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Interesting, and not in a good way: sales crash post KDP Select.

The latest tale in the saga of our indie publishing is a tragedy, not a triumph. We plan to turn it around, and you’ll get a ring side seat, but here’s the scoop for now.

Some of you may recall that we had a tremendous run on KDP Select with Saving Grace, first as a free promo in late October and then as a best selling ebook. It was so great in November that we want to tell you about the numbers that month, the months leading up to November, and the first few days of December. It helps to show you all sources of income aggregated for all books, so here’s how it looks (click to see it all):

Part of the benefit of KDP Select is that Amazon allows its Prime members to borrow your ebook as part of their membership at no additional charge to the member, and Amazon pays the participating books/authors/publishers their share of a pool of designated funds each month based on their percentage of overall member borrows.

Note that in October, with the pre-launch of Saving Grace, income was up. Then we ran all my books into KDP Select, and Saving Grace in the free promo. We did 33,000+ downloads in the promo.

In November, total income was way up. Including and especially on Kindle, where we had Saving Grace priced first at $4.99 then at $3.99 (separate post someday in the future on pricing strategy– it’s important and too detailed to address here). It also became a bestseller for most of the month. We priced the other five books at $2.99. In October, we made $2.36 per borrow, and we estimated the same amount per borrow for November.

All in all, since my first book only came out in May 2012, we were really happy with nearly $4500 in royalties for November. Note: actual sales $$ are much higher of course, but there is a cost of goods sold element which royalties are net of. There are also additional expenses, both before and after publication, but this isn’t a post on running an indie publishing business. I’ll write that at a later date, possibly a “first year retrospective” that includes profit/loss and costs. Suffice it to say we were elated with the numbers.

Then we got some bad news. Smashwords, with whom we had previously listed Saving Grace, had tried repeatedly on our behalf to get Apple to pull it down so that we could do KDP Select exclusively, as required. Apple did not comply. KDP Select booted Saving Grace.

We gnashed our teeth and sought advice and decided that with our upcoming marketing and promotional blitz plans for mid-December 2012 through March 2013 (online ads, publicist, and paid blog tour), that fate had spoken and we were better off available through all possible outlets, foregoing the $2.36/book borrow fee through KDP Select. {Huge sigh.} We hope this decision is right in the long run. For December, it looks awful. We sold 19 Kindles of Saving Grace per day in November, and we are down to 3/day in December. We did 35 borrows per day in November, and there are none and will be none for December. The other five books are still under exclusive for KDP Select. We re-enrolled Saving Grace with PubIt (Barnes & Noble) and Smashwords, and we enrolled it in Omnilit and Kobo. So far, zippo under any of them.

So, the promo and marketing are about to kick off, with the biggest surge unfortunately not until January. We are hopeful that we will regain some mojo in December, but without the exponential impact of rankings and KDP Select promo we are at a disadvantage just when the sales opportunity is best. Big fat freakin’ bummer.

I will say that the fantastic reviews continue to pour in, and are up from 19 to 71 from pre- to post-free promo on KDP Select. We’ve also experimented with a giveaway on Goodreads to increase the number of ratings there and it has taken it from 17 to 45 in three weeks. I hope this continues.

I am not a big fan of Amazon, the company. I hate their review policy, although I won’t rehash it here. I do recognize what they did for us as an indie author and indie publishing company through KDP Select, though, and I am hoping that we don’t live to regret our decision to accept Apple’s foot dragging as fate.

I’ll update you as updates become available.

Pamela

It’s No Contest

I don’t keep it much of a secret that I am a big fan of writing contests. As Garrett Morris used to say on Saturday Night Live, “Contests been veddy veddy good to me.” Or something like that, anyway.

So the question isn’t whether I’m a contest proponent, but why. Let me explain the whys, and, if I convince you of their merit, stick around for a few whens, wheres, and hows.

WHY

1. Many contests provide a critique sheet. Before you publish that book, you need unbiased critical feedback. How good is your critique group? Can they really be unbiased? The contest critiquer can, and the critical analysis of your manuscript and its relative position against other contest entries is worth the price of admission, even if you don’t win. Of course, you should ask whether a critique of your submission is included before you enter, as not all of them provide critique sheets.

2. Many contests suffer from too few entries. Few have the opposite problem. So your chances to win, place, or show may be greater than you think.

