THE EXPERIMENT
Early this year, after getting excited by what the Self-Publishing Podcast crew was up to, and after seeing a friend have great success with it, I decided to try my hand at a serialized novel. Serials were clearly working for a lot of people and it looked like fun on both the writing side (new format!) and the publishing side (a new release every week!).
So I set to work, and by April, I was ready to fling mine out into the world. How did it go?
Well, for the TL:DR version, and my all-time favorite post on the matter of selling serials vs. novels, see Susan Kaye Quinn. The slightly longer version is this: there are advantages to writing serials, but they don’t sell themselves any more than novels do. So if your new release strategies are based on, say, advertising novel-length works, releasing story/novella-length episodes might present you with a challenge.
Anyway, back to my results. I wrote a time travel thriller called The Cutting Room. I decided to write 6 episodes, each one running between 12,000-16,000 words and 84,000 in total, with a TV-style arc. I found a pre-made cover from James at the excellent Go On Write and, for a few bucks more, got him to set me up with six distinct looks as well as a full-length version (a 3D box set version, and a 2D version for Apple, which won’t take 3D covers). Individual episodes looked like this:
Not an ideal nailing of the genre, but suggestive of it, and perfect for the mood. In any event, enjoy the pictures now, because a wall of text is about to follow.
OUT INTO THE WORLD!
The first episode went live April 22, 2013. I alerted my Facebook page, then sent to my mailing list the next day. Neither was huge at that time—my FB page was probably around 100 Likes, as I recall, and my mailing list around 300—but that and some advertising had done quite well for the third book in my Breakers series two months earlier.
Excitement! The first day, I sold.. 4 copies. By the end of the first week, I was sitting pretty at 31. (Amazon.com numbers only—Amazon UK and B&N probably put that around 40, but I didn’t keep records for them.)
Well.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s not bad, given the modest size of my lists and the fact I was offering them a new series in a different format. But by comparison, Breakers #3, augmented by some serious ads, had moved 767 copies on .com in its first week. By contrast, this was looking like a bust.
But the advantage of serialization is you don’t get one release, you get a bunch. Six, in my case. With so many books hanging out as new releases, they should pull each other up the charts. Ideally.
Mine didn’t. To cut to the chase, each episode performed about the same. 25-30 copies sold its first week, about twice that in its first month. In an attempt to kick things up a notch, I made the first episode permafree about three weeks in. That helped a little, but with no way to advertise it on the freebie sites (too short), there was no significant bump.
Here is a chart of my first few weeks. It is mostly made of sad.
This is how each episode fared over its first ten days. Again, Amazon US only. Sales are cumulative; i.e., by day 3, episode #1 had sold 23 copies. Each episode was released exactly a week after the first. So in this chart, Day 1 for episode #2 happened on Day 8 after #1 was released. According to my records, #1 went free the day #4 went live. Also, you’ll note these numbers don’t perfectly match up to the ones I quoted above. That’s because I didn’t start pushing the episodes until the day after they went live, so that’s where I started counting for the chart.
Anyway, not a lot to see here. Every week was about the same as the one before it. At least the few people who got into it stuck with it!
Mostly, the lackluster results were because none of my launches was ever significant enough to start getting the books recommended to other readers. I think that if my first couple days of sales had been 30-60 rather than 10-15, I would have seen growth from episode to episode. Without hitting high enough to garner an internal push from Amazon, I was selling to the same group of saps each week (my readers). (That’s a joke, my readers are the best because they read my books, QED.)
So was it a bust? Well, I’d sold a few hundred copies of the episodes, which was better than a sharp stick in the anything. But my serial didn’t really expand my audience—my primary commercial reason for this experiment—so it certainly felt like a failure at the time. So much so that, before the final episode went live, I altered its ending to be a little more self-contained, so the book could better function as a standalone. (I had ideas for at least one more book if it took off.) Rewriting to audience response (or lack of it) was a fun experience, one you could never pull off in a novel. So, there was that. Overall, however, I was disappointed.
THE COMEBACK
But. I had yet to release the full book. Emboldened by my critical failure as a serialist, and with no momentum on the individual episodes, I decided to go all-out with the complete novel, releasing at $0.99 backed by whatever ads I could scrape together. Here was my cover:
I was in no hurry, and it took about a month to schedule everything, leap through Apple’s hoops, etc. Once it went live into the world, I discovered something funny: a lot of my readers hadn’t been interested in the serialized version, but they were plenty happy to pick up the full novel. With the individual episodes, my readers on FB and my mailing list were good for about 10 Amazon US sales in the first two days. With the full book, over an equal period, they were good for 54, and crossed 100 the day after that.
Then the ads kicked in. Which I could run, because this was a full-length novel, not a 15,000-word short. (Serializing gave me one advantage there, however: since some of my readers had already read the full thing, they were ready to review it right away. It was sort of like ARCs. That I made them pay for. Hahaha.)
With the initial push from my readers, the book became embedded in Amazon’s recommendation algorithms, which the ads helped amplify. Within a week, it had sold 575 copies there. I switched it to $2.99 a couple days after that. By the end of its first month, its Amazon US sales were about 1150, with another 150-200 on the other sites as well. Compare that to 50-60 sales of each episode over a similar timeframe.
