my experience (and new investigation) into "Publicity"

[FibonacciEddie]

Happy for you guys (The Mods) to move this... but I thought it had reasonably wide interest... I am probably just being an outrageous self-publicist so strike me down... I can take it (a thick skin is a prerequisite in this game)

This is my experience (below) ... please do add you own so we can share and learn...

***
So... I am trying to work out how/if/why/what can be done for self-published authors regarding marketing... there are plenty of threads

I started this new one to track a particular activity ... as follows

My book Emergence was self published Oct 2014, after a few reviews I tried out advertising... using a simple "Banner" of a well known Fanzine (A Dribble of Ink) - it cost me £50 for a month and resulted in 2 or 3 sales of my kindle eBook (3 * £2.99) ...... not so good

Not a great start, and in retrospect I went way too early (story of my life)... I had far too few reviews on Amazon/Good Reads to look credible... (and perhaps my Blurb is a little cliche)

In tandem with this I tried to drum up "free" awareness, I tried to get web-sites/fanzines/indie reviewers interested in a review - I wrote 150 begging emails and got 5 replies... ow!

I then took advice (Ben Galley) and he suggested I try to get "bloggers" interested in a Author Interviews. Well I got very very very lucky and one of my (only) ~20 begging emails was answered...

SF Signal have just run a Indie Author Interview of me !yeh!
www.sfsignal.com

So ... the purpose of this 'post' is to set a marker... my current eBook sales (averaged over the last month has been 1 per day) ... I will report back in a month to see if I have had any sales impact from the web exposure....clearly there are too many variables in order to be scientific...

Note: I don't want to come across as mercenary - I am so grateful to SF Signal and Max Pfeffer for giving me exposure... I really don't care if my sales double or triple... but I will be interested to see if they do!

any comments/thoughts/etc...?

 

[ratsy]

Well you have some good reviews on Amazon, and the SF Signal guy seemed to really like it, so that's good.

I just bought it for the Kindle and will give it a go at one point

Best of luck!

 

[FibonacciEddie]

thanks Ratsy ... but just for the record ... anybody on SFF (with more than ~20 posts!) only has to PM me and I will gladly send a Mobi or ePub for free

 

[ratsy]

That's okay. I don't mind spending $3.00 to support hard working authors. I figure if I buy everyone's books they will return the favor when the time comes

 

[FibonacciEddie]

 

[FibonacciEddie]

May 2015 --- time for a quick update on Publicity for the self-published author

In recap... I am doing my own marketing/advertising in the gaps between "my day job" and "my passion (i.e., writing book 2)" and "keeping my family from leaving me" (damn their lock picking buffs)...

My book "Emergence" is on Kindle, and Print On Demand with IngramSpark (available through all retailers)

Since Feb I have sold almost nothing in POD (a couple at a local bookshop) etc.

Here are my stats ... really this is just to give people ideas and maybe trigger someone else to give advice/experience

Since Feb. 2015
Amazon Kindle trundles along okay, my average Sales in ~1 copy of Kindle per day (really closer to 5 per week ... but I am bigging-myself-up)

GoogleADWords
I got a £150 free voucher (if you spend £50) with Google Adwords - I redeemed it and have being paying out ~40p per day which gets me about 800 Google "impressions" and ~3 clicks (to my web site) - I suspect not many have converted to sales... I am happy to let it run

AmazonMarketing
I probably made the wrong decision here and went for generic ad triggered on SciFi ... I only pay ~1p per click ... I have had ~400 impressions and 1 click - it did not convert to sale (I have spent 1p so far) ... this seems like a cheap way for my book to occasionally pop up when someone types in SciFi... slow burn product awareness

SFSignal Interview
This was "free" but did cost me ~20 hours of writing begging emails to the whole world ... I reckon I got ~6 sales total out of it, but I made a new friend in Max Pfeffer who is an awesome guy and so although almost no sales I am very happy to have done it -- also it gives me some credibility to have a real interview by a Hugo Award Winning Fanzine

Amazon Countdown Deal / BookTweeter
So this is where the Science of Statistical Analysis breaks down further - as I have two movable variables and I do not know which one was the big factor ... however the data is as follows ...
I did a 4 Day Countdown Deal (via Amazon KDP Select) and in tandem I paid $51 to BookTweeters to send out ~30 tweets over 3 days to their 150k followers ...
So I didn't get $51 of sales ... but I did get ~20 Kindle Sales over that 4 day period (14th May to 17th May) ... and I am getting $1.70 per book - so not a disaster from my perspective

"Random" point on Amazon categories
A final point ... if you want to get up the charts, do a little research on "categories" - most of us will be SciFi or Fantasy
You need to make a judgement on which sub-category will best "group" your book without unduly annoying reviewers or disadvantaging yourself
I naively put my book for 6 months in SciFi/FirstContact - not realising quite the volume of sales that "alien erotica abduction" generates
So after a few good days of Sales, if I am ~10,000 on the Kindle List - I will not be in the Top 100 of SciFi/FirstContact (because there are a lot of people reading about cold-hearted cyborgs who learned to love again) ---- whereas had I put myself in SciFi/HardScience (which although a bit of a push for Emergence is certainly no less a suspension of disbelief than Ann Leckie doing it for Ancillary Justice) I would have appeared at position ~50 of the Top 100 in SciFi/HardScience and gained more publicity

no real summary or conclusion - just a few ideas - please feel free to ask outright for more info or PM me...