3. Contests help a writer get over fear of submission/publication. Yegads, you mean I have to let someone else read my work and espouse their opinion????? Jump in, the water’s fine.

4. Judges may be agents or editors. Yes, this could be your big break. It probably won’t be, but you’ve got a better chance than all the other schmucks who don’t submit.

5. You could win. Contest wins give your book credibility. They give you fodder for a press release. They help you sell books.

WHEN

Don’t enter a book that isn’t finished. Don’t enter a book that isn’t ready for submission.

Are you still with me? Good. Let’s talk about how to find a contest, and which ones you should enter.

WHERE

Local, regional, genre, and national writing groups and conferences often hold annual competitions. Start in your region and genre by perusing websites and/or newsletters.

Looking for someone to do the heavy lifting for you? Here are a few good sources for contest lists, but none are comprehensive:

Writer’s Digest

Writers & Editors

Poets & Writers

Just google “writing contests” and the genre and year. You’ll get lots of choices. Pick contests that fit your work, of course, and don’t be afraid to email the organizer and ask about number of entries anticipated. If your writing is not yet contest-tested, start small and work your way up to bigger competitions.

HOW

Most contests list confusing explicit instructions. Expect that your entry may include any of the following:

1. Entry fee: The higher the award, the higher the fee. Expect around $50. Often you get a discount on multiple entries.

2. Excerpt: Most contests want only your first X pages or X words, not your whole manuscript, but some want it all. Many require it to be snail mailed, many don’t. Just follow the instructions to the T. They may differ from how your work is currently formatted.

3. Synopsis: A synopsis is generally required and graded. It needs to be compellingly written and match the book in voice/tone. The length will vary, but, again, follow the instructions.

You ain’t gonna win if you lose points for not following instructions, even instructions that don’t seem logical. FOLLOW THE DANG INSTRUCTIONS, Y’ALL. Been there, lost points (and a contest) on that.

Just for grins, I uploaded a critique sheets from one of my contest wins to give you a flavor for the elements analyzed and the type of feedback given. This will vary by contest, of course.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so venture forth my friends, and contest, contest, contest.

Pamela Fagan Hutchins

Happy Thanksgiving!

From us, to you: We are grateful for this opportunity to explore the brave new world of indie publishing today, and to share it with you.

We’ll be back next week with more of our hard-won experience.

Until then, Happy (American) Thanksgiving!

Eric

10 Tips to Take Your Book To #1 in a Free KDP Select Promo & Beyond

Note: The world of ebook sales has changed some since the events described in this post, below. Most notably, Amazon no longer calculates paid rankings with as much favor to free downloads, so the post free promo-sales bump is less dramatic. However, free promos are still great for generating reviews and readership. For the latest on improving your book’s ranking, read How to Sell a Ton of Books With BookBub: A Tale of Two Authors.

In October of 2012, I released my debut novel Saving Grace via a free Kindle promo on Amazon using KDP Select (for more info on KDP Select and my decision to try it, read To KDP Select or Not to KDP Select). It was the first time I’d used KDP Select, and of course that means I’d never done a free promo before, either. I was not just like a virgin; I was pure as the driven snow.

Five days later, I’d had a 24-hour run as the #1 free download on Amazon with over 33,000 downloads. It went fairly well, to say the least. It exceeded my goals by about 23,000 downloads, in fact, and I shed tears when I broke the top 100. The rest was just the best gravy ever.

I’d like to teach you how to do it, too.

It didn’t stop there, though. In the two weeks after the free promo, Saving Grace moved to #10 in women sleuths and #30 in women’s fiction, peaking at #390 overall, in paid downloads. There were 1,000 downloads in the first week alone. I was featured as “top rated” on the women sleuths page. It’s holding in the top 40 in both categories after three weeks. I was so pleased with the royalties during this period that I’ve invested the money in a publicist and a blog tour. My review count went from 19 to 52 and the rating held up. The more books I gave away, the more money I made, the more visibility my name and my book gained, and the more reviews people left on Amazon for my book. It was all kinds of awesome.

“Hot damn,” you’re thinking. I came to the right blog. She’s going to give me an easy, free formula to guarantee success.

Sorry, friends. Ain’t gonna happen. I’m going to give you a formula all right, but here’s the truth: you probably already know 90% of what you need to know to position your book for a great KDP Select run. I’ll share another 7%, and 3% is up to fate, IMHO.