Hooray for me! Wait, that’s not what this post is about; this post is about cold-blooded dissection. Where did I leave my scalpel?
LESSONS LEARNED
The first, and the biggest, is that serials aren’t a magic bullet. I guess that should be obvious. Nothing is! Earlier this year, however, it sort of felt like they were; at the very least, it seemed like serialization was a sure-fire way to expand your audience through the boost given to each new release.
For me, it didn’t (except maybe a little bit at Kobo). It could be the book or some part of its presentation hampered it, but whatever the cause, my episodes never gained enough momentum for the algos to take them off to the races.
Know what though, we can break this down. Here’s the main cause of my failure to launch: a) I was starting a new series my readers weren’t familiar with b) in a format they weren’t used to buying (serial rather than novel) c) with a limited fanbase to begin with (~400-500 potential readers on my lists) and d) with no outside sources to augment that potential readership; the episodes were too short to advertise in the venues I was familiar with, and I wasn’t creative enough to find alternate ways to reach people.
So basically, the only people buying the episodes were my core, core readers. The people who would buy and read the Kleenex I just sneezed into. If you’re looking at serializing purely for the benefit of multiple new releases, take a long hard look at your audience and understand that most of them aren’t going to follow your experiment right away.
Genre is part of this equation, too. Serials work better in some genres because those readers are actively searching for new content. Romance, definitely. Erotica/erom, for sure. Zombies, I think so. Time travel special ops? I.. no. No, there’s no rabid readership waiting for the next one of those to drop.
ON THE UPSIDE…
I’m talkin’ all mercenary here, but this experience was a ton of fun. Publishing a new episode every week was a blast. I would love to do that again.
Now, back to mercenary sales talk! Additionally, the format of serials provides you with many opportunities you don’t have publishing full-length novels. After the tepid response to the initial episodes, I was able to adjust my promotional tactics on the fly, permafreeing the first episode before the last was out. Not only that, but I was able to change the last episode itself based on this (lack of) response—since it looked like the season was a failure, sales-wise, I revised the ending to let the book function as more of a standalone story that would, hopefully, be more satisfying and self-contained. ‘Cause I sure as hell wasn’t gonna write a sequel to something nobody appeared to want!
There are obvious dangers with making changes like that, but being able to adjust and adapt to reader response is an incredible option to have in your back pocket.
Also, now that the full book is out there, I still have episode one free pointing to the whole thing. It doesn’t give away copies in the volume that a full book does, but it’s a nice little long-term funnel.
HOW TO DO IT BETTER
First: stick with it. My first season didn’t see any growth from episode to episode, but quite a few people wound up picking up the full novel. I think that, if I were to do more seasons, I would do a lot better. Mostly because my lists are much bigger these days. But also because I’ll have created a readership for The Cutting Room and that readership will be more used to serialization, meaning more of them would pick it up right off the bat.
Along similar lines, it would help lots to serialize something in a series/world where you’ve already got readers. Those people are already waiting for the next installment, whatever it is. That’s going to reduce a lot of their resistance to purchase a different format.
Note that I’m not saying everyone should serialize the next novel in their popular series. Just that, if you are interested in trying a serial, it’s going to help if your readers are already into the world. You could do a spinoff, say; pick up a secondary character or storyline and branch out into that in a serialized format. Now I’d better quit exploring this idea before I convince myself to do it.
Another area to explore with serials is pricing. When I released mine, I screwed up royally. Since $0.99 is the lowest you can charge for an ebook, those faithful readers who picked up The Cutting Room episode by episode paid $5.94. Then when I released the full book, I kicked it out the door at $0.99. That was due to circumstances forcing my hand, but.. that is not how you want to treat your most loyal readers, haha.
So, here’s my wonkiest idea of all: use inverted pricing. Price your episodes so buying them all will cost less than the full book. If you have 4 episodes, buying them will cost a minimum of $3.96; thus, sell your episodes at $0.99, and let your readers know that if they wait to buy the full book, well, it’s gonna cost $4.99. If you’ve got 6 eps, buying them one by one will run them $5.94, but the collection is going to be set at $7.99.
MADNESS!
Yes. Madness. A higher price will make the full-length book less appealing to readers who stumble onto it later. But that price doesn’t have to be permanent; when you get to season two, you could cut a couple bucks off the price of the complete season one. Either way, season one will still have a permafree entry point going for it. You might even package the first two episodes into a double-length pilot, the way a lot of TV shows do, and set that free to help people choose whether to plunk down for the full book. Size matters, gentlemen. If that double-length pilot is up around the 40K word range, you might have an easier time advertising it.
In any event, the point of inverted pricing isn’t to make money here and now on the full-length novels. It’s to take advantage of the perks of multiple new releases, reaching new readers episode by episode, expanding your reach each time. It’s a short-term hit for a long-term gain, Amazon-style.
GOOD LORD THIS IS AS LONG AS A KKR BLOG!
This post has largely banged on about sales, but serializing a novel was a really, really fun experience. I don’t want that to get lost in all the numbers-talk. Serializing challenged me to think about story structure in a new way, and publishing a new episode every single week was tremendously enjoyable. Despite the difficulties, I’d love to try it again some time.
