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.
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.
Anyone who follows this blog knows that last May, Amazon drastically changed their popularity lists (available on the left sidebar of the main Kindle store) to change the way free downloads were factored into the ranks. On last week’s Self-Publishing Podcast #42, I was asked whether this change was done in order to present readers with better books.
The short answer: yes.
The longer answer: not necessarily better books, but certainly more profitable ones. That’s a very important distinction to make right off the bat. In all media, there’s an ongoing, centuries-long debate about whether a work’s value is based on its commercial appeal or its artistic qualities. As it turns out, I have nothing to contribute to that debate. So what follows should in no way be taken as a judgment of books that have failed to thrive under the recent Select model. Some of my books did worse as well.
But here’s what we know. Between the birth of the Select program in December 2011 and mid-March 2012, all it took for a book to hit the first few pages of its category after a free run was a few hundred downloads. 2000+ would essentially guarantee you’d be near the top of your category, probably for 2-5 days. Because a free download was weighted the same as a paid sale. And very few books are currently selling hundreds of copies per day on Amazon. Right now, about 1000 sell 100/day. Maybe 500 sell 200/day. And only something like 100 sell 500+/day. The numbers were a little lower a year ago, but not by all that much.
Meanwhile, every day, freebie aggregate blogs were pointing their readerships toward several dozen free titles. The biggest blogs had tens of thousands of subscribers, more or less guaranteeing every book featured would pick up at least 1000 downloads. There was some level of curation involved–covers had to be at least halfway decent, and there was typically a rating threshold of some kind–but the blogs had no real way to test the commercial potential of the books they mentioned. And when a book is free, the resistance to downloading it is much, much lower than when that book has a price tag attached to it.
The result is that a lot of books with lower commercial appeal wound up displacing books with higher commercial appeal. On Amazon’s popularity lists, 1000 free downloads beat 100 paid sales, and new Select books were picking up thousands of free downloads every single day. The gatekeepers weren’t strong enough to keep out the low-appeal books, meaning readers were less likely to buy the books in front of them or to be satisfied with the titles they did purchase.
What was the solution? Well, Amazon wasn’t about to start curating these books themselves. Amazon is all about letting massive numbers of consumers reach their own decisions, proving in the most meaningful possible fashion which books have the highest commercial appeal. So some churn of their lists was probably a good thing, as it broke up the stagnation of long-term bestsellers (by the way, the iBookstore is currently struggling with this problem) and presented more voracious readers with fresh material. But this was too much, and it was too unregulated.
The answer was to raise the standards for which books would get prime placement. And in typical Amazon fashion, they would tie that standard to consumer behavior.
In March, they started testing new popularity lists; in May, there was a new algorithm. The winner no longer weighted free downloads equally with paid sales, but at something near a 10:1 scale. And instead of weighting the last 1-7 days of sales + downloads, it looked at the last 30.
So instead of needing 2000+ downloads to land high on the charts–a number most decent-looking books promoted by the top sites could cross; about 100 free books managed that number of downloads per day–their new formula required somewhere between 8000-20,000 downloads to really hit it big. The more niche or iffy books couldn’t hit those numbers anymore; fewer than twenty per day could climb those heights. With exceptions, the only books that could rake in that many downloads were the ones that would have guaranteed commercial appeal when plunked in front of readers. The gatekeepers–readers, making their download decisions one click at a time–were made stronger.
They crowdsourced commercial appeal. In the environment of the time, one or two or three thousand readers downloading a free book wasn’t a terribly accurate predictor of that book’s potential. But if you upped those numbers ten times over–to ten or twenty or thirty thousand reader downloads–you had a much more accurate barometer for which books would sell when they were awarded with extra visibility.
It was a net gain for readers, who had an easier time finding appealing books, but a net loss for writers, fewer of whom could pull in the number of downloads required to hit the jackpot.
Again, I’m presenting this without judgment. A book’s surface appeal, which prompts free downloads, doesn’t necessarily represent its deeper appeal, which prompts word of mouth and long-term sales (to say nothing of literary or artistic appeal). And Amazon’s current algos aren’t perfect. Certain factors–the readership demographics of the major blogs, crossover appeal of the larger genres, Amazon’s categories, etc.–means that certain subgenres (romance, thrillers, etc.) have an easier time of it than more niche subgenres (epic fantasy, Westerns?, etc.).
