by admin | Nov 7, 2018 | agents, Amazon, author platform, author talks, creativity, ebook, marketing, Pricing, selling, Uncategorized
All self-published writers know that the hardest part of the whole process is not the writing, which is creative and challenging and satisfying. The bit we struggle with is getting our books into the hands of readers, and having those readers pay a price commensurate with the effort and energy that’s gone in to the book.
Obviously, much will depend on the mode of publication you choose. With an ebook there’s no physical product, but readers still have to know where to find your book, and choose it over the masses of others that are available, especially in the crowded market of genre-fiction. Some ebook authors use price as the come-on, but that quickly turns into a race to the bottom and the pressure to charge a derisory amount or nothing at all.
If you choose, as I did, to create a physical book as well as an ebook, there are more routes to sales, but most of them still fundamentally depend on ‘visibility’. I advertise my books on my website and on all the flyers and bookmarks I have printed. I also get orders through Amazon, and through the major book distributors such as Gardners Books in Eastbourne. In Cumbria, where I live and the books are set, distribution is handled by Hills Books of Workington, which supplies almost all Cumbrian bookshops and other outlets, but beyond this region getting my books onto bookshop shelves is almost impossible. Readers can order them of course, and do so, but the supply chain is long with discounts at every stage.
The bookshop contacts their wholesaler, who contacts me, who posts off the requested amount, which then goes back to the wholesaler, then to the bookshop, and finally into the hands of the reader. With postal charges rising all the time, any supply chain that relies on the self-published author fulfilling such orders by post means precious little profit.
An efficient and profitable selling route for me is via my website direct to the reader, using Paypal for payment. I could invest in a card reader, but that in turn relies on a good mobile signal which can never be assumed either in my home or when I’m out on the road meeting potential readers. Maybe it’s something I need to investigate again.
The main problem is the very slow traffic to my website and how to increase the website’s ‘attractiveness’, a task so far from my original passion for writing that I constantly put it off. Everything I know about the internet and how to use it I’ve had to learn in the last twenty years, and much of it still frustrates me. I have a Twitter account with over a thousand followers, but won’t play some of the games that seem to required to grow that number. I use FB too, but am wary of it and share only with a limited number of people already known to me. The key issue may be that the generation that reads and loves my books is, like me, a pre-internet generation. Why else would people sometimes tell me that my books are ‘hard to find’ when a ten second online search using just my name would give them all the information they need?
Why do they go to a bookshop and order, when they could go straight to my website and its online ‘bookshop’ in half the time? Of course I’m keen to preserve local bookshops, but I wish more of them would stock good self-published books like mine.
Fortunately, I really enjoy doing presentations about my books to groups large and small, meeting readers and potential readers. Almost all of these are in Cumbria, but that’s where my books are already known. Without a publisher or an agent, it’s well-nigh unheard-of to be asked to present self-published work at any of the major events and book festivals, unless you’re very well-connected, which I am not. For me, an added frustration is that after thirty years as a professional presenter I know I could do as good a job as most of the authors I hear talking about their work, and better than some. Even with a restricted field for selling, however, direct sales account for a major part of my sales every year, and the most profitable.
Of course I’m contacted regularly by people offering to improve my website’s effectiveness, at a price. Is it worth it, in terms of time as well as cost? Life’s too short to spend too much time on things I really don’t enjoy. My problem is patience: I couldn’t be bothered trying to find an agent after the first few generic rejections. Nor, I fear, can I be bothered to spend precious hours growing my website traffic when I could be crafting another story. So, I’m a bit stuck. My books sell, but not as well as they should!
by admin | May 7, 2018 | A Good Liar, Cumbria, ebook, marketing, self-publishing, Uncategorized, West Cumbria
The story so far… I tried putting one of my books on the Kindle free list. 115 copies were downloaded, and quite a few readers were reading ‘pages’ during the four days of the promotion and shortly afterwards. No way of knowing whether there will be a longer term impact on sales.
