Sell

The London Olympics are almost over and the closing ceremony will finish off what has been a glorious few weeks. (Britain seems to have done really well in the medal table too!)

At the opening ceremony I shared 10 lessons writers can learn from the Olympics, but I have also been thinking a great deal about time and achievement during the competition. I have been learning about establishing professional creative habits in the last few months and the discipline of the athletes has really brought it home for me.

Warning: This post contains homework!

I do yearly goals, I also do daily To Do lists and any number of other goal setting activities. But it’s August already and it seems that the time flies by and I haven’t achieved everything I set out to do.

And yet, I also look back to the last Olympics in 2008 and see how far I have come.

It is hard to measure achievement in just one year, and 5 years often seems too far to see. But the Olympics are a great milestone by which to measure our creative lives. Not too short and not too long a period. I’m being open and honest in this post so I hope you will be too. Let’s do this together …

Where were you on your writing journey in August 2008? (Beijing Olympics)

First, write down what you had achieved on your writing journey by August 2008 and anything else that might be pertinent to what you have achieved. Please do share in the comments if you would like to, but definitely keep this written down somewhere. I use Moleskine journals these days.

By August 2008, I had written my first non-fiction book, How to love your job or find a new one. I had self-published it but it had only sold ~100 copies. I had started learning about marketing from books, audio CDs and online courses. I was working full-time as an IT consultant for a large multi-national mining company. I didn’t know any authors. I had not seriously considered writing fiction.

I had a new blog but it was about my non-fiction book. The Creative Penn didn’t exist and I didn’t have a business at all. I wasn’t on any social networks and I didn’t know anything about them at that point. The Kindle hadn’t been released outside of the US and ebooks weren’t mainstream. I didn’t even know what ebooks were. There was no KDP or Nook PubIt or Smashwords or BookBaby (or I didn’t know they existed if they were there). Print on demand existed but wasn’t mainstream. I didn’t have a podcast and I had never made a video before. I basically had no online presence, no email list, no way to connect with anyone.

I was living in Australia and just about to get married. I read only print books and owned over 1500 physical books, many of which I had shipped from the UK, to New Zealand and then on to Brisbane, Australia.

Where are you now on your writing journey, in August 2012? (London Olympics)

Again, write this down in a notebook and add to the comments if you would like to share. I hope we can all look back at this so please be honest. You can see where I was 4 years ago!

I have 2 thriller novels out, Pentecost and Prophecy, in the ARKANE series. They have sold ~40,000 copies. I have finished the first draft of the third book in the series, Exodus and I’m working on 2 other fiction books. I have signed with a New York literary agent to represent my fiction. I have 2 non-fiction books available, including a re-release of my career change book, How to love your job or find a new one. I have a fiction website and blog at JFPenn.com.

TheCreativePenn.com has been voted one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2 years running and has monthly visitors of ~ 40,000. The Creative Penn podcast has over 130 episodes, over 70 hours of free audio on writing, publishing and book marketing. It has had over 60,000 downloads. My YouTube channel has had over 102,000 views. I am on multiple social networks, primarily twitter @thecreativepenn where I have close to 30,000 followers.

I am a full-time author-entrepreneur. I make a living from writing, speaking, selling multimedia courses and consulting on internet marketing.

I have been happily married for 4 years and now live in London, England. I read 90% of the time on my Kindle or my iPhone and we left 99% of our print books in Australia.

Reading this I am pretty happy with the progress of the last 4 years, even though the route here has been a twisty one. Building the business and starting writing fiction have been my main aims. My next focus will be seriously building my fiction brand and backlist.

Where will you be in August 2016? (Rio Olympics)

This is the tough one. You need to be visionary for this. I can also guarantee that whatever you write, the reality will surpass it (if you put in the Olympic training). Who said your writing goals have to be insignificant?

By August 2016, I want to have 10 thriller novels available and be a New York Times bestselling author. I will combine my books between traditional publishing houses and self-publishing. My print and ebooks will be available in multiple languages and I will have an email list of over 20,000 readers who are keen for my books. Financially, I will be earning 6 figures from my fiction.

I’ll still be happily married, but I won’t commit to a physical location, since I have moved every few years all my life! I love London but I won’t rule out more traveling

Yes, I plan on revisiting this post and seeing how we all did. I fully intend to still be blogging in 2016.

Again, write this down in a notebook and add to the comments if you would like to share.

Will you commit to the writer’s Olympic training program?

I’m all for visualization as one aspect of peak performance but you actually have to put in the physical effort as well. So, your writer’s Olympic training program for achievement by Rio 2016 should include:

(1) Practice.

Writing – first, last and always. If you don’t do this every day, or week, you won’t make your goals. If the athletes don’t show up, their muscles just get weaker. It’s the same for writers. Show up on the page and get writing. Do you see any of the Olympic athletes making excuses?

(2) Perform and test yourself.

For athletes, they need to test themselves by turning up for championships or competitions. For us, it’s about publishing. Whether that is self-publishing to a professional standard, or querying a traditional publisher, you have to get your books out there if you want to be a pro writer. The only way to test yourself is by having others read your work. Writing for pleasure is fantastic but it is not a professional career. It wouldn’t be an Olympic sport. So get your work out there.

(3) Skills development.

Athletes have coaches and go on training camps. They research techniques for cutting off an extra 0.001 second off their time. They are always improving. We need to focus on that too. Buy some books, pay for a manuscript critique or a developmental editor, go on a course, do an online multimedia program. Write in a different genre. Invest and keep improving your skills.

(4) Brand building and marketing

Usain Bolt has a brand and marketing manager. He needs to run but he also needs to pay the bills, now and into the future. He only has a few years at the top of his game, whereas we have a lifetime career to manage. Yes, we need to write more books but I also believe you need to invest time in building your brand, connecting with your audience and looking after your business. If you do this, you will be earning money for the long term and you’ll be able to write for your (may it be long) lifetime.

If you want to kick it up a notch for the next Olympics, this is what I recommend. What about you? Please do leave a comment below.

