Last week, Passive Guy’s mentioned the publishing industry has jacked up book prices well beyond the rate of inflation. Curious, I decided to compare prices for myself. I didn’t know what I would find, but two results popped out: adjusted for inflation, publishers have tripled the price of mass market paperbacks. And this leap in prices coincides with the period of mass consolidation within the publishing industry.
The full results are available at David Gaughran’s blog. Dude has a lot of readers. Way more than I do.
This is a huge topic, one I may well explore in further depth down the road. Oh, in the meantime, one other thing that jumped out at me? Right now, many indie books are the exact same price as the original mass market paperbacks–paperbacks that helped revitalize the entire industry.
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!
Much like punching a crocodile, indie publishing is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. Exhilarating, because hey, you hit “publish” this morning and perhaps tomorrow the next thing you will hit is the ceiling after you discover you sold a million copies overnight. At the very least, it is exhilarating because you’ve taken control.
At the same time, it is utterly, skin-grippingly terrifying, because it’s such a big, big world, and when there are 1,504,243 titles and counting in the Kindle store alone, who the hell knows how a book ever sells a single copy in the first place.
When I put my first book out, I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it. Joe Konrath said I should join Kindleboards, so I did that. I posted about my book there and nothing happened. When my next books came out, I did the same thing, and more nothing continued to happen. It took me a full 12 months before all that nothing began to turn into something.
If I were starting my indie author career over right now, if I had my first book all ready to go out and conquer the world, here’s what I might do instead.
First, I would price my book at $2.99 or $3.99. This is not based on scientific research over here. But $0.99 is gaining a stigma and, from what I’ve absorbed elsewhere, $3.99 is the lowest price at which many readers will impulse-buy. When you’re just starting out, you’ve got nothing. No reviews. No also-boughts pointing back to your book. No recommendations from a reader’s trusted friend. There is nothing to break down a buyer’s resistance to buying your book, so you want to keep that resistance as low as possible with a bargain price. $2.99-3.99 seems to be low enough for that resistance to frequently be overcome by no other tools than your cover, your concept, and your sample.
Second, I would enroll my book in Amazon’s Select program.
This is a controversial decision. Well, it’s not that controversial. It’s about as controversial as all the thrillers listed on Amazon with subtitles including the word “CONTROVERSIAL,” which is to say that a few of us nerds might care, but nobody else gives a damn. Anyway, there is a mild controversy around Select. A lot of writers don’t like the idea of being exclusive to Amazon. A lot of writers think giving away your book devalues it and all books, and that it leads to temporary, inorganic gains that will soon dry up and blow away. What these authors are after is a long-term organic strategy of distributing to as many markets as possible and building up many different revenue streams that add up to a steady and sustainable income.
Well, good luck, guys.
That’s a little snarkety. But the thing is, every storefront presents you with a different set of tools to get your book in front of readers. And Amazon’s Select program is the very strongest tool of them all.
Quick aside: you should probably attach the phrase “In my opinion” to every sentence here. It will save us all a lot of time and anguish.
But here are some facts, or at least the facts as I have experienced them. If you push your book to Barnes & Noble, it will appear on the new releases list if readers sort by date, and there may be a week or two in which people see it. If you distribute to iTunes, it may not show up anywhere at all. Same with Kobo. It will be visible on Smashwords’ new releases for about a day before it’s buried, and then people are going to have to search for it to find it.
In other words, the window for your new book to take off purely organically is about 1-7 days long. If those 1-7 days pass and you haven’t sold enough to start making bestseller lists and generating also-boughts and all that–which you won’t–your book will be buried by all the new releases.
And that is where Select comes in.
For the record, I’m not an unrepentant Amazon/Select cheerleader. Of my 9 titles, only 2 are currently in Select, and I might not leave them there for another term. The program is not what it used to be. And it’s not a magic bullet. But it still has its uses.
Let us say you have hit “Publish.” Your book goes live. Shoppers can now find it by browsing the new releases or by searching for very specific terms and keywords, where your book will probably be listed as the #1,387th result. How else do you get readers to see your book?
One method, popularized widely by Amanda Hocking, is to submit your book to book bloggers. These people will review your book and then share it with their readership. This is a free and relatively simple way to get your book in front of people. But there are a lot of problems with this process. Another preface: book bloggers are great. I’ve known some spectacular people in the field who have really brightened my day with their devotion to finding new books and their enthusiasm in sharing them.