Last week I tried another of KDP’s suggested strategies, where the price gradually increases over four days – I think. Seemed complicated, but I gave it a go with another of my books and kept my eye on the ‘promotion’ results. Nothing. Nada. Nichts. Not a single download, at any of the ‘staged’ prices, and no impact on the ‘pages read’ numbers. I deliberately didn’t do a lot of Tweeting etc about the ‘promotion’ as I wanted to see whether price alone was the reason for people choosing to download.
The conclusion of these two deeply unscientific investigations is that you can guarantee a high level of interest in your ebook only if you give it away, for free. I find that pretty depressing.
In the past week I’ve experienced another form of ‘promotion’, which started small and then stepped up. Much of my readership is based in Cumbria, where all my books are set. Many of my readers are pre-digital, and the limit of their internet engagement will probably be Facebook, reading but not posting. There’s an FB page run by a a group in my local town and I use it to check dates, events, things for sale. I posted that my new book would be out on June 6th and a few details about it, and the post was shared quite widely. One of the people who saw it was obviously a local reporter looking for a story, and he rang me and asked a few more questions. The exchange took about five minutes and I thought no more about it.
The following day, this was the front page of the North West Evening Mail, based in Barrow-in-Furness and read all over South West Cumbria. There was a fuller article on an inside page, with quotes from my website and more information. It doesn’t raise my international profile, but the people who read this will get their signed paperback copy and pay the full price on the cover. Maybe thinking small and local is the way to go.
by admin | May 1, 2018 | A Good Liar, Cumbria, ebook, Fahrenheit Press, Forgiven, Lake District, marketing, Pricing, Publishing, readers, self-publishing, Uncategorized
Well, I put ‘A Good Liar’ on the Kindle free ebook list last week and 115 copies were downloaded over the five days of the offer. At the same time the number of (KENP) pages being read of both ‘A Good Liar’ and ‘Forgiven’, which is the next book in the series, both went up markedly. 
There may or may not be a connection. This week I’ve tried another Kindle promotion strategy, putting ‘Forgiven’ into the process where the price progresses from low back to the ‘normal’ of around £4 over four days. No noticeable increase in downloads as yet, but I admit I’ve been too busy to do anything about telling anyone about the promotion. At least there’s some income from this strategy, but it doesn’t look particularly effective so far.
More news on that next week. In the meantime, I’ve sent the new book ‘Burning Secrets’ to the printers and can do no more with it until the delivery arrives on May 31st. I know I should be more proactive about promotion, but I need a break after the struggle to get all the production stages completed on time and make all the necessary decisions. And I had a big birthday party to organise and then enjoy – which I did, very much. 
Loads of people came from away, and it was great to have a steady flow of visitors on the following morning, so we could catch up properly.
I could have put flyers about my new book on the tables at my party, and made a little speech about it, and had a draw for a free copy, but I just didn’t want to to do that. This was an important personal occasion, and the books are about what I do, not who I am. Does that make sense?
Hitting the big 70 puts things in perspective, and running around pushing people to buy my books isn’t top of my priorities. There are many readers, especially in Cumbria, who enjoy the books and say so, and have been anticipating the new one for some time. I’ll do the usual round of meetings, talks, festivals and radio, and hope that will draw some new readers in too. The ebook and Amazon sales will be picked up by my US distributors Fahrenheit Press and its charismatic MD Chris McVeigh,who knows the book selling business far better than I do. I could do with a similar ‘champion’ here in the UK – someone who loves my work and knows how to promote it – and does so for love, not money. Maybe that’s unrealistic, and lazy!
by admin | Apr 25, 2018 | A Good Liar, Alliance of Independent Authors, book covers, costs, ebook, editing, Pricing, proof-reading, readers, reviews, self-publishing, selling, Society of Authors, Uncategorized
After my post last week about the ludicrously low prices that are being charged for ebooks, I decided to try something. I put one of my novels – the first one, ‘A Good Liar’ – onto a four day free offer, starting on April 23rd, which happened to be my birthday. 
(Considering my qualms about this method of book promotion, you might call it an ‘unhappy birthday to me’. ) Ever open-minded, I wanted to see what would happen in both the short-term and as a possible more lasting consequence.