It also taught me a lot about why books sell. Much of what I learned is very basic—people are more likely to buy what they already know and like, be that novel-length fiction or a world they’re already familiar with—but the fact it’s simple means it’s all that more valuable to understand.
The other very simple thing it taught me: episodes aren’t novels. Trying to sell serialized fiction is a much different world than trying to sell full-length books, complete with different advantages and different challenges. If you’re going to try a serial, I would examine those challenges ahead of time and do your best to nullify them.
Maybe that’s just a matter of sticking with it.
This is the first in a sporadic series of posts examining the publishing market, specifically as it relates to self-publishing. To start things off, I want to look at pricing, and present an ass-backwards case: that it may make more sense to price your oldest, least popular books the highest—and your new books the lowest.
Traditionally, a book is priced highest when it’s brand new. Part of this is due to the formats of a new release itself, which begin with expensive hardcovers and later move on to less expensive paperbacks, but this is frequently how ebooks are treated, too.
For instance, Stephen King’s most recent book Doctor Sleep is currently $10.99. Take a look at his backlist, however, and it’s pretty much all priced lower—mostly $5.99-7.99, with a more recent and enduring book (11/22/63) leading the way at $9.99, and running all the way down to $3.99 (The Shining, currently price-dropped to promote the new sequel Doctor Sleep).
There’s no difference in production costs for an ebook sold today and a copy of that same ebook sold on the day the title came out. So why does it cost less now than when it was new?
The answer is demand. When an author puts out a new book, there is a high level of fan demand for that title. Everyone knows you’ll be able to get it for cheaper later. But so long as the price is semi-reasonable, readers don’t care about shelling out a few extra dollars in exchange for having the specific book they want now. And publishers are happy to take advantage of that demand by setting initial prices higher.
Why reduce price of that same ebook format later? I don’t get invited to sit around a lot of Big Publishing House marketing meetings, but the probable answer is obvious. As demand wanes, you cut price, hoping to lure in new readers. Especially the segments of the market that are more price-sensitive. Over time, as a book steps down the pricing staircase, it drops below the purchase threshold of several different markets, garnering new purchases at every step of the way. Eventually, once the higher-paying markets are exhausted and demand settles down to a trickle, you slot the book into a low price—one that minimizes readers’ resistance to purchase, but isn’t so low that it devalues the author and/or the publisher’s entire catalogue.
That’s the traditional model. It makes a lot of sense. Maximize initial revenues by taking advantage of pent-up demand, then lower prices to draw new readers into the backlist (and, hopefully, convert them into fans who’ll then go on to buy frontlist).
The self-publishing/indie approach is way more fragmented, with different people trying all kinds of different things, but I think the general approach is similar: release a new book at full price, or at a slight discount, let it fade into backlist, then run sales on backlist titles to goose new releases and/or the rest of the backlist.
This makes sense, too. I don’t think it’s a bad approach in the slightest. But I think there is a stark difference between the pre-digital publishing market and the current market. Back in the day, you counted on audience growth through word-of-mouth, right? People still treat word-of-mouth like your #1 weapon for growth from book to book.
Well, I think that’s been replaced. Overshadowed, at least. By visibility.
Yay, a buzzword! That’s how you know this must be smart. To explain this particular use of “visibility,” it’s time to dissect Amazon’s recommendation engine.
When a new book is released on Amazon—and the other stores, too, but Amazon is the one I’m most familiar with, and the one I believe does this best—its resulting sales aren’t just about the pent-up demand waiting for it. Instead, Amazon’s bots process its initial sales, then actively promotes that title to other customers likely to purchase it.
This is largely black box stuff accomplished through emails and on-site recommendations, so it’s hard to capture hard data on these processes. But I’m guessing Amazon’s system is a lot like Netflix, where people who watched/enjoyed Movie A, B, and C will be recommended Movie D, which other people who enjoyed A-C also watched and liked. Amazon has their own version of this front and center, the “alsobot” recommendations on every single product page.
So a new book comes out. Its fans buy it. And then the mighty Algorithm kicks in, recommending the book to potential customers. The people it recommends the book to are (probably) determined by taste-constellations, i.e. the people Amazon’s system thinks are most likely to buy it. And the volume of those recommendations is determined by the volume of outside sales—anything not initially generated by Amazon itself.
The recommendation algorithms are highly adaptive. Both the targeting and the volume of that targeting are influenced by the book’s performance when Amazon puts it in front of potential customers. The better a book converts potential customers to actual purchases, the more the algos ramp up the juice. The worse it does, the more the juice dries up. (For the record, I make no judgments here about a book’s literary quality—just its commercial potential, as predicted and then tested by Amazon.)
For a brief foray into concrete examples, last month, I released a new book. I was able to push about 250 sales through my own devices. Over the course of the month, it saw “organic” algo-driven growth, and finished September with about 1950 sales. Thanks to Amazon’s marketing, it sold 8x as many copies in its first month than I conjured up on my own.
For anyone who spends any time on Amazon, this general process is obvious. But look at what’s happening here: Amazon’s sophisticated recommendation system is identifying potential customers and then pushing something they’re likely to buy right in front of them.