FibE

 

[ralphkern]

Some very interesting analysis you have going on here. I'm very keen to have focus on meaningful marketing rather than treadmilling and not getting anywhere. So thankyou for making your experiences public.

I'm probably most interested in your experiences on AmazonMarketing. You are suggesting on your post that you can drill down into the subcategories beyond just SF?

Clearly competing AmazonMarketing on SF alone would be tough and expensive, however if that was combined with your final point of advertising on, say, hard SF, that could work a little better?

Of all the book advertising companies out there, the only one that seems to consistently get support on Absolutewrite Beware (who tend to take harsh to whole new levels) seems to be bookbub. Again, they can be expensive on SF.

 

[FibonacciEddie]

Two things in this post...

(1)
Hey Ralph, on you on the point about AmazonMarketing (the AMS service) I went for the simple "By Product" option and the most I could so was select SciFi/Fantasy - I cannot drill down. However, there is an option "By Interest" in which you can name Key Words - I suspect that is the better option but I have not tried it yet.

(2)
As a follow-up to my point on Sub-Genre Allocation on KDP
This is a screenprint from just now...
#8,000 on Kindle is awesome for me... it represents about five straight days of 3 or 4 sales (so the marketing/countdown must have worked a bit)
However, an 8,000 rank on FirstContact or SciFi Adventure would have only let me slip into 80 of Top 100
As you can see, I am now #14 of 100 in Technothrillers & #32 of 100 in HardSciFi

as I mentioned before, the question remains if any readers would feel "disgruntled" by my allocation - I think not, but let's see

 

[FibonacciEddie]

I remember someone talking before about getting into the Top 10 of a decent list which can then lead to self-sustaining sales...

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Really interesting thread, and thank you. And so glad it's going well for you - you deserve it!

A couple of thoughts - this is the second time I've seen six months mentioned as a bit of a take off point (I think Ralph mentioned it was around that stage he reposted Endeavour and it took off.) it also mirrors what I'm hearing that it takes time for word of mouth to build and the early reviews to come in and, based on a vox poll of the big sellers I took tonight (indies or small pubs not trad) all of them had been out 4 months plus.

I'm in an odd position. Easily half my sales - probably a little more - have been paperback. With at least 3 more high profile events between now and Sept (two signings in good stores and a convention where I'm a pannelist) I don't expect that to change too much. So I'm selling enough, based on figures above, to be up in the 8000s ( and I bounce in and out of a couple of top 100s - tonight I'm low, two days ago I was in a top 100) but I'm not. However, word of mouth, especially locally seems good and interest high. So it will be interesting to see how that pans out.

I'm also hoping that getting three novels out in six months will build things, with two more planned for 2016. Meanwhile, I need to keep writing the next one!

 

[FibonacciEddie]

if you take a look at Technothrillers list you can see that the Top 20 includes plenty of SciFi

 

[FibonacciEddie]

sorry.. slip of the mouse and posted the wrong post...

so to answer you specifically Jo, I hope the 6 Month thing is true... but it's only been 5 days of decent sales and that is on the back on a Kindle Countdown and a Tweet Advert Campaign... I am hoping... but maybe it takes a while of the book popping up in the corner of people's browser and then building in the subconscious (then a word of mouth trigger)... all we can do is measure and hopefully discern something from the data...
Andrew Morgan with Vessel continues to do well as does Luke Smitherd's The Stone Man - I think they both told me that their books hung around for a while before getting a boost for which they have sustained sales (noting Andrew is blogging a book chapter by chapter to direct people to his site)

the test will be if I stay up around the 2 or 3 sales a day in a fortnight from now... I will report faithfully back

..other point .. sorry to say but ... I got the AMS bit utterly reversed... I did an "Interest" adCampaign - I could so was select SciFi/Fantasy
If i had done Product I could have chosen Key words... I think

 

[Jo Zebedee]

One thing I did find. I changed my blurb at one point to a more plot based one and sales went dramatically down. (Although the first line wasn't great, my bad. But even when I fixed that, they stayed down.) I changed it back to a character-focused blurb and it came back up very quickly.

I think, the moral of that, for me, is not to try to sell a character-based book in an action-y blurb and vice versa. Because the minute any action lover/plot lover looks inside mine and finds a mad man on a space ship discussing mice with 2 kids they're going to go, 'what the hey!' Whereas the character readers are eating it up and wondering why the bloke's there and who are they all are.