But you can’t count on book bloggers as a release strategy. They are overwhelmed with review requests. It may be weeks or months after you write to them before they can get to your book. If you’re chummy and entrepreneurial enough, maybe you can send them an ARC and schedule a review for around the time of your book’s release, but that means you have to wait to release until they’re ready, and waiting to release sucks. Anyway, that’s assuming the review will be good, which is no sure thing, even if your book is a professional product. Their opinions are highly subjective, after all. I’m a movie reviewer. A paid one who works for a newspaper. I hate all kinds of professionally-made movies that other people love dearly because reviews are nothing more than opinions, which always, always vary.
To summarize, then, reviews from blogs are likely to be slow to arrive, there’s a chance the review will hurt your book (just try selling it when it’s got a single two-star review), and even if the review is positive, the blogger’s audience probably won’t be all that big. If everything breaks right, it might be good for a few sales. Having a positive review out there may also help future shoppers decide to purchase your book. Seeking blog reviews isn’t a dumb thing to do, then, and it can help build up your long-term infrastructure, but it’s not going to do much for you on Day 1.
Anyway, things are different from when book bloggers gave Amanda Hocking the push that helped break her out. They’re all overwhelmed. You can’t hit enough of them to make much if any difference. Personally, the entire submission process feels too much like the agent hunt. I don’t submit to book bloggers anymore. Unless you write in YA, where they still seem to have some influence, I wouldn’t burn too much time on that route.
What do you do instead? It’s probably worthwhile to get your book listed on GoodReads. I am not intricately well-versed in how Goodreads runs, but if you have librarian status, or know someone who does, you should be able to add your book easily. If you can’t, it’s no big deal–someone will get to it eventually–but Goodreads seems to be a fairly important part of developing your book’s infrastructure, a concept I’ll get to in a bit.
But perhaps the most important thing you can do after hitting publish is this: make your book free. Right out of the gate. Give away the hell out if it. Schedule it for a two-day run, sit back, and see what happens.
“What happens” probably won’t be much. I think it’s vitally important to set the right expectations at this stage, and for most beginning authors, the reality is you’re going to sell very little right off the bat. In concrete terms, you’re doing very well if you’re selling 1/day. Many brand-new books from first-time authors with no platform can easily go days or weeks or even months between sales. A month from now, your sales column might consist of a number between 1-9, and that is perfectly okay.
At this phase, that means every single sale is a success. Every sale means someone stumbled over an unknown book and thought it looked interesting enough to pay money for. Do you know how hard it is to make that happen? Remember: 1,504,243 ebook titles and counting. As a brand-new book, the only place you’re showing up is in the new releases list and in keyword searches, and even then, anyone who found your book is either obsessive or almost superhumanly dedicated to finding new books, because they probably had to dig through dozens of pages before they happened upon yours. In terms of its present visibility, your book may have a “Buy” button on its page, but in many ways it still hasn’t really been published.
So cheer every day you do get a sale, but try not to be surprised or disappointed when you don’t. It’s probably going to be some time before your book starts traveling down some of the main avenues to discoverability.
And that’s why we’re going free right off the bat–to try to kickstart a couple of these avenues.
Again, don’t expect much from your first free run. A few hundred downloads on your first day is a pretty good outcome; my brand-new novels have typically pulled 200-500 on their first day free. If you’re in that range, hooray! I’d let it run free for a second day just in case it wants to catch fire, but it’ll probably give away fewer copies than it did the day before, which is perfectly normal.
Let’s address the exceptions real quick. If your book does start giving away a ton of copies–I dunno, 2000 or more–I would definitely add a third day, and keep adding days for as long as it keeps getting downloads. If it gets very few downloads–like, 50 or fewer over those two days–take a close look at your book’s presentation, its cover and blurb. If they look good, maybe you just ran into some bad luck, but this could be a sign that your book’s appeal isn’t quite there yet. One of the collateral benefits to making your book free is it can help you ballpark its overall sexiness. If you’ve got doubts about your book’s surface appeal, take this opportunity to fix it up now. Seriously. It matters.