In other words, they’ve slashed a huge shortcut through word-of-mouth. They have replicated an organic process that used to take weeks, months, or years to really kick in, and condensed it to a matter of days.
I’ve got one bit of data to help approach this, though. In my observation and experience—anecdote alert!—given equal visibility, a book priced at $0.99 will sell roughly 2x as many copies as one priced at $2.99. This is in SF/F; in particularly price-sensitive genres, like New Adult and possibly Romance, the difference may be higher, maybe as high as 3x.
Working from a 2x figure, though, let’s crunch some numbers. Say you have the option of 1000 sales in your first month at $2.99 or 2000 sales at $0.99. $2.99 earns 70% royalties—$2100, in this hypothetical. $0.99 earns 35%—$700. That is a huge difference, one that I have no doubt Amazon intentionally laid out to create a soft floor for ebook prices.
But let’s say you can convert 1 out of every 20 purchases into core fans, people who’ll happily sign up for your mailing list/Facebook page/blog so you can reach them directly when the next book is out. At $2.99, you’ve added 50 core readers. At $0.99, you’ve added 100. Your next book will have twice as many purchases to impress the recommendation algos with than if you’d launched the previous book at $2.99. Multiply by as many books as you intend to write in the series.
Caveats here, of course. A few of the people who signed up for $0.99 books may not buy a sequel at $2.99. And conversion rate naturally degrades the deeper you get into a series. And a 20:1 purchase:signup ratio is generally too high (though it doesn’t really matter what the absolute ratio is, it’s more about the relative ratio of sales between $2.99 and $0.99).
So you can downplay this idea a little bit. Even so, the long-term implications of launching cheap are pretty interesting. And obviously there are more ways to look at this besides $0.99 vs. $2.99. Such as this:
This is from Smashwords’ yearly survey on self-publishing trends. The first thing you’ll note is that it directly contradicts what I claimed above about a title selling twice as much at $0.99 vs. when it’s priced at $2.99. So it’s kind of hilarious that I’m going to use other parts of the data to make a point. But whatever, apply the salt grains as necessary. This Smashwords survey isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s looking at sales across its entire catalogue, not just at the difference in sales volume when a specific book with constant, equal visibility is switched between different prices.
Anyway, that’s outside what I want to look at here, which is that big ol’ hump in unit sales for books priced $2.99-3.99, the slope between $4.99-6.99, and that floor at $7.99+.
If this data is trustworthy, you can use it to explore the various mini-markets of the overall ebook market. For many people, up to $3.99 is a bargain, an impulse purchase. Another smaller segment doesn’t think much of paying up to $6.99 for an ebook. Move to $7.99+, and you’re at frontlist prices. There’s no bargain at all.
Thus I think there’s a pretty crazy case for punting new books out the door at $3.99, max. Even if you’re an indie and you don’t charge much to begin with—few of us go higher than $4.99—just a small initial discount could pay off.
Whatever the case, applying traditional frontlist prices to new releases maximizes earnings from preexisting fans, but drastically reduces your ability to create new fans. Not just over the long-term, but during the short-term recommendation-driven visibility Amazon will grant you as a new release.
That by itself is a strong argument for inverting the traditional pricing structure. On top of that, you’re actually rewarding your existing fans for their loyalty by charging them less than the book’s eventual list price. Treat your readers well, and they’re more likely to stick around for the future. Yay, a lasting career.
I know there are a lot of good arguments against this general premise. Particularly in series, where you can put out new releases at whatever price you want and use the visibility of the new release to push potential readers toward the (bargain-priced!) beginning of the series. Even so, I think it’s worth thinking about. Particularly for standalones and the beginning of a new series, launching at a lower price than your “list” might be the best move.
A couple days ago, I rejoined the Self-Publishing Podcast once again. This time, we’re talking launch strategies, box sets, sales trends, and how to give a big boost to later releases in your series, among other things. This is either the third or fourth time I’ve been on the show—apparently I’m now the Justin Timberlake to the SPP’s SNL—but I had a particularly great time on this episode, and feel we covered an awful lot of ground.
So, looking back over Part 1 and Part 2, here are the conclusions I’d put forward.
First, Amazon Select no longer offers much if any reward to most of its participants. Meanwhile, a new market has opened (Kobo), and while everyone is waiting for B&N to keel over and die, the Nook store is still selling boatloads of books every single day. Until they close, the sales are there. It’s hard to know exactly where Apple’s at, but they’re a legit ebookstore too. Lots of people make lots of money there. I sure don’t, but you can’t win ’em all.
So the current environment favors distributing everywhere in a way it didn’t back when Select was a magic bullet. Even if geographical or technical challenges makes it hard to publish direct to B&N, Apple, and Kobo, just use Draft2Digital or Smashwords.
Waiting to publish and/or promote is a bad idea (I hath decreed it!). So what do we do with our first book?
I see a few ways to go with this. The first option is to toss your first book into Select for a single three-month period with the knowledge it’s highly unlikely to do much for you. Call this the “At least it’s better than nothing.” In fact, let’s make sections!