This is just my narrative of what happened. Amazon’s standards/algos weren’t high enough to deal with the emerging free book market; the rewards for making your book free were disproportionately high compared to their average commercial value.
So they raised their standards. And a lot of authors were left scrambling for a new solution.
~
The silver lining to these changes is that we as authors can take advantage of the raised standards to gauge the appeal of our own books. But since this post is already closing in on 1000 words long, I’m going to tackle that in a followup.
Last post, I looked at how to run big giveaways in order to build up your floor as an author. As long as you’re comfortable giving away thousands of copies of your books, it’s a fast, low-effort way to grab your first real visibility. Along the way, you’re gaining fans, which will help you sell your next book, as well as reviews and likes and tags and all that, which will help you sell this book the next time you promote it.
This whole strategy is based on KDP Select, however. Which requires selling exclusively through Amazon. Which continues to be a contentious and divisive topic within the indie publishing world.
The pro-Select crowd more or less believes this: “Select is a tool, nothing more. I’ve gotten better results through it than I ever have when my book was available at all the other stories. Until that changes, I’m going to stick with what’s working for me–Select, and Amazon exclusivity.”
The anti-Select argument has a few facets to it. Some people have a philosophical problem with exclusivity; they want readers to be able to buy their books through whatever store and on whatever format they prefer. Others just think Select is a bad business decision: it’s not sustainable, the gains from free giveaways are temporary, and you aren’t factoring in the opportunity cost of exclusivity: you don’t know what your books could be selling in the other stores. “I want steady, organic growth. A long-term career. The best way to achieve this is to make my books available in as many stores and formats as I possibly can.”
This perspective is perhaps most visibly argued by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. These two are long-term pros with all kinds of great advice about protecting your rights as an author and running your business wisely. I’ve met them once, and found them smart, approachable, and downright excited to share what they know with new authors. (Hi, Kris! RadCon 2010–I was the young dude in the Bukowski shirt. Got flustered when you told me he was one of Dean’s favorites.)
But I also think they’re full of crap.
To me, the business plan of pushing your work out to every stores is a strategy of hope. As in, “I’m going to sell my work in every store, and hope the readers there magically find it.” It’s the power of prayer, in other words–and we all know God helps those who help themselves.
So you can hope. Or, you can enroll in Select. At the cost of hoping you might sell at the other markets, you now have a powerful tool to create visibility for yourself in what remains the majority share of the ebook market.
That said? I’m growing skeptical of Select. I don’t think it is necessarily a long-term part of an indie author’s career.
Boy, this is going to be a long post. Here’s the thing. The benefits of Select depend on giving away a lot of books. You can only give away a lot of books if a lot of people know you have a book to give away. The way most books give away thousands of copies is through being listed by the big three freebie blogs: ENT, POI, and FKBT. In other words, your success as a self-published author depends on a new set of gatekeepers.
These gatekeepers have their own sets of standards as to which books they’ll choose to promote. These standards may or may not be public. If you’ve got a book that doesn’t meet their standards–whether because of your cover, your genre, your number or average rating of reviews, or you gave their dog a dirty look nine years back–Select may not be of any use to you. Note that I surely don’t blame these blogs for having standards–they’ve built their own readership by curating titles and offering up what appear to be the good ones; if they had no standards, no one would follow them–I’m just saying that your success in Select depends on factors outside of your control.
Speaking of factors outside of your control: Amazon is not reliable. Not 100%. Using Select, you’ll run into glitches all the time. Your free day may not start as scheduled, or at all. Your book may not go free on time or go back to paid on time. You may not be displayed on the free ranks for hours or days at a time, curtailing the effectiveness of your promo. And you know how much immediate customer support Amazon offers for these problems? Zero. There’s no phone number for you to call. If you email KDP support, you’ll be lucky to get a response by the next day, and it will probably be several days after that before they’ll address your issue. Too late to matter, in other words.