If your book had a more middle-of-the-road outcome, though, and gave away 300-1000ish copies over its run, awesome. With a little luck, its infrastructure is about to get going. “Infrastructure” is just some crap I made up, but I think of it in terms of all the things about your book that makes it visible and makes it pretty. This includes any number of things. Reviews–onsite, on Goodreads, on blogs, wherever. Alsobots, which is our very clever slang term for the similar/related books a website will recommend to people viewing a specific title. Nice placement on lists (bestseller, popularity, new releases, whatever). And the ever-popular, ever-nebulous word of mouth.
By going free and giving away several hundred copies of your book, you’ll generate a bunch of alsobots that appear on other titles’ product pages that point back to your book. Hooray for visibility! And with a little luck, you’ll pick up a few Amazon reviews in the next few days and weeks, too. Maybe just one or two or three, but assuming they’re generally positive, these are going to help take advantage of your increased visibility by helping to convince anyone browsing your page that a living, breathing, non-you person enjoyed and recommended your book. (Because a real person did enjoy it. Don’t fake reviews. It’ll come back to bite you.) People might start reviewing your book on Goodreads, too–they’ll probably be more inclined to do so if its page already exists–which means their friends will see their reviews, which might entice them to check out your book. (More expectations-setting: Goodreads reviews are generally much harsher than Amazon. On Goodreads, 3 stars generally means they liked it. Didn’t love it, but liked it. That’s more like a 4-star review over on Amazon.)
You may wind up with a handful of sales in the first few days after your free run, too. Always an awesome feeling. These will probably slow down all too soon. But between alsobots (hopefully!) and reviews (hopefully!), maybe instead of selling 1/month, you’re selling 1/week. Or instead of 1/week, you’re up to 1/day.
These are small gains. Frustratingly small, probably. Well quit whining, whiner! Ha ha, sorry. But really, right now, every gain is a gain. And there’s a less-tangible gain going on here, too. Through this process, you are learning. At least you better be learning! Again, sorry. You’re learning how to sell books in general and how to sell this book in specific. That’s going to make this whole business much easier down the road.
For now, that’s it. I mean, if you want, you can tweet and blog and Facebook and pursue book bloggers about your book. That could help. It’s probably better than nothing. It makes me feel like a jerk, though, and it’s very time-consuming, so I don’t do any of that stuff. Except blog here. Because I enjoy it. That is the real secret to self-promotion: find what you like, and do that.
Otherwise, there’s not much more you can do for now. Watch your book for 2-4 weeks. Most of all, you’re looking for reviews. You’re going to want 5+ of them, ideally with an average of 4.0 or better. Having done a giveaway is risky at this early stage, because a couple of poor negative reviews right off the bat can turn this process into an uphill slog, but I think it’s worth the risk. Just be aware that this could happen.
Hopefully you can get these initial mostly-positive reviews just through your giveaway and through normal sales, but if they’re not coming, you may want to spend time actively pursuing them. Again: please be ethical. Sockpuppets stink. Paid reviews are against Amazon’s policy, too. Don’t fall prey to temptation. This is a game of patience. This won’t be your only book, right? Then act with the same class you’d like to be known for in a year or five or twenty, when you have many books and many fans.
While you wait, work on your next novel. Learn more about the business by reading blogs or Kindleboards or whatever. Try not to obsess. Almost everyone sucks at first. Like I said, it was a full 12 months before I started selling more than 5-20 books per month.
What you’re gearing up for here is your second giveaway. A giveaway with a much better chance to hit it big and push your book up to the next plateau.
A giveaway which–cliffhanger!–will be the subject of my next post.
I’ve made a small edit to my first post on Amazon’s recent changes to their sales algorithms. As you’ll recall, in that post, I took a look at the three different sets of popularity lists Amazon was displaying between March 19 and May 3. To summarize, List A was Select- and indie author-friendly. List B showed signs that making your book free would be drastically less effective than it used to be. And List C looked downright draconian: even strongly-selling indie books that had never been free were ranked 15-25% worse on List C than on List B.
Originally, we thought this was because List C factored physical book copies into its ranks, inadvertently penalizing indies who predominantly sell ebooks. We were wrong. The difference appears to be about price.