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

I think I’m almost a walking/classic example of “we don’t know what the public wants or how to anticipate it” that seems to be the battle cry of the entertainment industry, particularly books. Publishers take risks every day on things. They think “Oh this will be big” and then it isn’t. Or they put a book out there and it does way better than they ever expected.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

That’s about where I am right now. When I started the Zoe pen name and the paranormal romance and then started the Kitty pen name with the erotica, the idea was as follows: I was going to market the hell out of Zoe, and really build that. It would be my more “commercial” name. Kitty would just be a niche passion project, written for love, not money.

The reality turned out to be the opposite. I have spent thousands of dollars marketing and pushing Zoe. I’ve spent probably thousands of hours toward the same goal. In the beginning when there wasn’t much in the Kindle store, Zoe books sold well. If I’d had a lot more books out (i.e. if I’d stopped arguing on the Internet and kept my eye on the prize), I would have been able to lock in more long-term fans who would REMEMBER me and keep coming back.

But I didn’t do that.

Now, a few years later, the paranormal romance market is glutted and it’s starting to go a little out of fashion. i.e. while there will always be hardcore PNR fans and you can always probably do pretty decently there if you’re at the top of the pile, except for your hardcore fans, it’s just a harder sell now.

Likewise, YA dystopians are probably on the way out, too. People just get so sick of seeing the same shit over and over. So I probably won’t be doing YA dystopians. I might do some YA, but not dystopians, probably. This isn’t me just letting the market dictate to me. If I had a really well-developed idea that I LOVED and that kept me up at night thinking about it, I’d write it and publish it and just let the chips fall wherever. It’s always possible to write that book in a glutted and largely on the way out market that just grabs people anyway.

I mean YA dystopians have been slowly falling out of favor and then we had The Hunger Games happen. So there will probably be another little surge of it. Just like there was another surge of PNR after Twilight.

So what does this mean? Life Cycle has been out three weeks. And this is generally the point where if a title of mine is going to have a good upswing in sales and ranking, it happens now. I’ve got a huge cross-promo thing going with Kimberly Kinrade. We have thousands of entries. I’ve got major paid promo with a company whose name I won’t mention since the results are lackluster and I know some people swear by the company… All this is going on CURRENTLY and is in progress. I’ve spent more money promoting Life Cycle than any other title I’ve written for either name and it’s had the most disappointing sales so far. It has only 2 Amazon reviews in all of that time. While I may love it and those who love everything I write may love it… it obviously doesn’t have enough interest in the general marketplace and people aren’t passionate enough about it to really talk about it. (This isn’t me whining or crying or bitching or boo hooing, this is me facing reality.) Though it does make me pretty sad given how much I LOVE Cain and wanted to share him with a larger audience.

Zoe has a MUCH larger visible social platform than Kitty. But doesn’t sell as well. So all this crap about building your ‘platform’ with a billion twitter followers and facebook followers and newsletter subscribers and on and on is just that… crap. 5,000 Twitter followers isn’t 5,000 core fan base. I would LOVE it if all my kitty fans were on my newsletter because frankly it feels wild and out of control to not have direct access to everybody who loves my books to make sure they know about them when they come out. But that’s part of the wholesale model, when you deal directly with an intermediary company instead of directly selling to your audience. It’s a trade off. On the one hand bad: you lose direct access to everybody. On the other hand good: you have more access to people in general.

Kitty has 150 newsletter subscribers. But every single person on that list is a SERIOUS fan. Zoe has over 2,000 newsletter subscribers and yet 25% or less even open their newsletters from Zoe. I used to have a much higher open conversion rate for Zoe. It dropped because I started giving away Kept for free to entice people to subscribe to the newsletter and also doing newsletter drives and promotions where people subscribe. Most of those people just delete the emails when they come. They don’t CARE about my work. They just wanted free stuff. (Obviously there are exceptions but they aren’t the rule.)

Back to Zoe:

I LOVE Life Cycle. I really thought it would break out. But I think part of the problem is… it’s book 4 in the series. And I think it just doesn’t matter how much I scream that it can work as a stand-alone, most people want to read books in a series in order. And Blood Lust is not my strongest book. It’s not “weak”, but it’s not break-out-able. So I can’t expect readers–except for a small core following–to push through all those books to get to Life Cycle.

I think I can wrap up this series in 7 books, so that’s what I’m going to do. Hadrian and Angeline’s book (book 5) is next. That will tie up their storyline started in Dark Mercy. Then I have 2 more to wrap up the series. I’m not going to continue to try to resurrect something that just isn’t giving me the results I want. But by the same token, I’m not going to betray the fans of the series by not finishing what I started. (and FYI, I only had 7 books with full PLANS. I was going to put in an extra book assuming I could figure out something to go in that slot, but I’m not going to do that now.)

Not when Kitty does so much better. With Kitty I have done NO major promos or giveaways (nor will I ever.) I’ve come to understand that if your selling point is giving away a Kindle or signed free books you are mainly attracting people who want free things, not a fan base. They may say: “Oh, that book sounds good!” but they will add it to their TBR pile (maybe) and then never bother to buy it or read it. Some will, but most won’t. This is 4 years of experience with all this crap talking. (And 4 years isn’t massive experience, but it’s enough to note a trend and stop doing stupid things.)

When I think of all my favorite authors and favorite books, the selling point that brought me to those authors was THE BOOK. It wasn’t a giveaway of any stripe. So all this expensive and time consuming promotion just doesn’t work. IMO. Maybe it works for other people and if so, great. But I’ve seen the difference in how Kitty and Zoe sell and the crazy amount of work I have to put into Zoe for mediocre sales

Zoe is also harder for me to write. It’s more work for the writing, more work for the editing, more work and money for the marketing… lackluster results. Kitty is easier to write, less work for the editing, no major marketing… better results… sells better over the long haul even with many months of no new release. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what I should be focusing most of my attention on, here.

Writing is my career. It’s what pays my rent and puts food on my table. Without writing, I’d have to go out and get a real job. So, while I can’t write something I hate just to please/feed a market… (i.e. I can’t just ‘write what’s hot’ if my heart isn’t in it)… I also have to focus on what makes the most sense to focus on.

I said I would write and publish as long as I could make enough money to sustain me doing it. That applies not just to my writing in general but to specific pen names/genres and how much energy I assign to things based both on my passion for it as well as reader passion for it.