Amazon’s algorithms that help translate free promotions into paid sales aren’t reliable, either. They’ve already changed twice this year: once in March, once in May. They could change again at any time. Could be better, could be worse. There’s no way to know until it happens.
Then there’s the matter of sustainability. I don’t know if it’s sustainable to pick up sales by giving away thousands of free copies on a regular basis. No one knows this. The Select program hasn’t even been out a year yet. If we’re talking about a career, we’re talking about decades of time. Can you get effective results by giving away a book month after month and year after year?
Common sense says you’ll see diminishing returns, but in a business as chaotic as the current ebook world, common sense needs to sit down and shut up. I can relate that, anecdotally, I have seen a handful of people who have been able to run highly successful monthly or semi-monthly giveaways of a title and pick up some real sales afterwards. The May changes to Amazon’s algorithms have made this harder to do, but people are still doing it. (And this mostly depends on POI picking you up every time you go free.)
But they’re not common. There is a larger pool of people who can regularly give away a decent number of copies on a regular basis, but their post-free sales aren’t that inspirational. I’m talking a few dozen extra sales following a giveaway. Probably no more than a couple hundred bucks in income. And then there is an even larger pool of authors who get very inconsistent results. Sometimes, they may give away thousands of copies during a promotion, but other times, they aren’t picked up anywhere and they’re lucky to give away a few hundred.
And there is an opportunity cost. This cost is totally unknown, of course; you can’t know how your book would do in the other stores until it is in the other stores. This is what I’ve seen, though. A book that does well in Select tends to sell in the other stores, too. Probably not like gangbusters. Usually not enough to make up the difference. But it will sell some. And I’ve had some books that gained nothing from Select wind up selling more in the other stores than they have on Amazon. Again, not sales by the truckload. But a few here and there. Furthermore, all the things you’ll learn about selling books by being in Select–covers and categories and all the rest–largely apply to the other stores as well. After seasoning yourself in Select, it should be easier to take what you’ve learned and apply it to Apple and B&N and Kobo as well.
Then there’s the issue of trying to become a big fish in a small pond. Of trying to stay ahead of the curve rather than blindly following what dummies like me are trying to pass along as fresh news.
In order to make Select work, then, you have to rely on the gatekeepers of blogs. You have to rely on Amazon to actually run your promo as scheduled and to not change the program’s effectiveness three weeks from now. And you have to rely on the Select concept being one that will work for years and years down the road. Meanwhile, you can’t know where you’d be at in the other stores if you’d never tried Select in the first place.
All that said? I still recommend Select as a starting point. Right here, right now, Select still works very well for a great many people. Even for seasoned indies, the other stores can be a struggle. Select remains well-understood and easy to leverage. It’s particularly useful for a series and for getting new books off the ground before you have a fanbase to do that for you.
But for all these reasons, I think a longer-term strategy involves more than Select. I, for one, am trying to make a career out of this. I don’t like the idea of my success being dependent on a handful of blogs, a single store, a single program, and a single trick. I still have a couple books enrolled in Select, but I’m trying to make it one of my tools rather than my only tool.
Okay, this post is approaching Konrathian lengths. I’m going to explore medium-term strategies in a followup post instead. But I thought it was necessary to lay out all my thoughts about Select before delving into where you might go with your career after you’re, say, 6-12 months into your career, have 2-6 titles out there, and have run multiple giveaways. That way, you’ll know where I’m coming from, and can adjust your own strategies accordingly.
In my first post, I looked at what to do and what to expect from your first novel release. In brief, the strategy involved enrolling in KDP Select and doing a quick initial giveaway. It’s a very simple strategy. All it takes is a few clicks, some waiting, and some hoping. In fact, if you’re some marketing ninja or already have a huge platform, you’ve probably got better options for pushing your book. So go ninja-tweet instead of reading this post, goofus! This is more for authors who are starting off with no support, tools, or weapons whatsoever.