I first started looking into this after Phoenix Sullivan noticed there were very few $0.99 books high on the popularity lists. (The popularity lists are the main browsable lists displayed on Amazon. For instance, the Epic Fantasy list can be seen here.) It was theorized that the new algorithms were discriminating against the $0.99 price setting, weighing $0.99 sales at a lesser value than at higher price points. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with this theory, because I generally don’t think Amazon sets their algorithms with specific goals in mind (besides “Make $, win”). So I compared hundreds of books on several different popularity lists, focusing on the lowest-priced ebook titles. Soon, I was honing in on the highest-priced books, too. Because I was seeing something very, very strange.
The higher the price, the better the book was placed on the popularity lists.
In other words, say you’ve got a $0.99 book at #10 on the Epic Fantasy list. (Popularity list, not bestseller.) Say its sales rank (bestseller list) is #1000. The books at #9 and #11, meanwhile, are both listed at $9.99–and their sales ranks will probably look more like #3000, say.
This isn’t an ironclad correlation. Bestseller rank is a transitory thing. It shifts very quickly compared to popularity rank; a book that’s #1000 today could be #1 or #10,000 tomorrow. Seeing one instance of a book outperforming its bestseller rank on the pop list ranks proves nothing.
Seeing hundreds of these instances, however, is another thing altogether.
And that’s what I saw. Repeatedly. Undeniably. It was 1 AM, I’d had a couple of drinks, and my fiancee was snoring on the couch as I nerded it up with my numbers, but what I was seeing was strong enough to not only prove the theory I’d set out to disprove, but to go one step further: all things being even in terms of sales, not only did a lower price indicate a worse position on the popularity lists, but a higher price indicated a better one.
The implications for indie authors are immediate. And not pleasant. Most indie authors price their ebooks between $0.99 – $5.99. A few brave souls and small presses price as high as $9.99, but generally speaking, $5 and under is seen as the way to reach readers who may be hesitant to take a shot on a lesser-known or completely anonymous author. But if you price at $2.99 while HarperCollins prices at $12.99, you’re going to have to sell significantly more copies to be neighbors on the popularity lists. And if you’re selling at $0.99, you’re going to have to sell very, very well to achieve the same level of visibility.
We’ve termed this change “price biasing.” Here’s what it looks like in practice. Let me show you a shot of the Epic Fantasy popularity list:
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| Evidence of price biasing: Epic Fantasy popularity list, page 2 |
Now, here is the bestseller rank of these same titles:
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| Bestseller ranks of these same books |
Let’s move to the next page:
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| Epic Fantasy popularity list, page 3 |
And their bestseller ranks:
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| Bestseller ranks of these same books |
Take a look at that–in the first example, all of the higher-priced books shown are ranked above the lower-priced books on the popularity list, but their sales ranks are worse. In order! In the second example, the $0.99 book requires drastically higher sales to keep pace on the popularity lists with the $13.99 book. For another example of price biasing, simply go to the top of Epic Fantasy, where George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle, is priced at $29.99 with a bestseller rank of #60 and a popularity list rank of #1. The next book, Martin’s A Game of Thrones, is priced at $8.99, yet is #2–behind the omnibus–despite a bestseller rank of #27.
There are a lot of variables at play here. Because of the volatility of bestseller rank, I can’t be certain that the higher-priced books haven’t outsold the lower-priced ones over the last 30 days, and it will be easy enough to find counter-evidence where books are “properly” ranked and price seems to make no difference. But I’ve tried to minimize the variables by choosing books that haven’t been recently released (so sales should be steadier) and by going to page 2 and 3 of the popularity list, where the volatility should be lesser than at the very top. Really, it wasn’t hard to find this example. Because it’s all over the place. And if you look at hundreds and hundreds of titles next to each other on the popularity lists–especially the extremes, $0.99 – $2.99 books next to $12.99 – $29.99 books–the correlation is extremely high.
I don’t have the answers to a lot of the inevitable questions. I don’t know what the “ideal price” would be to take advantage of this new formula. I don’t know how many more copies you need to sell at $0.99 to achieve the same weight as you would selling at $9.99. I don’t know why Amazon did this, particularly when they price their own imprints at $7.99 and under. I don’t know if this is the end of the world or a brief couple weeks of suffering followed by another golden age.