There is a lot of ego tied up in Zoe. When I was this scrappy little indie not making any money I was all over the Internet running my mouth. I had something to prove. By pulling away from Zoe some, it feels like failure. It feels like all those people will go: “What the fuck happened to that loud-mouthed indie? I haven’t seen anything from her in awhile. Guess she didn’t have the goods.” Well, I think I ‘have the goods’, but the issue is, I either don’t have them enough in this genre, or I’m trying to fight an uphill struggle in a glutted market and it’s just me being stupid.

There is a lot of ego death involved in letting Zoe fade off more and more people’s radars. There was so much of a “I’ll show them!” attitude going on. And frankly I just don’t think ZOE is going to show anybody anything, except how to keep doing the same stupid thing over and over when it is like banging my head against a brick wall.

I’ll do more Zoe stuff after this series, probably. I’ll probably be shifting more into urban fantasy with romantic subplots. But I won’t put giant energy into it until and unless I see it’s got a real market/readership potential. It’s a close enough neighbor to the PNR that I think I can keep most of my readers. But at least until I finish the Preternaturals series, I’ll probably be doing one Zoe book a year and focusing most of my energy on what’s selling right now and what I’m most passionate about and have the most active ideas for and excitement… the kitty stuff.

And I’m sure I’ll get “kittied out” and need to write some Zoe, or maybe perhaps a third pen name, which I probably won’t share. Because it gets to be too much pressure. Anything tied into Zoe is too much pressure. If I’d just QUIETLY done my thing, it would be one thing… but I was not quiet. And so… whether or not anybody really notices or cares I feel like I have to “live up to something” and that’s too much fucking pressure.

I’m also pretty much finished expecting anything. I frankly don’t know what the fuck people want, and I’m tired of pretending I’m some kind of fictional oracle. For Kitty, I didn’t really think much about The Auction. I mean I enjoyed writing the book as much as all of the other Kitty books, but I didn’t think it was going to sell great. It got to the highest ranking of any of my Kitty books. People LOVED those alien dragon guys. Who knew? Several people want some more sci-fi type kitty stuff, and I do have some ideas of that nature.

Comfort Food still sells strong after over two years. Sometimes someone will rave about it with a big following and it will get a huge uptick. like a few weeks ago it got back into the top 2k of the Kindle store. (And you know what, Guys? I GET that Amazon is not the only market out there, but it is the biggest one and how you are doing there in sales ranking is a pretty good indicator of how your name/book is doing overall in terms of popularity side-by-side with others. And yes, you shouldn’t compare yourself to others… blah blah blah… but… really… you need to have some inkling on how you rank. If I didn’t pay any attention to that stuff, I wouldn’t know Kitty does so much better than Zoe.)

But… then The Last Girl, which I LOVED, didn’t do as well. It still does better than all my Zoe books, but for a Kitty book it didn’t exactly explode the charts.

But the bottom line of what I’m trying to say is… I’m done trying to “make people interested” in stuff they aren’t interested in. Advertising is next to useless. It’s word of mouth that sells books. The theory is that you need enough advertising to get enough word of mouth started, but honestly if a book is THAT gripping, it doesn’t take that many readers for word of mouth to really get started. (Kitty stuff is a prime example of this.) Advertising only really pumps up books that are already going. It’s hard to get people’s attention with stuff they’ve never heard about. And I’m really starting to believe that the kind of brand-building advertising that seems to “work” (as much as advertising ever does), is really more for the big boys, or people who are in a very limited niche where they have access to much of that audience over and over.

If you’re writing/making/doing something that has an audience you can’t reach all at once, then it’s pissing in the wind at a target you can’t even see. For something that costs thousands of dollars and tons of angst, it’s not how I want to be spending my time or money.

In an interesting twist of serendipity, today while I’m thinking about all of this, this post was Freshly Pressed on wordpress.

The only thing I don’t fully agree with is: “Let money dictate what you do”. If you are an ARTIST and that is IT and you don’t rely on your art as your livelihood, then yeah, feel free to ignore that. But if you ARE reliant on the money to live, then ideally you want to find something you love that other people love and will pay for (like for me: the Kitty work), but it’s not feasible to keep doing something that isn’t giving you the results you need/want.

That’s just reality. I have to do what I love that pays the bills. Zoe doesn’t do that for me nearly as much as Kitty, so I’m done waiting for something of Zoe’s to “break out”, or for it to “catch on and build up a following” etc. I’m just done. I’m still writing Zoe, I’m just not putting all my hopes and dreams in it or the bulk of my energy into it. Likewise, I’m not going to start having tons of expectations for Kitty, either, because it’s the expectations that lead to the disappointment. I’m just going to write what I love and am passionate about and let the chips fall wherever.

If I hadn’t been trying so hard to push Zoe and make Zoe “work” on a larger scale I probably naturally would have drifted to 1-2 Zoe titles a year as a break from Kitty and most of my focus on Kitty. I feel like if I ignored this instinct, 4 years from now I’ll be talking about how I had an opportunity to really make Kitty work, but was focused too much on Zoe. (Like I did with regards to Zoe vs. Internet arguing.)

And I swore I wouldn’t make that same stupid mistake twice.

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters. Also see this follow-up post.

So…

I lasted only a month off of KDP Select. It was an eye-opening experience. I knew that I would lose sales on Amazon without the borrows and KDP free days to keep my books visible on the historical mystery bestseller lists, but my hope was that I would be building enough sales on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and the Smashwords affiliates, to make up for these lost sales. I even told myself I was willing to accept lower overall sales for 2-3 months in order to test the idea that having my book on multiple sites (even if the sales on those sites were lower, on average, than on Kindle) was a workable alternative to exclusivity on Amazon, which is what KDP Select requires.

But this was predicated on being able to figure out how to get my books, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, discovered on these other sites, because my experience is that if readers find my books, they will buy them.

But I was not able to figure out how to do this for Barnes and Noble or Kobo and I didn’t see any evidence that this was something I would be able to solve in a short period of time.

As I have written about before, there are primarily two ways a person ends up buying a book (from a brick and mortar store or estore).

They either:

1) come to the store looking for that book (or books by a certain author) or

2) find the books in the store while browsing.