Anyway, so you’ve run a giveaway or two, resulting in several hundred downloads. If you haven’t been able to garner that many, take a cold, hard look at your cover–this is the first thing prospective downloaders are seeing as they browse the freebie listings, so if they’re not clicking over, that’s the first part of your book to troubleshoot. If your cover’s at least good, though (and I mean actually good, a cover that doesn’t instantly out you as a self-published author–not that there’s anything wrong with self-pubbing, but the idea is to create a product that’s indistinguishable from traditional products), and the downloads still aren’t coming, that could be a problem. I’ll look at that in a followup post dedicated to troubleshooting.
But let’s say you’ve managed to give away, say, 400-2000 copies. You have, hopefully, also gained a handful–maybe even two scoops!–of cold cash sales. Most likely, however, things have quieted down within a week of your promo. You might feel like you’re back to square one. Oh god, we’re writing our names in water!
Yeah, but now it’s time for Phase 2.
Phase 2 can probably only take place if your giveaways have garnered you a minimum of 5 reviews with an average rating of 4.0. I know there’s a good chance this hasn’t happened for your book even if you’ve spent all five of your free days already. One of my novels has been out for 18 months and it still only has 3 reviews (with a sterling 3.7 average!). When you’re starting out, getting reviews can feel even harder than getting sales.
Because it is. Reviews tend to come faster for new books with none, but from what I’ve garnered from my results and those of others, you’ll probably pick up just one review for every 100-300 paid sales. And the ratio of reviews to freebies given away is generally even worse. I’ll talk more about how to pick up reviews in the troubleshooting post (I’ll try to get that up later today or this weekend), but for now, if you’re not there, let me just reiterate: don’t pay for reviews. Don’t use sockpuppets. Don’t do anything shady. You don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot. Fake reviews have crippled or killed the careers of several indies already. Even if you get away with it, and intend for it to be a one-time thing to jumpstart yourself, here’s the thing–you haven’t learned how to pick up reviews legitimately. That’s a skill you will need as your career continues to build up steam.
And building these skills is the ultimate point of these posts. Hopefully this strategy will help you fast-forward through the most grueling, painful, self-doubtful portion of your indie career. But more importantly, the giveaway process is helping you learn what works for you and what doesn’t. What makes a good cover. How to categorize your books. What promo efforts lead to sales and which are a waste of time. Which of your books have big appeal and which don’t. Blah blah blah. You are building the skillz to pay your literal bills. Acquiring honest reviews is one of those skillz. Don’t shortchange yourself.
Back to Phase 2: The Big Giveaway.
There is where we’re going to try to give away a lot of copies. At least 3000. Hopefully 5000-8000. And, if everything breaks right, 20,000+.
That probably sounds like a lot. Because it is. No one will be left to read my novel! Oh no I gave away all my readers!
Nah. Brand-new Kindle owners are buying their first ebooks every single day. Same deal with Nooks and Kobos and iPads. Brand-new readers are being born every day. There isn’t really a limit to how many people could potentially buy your book. I mean, 7ish billion, plus however many aliens are lurking within wireless range. But compared to that, 20,000 is nothing. A piece of Twilight erotic fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off has sold millions of copies this year. If you’ve got a book with the appeal to give away 20,000 copies, trust me, it has the appeal to sell plenty more.
Before your promo, set up a mailing lost. I use Mailchimp, but any service will do. Put a line at the end of your book like “If you’d like to hear when I’ve got a new book out, please sign up for my mailing list,” and include a link to your signup page. Doesn’t have to be anything fancy. The goal is to create a way to get in touch with the people who liked your freebie so you can let them know when your next release is out. Having an initial base, however small, will help get your next book up and running much faster.
Don’t skip that step. I did, because I am lazy and dumb, and then I had a huge giveaway and a great month of sales and I lost out on adding all kinds of fans to my list, which I would regret deeply, except I am too lazy and dumb to care about the mistakes I’ve made along the way.
With that out of the way, it’s time to schedule your promo. You want at least two promo days available. Schedule a two-day free run for 1-2 weeks from now. Now, go alert the three major sites about your upcoming giveaway:
Links go to their announcement pages. Now, wait for your free day to come, and pray to the Bibliolords that one, two, or all three of these sites mention you to their fans.