And let’s not storm the gates or raise all our titles to $199.99 just yet. The popularity lists are far from the only driver of sales through Amazon. There are bestseller lists. Targeted emails. Bargain book lists of all shapes and sizes which you’ll only make through pricing lower. And if you raise your prices significantly enough to achieve a major change on the new popularity lists, you may drive away so many sales your placement actually winds up going down. Unless you’re priced at $0.99, I don’t think raising your price by a dollar or two will make any real difference to your placement on the popularity lists, so please don’t overreact–if you’re still selling, you’re still selling, no matter how the new algorithms may work.
Still, I don’t see how these new lists are any good for indies under any circumstances. What they do is force us to sell more books to maintain the same visibility as higher-priced trad titles. They diminish our ability to experiment with lower prices, whether the goal is a temporary sale, a low-priced entrypoint to a series, or because you just don’t feel comfortable charging more than $0.99 for that 5000-word story.
Furthermore, the playing field is no longer level. Indie authors published through KDP only earn 70% royalties at prices between $2.99 and $9.99. Yet many traditionally published books that are most benefiting from price biasing are priced at $12.99 – $14.99, with some omnibus editions priced as high as $22.99 – $29.99. If indies want to match those prices to match their visibility on the popularity lists, they’ll actually make less money with each sale than they would at $9.99. There’s no way to win.
I don’t like fearmongering. But I don’t see how it helps to sit on this information any longer. I encourage you to look at the popularity lists for yourself. Maybe I’m wrong. I’d prefer if I were. I’ll try to answer any questions in comments, but be prepared for a lot of “I don’t know.” All I know for sure is that if this analysis is correct, the deck has been stacked against us. I highly doubt it was intentional. Indies aren’t being targeted. We’re just a small part of the Amazon equation, and as Amazon attempts to maximize their revenues, I really don’t think they care who that revenue’s coming from. And remember: this is just one factor among many, many others as to how a book is seen on Amazon’s storefront. It’s not a revolution in and of itself.
But it does feel like it will have some impact on indie authors. I thought it was time to share and let everyone experiment for themselves.
A couple weeks ago, I started talking to an artist about a new cover for Breakers. A couple days ago, she finalized my new cover:
Yesterday, I noticed my novella The Zombies of Hobbiton was #34 on iTunes in Science Fiction & Literature. #34! That sounded like big news. Especially considering my Amazon sales are way, way down after the most recent algorithm changes that are strangling Select in its crib. That prompted me to take a real look at the iTunes store for the first time. I love Amazon and all, but I don’t like the idea of having all my eggs in one basket.
Here’s the problem. iTunes is a lot harder to read than Amazon.
There are a whole lot of different factors for this. Some of them are personal. I just haven’t ever really spent any time browsing the store. I’ve looked at my own books a couple times, but I found the store clumsy and confusing, especially when it came to navigation. Guess who just discovered iTunes has a back button!
The second factor is a cultural one. Among indie authors, Amazon is king. It currently owns something like 60% of the ebook market, yet it probably commands closer to 90% of the discussion. People just don’t talk about B&N or iTunes or Kobo or Sony, except perhaps to point and laugh. Maybe I need to expand my horizons, but in the circles I run in, very little analysis is focused on the workings of the other stores. And this makes sense. Who cares about how Kobo works if it’s only pulling 3% of all book sales? (Note: I made that number up.) Just distribute there through Smashwords and forget about it. Now let’s talk about Amazon some more.
In that environment, you don’t get communities of authors coming together to swap information and compare notes. Like, I am aware some indie authors do really well on iTunes or B&N, but I have no clue what’s driving that success.
The third and possibly biggest factor in the unknowns of iTunes is the real killer: I don’t have access to real-time sales figures.
I distribute to iTunes through Smashwords. Smashwords is a great program, but it places a filter between me and what’s happening with my books. For instance, right now, May 13, SW only has updated figures for Apple through March 31. Sales are all tallied on a lump sum, too–like, if SW updates their iTunes on May 15, and I sold 10 books during that period (I didn’t), it will list all those sales as occurring on May 15. Oh, and if you’re giving away a book for free, iTunes doesn’t give out numbers for how many copies you’ve had downloaded.
To summarize: so I’m stumbling around the store, with no real awareness of what I’m looking at, and with sales figures that lag 6-10 weeks behind whatever I might be doing with my books today.