First though, what is a great run? It depends on your book. If it doesn’t have the potential for widespread appeal, then keep your goals modest. Last week, my dynamite little relationship book, How to Screw Up Your Marriage: Do-Over Tips for First-Time Failures, did less than 400 downloads in its three free promo days, but it went to #1 in Divorce and #1 in Marriage, and I was delighted. The audience is much, much smaller. But 75% of all books (in any format) are purchased by women over 40, or so I was told at a Writer’s Digest Editor’s Intensive Conference, so if your book appeals at all to that demographic, then you should set your download goals higher.

OK, now let’s talk tips.

1. If your book isn’t professionally edited, your success has a ceiling. You didn’t want to hear that, did you? But it’s true. However, I love the books edited by your critique group. They make my editor look really good.

Editing is worth the investment. Can’t afford it? Sell your car. Try crowdfunding. Barter services. Otherwise, wait or go the traditional route. Topnotch editing is not optional for a successful book. Amazon allows previews, so people can open your book before they download it. Bad editing doesn’t make the cut, even when it’s free, for a lot of people.

2. You must have a grab-ya cover. Again, spend the money on a professional cover artist/designer. See my suggestions in #1 for ways to raise money. My Saving Grace cover, designed by Heidi Dorey (who I plan to keep so busy she doesn’t have time for anyone else), drove downloads. Weak covers don’t. And they must convey their power in 100×150 pixels, so plan for the thumbnail version.

[Yeah, I know you already knew this, but it’s too important to skip this part.]

3. Start months ahead and plan for promotion for your free run, for a minimum of three consecutive days (I did five, and I am glad I did). This means you work in advance on that dirty word, PLATFORM, so you have an audience to ask to drink your Koolaid to get your initial download bump.

Your planned promotion should be comprehensive. Consult Kindle Book Review’s Author Resources page for options on free and low-to-medium cost online promotion. Bookmark the page. Send Jeff Bennington a thank you note (mine will be this blog: hi Jeff, and thank you tons for sharing your wisdom!). Set a budget. Schedule your dates two months in advance. Spend the money you budgeted. I spent $150.  I made $1000 in Kindle royalties the next week. You decide if it was worth it.

4. Be sure your author and book pages on Amazon are sparkly and tight. The value of your book must be clear; your author creds must be solid and interesting. And don’t forget: emotion begets action. Create a book page that plays on emotion.

5. Raise your price right before you start your free promo. The difference between “free” and the stated price has a psychological impact that drives downloads.

6. Get reviews in place on Amazon for your book before your promo. This is so dang hard, and Amazon is making it harder all the time, pulling down every review they can get their hands on. For my rant on this topic, read Amazon is a big review gobbling meanie (my post) and also, for NEW (worse) factoids, read Amazon Overboard: Further Thoughts (or one of a million others). In my opinion, you need 15 reviews of a 4-star rating or higher on Amazon to get significant traction. Good luck. Start early. Follow Amazon’s rules to the letter, and expect they’ll still arbitrarily pull your reviews. OK, I have to stop talking about this now, b/c my face is getting purple. Save my blood pressure: Sign this petition to Amazon.

Why plan ahead, and why wait for reviews to be in place? I started my paid promo with Digital Book Today, which in retrospect was a fantastic call. I had it in place for day two, after I’d exhausted all the free downloads I could get from my Platform folks on day one, who I communicated with to the point of spamming them via Twitter and Facebook. But I was only able to make the most of DGT b/c I had 19 reviews, 18 of which were 5-star. This resulted in me waking up on day two to see Saving Grace #1 on The Best Free Kindle Books – *Updated Daily* Most Books Are Available Only for 24 – 48 hours. The list that Amazon does not give to the Book Lover. Thank you, Anthony Wessel. He’s also getting a copy of this post. Thank you, kind people with discerning literary taste who reviewed my book. Saving Grace took off like a rocket as soon as the Squidoo post went up.

*Reviews are everything*

*Reviews are everything*

*Reviews are everything*

7. Make your promotion multi-pronged, or “layered,” by utilizing multiple sites. On day three, my one-day promo with World Literary Cafe took Saving Grace into overdrive. The one-two punch of Digital Book Today’s Squidoo list with the Tweeting frenzy of the World Literary Cafe Tweet teams was staggering. And here’s where I thank Melissa Foster. Thanks, Melissa! I used Kindle Book Review on the 4th day, and it kept the buzz alive. Note: I also posted Saving Grace’s free days on every free site I could find, using Jeff Bennington’s Author Resources on Kindle Book Review.