It's just we often focus on making our blurbs hooky and what not and forget what hooks one person isn't the same for others (all the blurbs that have attracted me recently are about the character). Teresa made this point in the writing group when I was playing with blurbs - that, yes, it had to hook, but it also had to sell the story inside. And mine happens to be characters interacting with other characters and be less about a cool sf concept and plot. So, um, not selling people a pup?

 

[FibonacciEddie]

... ! ah ! there is too much to worry about ... I never considered hacking my Blurb ...
all this total miserable publicity roulette when what I really want to be doing is writing my next book
(or playing Risk with Neal Stephenson and George Michael and Emma Thompson but somehow I can't see that happening)

 

[Jo Zebedee]

... ! ah ! there is too much to worry about ... I never considered hacking my Blurb ...
all this total miserable publicity roulette when what I really want to be doing is writing my next book
(or playing Risk with Neal Stephenson and George Michael and Emma Thompson but somehow I can't see that happening)

Might I suggest that writing the next book is the single best thing you can do for book one. Everyone is sure about that - it takes three to establish yourself. Go, write.

 

[ratsy]

Its always really nice to hear what others are doing and how the process has been for them. Thank you for sharing Nick.

I do still have your book in queue on my kindle too.

 

[FibonacciEddie]

so a month later... thought I'd provide some more info on my publicity / advertising activities.

to recap... I published Emergence in Oct/Nov 2014
After an initial burst of 50/60 sales in the first few weeks my sales settled down to
1 per day (averaged over a week) of Kindle
1 per month (averaged over a month!) of paperback or hardback
all UK ... ZERO US sales

So, effectively, I am a pure Kindle/Amazon product
and from Oct 2014 to May 2015 pretty much only UK Sales
(I am on Kindle Select so don't have epub/Kobo/Nook etc.)

During Oct - May I was pricing at UK £2.49 / US $2.99

I then did the Amazon Countdown deal (mentioned above) along with a $51 BookTweeters service
and got ~30 sales over a 5/6 day period --- ALL UK
--- I subsequently noticed that the Amazon Countdown was only UK site --- so US buyers may have been put off by $2.99 price
...

In June 7th I changed by price to £0.99 / $0.99 and did a $25 Free Kindle Books and Tips service
http://fkbt.com/for-authors/regular-book-posting/
I was not expecting much --- I was wrong --- my book got ~35 sales on the same day (mostly US) ... the sales tailed off pretty quickly though ... the sales were 80% US site

Enthused --- still at bargain price --- £0.99 / $0.99
I did a $35 Book Sends service on June 14th
I hoped for a repeat of FKBT - I was wrong ... my book got ~60 sales on the same day (again mostly on the US site Amazon.com)

Since then over the last 10 days, I have sold on average 4 or 5 kindle version per day again in the US

UK sales remain a pretty flat 1 per day

But the two "advert injections" FBKT ($25) and BookSends ($35) definitely gave my book a burst in the US and, although I have not quite broken even on the cost/revenue I am hoping that the ~140 US sales (which converts to about $40 cash in my pocket) over the last 4 weeks will trigger "word of mouth" to keep things moving --- got to dream the dream

Clearly, I have changed the price to £0.99 / $0.99 (bargain bucket) and many authors baulk at the idea...

My opinion is that as long as I am almost breaking even on revenue versus cost then I am happy to get my work out there --- hopefully to get to 1,000 sales before I send out Book 2 to Agents/Publishers for consideration............

anyway... sales have tailed off today so perhaps the dream is over

update to follow at the end of July

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Perhaps too, part of secret of SP is being good enough that most of the actual readers will want the next one, so if you can release a Title every couple of months... I think I could do that if I had someone do final edit / proof corrections. So I'm tempted to only "sub" my Fantasy (which oddly needs more research and more likely to be single stories) and SP my SF (6 stories written in last year as well as my other writing). The SF isn't mainstream either.

 

[FibonacciEddie]

Unfortunately I work 5 days per week for 'the man' - so the best I can hope for (writing at night) is one title every 18 months (noting it is a full 100k words - standalone)

But you raise a good point about SP or Sub ...... I will continue to "Sub" any work that I do, but put a time limit of 3 to 4 months (and if no bites then I self publish) --- the "sub" angle for me is mostly about validation (I'm needy...)

And for SP, many people (in SFF) have agreed -> the best SP approach is plenty of product, of course if that's good product then all the better

Are you able to PM a set of directions so that I can find and read one of your SF pieces?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

My worry about the sort of promo you mention is whether it hits your target market? Or just people after a bargain who may not ever read it? Only word of mouth only works in the relevant cycles, if that makes sense.

It's a bugger - we need to write to succeed, but we need to work to eat....