Category Archives: Book Marketing

First Anniversary: Just Another Day at the Office

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$0.99 / £0.99 / EUR0.99
Amazon | Kobo | Google Play

If you’re on the mailing list, or you’ve seen my Facebook page lately, you will have noticed I’m having a sale of one of my books, Just Another Day at the Office. If you’ve followed me for a while (or you are actually spying on what’s happening in my head), you might have noticed that this is the first time I’ve discounted this book. I’ve donated it to giveaways, I’ve given free copies away on my page. I have never sold it at a discount.

There’s a reason.

A look at my author page on Amazon reveals I have a bunch of books out. Except for the two Gratis Anthologies, they’re all fairly similar: cheap, cheerful, short. Just Another Day at the Office is my début novel, with the rest of my works being around 1/4th-1/5th the length. It’s my premium product, the thing I’m most proud of, because it’s the first (and currently only) work I have published which I can point to and say:

“Yes! I can write a novel. I can finish something.“

Consequently, I am now discounting it for a reason as well. The story, which I first published as four individual parts, was completed a year ago on 23rd May 2013. It’s all too easy to forget these milestones, and I almost did if not for some advertising I had bought months ago, which I expected to use for something else. That something else isn’t ready yet, which actually turned out OK for me. It gave me a prod in the ribs to hurry up and do something with it, that’s a bit more meaningful than just push one of my freebies. As soon as I realised the timing, everything fell into place.

So this week for me is a time of reflection, even though I’m rushed off my feet to make this sale a success. It’s a time to realise that I’ve come quite far in a year, yet there’s always time for improvement.

I’ve made mistakes: I really should have written more last summer, instead I became lax after publishing Just Another Day at the Office, the full edition and paperback. I should’ve figured out how to advertise properly before too. But that’s OK, I’ve learned a lot anyway.

In 2012 I dipped my toes in and published one short story. In 2013 I wrote a novel and a few more bits and bobs. I also got involved in my first collaboration with other writers, in the form of the first Gratis Anthology, which was a raving success. In 2014 I’ll finish my second novel and like to think that I have generally upped my game with improved covers, and a more level headed approach to advertising.

Things are heading in the right direction, let’s see what the rest of the year will bring!

Why Authors Keep Bitching about Reviews

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Dear Reader,

I’m sorry, because I know I’m guilty of this: constantly asking, even begging for reviews.

I know it’s annoying, because I don’t always feel like leaving a review for books I’ve read either. I worry about what to write, and whether my review will look stupid among all the others which invariably seem cleverer to me. But there’s a good reason for my irritating behaviour, I promise…

Why Reviews Mean Everything

What do writers want? To write and sell books. Not necessarily to make money, but to fund future book projects. In order to be able to write (and have our work read by people, rather than sitting around on our computers in complete obscurity), we need to have some money to put into our books. Whether it’s for cover art, editing, promotion, gifts. It’s almost impossible to make it in this business if you don’t invest anything into your books.

So, how do we sell books? We rely on our existing readers to buy our new releases, and we try to grow our readership by making it easy for our books to be found by people who’ve never heard of us before.

How do we get found? Dumb luck is too unreliable, so the answer is: advertising.

How do we advertise? When a reader finds us via our advertising, how do we make our book attractive enough to buy?

Some Facts about Advertising

  1. Not every advertising service actually works
  2. The ones that do work, won’t accept books without a proven track record
  3. They choose to measure the success of a book by its reviews
  4. Even if your book gets accepted without any or with few reviews, any reader who clicks on it, is going to feel nervous parting with their money, if they don’t trust the reviews
  5. Because it has to be said: Buying reviews is bad, so there’s no easy way out but to somehow encourage real people to leave real reviews
  6. Amazon (and perhaps other retailers as well), are rumoured to give more prominent placement of books with lots of good reviews.
  7. Think about how you buy books? Given the choice between two interesting titles, do you go for the one with no reviews or the one with 100 of them, and a 4.5 star average?

Together with having a good-looking cover, and a convincing product description, plus attractive price, reviews are a crucial part of turning a book that looks like nobody wants it into one which people are willing to spend on.

So, while I apologise for being pushy and annoying, asking for reviews, I hope this information explains my motivation behind it. And I hope next time you read a book, whether one of mine, or another author’s, you remember some of what I’ve said, and leave them a review. Even if it’s just a couple of sentences outlining what you liked about it. You’ll be contributing directly to that author’s career by doing so. And they’ll appreciate it, so much.

The Amazon Free Promotion Experiment; 2

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Back in November I did a blog post about my first experience doing a free promotion with KDP Select on Amazon.

This initial free promotion was a bit of a failure considering I fell ill and didn’t manage to tell a single person about my free book. However, the results were interesting, giving me a baseline for what to expect with zero promotion.

Just to recap, I managed to get a bunch of downloads;
Amazon.com – 87
Amazon.co.uk – 33 (one of these was me)
Amazon.de – 11
Amazon.fr – 1

And the book reached spot 98 in the Amazon UK Erotic Fiction Free Bestseller category.

This time, I’m giving away a different book, Just Another Day at the Office – I and I even have a bit of a cunning plan.