For authors who are independently published and who sell most of their books in on-line stores, social media (blogs, twitter, facebook, pinterest, etc) can play an important role in getting people to go looking for their books. When a potential reader discovers the title of a book through reading a review or an interview with an author on a blog, or reading a tweet or a facebook post from a friend, they may decide to go looking for this book. The more frequently they run across that author’s name or the title of the book, the more likely they are to do so. In addition, social media usually provides direct links to the product pages of estores so that the impulse to look for the book can lead immediately to the decision to buy the book, which increases the effectiveness of this form of marketing.

Social media also has the benefit of costing less money and requiring less clout than the methods traditionally used by authors to market (reviews in print media, book signings, talks at conventions, interviews on radio or tv, mass mailings, etc).

While I don’t believe that the majority of sales I have made have come through my social media activities, I did understand that I might have to work harder to drive people to look for my books in the Barnes and Noble and Kobo stores because they initially wouldn’t have much visibility in these stores. What I didn’t expect was to have difficulty finding places on the internet that specifically targeted Nook or Kobo owners. If an author wants to connect with Kindle owners there are the Kindle Boards, literally dozens of Kindle oriented facebook pages, book blogs and websites that target Kindle owners, providing free and paid methods of promoting your book. I couldn’t find any similar sites that focused on Kobo beyond their official facebook/websites, and the small number of sites that focused on Nook ebooks generally didn’t have many followers. So beyond tweeting using the #kobo or #nook hashtags, I discovered few ways of reaching out and alerting these specific readers that my books were available on their devices.

Which brings me to the other way people find books–browsing. Whether it was in the libraries of my youth, the bookstores of my middle years, or Amazon in my senior years, I discover new authors primarily by looking on the “shelves,” being intrigued by the cover picture and the title, looking at the short description of the book and blurbs, maybe scanning the first pages, and then deciding to take a chance. This is what I want to have happen with my books, and while Amazon’s browsing experience isn’t perfect, for my books, it turns out Amazon is much better than the other two major ebook stores at helping potential customers find my books on their shelves.

I had some hopes for Barnes and Noble because my books had been in this store before and had done moderately well. While I had been disappointed in the total number of my Nook sales, I thought that if I could figure out how to get my books visible in the right browsing categories I could increase these sales. I was particularly encouraged by the fact that Barnes and Noble gives you 5 categories to put your books in (Amazon now only gives you 2), and that they had some smaller sub-categories that Amazon didn’t have where I knew my historical mysteries would shine (like historical romances in the Victorian/Gilded Age, or American Cozy mysteries.) I also know a number of people who sell well on the Nook, although most of them have at least 5 books for sale, usually in a series, and they have been able to take advantage of either the NookFirst program or have used the first book in their series as their loss leader by making the book 99 cents or free (through price matching.) But they also seemed to have their books in the right categories.

However, my plan to make my books be more visible through better category placement in the Nook store failed completely when I couldn’t even figure out where my books were showing up after I uploaded them through ePubit, much less how to get them into the right categories.

Side note: all the Kindle/Nook/Kobo self-publishing systems have the same problem in that the categories you get to choose from when uploading your book aren’t identical to the categories that show up when browsing. See my discussion of this in my post on Categories.

Both the Amazon and Kobo product pages lists a book’s browsing categories, not so Barnes and Noble. When I went to the categories and subcategories I thought my books might be in and scrolled through, looking for my books, either my book would be missing or the pages would freeze before I got through the hundreds of pages, so I could never determine if they were there. Arggh. (And of course this means a potential customer wasn’t going to find them either.)

So, I did what I had done to get my books properly in the right categories on Amazon when I was first figuring out how browsing worked in that store, I wrote the Barnes and Noble/Nook support staff, first asking what 5 categories my books were in and next asking how I could get them into the 5 categories I wanted.

And got no reply. Not even an automated, “we have received your email and we are working on an answer.” Nothing. So I resent my request a week later (mentioning that this was the second request and that I would appreciate some response.) Nothing. So then I wrote the Director of Digital Content, asking if she could direct me to where I could find out the answers to my questions and asking if she could give me advice on how to better market my books for the Nook. No reply.

Bangs head.

I do believe that if I got my books into the right categories that I would begin to have decent sales on the Nook. I am assuming the books I did sell were primarily to those people who went into the bookstore looking for them (based on my tweets and facebook postings), but I don’t think it makes sense to go another month or two hoping I will finally get an answer, and that my books will finally start showing up where I want them to be. I am leaving my short stories up in this store, and maybe I will eventually get these stories into the right categories and begin to get more sales. If this happens and my sales of these stories increase enough on the Nook, I may try again with the full-length novels.

I also had high hopes for Kobo, after reading about their new self-publishing initiative, WritingLife. What was particularly attractive was that they are letting indies price their books at free, without an exclusivity requirement or time limit. But, despite the promise that they had been consulting with indie authors in beta testing, Kobo’s WritingLife is not yet ready for prime time when it comes to browsing categories or free promotions.

I was pleased with the ability to designate three categories on Kobo and my books actually showed up in the categories I put them in. The problem was that these categories are currently very limited. Most distressing from my perspective, there is no historical mystery category (which is the subgenre that is most aligned with my books). Also, if you put “historical mystery” in as a keyword search there were 51,000 books (many which didn’t appear to be historical mysteries), which says to me the search function isn’t very useful as an alternative way for readers to find this kind of book.

The categories my books do show up in the Kobo store (mystery-women sleuths, historical fiction and historical romance) contain a lot of books, with none of the sub-categories that the Nook has, which also makes it difficult for a book by a relative unknown such as myself to become visible in them. I was facing the old chicken and the egg problem (how do you get a book up high enough in a category for people to find it without sales, but how do you get sales if no one ever sees your book?) This is where I hoped Kobo’s free option would help––as it has helped so many authors who have used the KDP Select free promotion option.

However, when I put my short story, Dandy Detects,up as free on Kobo, I found that Kobo has a very ineffective method of making free books visible. While I don’t know how the Kobo ereader itself works, if you are using the Kobo ap there is no way to find free books because there is no way of finding out what books within a category or subcategory are free. This is true for the on-line Kobo bookstore as well.

For example, in Barnes and Noble’s Nook ebook store, if you click on the mystery-women sleuth category, you find 2338 books, and you can order these books by price, with the free books showing up first (15 of them). By the way, my short story Dandy Detect, which should be in this category as a 99 cent book, isn’t there (sigh).

