuscripts like my own were taken out of drawers, and genre writers began to pump out 2-4 books a year), but we also proved leaders in the changes that were going on in publishing, proving the viability of new short forms of fiction (novellas, short stories, serialized novels) and experimenting with new marketing techniques (using discounts, free promotions, blog tours, giveaways, twitter, facebook author pages, etc). Our books and our innovation helped fuel the heady growth of ebooks in a short period of time.

For example, from the beginning, Amazon’s royalty structure, which gave the 70% royalty rate only to books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, was challenged by indie authors like Amanda Hocking, who proved that the volume of sales you could make at 99 cents could make up for the lower 35% royalty rate. Amazon made money (and kept a bigger chunk of the money), and Hocking got her traditional contract (and paved the way for the idea that traditional publishers––including the new Amazon imprints––might find their next bestselling authors from among the ranks of the self-published.)

Then came KDP Select. If you will all remember, when Amazon introduced its first Kindle Fire, one of the selling points was that if you were a member of Amazon Prime you could download one free book a month. Initially Amazon had targeted traditional publishers (who––as with the whole ebook thing––ran away, screaming bloody murder), so once again they had to turn to indie authors to provide the product they needed to make the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) effective. However, while this is pure speculation on my part, by the end of 2011 (when KDP Select was set up) they were beginning to be concerned by the way that other booksellers (Barnes and Noble, Kobo, etc) were tapping into the ebook market so they came up with the exclusivity clause. If a book is in KDP Select it can not be sold anywhere else.

They needed a way to induce indie authors to go exclusive, and, besides creating the pool of money to be shared by KDP Select authors whose books were borrowed, they threw in the 5 free promotion days, having learned from indies that free promotions could sell books. In fact, a growing number of authors who had now published their back lists (or were very prolific in self-publishing lots of books a year) had discovered that if they made their books free on Smashwords, Amazon would price match. They had also proven that a free book that was the first in a series, or a free short story, could drive up sales for their other books. No doubt, seeing this trend, Amazon thought that the chance to put up your book for free, for a limited time for promotional reasons, would be a good inducement to get indies to sign up. Which we did, to great success in the first months of KDP Select’s existence.

But there was an unintended consequence. New kindle owners loved free and were gobbling these free books up at an amazing rate. And, since initially a free downloaded copy counted as a sale, the books that had been free dominated the best-seller categories, pushing the traditionally published books into invisibility. I am sure the traditional publishers complained, and I suspect that since indie books are by-in-large cheaper than traditionally published books this was not seen as a good thing in terms of profits for Amazon. The truth of the matter is that KDP Select and free promotions pushed the ebook environment from a level playing field for indies to giving them an unfair advantage within the Kindle store. Hence the changes to the algorithm counting downloads as sales and other tweaks to the formula that determined where a book is ranked on the popularity lists.

This was not the first time that some indie authors rent their garments and claimed that Amazon had turned its back on indies, and it certainly discouraged some authors from using KDP Select. However, while it became more difficult to translate your free promotions into high enough visibility to sustain sales afterwards, indies and those who supported indies again innovated, and a whole bunch of facebook pages, book bloggers, and websites popped up to advertise free promotions. The data above, from my last promotion, shows that KDP Select promotions remained a viable way of improving visibility and sales.

Again, however, unintended consequences caused Amazon to make the changes to their Amazon Associates because they were shelling out substantial amounts of money to websites that were primarily promoting free books. Again, the goal wasn’t to discourage indie authors, or even free books, but to direct the Associates program back to its original goal, encouraging people to go to Amazon to buy things.

So what does this mean for the future? First of all, a few of these promotion sites will go away, a larger percentage will start to charge for promotions––like BookBub.com does (to make up the revenue loss if they stop using Associates links), and others will begin to promote primarily cheap and discounted books rather than free.

If you look at the Promotional Links I have listed, you will see that there are still a significant number available, even after the Amazon change. And, one of my friends just put her book, A Provencal Mystery, up for free in KDP Select (breaking through into the top 100 by noon the first day and getting over 24,000 free downloads in two days) so I think we can safely say these promotional sites are still doing their job.

However, I do think that as indie authors we need to continue to innovate. Here is what I plan to do––I would love to hear from the rest of you what your strategies are.

Have free promotions less frequently. I had already noticed a growing tension between my reliance on free promotions to keep my books visible (agonizing when 30 days from the last promotion had passed and my books began to drop in the rankings and then lose sales) and the law of diminishing returns (if I offered the book free too frequently, the promotions were less successful.)

Then the success of BookBub.com (as the promotion site that has been delivering the highest number of downloads) forced me to make a change since they won’t feature a book more than every 90 days or an author more than every 30 days. Because of these limitations, my most recent promotion of Maids of Misfortune came two months after my last promotion (and three months after my last BookBub promotion.) I don’t think it is a coincidence I had more downloads than ever, with the strongest post sale bump since last March (and the infamous Amazon algorithm change.)

Longer promotions are safer. I used to suggest that authors not put their books up for free for longer than two days at a time (based on the idea of doing several promotions in the three-month contractual period under KDP Select.) But now that you need to get more downloads to achieve a post sales bump (see the amusing post by Elle Lothlorien), you need to consider how long it is going to take your particular book, in its specific genre, to reach enough downloads. I would do at least a two-day promotion if you have been able to get accepted by BookBub, three days if you don’t but have your book in categories that do well in free promotions and have a strong number of reviews, and maybe the full five days if your book is new, doesn’t have a lot of reviews, or is in a tiny niche market.

Schedule promotions near the end of a month. I started to notice that my borrows are always the strongest the first few days of every month so it is helpful to have my books as high as possible in bestseller lists at the beginning of the month. March 1-3 (three days after my last promotion ended) 394 of my books were borrowed. This helps maintain visibility as well since the borrows appear to be counted as sales.

Do more 99 cent promotions. For awhile, 99 cents was considered ‘dead’ as free books began to dominate as the main method of promotion, but just last week, for the first time, a self-published book hit #1 on NYT Bestseller list (with a 99 cent book). What I plan to do is experiment more with combining a 99 cent sale with a free promotion, or doing a 99 cent promotion to help maintain visibility during those longer times between free promotions.

Experiment more with promotions that are not tied to free or discounting my books. I don’t know for certain whether or not having a week-long promotion of Uneasy Spirits on the heels of the Maids free promotion has helped keep its sales up, but as more of the sites on the list I have compiled switch to non-free promotions, there will be certainly some of them that will turn out to be successful. BookBub can charge high rates they have demonstrated that they consistently deliver enough post promotion sales to more than make up for their cost. I expect that new marketing strategies will emerge in the next few months that are not dependent on free promotions.

Write more books and short stories. I know, I know, this is not a new strategy. But I know that the time I was taking to do free promotions every month was taking away from my writing time. The launch of a new book or short story (like a free promotion), if done correctly, can bump up sales and visibility of your other books, and it can take the sting away from those months between free promotions when your sales drop.

In short, I predict that as long as free promotional days in KDP Select deliver increased post promotion sales and borrows, Amazon has no reason to get rid of them, particularly if this is the main way to get authors to sign an exclusivity contract. And, as long as indie authors continue to produce books and stories that sell and provide new innovative ways to promote those books, the partnership between KDP Select and indie authors will continue.

What do you think?

 

This is a cross-posting from M. Louisa Locke‘s site.