  1. I’m spamming the hell out of Facebook especially and to a lesser extent Twitter and Google+. If you’re my FB friend, you might want to ignore me during this period, after getting your free copy of course!
  2. After reading the free book, readers who want to read more of my work can actually do so because I have more published (Last time the free book was my ONLY book).
  3. Just Another Day at the Office – I, obviously, is only the first part of a larger work. My free promo coincides with the launch of part two. Hopefully my free promo will hook readers into buying the next part.
  4. Compared to last time, I have some lovely writer friends who are helping to put the word out about this promo, and I even have some reviews already up on the book I’m giving away which should make it more attractive.

I cannot wait to see how this promo will play out!

Check back later, when I’ll update this post with the results.

Please note when comparing figures that the first giveaway lasted only one day, the current one will last two days.

The results are in!

Downloads; 2157 in total!
Amazon.com – 1887
Amazon.co.uk – 202 (one of these was me)
Amazon.de – 55
Amazon.fr – 2
Amazon.es – 2
Amazon.it – 1
Amazon.co.jp – 1
Amazon.ca – 7

Rankings:
#4 in Free Erotica on Amazon.com!

#9 in Free Erotica on Amazon.co.uk!

Reviews/Likes
I’ll be honest, I am not sure how many likes I had before the promo so it would be hard to measure any effect. But on 6 and 7 February (while the book was free) I did manage to get two awesome reviews on Amazon.com and one on Goodreads. Also, a few people marked it as “to read” on Goodreads on the 6th.

Resulting sales
It’s too early to tell if now that Just Another Day at the Office – I is no longer free, I might get sales based on how it performed in the rankings. I will post an update about this in a week or two. But, part two, which I launched at the same time as the free promo (with very limited marketing efforts comparatively) managed to achieve quite a few sales in these two days. Some will have been by readers who were already waiting for it to come out, but I suspect that a fair number were from people who may have wanted more of the same story after reading part one.

UPDATE:

18th Feb – Almost 2 weeks after the free promo, I can see a clear trend in my sales on Amazon. Note the graph below. the horizontal axis represents days, 1 being the day I did the free promo. The vertical axis shows the total sales up to that day. (Growth = I’ve sold something, Flat = no sales).

After giving away part one for free on 6 Feb, you can see a sharp rise in sales immediately after, since things have calmed down but I am still seeing more sales than I normally would during times when I’m not actively promoting my work. There is also a little effect on sales of Ladies’ Day, which I haven’t promoted at all for months.

Salesperday


Verdict
This went way better than I expected! I never thought I’d get close to 1000 downloads, never mind exceeding 2100! And hopefully using the free giveaway as a hook to get readers to try out more of my work will pay off beyond these few days as well. I’ll definitely do this again, whether with the same book or something new perhaps.

The Amazon Free Promotion Experiment

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My last blog post, for those who read it, already announced that I have self published my first ever work on Amazon. For better of for worse I opted to enroll in KDP Select which means I can choose to give away the ebook for free during 5 days in each given 6 month period.The downside is I am locking myself into an agreement to exclusively sell on Amazon, and not on any other ebook market places such as Smashwords, Apple iBooks, etc.

Now, obviously I’d prefer people to buy it so I get paid royalties, but I have read on other author’s blogs that a free promotion can do wonders for future book sales. So I thought I’d give it a go.

For 24 hours yesterday, my ebook, “Ladies’ Day” was available for free on Amazon Kindle. Now I was planning to be very productive and promote this fact on Facebook and Twitter, and also on this blog, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

Instead of waking up fresh and ready to spam the internet, I woke up with a terrible sinus headache and opted to stay in bed all day. I didn’t post a single link to my book page, didn’t tell a soul that it would be free for 24 hours. Though not ideal, at least I figure this free promotion can serve as a benchmark for any future marketing I do. And for the benefit of other self publishing authors out there, I decided to publish my figures for what might happen when you give away an erotic story (normal price $0.99 or so) without doing a single bit of promotion for it.

Downloads:
Amazon.com – 87
Amazon.co.uk – 33 (one of these was me)
Amazon.de – 11
Amazon.fr – 1

Rankings:
No idea what it was like yesterday but this morning I was ranked 98 in the Amazon.co.uk Free Bestsellers within the Erotic fiction category. My book was nowhere to be found in the Amazon.com bestseller list. This tells me that potentially the market for Erotica in the UK is very small, if I can make it into the top 100 with only 33 downloads.

Reviews / Likes:
I don’t see any discernible increase in Likes on my book, but then I haven’t really been keeping tabs a lot on how many likes I had before. There have been no reviews.

Verdict:
I have no idea yet if this was worth it. But it seems once you start giving stuff away for free, someone or other will notice and download it. This alone is quite promising. I’ll have to assume that at least some of the people who got a free copy will read it, at least in part. And just maybe they’ll later be inclined to leave a review, even if it’s negative.

On the other hand, the next time I do a free promotion, I hope to actually manage to plaster my link all over Facebook/Twitter and maybe websites that list free ebooks. And if I do that, I should be able to see fairly easily if the downloads I’m getting are similar to these current figures, or if there will be a visible increase in downloads due to the social marketing efforts I’ll be putting in.

2 Weeks later:
Although of course I was very pleased that I managed relatively many downloads with zero promotion, it’s the commercial results that count. To be honest there haven’t been any that I could find.

No reviews as a result of the free promotion.
No increase in sales that could be attributed to the free promotion.

Next time I give away my book for free and actually advertise that fact, I’ll write another post which should show a dramatic difference in exposure and hopefully an increase in sales by the end of it.