For Kindle, if you look on the device at the best seller list under the “mysteries-women sleuths” you can look at the free list separately for this subcategory, and in the online store you can see the paid list to the left and the free list to the right in this category. Today the free list for this category is 53 books––so it is easy to have your book visible if it is in the midst of a free promotion. Visible not just to people who are looking for free books, but visible to people who are looking at books that are for sale––maybe the newest Anne Perry––and just glance over to the right and notice a free book that looks intriguing.

In the Kobo store, the mystery-women sleuth category (3303 books) can be sorted by price, but the lowest price is 99 cents, so no free books are visible. Instead, you have to click on the free books link on the home page of the estore, a link that is not available on the ap (I don’t know if it is on the Nook itself). Then there are two options. The most straightforward––on the surface––is a link to one of 6 categories, one that is called “Free Mysteries.” But when you click this link only 20 books show up, most of them public domain, and none of them Dandy Detects. Dead end, and frankly if I was a consumer I would try this category once, and never again.

The second option Kobo gives you is to follow these 3 Step instructions

Step 1: Perform a search using any keyword

Step 2: Filter your results by “Free Only” from the pull-down menu

Step 3: Select your download from the search results

This does work, and Dandy Detects did show up under key words like mystery, historical mystery, fiction historical, but the separation from paid books and the browsing categories means that this method isn’t going to produce the traffic that it would get in either the Kindle or Nook stores where there is a connection between the paid and the free listings. In addition, the Kobo method depends on the consumer to come up with the right key words.

I suspect that these problems (no way to find free books through the Nook ap, limited free books under the Free Mystery link, and the lack of connection between paid and free books) have meant that Kobo readers aren’t accustomed to looking for free promotions the way Kindle readers have become since the introduction of KDP Select.  Even more frustrating, when I downloaded a free copy of Dandy to my Nook ap I discovered that the dashboard for WritingLife doesn’t report free book downloads so I had no way of knowing if anyone is finding it.

The only evidence I have that a few people eventually found the story (probably because I have been tweeting about Dandy being free) is after a few days a small number of other books started to show up in the “You Might Like” listing on Dandy’s product page. But I don’t know how many copies have been downloaded, I don’t know when they were downloaded (so I can’t connect up with my marketing), and, so far, putting Dandy up for free hasn’t translated into anyone buying either of my full-length novels or even the other short story. I also haven’t seen any movement in the total ranking of Dandy in the categories––so I don’t know if I put it back to paid if it would show up any higher in these categories. In short, at this point the Kobo option of putting a book up for free doesn’t seem to help sell books.

While I imagine that the Kobo techs, who have responded to my questions (unlike Barnes and Noble), will try to solve some of these problems, until they do and Kobo readers get used to looking for free books, I don’t anticipate free promotions being as successful as they are currently on Kindle.

Again, as with the Nook, I will keep my short stories in the Kobo store, keep Dandy free, and see if over the next few months some of these problems are resolved. But I don’t want to continue to let my sales on Kindle stagnate on the promise that the conditions for selling in either the Barnes and Noble or the Kobo stores will improve dramatically in the short term.

So…Back I will go to KDP Select next week, when my books have been successfully unpublished in the other stores, and then I can get back to writing and doing an occasional KDP promotion.

Obviously, I would love to hear if any of you have tips on how to get books in the right categories for the Nook, or have had better success with selling on Kobo. But meanwhile, if any of you are Nook or Kobo owners, my novels will be available for these devices until Sunday, August 12, and my short stories will continue to be there indefinitely.

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.

This post, by Steve (Stephanie) Nilles, of Booknook.biz, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog.

Kimberly Hitchens is the founder and owner of Booknook.biz, an ebook production company that has produced books for over 750 authors and imprints.

This week’s entry is from our Social Networking Genius  extraordinaire, Steve (Stephanie) Nilles, who holds down the fort on Tweeting and Facebooking, Pinteresting and other "stuff" over at Booknook.biz, and has taught me all I know about Twitter, et al.  She will be guest blogging for me while I recover from a shoulder problem, and to provide a different perspective than I usually have. Take it away, Steve:

I’m not an agent, publisher, or aspiring novelist. I’m a working musician. About a year and a half ago, while taking a month-long break from the road, I happened upon part-time work for a well-established and traditionally published mystery writer who was just starting her own e-pub company. I have since edited manuscripts and provided marketing assistance for an ebook producer, as well as for mystery, science fiction, romance, children’s books, and nonfiction authors, ranging from the seasoned and well-known to the obscure writer pushing his very first novel. Predictably, my work in publishing has drawn enlightening parallels to my work in the music business. In short, publishing seems to be about 20 years behind the music industry, at least in terms of adjusting to a preference for digital. And as an outsider temporarily peering into a world of energetic bordering on frantic writers and publishers, I’ve found the clamoring for the magical marketing plan that will give birth to the next Amanda Hocking, H.P. Mallory, or John Locke to be … amusing.

The obvious explanation for what now makes being a musician or author nearly impossible is that “everyone can do it.” Perhaps screenwriter Aaron Sorkin put it best in a particularly wry interview: Interviewer: "Look, I don’t want to step on your toes, you don’t want to step on mine. We’re both writers."  Sorkin: "Yes, I suppose, if we broaden the definition to those who can spell."

As technology provides limitless tools for distribution, self-promotion, and even production of the artform itself, the internet has, as Mark Bowden puts it, "replaced everyman with every man." From art of every medium to the once revered science of journalism, press critic A.J. Liebling’s 1960s fear of a dystopia with only one newspaper, "a city with one eye," has been replaced by a city with a million eyes.

Much like a writer, when I tell a stranger that I am a "musician," I’m painfully aware that my self-proclaimed title conjures up images of a dramatic and self-medicated kid, sulking in her bedroom and writing break up ballads in her diary. I am a 28-year-old that has spent 23 years playing music, 15 of those years nearly 5-10 hours a day. I’m on the road 8 months out of the year. I play 150 gigs a year. So imagine my displeasure at sharing the semantics of a vocation with an overnight YouTube sensation who recorded a 4 song EP in a basement with a Fisher Price tape recorder.