To summarize another way: damn it.
But we can watch the storefront itself. And here’s what I’ve seen so far. iTunes updates constantly–like, possibly more than once an hour. Yesterday, after I spotted my book at #34 on Science Fiction & Literature, it quickly dropped to #35, then #36. A few hours later, it was at #58; a half hour later, it rose to #56, before falling back to #58, #63, and #64 when I stopped paying attention.
This morning, I first saw it back up at #34 (and sandwiched between Iain M. Banks and Neal Stephenson, my two favorite SF authors!). That was about an hour ago. Checking again, it’s currently at #36. I also saw Hugh Howey’s Wool take a big leap yesterday–it vaulted from somewhere in the 60s to #5, propelled, no doubt, by news of Howey’s movie deal. The Wool Omnibus was already at #1. Right now, Wool has slipped to #18, with the Omnibus at #4.
So we’re seeing a lot of volatility. At least within this category. What this suggests to me is that the sample size of sales is pretty low. It may only take a handful to vault you to the top, and if you don’t continue to sell regularly, you’ll quickly be knocked off the list by those who are. Possibly, it took me just one sale to get The Zombies of Hobbiton to #34. After that, it slid throughout the day into the #60s until this morning, when it sold another copy, kicking it back up to that same #34 placement. That small rise yesterday afternoon from #58 to #56 suggests the possibility sales figures are higher, but I don’t know iTunes’ algorithms well enough to put any major faith in that. Possibly, books ahead of me were just falling faster than I was.
Sales on any given store are driven by two things: external visibility–you driving traffic to your books via word of mouth, ads, etc.–and internal visibility, where the store’s own lists, recommendations, emails, etc. put your book in front of new customers. What this tells me is that if you want to stay on iTunes’ volatile bestseller lists, and you don’t have the fanbase to keep that up on their own, you’re going to have to find a way to get yourself on some of iTunes’ other lists and other sources of internal visibility. And I know far too little about the store just yet to know how to do that.
For fun, I’m going to guess my book is currently selling 1 copy/day. This doesn’t contradict the data and it will keep my expectations nice and low. I sell through Smashwords at $1.99. I get 60% of each sale made on iTunes through SW. So my cut for each copy sold will be about $1.19. If I can keep this up for a month, I expect to see around $36 from this title over that period.
And you know what? I would take that. In a heartbeat. Soon, I’ll have a novel and another novella up at iTunes as well. If I can figure out how to produce similar sales for them, my income through Apple would be a nice supplement to what I’m doing on Amazon–and would go a long ways towards convincing me to take my other titles out of Select, too. We’ll see if that’s possible. iTunes remains much more difficult to examine than Amazon. It may be weeks or months before I’ve got any solid conclusions. Expect more posts in this series as I continue to gather new information.
I spend a lot of time talking about Amazon here. That’s natural. Not only are they the biggest gorilla in the ebook business, but they’re the one I understand best. I can barely find my way around the iTunes store. To cap it off, after I started getting excited about Select back in February, I pulled all my novels from the other stores to meet Amazon’s exclusivity requirements. My total presence in the other stores consisted of one novella, which I made free, two short story collections priced at $0.99, and a longer collection at $2.99.
So it should be no surprise that according to Smashwords’ most recent updates, my total sales among all non-Amazon stores in 2012 have added up to about $30.
Well, last week I changed my novella The Zombies of Hobbiton from free to $1.99. Today, I was poking around iTunes. Here’s what I saw in Top Science Fiction & Literature Paid Books:
#34! In the entire Sci-Fi category! WOOOOO! Time to throw a party! Time to throw five parties!
Actually, I have absolutely no idea what that means in terms of sales. For all I know it only takes 1 sale/day to reach #34 in Sci-Fi. (And from what I hear from other authors, that’s probably a lot more realistic than thinking #34 means 10 or 100/day.) But you know what? Considering how crummy my sales of Amazon have been since the most recent algorithm change, I’m pretty damn happy to maybe be selling 1/day of something over on Apple. Time to get a couple more things out of Select and see what happens.
The Red Sea
When Dante Galand was just a boy, his father Larsin sailed away to make his fortune. And never returned. Since then, Dante has become a great sorcerer...
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