“At Least It’s Better Than Nothing”
Sure, the other stores exist, and sell books, but with so few ways to advertise or otherwise reach Nook/Kobo/Apple readers, you’re sacrificing very little by starting out in Select. And free runs still have some utility. You may sell a few copies post-free. You may start to get a feel for how appealing your book is; don’t read too much into any one failure, but if it gives a bunch of copies away with little to no promotion, you might just be on to something. And perhaps most valuably, free runs are still a good way to garner some initial reviews to qualify your book for promotion at the various advertisers.
Here’s how I would handle it. Do a couple free runs immediately, just 1-2 days long. Feel free to extend them if you really explode, but try to save two free days. Next, schedule Book #2 to publish about a week before Book #1 expires from Select. (This may require waiting a short while to publish #1 or #2, so let’s just pretend I didn’t spend 1500 words condemning the idea of waiting in Part 2.) Do not enroll #2 in Select. Instead, schedule a free run on #1 for the day after #2 goes live, with the hope this will get #2 off to a stronger launch.
When #1 reverts to paid, see how it sells. If you’re satisfied with the way things are going, you can enroll #2 in Select at this point and re-up #1. But if Select is as dead as it is for most people, #1 is ready to expire and #2 was never enrolled. As soon as #1 exits the program, distribute both books to all channels, uploading directly wherever possible.
The idea here isn’t to use Select to rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales. Those days are long gone, sad trombone. Rather, the idea is to leverage the power of free to get readers to take a chance on you, to build up Book #1’s infrastructure (its reviews, alsobots, etc.), to gain mailing list subscribers, and to support the launch of #2. Any real sales over this period is just a bonus.
This is a very short-term plan and it’s highly unlikely to make you a rock star, but at least it’s a plan.
“The Boring Way That I Do Things: Sales and Ads”
Option number two is what I’m (mostly) currently doing. It’s not how I got here, but I think it should work all right, with a few modifications. Basically, it consists of publishing to all platforms, then running advertised sales, particularly to bolster new releases.
To get a little grittier with my nits, if I were just starting out with this method, I’d upload direct to all four major self-publishing platforms (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple). If for some reason you can’t upload to BN or Apple, use Draft2Digital. Their price changes go through much faster than Smashwords, and if you’re running regular sales, it’s going to be important to be able to change prices quickly–like within 24 hours. You’ll probably want to publish to Smashwords and distribute to all the other markets eventually, but honestly, they’re all so small you’re not missing out.
Then.. scramble for reviews.
And by reviews I mostly mean “Amazon reviews,” although BookBub will look at everything you’ve got, including Goodreads, so they’re all worth getting. The purpose isn’t the reviews themselves, but to get enough that the various ad sites will agree to advertise your book. While there’s no such thing as enough reviews, the scale we’re looking at is somewhere around 5-20; ~5 will qualify you for smaller sites, and ~20+ will start to look pretty good to the big ones.
How do you get these reviews? Honest ones, that is? Some people have had success with giveaways at LibraryThing and Goodreads (offer free copies in exchange for honest reviews), but that’s seriously all I know about that. I hate stuff like chasing reviews and it makes me want to give up and go home.
But the reviews aren’t going to just show up on their own, and in my experience it takes something like 100 sales to get 1 single review, so do the math. It could be months–years!–before your book has ~20 reviews arrive organically. You’ll have to chase them down somehow. If it helps, think of them as a Legend of Zelda sidequest. O brave warrior, you must track down the 20 Lost Reviews in order to unlock the Dungeon of Forbidden Advertising!
That out of the way, things are much simpler: find places that advertise ebooks, and book ads. To be a little more specific, find places that advertise ebooks well. Places that immediately cover the cost of the ad or come close to it. Some people like to argue that all advertising is valuable, because brand awareness, and when a consumer sees something seven times mumble grumble sales, but you’re not Crest toothpaste on a shelf with Arm & Hammer and the store brand. You’re one book on a shelf of two million. The people seeing your ad are probably never going to stumble over your book again.
I’m aware of five good ebook advertising sites. In roughly descending order: BookBub, POI, ENT, KBT, Book Blast. Generally speaking, it’s best to advertise at $0.99. At $0.99, these sites will generally break even or better, and the goal is to reach as many new readers as possible.
Run ads whenever your sales dry up, which as a new author will probably be always. And when book #2 arrives, try to have ads in place for book #1. It’s generally effective to drop to $0.99 for three days (the day before the ad, to ensure your price lowers; the day of the ad; and the day after to pick up the stragglers), but if you keep selling at $0.99 and you like what you’re seeing, stick with it as long as you like.
And that’s it, really. The downsides are there are only so many places to advertise, competition for spots is fierce, and BookBub is the only effective site I know about to reach beyond Amazon, but as they say, it is what it is. Even temporary boosts will reach new readers and may shake up your alsobots, leading to a longer tail of post-promo sales. It’s a long-term strategy, too. You’ll only be able to advertise any one book every so often, but as long as you keep writing new ones, that’s fresh material to promote.
This is the core of my current strategy, for whatever it’s worth, but I do have some qualms that it might be tough for brand-new authors to book ads at desirable sites. And there’s the review threshold to get over. But I see new authors doing this on KBoards right now, so it’s not impossible.
Now.. my favorite idea.