My 28 years notwithstanding, I think I’ve amassed an interesting cross section of experience witnessing the worlds of music-making as well as book publishing, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that what works in music works in publishing–whether you’re writing what one of my clients calls The Great American Novel or the next paranormal romance Kindle millionaire-maker. If we define "success" as "consistently selling books" (and I have yet to find a better definition), the most successful authors I’ve worked for have one and only one thing in common: they spend all of their time writing more books. And each book is better than the one that came before it.

Read the rest of the post on the Crime Fiction Collective blog.

This post, by Penny Sansevieri, originally appeared on Ezine @rticles.

If the idea of Facebook, Squidoo, Twitter, and YouTube (not to mention your own site and blog) are inundating you. Take heart! You’re not the only person overwhelmed with choices. With more places to post and keep track of, our days seem to shrink . Here are some helpful, time-saving tips for making the most of your social networking without having it take over your life.

1) Blogging: first off, try and plan as many blogs as you can so you can preload them and forget about them. You can still post additional content but ideally you want to have at least one or two posts a week that are scheduled.

2) Social networking: sometimes an author will come to us with 35 social networking sites. Frankly that’s about 34 too many. With the popularity of social networking growing these niche social sites are popping up everywhere. I’m not telling you not to post something there but if you are stretched too thin and can’t keep them updated, what’s the point? Personally I recommend posting to two sites: Facebook and Squidoo. Start with one or the other and get your feet wet, then once you have an audience built and a social networking routine in place you can expand your networks.

If you’re unfamiliar with these sites (and many are unfamiliar with Squidoo, I’ll explain why in a minute) know that these are the two powerhouses when it comes to social networking. You can get on there and start a page, build a fan base and promote your book. It’s very easy to do and best of all, it’s entirely free. Squidoo.com is (like Facebook) very integrated in Google’s ranking system. Any Search Engine Marketing expert will tell you that you need three things: Facebook, Squidoo, and Twitter. Squidoo (again free) is very easy.

Also take advantage of time saving options on both of these sites. Both Facebook and Squidoo let you feed your blog and Twitter account through there which will help with keeping the page updated. You should plan to update each page once daily and here’s a quick Facebook tip for you and a great way to expand your network. Go in and wish folks a happy birthday. Birthdays are always posted on your page so go in and write on someone’s wall and wish them well, it’s a great way to network with your FB peeps and trust me, it will also help to expand your network!

Read the rest of the post on Ezine @rticles.

Book award contests can be a great promotion tool for authors. When your book wins an award, you can promote yourself as an "award-winning author" and the book as an "award-winning book."

In addition, the award organizers often promote the winners and they usually provide some kind of a graphic (such as the one shown here) that you can use for promotional purposes.

My book, How to Get Your Book Reviewed, recently won an Indie Excellence award. The award was for the paperback version, but the book is also available in PDF, Kindle, and epub formats. Here are some of the things that I’m doing to promote this award:

• Write a blog post about book awards.

• Write an article in my newsletter about my award.

• Add the award graphic to the book’s sales page and the media page on my website.  

• List the award in the book description on my website, on Amazon and on the Nook site.

• Add the words "award-winning author" to my bio.

• Post a press release about the award on a free press release site.

Award competitions are held throughout the year, but the major ones tend to have entry deadlines in the December to April timeframe. This article lists some of the most popular contests. The entry fees can really add up, so you’ll need to be selective about which contests you enter and read the eligibility rules carefully. For example, some book award competitions accept only books published in the current year, and some do not accept ebooks. 

Now is the time to start researching and planning for book award contests to enter. And if you have won any awards, be sure to get maximum promotional benefit from them!

Do you have any other ideas on how to promote book awards? Please share them in the comments area below.

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

This morning I read a post by Anderson Porter about a four-piece article written a few weeks in the Boston Phoenix by Eugenia Williamson, entitled The dead end of DIY publishing. I had read the Williams piece earlier, and the more than fifty comments, which in my opinion had done a more than adequate job of pointing out its problems. But when Anderson seemed to accept much of her analysis, and labeled the comments as “the usual pitchfork-waving, spittoon-dinging dismissals, I found myself spending the rest of the morning writing a reply. When I finished, I thought I ought to expand abit, and post what I had to say as a blog, thereby at least justifying a morning lost to writing on my next book. So here goes:

I am a DIY self-published author, who found Williamson’s piece upsetting because it did what so many other pieces have done, alternated between describing self-published authors as a group in dismissive terms and using some of the most unrepresentative examples to prove its points. I am not going to argue that traditional publishing is dead, or that self-publishing is the best or only route for every author to take, but what I am going to do is give you my reasons why I don’t believe that self-publishing is a dead end.

Williams is making 3 points: That publishing is not profitable, that when it is, it is not because of merit, and that it can not provide “the equivalent of research and development: the nurturing of young writers with a first book of short stories as well as critically worthy mid-list authors provide the equivalent of research and best sellers paid for.”

For example, in Williamson’s article she has as a heading the statement: SELF-PUBLISHING ISN’T PROFITABLE, OR MERITOCRATIC. I don’t know how you would interpret this, but I read it to mean that if you self-publish you won’t make money, and if you are successful it isn’t because of the value of the work you produce. As a self-published author who is successful (in this my 3rd year as an author the income I am making per month in sales is well over what I made as a full time history professor), I naturally found the first part of the statement inaccurate and the second point insulting.

Her proof of the first statement is that for every Konrath there are thousands who don’t make any money. This is a meaningless statement since, while I am sure it is true, it is equally true that for every Steven King there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of traditionally published authors who make no money. Writing, at least until now, is not profitable for the vast majority of the people who engage in this activity. If she really wanted to make a statement that added to the discussion, she should have said that self-publishing was less profitable than traditional publishing for the majority of authors. But she can’t say this, not just because the systematic data comparing the two doesn’t exist, but because the increased number of traditional authors who are choosing to self-publish would argue that the statement was untrue.

Since she can’t prove her statement that self-publishing is unprofitable, she instead feels the need to insult those people who do it by suggesting that the authors don’t care if they make money because they “wouldn’t make a dime because no publisher would take them,” or that if they make money, it was only because they had the money to invest in the process because the “truth is self-publishing costs money.”