Don’t forget Amazon’s international markets, when you’re building your layers. I tweeted links for the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Japan on a daily basis, scheduled ahead of time through Tweetdeck.  It did pretty darn good in the UK, too.

8. Engage people with your excitement during your promo. If you achieve milestones, thank your supporters and share the news. I found that my supporters really wanted to share in the success that they rightly felt they contributed to. I did a lot of Screen Shot posts to Twitter and FB as I moved up in the rankings. This keeps your best supporters buzzing like crazy.

Then, when it’s done, let it be done. Don’t wear out your welcome. Resume (see #10) promoting other people instead.

9. Post Promo:

a. Drop your price! For better or worse, I chose to price Saving Grace at $4.99, down from the $7.99 which I had listed it for before the promo. Yes, that’s high for an indie book. But I believe that quality indie books should hold their heads up and announce it by their price. Anyway, $4.99 worked well for me. And when sales started to slow down a bit, I dropped the price to $3.99 and they sped back up. Others will tell you to price your book at 99 cents during this period, and they may be right. You’ll have to decide what is right for you, and I felt 99 cents sent the wrong message for Saving Grace, even if it cost me sales.

The best thing about the post free promo days was Kindle Prime, and the hordes of people that downloaded Saving Grace for a free Kindle read via their Prime membership. I have yet to see what I will be paid for these (it comes from a designated monthly pool of money, and it’s a trust issue for all of us KDP Select authors with Amazon), but they counted toward my paid downloads/sales and helped me stay high in the rankings.

b. Keep the buzz alive. I promoted on a banner on World Literary Cafe in my first week post-promo. It was cheap. It helped. I tried The Women’s Nest the next week, and they tweeted for me and kept my buzz alive, but without the World Literary Cafe Tweet teams to keep the message moving, this paid promo did not have nearly as large an impact as WLC (The Women’s Nest was founded by WLC founder Melissa Foster, too). I didn’t plan far enough in advance to schedule promo with some sites I really wanted to, like Kindle Nation Daily, but I still seemed to do pretty well. 🙂

10. Every chance you get, say thank you, again and again and again and again, in part because it’s the nice thing to do, and also because it inspires others to help you. Every time I thanked someone via FB or Twitter for pushing my promo or leaving a review, someone else offered to help. Can you say SNOWBALL?

Don’t stop with thank you. Pay it forward. Help “them,” all of them, no matter how long it takes. And please note that the amount of effort you’ve expended promoting others prior to your free download will be directly related to the numbers that line up to help you during it. Invest in your network early and often, or they won’t invest in you. This is how you move mountains in platform building (see #3).

Well, I just looked at my word count and realized I need to back away from the keyboard. Sorry for going on and on. I hope this helped some of you. But let me be totally honest here: If I helped you at all, I hope you will remember my name and check out one of my books, Saving Grace for instance. Just sayin’. If there’s any other questions I can answer for you, make me part of your indie author network, and ask away.

Good luck, all’a y’all,

Pamela

***

Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes bestselling, award winning mysterious women’s fiction and relationship humor. If you’re at all inclined to be swept away to the islands to fall in love with a rainforest jumbie house and a Texas attorney who is as much a danger to herself as the island bad guys, then check out Saving Grace.

***

p.s. A word about giving away downloads to my “friends and family”/platform folks, the only people that would have paid for my book, had I not done the free promo:

1) They cared enough to leave reviews, most people don’t.

2) Giving the book away free gave them a reason to create buzz with their friends and family. Buzz is good.

3) The time-constrained nature of the free download created an urgency that got them to read the book sooner rather than later. This sped up the buzz, and concentrated it.

4) It is my sincere belief that these are the folks that will buy the paperback version anyway and give it as a gift.

I worried about this before my promo, but I never will again.

p.p.s. I relied on a few online resources to guide my free promo strategy. The best of them, IMHO: Maximize Your KDP Select Days. Google. You’ll find a ton more.

To Nano or Not

I’ve written four novels; one is published (Saving Grace), and three are scheduled for publication over the next few years. Of these four, guess how many I drafted originally during the annual National Novel Writing Month of November (NanoWriMo)?