“The Nuclear Option!”
While I was mulling around the idea of this little series, I ran this idea by a group of writers I know–several of whom are much more successful than myself, and all of whom are very smart–and it was pretty much roundly rejected. So bear in mind that if this were a commercial, that commercial would say “Five out of six full-time indies think this is a Bad Idea!”
But it is, I think, what I would do if I were just starting today.
I would go permafree immediately.
For those just dipping their toes into the self-publishing waters, “permafree” means setting your book free permanently. Bit of a misnomer, as technically you can revert it to paid at any time, but the idea is to set it to $0.00 forever as a free introduction to your series. It’s a powerful tactic because it costs readers nothing to give your book a shot, and if they like it enough, they’ll go pay actual money for the later books in the series. Indies do this all the time. It’s one of our most basic tactics.
The unconventional bit of this is that writers generally don’t put it to use until they’ve got three books in the series out in the world.
The idea is to wait until you’ve got a couple sequels to make money from before you start giving the first one away for nothin’. But I’m not sure why the magic number is three. I’ve seen people go permafree with great results when they only had two books. So if it works for two, why not one??
…oh right, the part where you’re making zero money. But here’s what you’re making instead: readers. Of your stuff. At a much faster rate than you’ll be gaining them by charging $2.99. Readers who will (hopefully) go on to buy your sequels when they do come out (so long as you have a mailing list or other way to alert them), helping launch those books higher, and ultimately making you more money–and thus getting you closer to a real career–than you would have made waiting until book #3 to drop #1 to free.
And if you’d be worried about giving away a potential bestseller before it has the chance to find its legs, good news! The logistics of permafree require your book to start life as a paid title. Since you can’t set your BN price to $0.00 yourself, you’ll have to distribute your book there via Smashwords. It can take a few weeks for a SW-distributed book to go live at BN. Even after it does show up free on BN, it may take Amazon days, weeks, or months to pricematch to free.
And you can test the waters in the other stores as well. Upload direct to Kobo, Apple, and even BN and see whether the book takes off as a paid title. If it doesn’t, and you want to hasten the pricematching process, lower your price at Apple and Kobo to $0.00. As soon as the free SW version shows up at BN, pull your self-published version from sale.
It’s an extremely simple plan, there’s flexibility in the execution, and since advertising beyond Amazon is so limited, making a book permafree is probably the best option for reaching readers in the other stores. Amazon’s algos are pretty cruel these days. The trend is almost always down, and once your first 30 days as a new release are up, the cliff can come hard and fast. Diversifying your readership in other stores will help keep things steady between new releases.
Also, it’s pretty dang low-effort. Upload, tweak a couple prices, then remind Amazon that it’s free elsewhere until they pricematch. Once it qualifies (reviews etc.), sub it to freebie sites. That’s pretty much it. Go write!
But this plan isn’t without drawbacks. Some authors feel that books downloaded for free wind up with lower reviews than books people paid for, and there’s anecdotal and logical support for that idea (although no comprehensive studies I’m aware of). You’ll be giving up some unknown amount of initial income until your sequels arrive. If you’re on a tight budget, that’s a real consideration, especially if you could use those earnings to invest in snazzier covers or advertising or whatever. Someone suggested to me there’s psychological value in knowing total strangers have paid real money for a book you wrote, particularly in the fragile early days.
I’m unswayed. Free is one of the few tools brand-new authors have to make themselves competitive. If you can see yourself using it eventually, why wait? Why not fire it up right now and grab all the visibility you can in every store you can get into? Why not start gathering a mailing list right off the bat?
Anyway, let’s look at the timing on this. Day zero, you publish to Amazon, Smashwords, and wherever you’re uploading direct. It then takes a few days to be approved by Smashwords premium distribution (which you need to distribute to BN). If you haven’t met their formatting demands, you’ll have to try again; there’s a few more days. Once approved, it’ll probably be a couple days until it actually ships, and even then it can take 2-3 weeks for the free book to actually show up at BN. Once it does, Amazon rarely pricematches immediately. Even if you’re reporting your free book on their “tell us about a lower price” link, it can be days or weeks before they decide to match.
At this point, you’re beyond Amazon’s new release window, and if you’ve buckled down on the sequel, you should only be a couple months out from publishing. Yay. You gave #1 a shot as a paid title, and even if permafreeing it before #2 is out turns out to be a stupid idea, it’ll only be a stupid idea for a couple months until #2 goes live and permafree magically becomes a good idea.
You could hedge a bit more by waiting to set the permafree wheels in motion until #2 is almost ready. Finish up #2, then hit publish as soon as Amazon sets #1 to $0.00.
Anyway, this rationale is getting ridiculously long.
Let’s take a step back and look at what brand-new indies have to work with: virtually nothing. No fans, no reviews, no experience. The only way to accumulate those things is to publish a book and get it into readers’ hands. There are two factors in getting a reader to choose a book: first, they have to see it; second, it has to look interesting enough to overcome their resistance to buy. Making a book free creates visibility and reduces resistance. QED. I said QED!
P.S. — For unknown reasons, the comments section of this blog like to disappear sometimes. Refreshing a couple times will generally convince them to show up. This is one of the many things I lament, but don’t have time to fix. The glorious life of a mid-list indie.