Then she picks one of the least representative examples of a self-published author she could find–De La Pava to prove this point. Here is an author who published a book and “forgot about it.” How unrepresentative is that! And she mentions that he spent thousands of dollars, which sounds like he used an “authors services” package. If she had either done her research or wanted to paint a balanced view of self-publishing surely she would have taken the time to interview one of the hundreds of self-published authors she could find on the internet (we blog incessantly about our experiences), and mentioned that Smashwords, Amazon’s KDP, and Barnes and Noble’s PubIt, and Amazon’s CreateSpace and Lightening Source have made it possible for authors to publish without that large initial investment.

But no, she doesn’t do that, instead she tries to use this author to make the point that there is no meritocracy in self-publishing because this particular author was successful because he had good luck. The implication is that success has nothing to do with the work an author puts into the writing of the book, or the marketing of the book, or the judgment of the readers, hence the idea that those who are successful don’t “merit” the success. If Williamson had spent just a few hours reading the blogs of self-published authors she would see how much time is being spent on the craft of writing, on learning how to design better book, inside and out, on how to most effectively promote, on actual promotion, and she might have been able to see how little luck has to do with it.

Finally there is her third point that self-publishing lacks the nurturing of young authors through that advances provide or the research and development possibilities of traditional publishing. Porter (and many of the authors who commented on the article) pointed out the problem with her assumption that traditional publishing uses its bestseller profits to nurture their midlist authors, so I won’t belabor this point. What I will argue is, that if we are discussing fiction, which Williamson seemed to be doing, the nurturing that authors need the most is a steady predictable income so that they don’t have to work full time at something else, and the research and development they need is marketing data that they can then use to develop new strategies for getting their work to the reader and getting that reader to buy their work.

If you compare the traditional to the self-publishing model, the self-publishing model is anything but a dead end. For the traditionally published author, small advances, spread over 3 or 4 payments, and royalties, that only come 2-4 times a year, mean that most authors have a very insecure and spotty income. It is hard to take the leap to leave your “day job” when your money comes in dribs and drabs and you don’t know from year to year what you are going to make.

In contrast, as a self-published author I see my sales daily, I get my checks monthly, I have sales data for 2 1/2 years and can tell you which months I will make the most money, and which months the sales dip, so I can make my fiscal plans accordingly. Within a year of publishing my first novel, I was making enough money monthly to replace my part-time teaching salary (I was semi-retired), and I retired completely to write full time. As with most small businesses, it may take authors who self-publish years to grow their business to the point of making a living, but I am hearing many more stories of authors finding this sort of sustainable income than I ever heard from mid-list authors in traditional publishing. And with more income coming from ebooks, which don’t have the short life span of print books, this income has a much longer impact on an author’s financial security.

I have every reason to expect that the two books I have published will continue to sell, and that as I publish more books, my income will go up. My traditionally published friends know that in most cases they will never make any money after the advance, and they have no guarantee that the next book they write will ever be published. Which vision of the future would you find more nurturing?

Williams says that if traditional publishing disappeared the only books published would be by those with “the money and the time to publish and promote it.” But if she had done adequate research she would have seen that the initial investments in self-publishing are generally small (mine was $250 for a cover) and can be recouped quickly, and only a small percentage of future profits need to be plowed back into the business on a yearly basis (upgrade websites, professional editing, etc.), and you don’t need to even do that to get out another book, which can then double your earnings.

And for fiction, research and development should mean researching the market and developing good promotional strategies. But again, traditional publishing doesn’t do a very good job of this for most authors. Traditional publishers are just starting to talk about shifting their marketing focus from book sellers to book readers, and most authors are still expected to come up with their own marketing campaigns based on extremely limited data and often years-out-of-date information about where and how their books are selling. Even if they get direct feedback from their fans, they have little control over covers, interior formatting, pricing or promotions. So even if they did their own research, they don’t have authority or mechanisms to use that information to improve the product.

In contrast, because I know every day how many books sold, in what venue, I can mount a promotion, change a price, upload a book into a new book store, and know instantly what the effect of these actions are. I can change a book cover, go in and correct formatting errors instantly, not wait until another edition is printed (if ever). And, as I write my next book, I can take into consideration what 100s of my readers have said in their reviews, not what an editor says based on limited marketing analysis of my mid-list genre.

Just three years ago when I started, it was very difficult to get any information on how other authors were doing with their sales. (Which is why Konrath’s willingness to publish his sales data was so revolutionary!) While there might have been a top down mentoring system among agents, editors and successful authors, there wasn’t the vibrant community that now exists among authors that is open to all. Self-published authors share information readily about what promotions worked and what didn’t. We share information about sales data, how to over come formatting difficulties, what covers work, what fonts to use, and promotional strategies. We open up our blogs to guest reviewers, form cooperatives for cross-promotional purposes. Self-publishing welcomes writers of any age, any background, who write about every subject in every form. Any time spent online looking in Barnes and Noble or Amazon’s stores, or reading writers’ blogs demonstrates that authors are experimenting more than ever before. Short stories, novellas, graphic novels are being published and read that would never have made it through the narrow gates of traditional publishing, which tended to strain out anything that deviated from the recent bestseller trend.

Will some authors fail, or be disappointed? Of course. Will some of these experiments prove unsuccessful, certainly. But, without self-publishing these authors wouldn’t have gotten the chance to fail, and many others, like myself, a former academic in her sixties, wouldn’t have ever gotten the chance to succeed.

I would love to hear from those of you who have had experience with both traditional and self-publishing and examples of nurturing you found in both.

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.

The majority of indie authors have day jobs, family responsibilities, the burden of developing, writing and publishing their books, and the burden of establishing and maintaining an author platform on top of all of it. It’s not surprising that when it comes time to promote a new book, indie authors very frequently begin by reaching out to their fellow indie authors. After all, who can better understand the struggle and sacrifice that went into the achievement of bringing a book to market independently, and who could possibly be more supportive of an indie author’s efforts than another indie author?

Even though that rationale seems sound, authors promoting to other authors has got to stop, NOW, for two very good reasons.

The first is that unless you’re writing nonfiction books on craft or book production, other authors are not your target demographic and every bit of money, time and effort you spend promoting to them is money, time and effort that isn’t going toward courting your real intended audience. The second is that it’s simply too much to ask of your fellow authors.