I’ve just checked the figures on my KDP dashboard and 97 free ebook copies of ‘A Good Liar’ have been downloaded in the past two days, 72 on day 1 and 25 yesterday. Will the downward trend will continue over the next two days? Apart from listing the offer, I did nothing more to publicise it. I assume that Kindle have a list of freebies that tight-fisted readers trawl through. It only takes seconds to click and costs them nothing, but then what? Do they actually read the book, or check the first page or two and discard those that don’t appeal?
By the weekend I’ll know the total number of downloads. What I will not know is how many, if any, of these free books were read. I could check the Amazon reviews, but very few readers actually bother to submit anything. I could check hits on the website, or sales of the other books in the series – all of which are still listed at the ‘normal’ price of around £4 – £5. I’d be surprised if a freeloader was prepared to pay that for a book, unless they were so enamoured of the story that they simply had to read on, and that would be great.
My curiosity is piqued. Maybe I should try another experiment, temporarily reducing the cost of one of my books to 99p, to see if that makes the same difference. I could use it as part of the promotion campaign for the new book, which is due in early June. That book will handled by Fahrenheit Press, who have the ebook rights to my crime novels. I’ll be interested to see what their fairly idiosyncratic approach to promotion does to raise reader awareness.
I’ve done ‘loss leaders’ before: in my previous life as an international education consultant I did work ‘pro bono’ sometimes, just to introduce myself to a new client, confident that ‘work generates work’ and that more jobs would follow, and they always did. With book sales I’m less confident that a free offer will produce a lasting effect. That could be because my books are not as good as the contribution I made as a consultant, although I do get a gratifying amount of positive feedback. Or maybe as a relative novice, I just don’t understand how book selling really works.
Fortunately, I don’t expect or need to make a living from writing and publishing my own books, in paperback as well as ebook formats. But I don’t expect to make a loss either. I work hard at my writing and want readers to enjoy the result. I find and pay good people with expertise to edit, typeset, proofread, design the covers and print my books. All those paperback production costs need to be covered, and that depends on the delicate balance of sales and pricing. Conversion to ebook is relatively cheap, but I still don’t want to undervalue the work that goes into my novel, in what ever format. There’s the dilemma.
by admin | Apr 19, 2018 | cover, ebook, promotion, Publishing, readers, self-publishing, Uncategorized
I had an interesting exchange recently with an indie publisher who’s been in the trade for many years and seen it all. This is what he said on the issue of eBook prices. “Things are tough for every indie publisher – readers seem to have
decided that the price point for eBooks is 0.99 or free and as you know there are very small margins involved at that level”. Oh yes, the margins are very small indeed.
Self-publishing writers like me are attracted to eBooks for all sorts of reasons. The upfront costs are minimal compared with publishing ‘real’ books; you don’t have to decide how many to produce, balancing unit costs and the risk of coping with unsold stock; and there are no issues around storage. Cheap and easy, or so it appears.
But, if you want to produce an ebook to an acceptable standard, you may want help with editing, and proofreading, and the cover. All those need to be paid for, and the costs will far outweigh the cost of conversion to eBook format. And if you want people to buy your book, in whatever format, you will need to publicise and promote it. Any potential reader first needs to know that your book exists, and believe that they want to spend some money on it. Promotion takes effort and energy and can be frustrating, as you realise that ‘professional’ reviews are unachievable, the market is saturated, local media don’t care that much, and advertising is expensive.
The promotional strategy that takes least effort is simply to lower the price, and here’s where the problem starts that all of us are currently facing. If a sufficient proportion authors are prepared to sell their work for £1 or $1, or even give it away to manipulate the ‘best-seller’ lists, how can we then persuade readers to pay a proper price, for a product that represents many many hours or work? It makes no sense to under-price, and thereby under-value, a book. It cheapens the writing process, and makes me – for one – feel like a mug.
If selling for these ludicrous prices were a rarity, and a temporary way to attract buyers, fair enough. But the ‘bargain’ price has now become the ‘standard’ price and the value of our work as writers appears to be permanently 
debased.
I would love to increase my ebook sales, but right now I’m simply not prepared to reduce the price to less than a cup of tea. Am I being foolish? Maybe, but I value my self-respect.
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