** THREE **

That’s right — I gave birth to three Sagittarians, then nurtured them in the ensuing months as lovingly as I would a human baby. That got them to the point of “crappy first draft” status. From there, many more months and much hard work later, I had something I could turn over to my editor.

NanoWriMo works for me. It works for some other folks, too. It does not work AT ALL for a great number of people.

First, let me explain NanoWriMo. NanoWriMo occurs for 30 days each year during November. During NanoWriMo, participants are challenged to write a 50,000-word “novel.” They are urged to curb their inner editor and bear down until they reach the word count goal. They are not tasked to write good fiction. They are not even required to reach “the end.” In fact, you could type your name in, copy, paste, and repeat until you hit 50,000 words, and they would never know. (But you would)

So why do people do it? For me, it was a cattle prod to the haunches. I flourish under deadlines and pressure. I sit on my tush and eat bon-bons the rest of the time. For people like me, it provides just the right structure and conditions to make us work. Not necessarily work well, but work.

For others, NanoWriMo is a spirit-crushing venture doomed for failure. These are the folks who can work steadily at a middlin’ pace for day after day, but who absolutely freeze creatively or otherwise with the clock ticking. NanoWriMo for them is cruel and unusual punishment at best, and, at worst, crippling.

Thus, before you sign up for NanoWriMo, decide which team you play on, Team Adrenaline or Team Consistency. If you’re an adrenaline junkie like me, the next decision point is preparedness. I highly advocate completion of a full outline and/or synopsis before November 1st, otherwise you may spend the rest of your life deciphering the hidden meaning in your speed writing.

Next, will you be able to clear your decks to ensure success? The pace is only 1700 words per day, but life has a way of stealing writing days. My max day during NanoWriMo was 10,000. I had to wrap my elevated hands in ice packs for hours afterwards. Put off the deadline on anything else you can. Line up your support team. Who’s going to feed the kids/dog? Pay the bills? Take out the garbage? Prepare your family mentally, and run Nano drills to ready them.

Lastly, remind yourself going in that at best you will end up with a too-short-for-prime-time novel in shitty-first-draft shape. Too many novice writers think that reaching the end of NanoWriMo means you have a work worthy of pushing out to readers everywhere. Um, you probably don’t. Be patient. Work it, re-work it, and re-re-work it. You’ll get there (probably), but writing must cure before consumption. My NanoWriMo from five years ago was published this year. I can’t count the rewrites, but writing IS rewriting. Really, it is.

I believe that, for me, creativity follows productivity. Sure, inspiration randomly strikes at times, but not many of them. Mostly, I buckle down and, by pushing myself through the process, jumpstart my creative mind. As the word count grows, my brain has more to work with.

Write now. Rewrite later.

I won’t be able to do NanoWriMo this year, but not because I don’t want to. I have a draft to get to my editor by December 1st, something I couldn’t say had I never Nano’ed.

How about you?

Pamela Fagan Hutchins

Amazon is a big review-gobbling meanie.

If you’re an indie author — hell, if you’re a traditionally-published author — you know it is damn hard to get people to post reviews on Amazon for your books. I get it. I never posted a review unless asked, until I published my first book. Now I’m a review-posting fool. I post honestly, but never unkindly.

Reviews are simply everything for online sales. Reviews beget sales which beget sales rankings which beget more sales. (Reviews in magazine, newspapers, and blogs are also huge for sales, but in a more expansive way, and are a subject for another time, although I’ve touched lightly upon it in Book Reviews for the Indie Published Author.)

But how do you get them when you’re just starting out? Indie authors, new authors, let’s get real: who gave you your first five reviews? I’ll bet your mom, spouse, sibling, and best friend were on the list. Every time I pop by the reviews of an indie book, I expect this phenomena. I’m amused when I see it (and I do see it). I don’t mind it. I’ve lived it. It takes a lot of sparks to start a fire, and we use any kindling we can.

For many authors, the reviews stop after this inner circle finishes posting. If you’re energetic, persuasive, and strategic (in other words, if you spam everyone you know until they give in out of a desperation to MAKE IT STOP), you can keep building upon that initial flicker until you get a nice little flame.