There is no guarantee this will happen. On any given day, some 4000+ books are free on Amazon. These sites list a few dozen free books between them. They have standards, too. They want a professional-looking, well-reviewed book (and in POI’s case, they’re definitely more interested in certain genres). They have attained their massive followings–followings you are now attempting to tap–by only presenting great-looking books to their readership. If your book doesn’t have strong surface appeal, your chances of getting picked up by these places is pretty low.
These aren’t the only free sites out there, but they are the only ones who seem capable of launching your book into the freebie stratosphere. Alert everywhere else under the sun, if you like (freebooksy, for one, appears to be building an audience), but these are the big dogs.
If they mention you, you’ll probably finish the day with somewhere between 1500 and 15,000 downloads. 2500-6000 is a more typical range. Unless you get more mentions elsewhere on day two, you probably won’t grab as many downloads on your second day, but so long as you’re in the top 100 free, you’ll still get plenty. If you’re still pulling them in fast and furious at the end of day two, add a third day to your promotion.
You may want to save the rest of your free days for a later promo, but as long as the downloads keep coming, there’s an argument to be made to keep adding more days and racking them up. Amazon’s algorithms are currently stacked to favor colossal download counts. It varies wildly by genre, as will your post-free results, but I’m talking 8-30K to really move the needle. If your promo is working, be aggressive with it. In fact, that is the #1 rule of selling books: “If it’s working, be aggressive.”
Some people tweet and Facebook and etc. etc. while their promo is working. It can’t hurt. I don’t, personally. Again: I’m lazy; possibly dumb.
Now your promo’s over. With any luck, you’ve given away somewhere between 3000-20,000 copies. Yay! Now what?
Now you watch, that’s what. Your first day or two or three back to paid might be pretty quiet. It will take a couple days for all those freebies to be counted toward your popularity list ranking and for your alsobots to recrunch and all that. But I would bet that some sales are coming in, and that they will continue to do so for a week or so. Not hundreds upon hundreds. Those days are over, unless you just gave away a ton of copies and have a killer book that’s going to take advantage of its new visibility by hooking every reader who glances its way. But a few dozen. Maaaybe a couple hundred, again depending on genre, appeal, the size of your giveaway, etc. Enough to pay a few bills, though.
And to snag some more reviews. And some signups to your mailing list. And Goodreads reviews. And recommendations to their friends. These things build up over time, adding to your infrastructure. If the edifice of your authordom grows sturdy enough, the lean times will be less lean and the boom times will boom much harder. Right now, we’re building your floor. Floors are very unexciting. Very unsexy (unless you have a skilled tile worker at hand). But they hold you up while you are walking around, which is very preferable to crashing through the basement, or leaping from beam to beam like some kind of fool.
You may see your floor start to strengthen after your very first big giveaway–if you were selling 1/week, maybe after the initial rush of sales you level off at 1/day; if you were doing 1/day, maybe you’re up to 2/day. I know, pretty meager gains, considering you just gave away thousands and thousands of damn copies of a book you nearly killed yourself writing.
But you’ve only got one book out, sir or ma’am. It’s hard to sell consistently with just one book. You have nothing else for your fans to snap up. You have nothing else to promote. Meanwhile, Amazon’s algorithms have become a very harsh mistress. And your first published book–even if it’s not the first book you ever wrote–will probably not be your most appealing book.
So I hope you’ve been working on a second book. And, once that one’s finished, that you’re ready to get to work on a third. This business is a bloodsport! The more gladiators you’ve got ready to hit the arena, the better your chances of producing a champion. Trust me, if you keep at it, if you keep writing and you keep learning to make better books on the inside and out, it will get easier.
I hope Phase 2 has given you your first taste of success, however modest. I’m thinking you’re now 1-6 months into your indie career, depending on how fast it took to get your initial reviews and such. As you continue to publish new books, repeat Phase 2 with each of your books every 30-90 days.
What? Give away thousands of copies of every book every 1-3 months? Is giving away this many books sustainable? I don’t know, actually. I do know it’s more sustainable than you’d think. But there’s a reason it’s called “Phase 2” and not “Permanent, Immutable Plan 2.” Next post, I’m going to look at branching out to the other stores and more long-term strategies. We’re going to go pretty far off the beaten path. GRAB YOUR PITH HELMETS!
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