You may think the fact that you’re spending more time promoting to fellow authors than the general public doesn’t matter, since increased sales and positive reviews will inevitably raise your book’s visibility among members of your target demographic and the general public, leading to more sales, but you’re wrong. Book lovers have gotten pretty savvy to the indie world, and they automatically discount reviews written for indie authors by indie authors. If the majority of your book’s positive reviews are from fellow indies — especially those who take posting a review as an opportunity to cross-promote their own books by including their own book title in their username or signature line — it’s actually a mark against your book in the eyes of the general public. They think, "How good could this book be, if the only people who read it and posted positive reviews are friends of the author?"

You may also think that since writers are readers too, it’s totally legitimate to promote to them the same as you would any other member of the public. But the thing is, most indie authors don’t promote to one another the way they would to the general public, they often think nothing of spamming and haranguing their fellows in ways they would never even consider doing to the general public. For example, they may think it’s totally fine to post a promotional message and link to their book’s product page on the Facebook wall, page or timeline of an indie author ‘friend’, but would never dream of doing so on other Facebook members’ walls, pages or timelines. They would never send out a "please buy my new book, I really need your support" email to their PTA or church email list, but don’t hesitate to do it to their own email list of indie authors.

Spam is spam is spam, regardless of whether or not the person on the receiving end is a fellow indie author. If anything, indie authors should be even more hesitant to bombard their fellows with promotional messages and pleas than they would be in dealing with the general public, because they should know very well what those fellows are up against every day.

Several times a week (or more) I’ll receive pleas from indie authors to buy, review and recommend their books, attend their events (virtual or IRL), locate and tag their books on Amazon, cross-post announcements of their book release events, share links to their blogs on my own blog, "Like" their Facebook pages, follow them on Twitter, allow them to post their promotional messages on my sites, et cetera. They don’t seem to realize it, but what their requests really mean to the person on the receiving end is this:

"Hey, I know you have a job, and a family, and your own works in progress, and your own published books that you need to promote, and a website, blog, FB page, Twitter stream and Goodreads account to keep updated, and a To Read pile a mile high containing many works from favorite authors of yours that you’ve spent the last year wanting to read for pleasure and for your continuing education in craft, and that on top of all this you’re trying to squeeze a half hour or so of free time or exercise into your day (and failing in that endeavor more often than not), but can you just drop one or more of those things to do me a favor, even though we’re only nominally acquainted and your own siblings would think twice before making this request? P.S. – Since we’re only nominally acquainted you don’t really know me, and it’s possible that I’m hypersensitive or just plain off my nut. If you don’t grant me this favor I may go totally ballistic and badmouth you all over the internet as being non-supportive of your fellow indie authors. ‘Kay? THANKS!!!"

If the request is to read a book and post a review for it, this wrinkle is added:

"I know you value your online reputation and integrity and stuff, but can you read my book and post a positive review of it? And if you don’t like it, can you just write off all that time you spent reading it and pretend you never read it at all? P.S. – If you do post a review and it’s anything less than a glowing 5-starrer, I may go totally ballistic and badmouth you all over the internet as being non-supportive of your fellow indie authors. I may even be one of those mean and bitter types who will go so far as to post negative reviews on all your books on every site where they’re listed. ‘Kay? THANKS!!!"

If the request is to buy a book, that request really means this:

"Hey, I know you’re only earning something like twenty bucks a month in royalties off your own books but can you take some of that hard-earned cash this month and hand it over to me? Of course, I’ll only be getting a small percentage of the profit, you’ll actually be giving most of your money to a publisher or reseller. I know you’re acquainted with hundreds of other indie authors who may be making this same request, and of course I realize you can’t afford to buy everyone’s books, and you don’t really know me any better than you know any of the rest of them, but can you just blow the rest of them off this one time and buy my book, because I really really really really need the help so much more than they do, and you know what it’s like being a struggling indie author so I’m pretty sure your guilt alone is already making you lean toward ‘yes’? P.S. – Again, since you don’t really know me it’s possible that I’m a selfish jerk. If you don’t buy my book and I find out about that, I may go totally ballistic and badmouth you all over the internet as being a greedy, tight-fisted hypocrite. ‘Kay? THANKS!!!"

What about lesser requests than these? You may assume that because it only takes a second to ‘Like’ a Facebook page or re-tweet a message, there’s no reason why anyone should turn you down or be annoyed by the request when you make it. But many people take their ‘Likes’ and re-tweets seriously, and believe there’s an implied endorsement and recommendation in every one of their ‘Likes’ and re-tweets. I don’t personally think there’s anything wrong with asking for a ‘Like’ or re-tweet, the problem is that most people who make the request attach an expectation to it and get angry or disappointed when their expectation isn’t met. Asking isn’t the problem, it’s the wave of resentment or even retribution that too often follows.

Identifying your target demographic, locating its members and crafting a promotional strategy that’s tailor-made to appeal to that demographic is hard work, but it’s the only kind of promotion and marketing that truly builds a dedicated and enthusiastic readership from the ground up. An appreciative readership becomes both a fan base and a cheering section, filled with people who are very happy to recommend a book they’ve discovered and enjoyed. That kind of fan base grows organically, so long as the author or publisher doesn’t screw up the relationship by subjecting the fans to spam or trampling on their boundaries.

If you still insist on viewing your fellow indie authors as a kind of training wheels community to which you can turn for support in promoting your book and goosing your sales, really think about what you’re asking before you ask. And no matter what, never ask your fellow authors for something, or promote to them, in a way you would think is inappropriate to do to your neighbors, the other parents involved with your kid’s soccer team, your co-workers, or the general public.

Being an indie author is a demanding and draining privilege; we need to treat it, and one another, with respect.

This is a cross-posting from Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

 I’m never sure what I should be doing or not doing. What I don’t want to do is post a link, so I’m not. I’m Author Madison Johns. I have published a short story collections of the horror genre on Amazon entitled Coffin Tales Season of Death. It contains two short stories that I’d say would appeal more to the YA audience, but hey they are creepy.

In May 2012 I published my first novel Armed and Outrageous, which is a cozy mystery featuring a senior citizen sleuth Agnes Barton. Well I must admit writing about characters this age is challenging. It’s laugh out loud funny and with enough realism to make most people identify with one or more of the situations they get themselves into.

I’m happy to be here and look forward to interacting here. I’m also active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Goodreads.