Last year, I wrote a series of posts about what I would do if I were just getting my start as an indie author. It was intended to be a modest and simple way to get your foot in the door even if, like me, you’ve been on Facebook 18 months but still find yourself terrified that one wrong click will announce to the world that it’s been nine days since you last put on pants.
But the problem with last year is that it was last year. In the timescale of indie authors, “last year” is like another epoch. I may as well have written a guide on the best way to trap an allosaurus. Interesting, perhaps, as a historical document, but not all that relevant in this brave new world of “mammals.”
That right there is the problem. My advice, at the time, was (hopefully) relevant, because I had just graduated from indie-hobo to making a living at this (by my comically low standards). Then things changed. And they changed some more. And they changed again. When the landscape changes this fast, as soon as you take off, you no longer have a clear view of what’s happening down on the ground. By the time someone’s an expert, they’re obsolete.
That’s maybe a bit harsh. But it is absolutely critical to understand that nobody is offering bulletproof advice. And that, perversely, people with less authority–indies with little to no track record–may be in better position to offer quality advice than people who’ve sold hundreds and thousands of their books.
I don’t know where that leaves me exactly, and you know what, I’m not going to bother to figure it out. A couple weeks ago, someone asked me how to get started here and now. I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that anymore, but it’s an interesting question. So here’s some advice and analysis! Some or all of it might be worthless! Enjoy figuring that out for yourself.
Okay. To understand what you might do differently in 2013, we should probably look at what is different. What’s changed over the last year?
First, the biggie: Select sucks. The way Amazon treats free giveaways has changed repeatedly. Right now, even people who are giving away as many as 40,000 copies of their books during a free run are often seeing just a few dozen sales afterwards.
I don’t know the exact mechanics of the latest algo change, but the results aren’t there anymore. It isn’t just about the algos, either. Back in February, Amazon changed their affiliate agreement in a way that diminished or destroyed a lot of the freebie-advertising affiliate sites. Select isn’t dead for all books and strategies, but it’s been reduced to a fraction of its former power. It’s no longer the no-duh choice for anyone, let alone new authors.
Now, some good news: Kobo threw open the doors to self-publishers, joining Amazon, B&N, and Apple as markets we can directly upload our work to. Kobo got a lot of early hype as this was happening last summer. A lot of indie gurus painted them as the next big thing, particularly in international markets.
That hasn’t exactly happened yet, so here’s my assessment of Kobo: they’re a cool company whose self-publishing wing (Writing Life) is run by great people. So far, they’ve managed to capture a few percent of the various English-speaking markets, except Canada, where they’re Godzilla. Currently, they are probably the fourth-largest market for self-published authors, who make up some 25% of their total sales. A new store is a new opportunity to be discovered.
On the distribution side, Smashwords has made a couple cool improvements, allowing you to upload epubs and to set up preorders at B&N, Kobo, and Apple. They also seem to have made modest improvements to the quality and speed of their distribution process. Bigger yet, the first real alternative to Smashwords popped into being: Draft2Digital. While they don’t publish to as many venues as Smashwords, they cover the major outlets, and generally seem to be much speedier and more responsive. It’s now significantly easier to reach the big markets like B&N, which non-US residents can’t publish to directly, and Apple, which has a steep learning curve.
In terms of advertising, BookBub exploded on the scene and is hands down the best mover of free and discount books (although that means their ads are expensive and can be hard to book). Kindle Books and Tips converted from a freebie site and now runs discount books. Their results can be a little inconsistent, but are often in the same tier as ENT and POI–pretty great, in other words. BookBlast opened up, too. Operating on the BookBub model, it isn’t yet large enough to be the cornerstone of an advertising campaign, but their rates are very fair, the results are there, and they’ve been growing steadily. There still aren’t enough ways to advertise to non-Amazon readers, but we have a few new tools at our disposal. And as long as there’s money to be made, effective advertising options should continue to grow.
Eight jillion other things happened, too, but these are the ones that feel significant to me. And they all pretty much point in the same direction: away from Select freebies and toward wide distribution bolstered by $0.99 sales.
But success with that model generally means having multiple books and building an audience in multiple markets. Which, by definition, excludes brand-new authors. So now that the easy button of Select has been disconnected, what should new authors do instead?
Well, I’ve got an idea. It’s pretty simple and obvious. But before I get to that, I want to look at an idea that’s kind of its opposite–and which is becoming an increasingly popular piece of advice. Part 2: Don’t Wait.
Want to know how many sales a given Amazon Kindle rank represents? Here’s a quick and dirty formula:
100,000/rank # = sales per day
In other words, if a book’s rank is #100, then 100,000/100 = 1000 sales/day. If a book’s rank is #1000, then 100,000/1000 = 100 sales/day. At #100,000, then 100,000/100,000 = 1/day.
The formula breaks down at the extremes. It probably overestimates the sales of the top 100 books by a little, and the #1 book in a given day probably sells much more like 10,000/day than 100K, although as ever, at the top, it varies tremendously. And at #1,000,000, that’s not a book that sells 1 copy/10 days. We’re talking about a book that might not have sold more than 1 copy ever, or at least within the last 6 months.
Overall, though, it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. It’s probably a little conservative–tack on 10-20%, and you’re probably closer to the truth for most ranks–and it also depends on factors like velocity of sales in the last 0-48 hours, so books that have recently been boosted by a sale may be +/- 50% of the sales numbers or more. Also, a book that has hung out at a certain rank for a while needs fewer sales to maintain that ranking long-term.
Treat it as a guideline, though, and it’s pretty close to the truth. Does that mean you could extrapolate it to estimate how many ebooks Amazon sells per day? Yes. You totally could.
Very early this morning, Amazon posted the following changes to their Affiliate program, effective March 1st:
“In addition, notwithstanding the advertising fee rates described on this page or anything to the contrary contained in this Operating Agreement, if we determine you are primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks (i.e., eBooks for which the customer purchase price is $0.00), YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:
(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and
(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.”
Here’s my reading of this: if you’re a bargain ebook site that gets at least 20,000 free book downloads a month, and at least 20% of your total orders aren’t paid books, then you don’t earn any affiliate money that month. If you think I’m misinterpreting, please chime in.
So. Major sites like Pixel of Ink earn scads and scads of money off their affiliate sales, which include any Amazon purchases made by a customer who was driven to the site by clicking on one of POI’s free book listings. I don’t know how many freebie orders POI generates, but I’m pretty positive they’re good for well more than 20K a day.
In other words, they’re going to be way, way past the cap.
Here’s the question: what percentage of their current orders are of paid books vs. free books? If they’re past the 80% mark, how much are they going to have to change their listings–by decreasing free mentions, increasing paid mentions, or both–to not forfeit their affiliate earnings?
Turns out I can drop some very rough math on this. I think that, generally speaking, a free book listing will get about 15 times as many orders as a paid book listing. In other words, that’s a 15:1 ratio. To come in under the new requirements, sites need to hit a 4:1 ratio. That means the bargain book sites will have to post approximately four times as many paid books as free ones.
Right now, nobody’s all that close to those numbers.
POI’s closest; they already run around a 2:1 ratio of paid:free. ENT runs about 1:1. So does BookBub. FKBT runs several times more free books than paid. My figures are extremely back-of-the-envelope here, but you can see that major change is on the way. Either the major sites are going to have to offer a lot more paid books (although I doubt that tripling their paid listings would triple their paid orders), or offer a lot fewer free books. It could shake out that they list 50-80% fewer free books every day than they do now.
Now, it’s possible things aren’t as grim as that. These sites are so big that Amazon may have reached special arrangements with them to allow them to run more freebies–POI and ENT were already contacted about this general issue a few months back. Or my 15:1 ratio could be off. It’s extrapolated from ad results, but it’s not like I have direct access to these sites’ affiliate numbers. But it could be closer to status quo than I think.
That said, it’s pretty clear that things will change. The question is how much. And there are two obvious outcomes of these changes.
First, if you’re an author, it’s going to be tougher to get your free book mentioned on the major sites. Probably the medium-sized sites, too.
Second, the bargain sites may open to more for advertising of discounted titles, giving authors more venues to promote $0.99 sales and such. If demand from authors for freebie mentions is high enough, and supply is limited enough, the sites might start charging to list free books. And if the results are there, we’ll totally pay them for that, too.
This will be another blow to Select, making the program more winner-takes-all than ever. Why would they harm the program? Because they care infinitely more about the overall ebook market than they do about Select. EDIT: And it might not even be about the ebook market. This could be nothing more than an attempt to correct a problem with the affiliate program, which may feel it’s overpaying for the results its ebook affiliates are providing Amazon.
Whatever the case, it may be extremely chaotic over the next few weeks and months. As the bargain sites attempt to adjust to the new guidelines, you can guarantee they’re going to err on the side of caution, meaning very few free books will be listed each day. They might loosen up as they learn to work with the new system, but who knows how long it could take.
This is why I remain ambivalent about Select in general. Success depends heavily on these bargain book sites. If they change their rules, or Amazon changes the rules for them, it can leave authors caught on the carpet.
As they say, though, from crisis comes opportunity. If there are fewer site-launched freebies dominating the charts each day, that may leave more room for more “organic” free runs for books to claw their way up the ranks on their own (or aided by a bevy of small sites instead). Especially in the transition period, the books that do very well on free runs could do even better than ever, because there’s less competition vying for clicks.
That’s about as far as I can squint into the future. I fear that shit is about to get real. If you’ve got any questions, thoughts, or predictions, fire away.
EDIT, 2/28: Some numbers have started to emerge from affiliates who links to ebooks. The performance of free books vs. paid books varies heavily depending on how the site owner built their readership, but the order numbers have looked.. challenging. The best ratio I’ve seen was 91% free books, 9% paid. Others have been as high as 98.5% free. Michael Gallagher, owner of FKBT, estimates his links to free books get 148 times as many clicks as his links to paid books.
It sounds like virtually all of the freebie sites are going to have to make some changes: some minor, some drastic. March should be interesting.
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Rob Dunbar is the world's best history professor. And with good reason: he's been alive for three thousand years, keeping his existence a secret since...
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