Reviews not only beget sales which beget rankings which beget more sales, reviews on Amazon are sometimes the ante up to promotion. Last week I launched my debut novel, Saving Grace, on Amazon with a free Kindle-version giveaway. This came after 6 months of agonizing over whether to sign up for KDP Select. I utilized some very inexpensive advertising to promote my giveaway (I’ll blog on that soon) and ended up after four days at #1 in free downloads out of 55,000+ books PER DAY, with 33,016 downloads. I was elated with this success, and it propelled me into big sales over the next week (yes, all of this will be part of that upcoming post).

But none of this would have happened without reviews. Why? Because the websites I paid for promotion won’t even take an author’s money unless they have 13-15 reviews with an average of 4 out of 5 stars or higher. It’s their way of ensuring they don’t promote crap to their readership. I applaud them for it.

And it is a tough hurdle to cross. Conventional wisdom says you’ll give away 200-500 free books for the hope of reviews (yes, I just said 200-500). Not everyone that receives a free copy for a review will end up reviewing it, by a long shot. Another topic for another day is in what form to transmit those free books. (I’m going to be writing up until the final seconds of doomsday based on the promises I’m making in this post alone.)

So here’s where Amazon’s little-read review policy comes into play. The policy you probably only learn about if you notice Amazon is pulling reviews down from your book and you have the intestinal fortitude to challenge them on it (via a “contact us” button, because you’re not allowed to talk to them), given any trepidation you have as you are snarfing up sales out of their hand.

Let’s start with a spouse. My husband posted reviews on my books. He is uber-supportive. His reviews were yanked. He contacted Amazon. They said:

We have removed your reviews as we do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product. As a result, we’ve removed your reviews for this title. Any further violations of our posted Guidelines may result in the removal of this item from our website.

Ouchy. Scary, that last sentence. Now, they did not say spouses. But since I own an indie publishing company and he is married to me, we decided not to push it. When I lose money, he loses money. It makes sense, even if we have yet to make any cents in the form of PROFIT from my endeavors.

My mother posted reviews. Her last name matches my middle name/maiden name — Fagan. Amazon yanked them down. My uncle, last name of Fagan and himself a writer, posted a review. Amazon yanked it. My adult stepdaughter living in Colorado posted a review (Hutchins is her last name). Amazon pulled it. Eric complained, and so did my mother and my uncle. Amazon responded (and by now Eric and Amazon were on a first name basis):

I understand your concerns about these missing reviews by other members of Pamela’s family. We take the removal of customer reviews very seriously.

I’m not able to tell you why these specific reviews were removed from our website. I can only discuss that with the person who wrote each review. However, I can tell you that reviews are removed from the Amazon.com website for three reasons:

1. The review conflicted with our posted guidelines http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines/.

2. The review was removed at the request of the customer who submitted the review.

3. We discovered that multiple items were linked together on our website incorrectly. Reviews that were posted on those pages were removed when the items were separated on the site.

Thank you for your understanding of our policies, Eric. We look forward to seeing you again soon and have a good day.

The referenced review policy prohibited:

Objectionable material:
• Obscene or distasteful content
• Profanity or spiteful remarks
• Promotion of illegal or immoral conduct

Promotional content:
• Advertisements, promotional material or repeated posts that make the same point excessively
• Sentiments by or on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product (including reviews by publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product)
• Reviews written for any form of compensation other than a free copy of the product. This includes reviews that are a part of a paid publicity package
• Solicitations for helpful votes

Inappropriate content:
• Other people’s material (this includes excessive quoting)
• Phone numbers, postal mailing addresses, and URLs external to Amazon.com
• Videos with watermarks
• Comments on other reviews visible on the page (because page visibility is subject to change without notice)
• Foreign language content (unless there is a clear connection to the product)

Off-topic information:
• Feedback on the seller, your shipment experience or the packaging (you can do that at www.amazon.com/feedback and www.amazon.com/packaging)
• Details about availability or alternative ordering and shipping information
• Feedback about typos or inaccuracies in our catalog or product description (instead, use the feedback form at the bottom of the product page).

All involved assured Amazon that none of these were the case. And none were. I can promise you, none of the listed individuals has volunteered to share in our household tax write-off, aka Pamela’s writing career. Amazon was not able to state a valid reason for sucking my mother’s and uncle’s reviews into a black hole, and they encouraged them to repost.

They gobbled up the reposts, too.

By this point, authors, even our most loyal fans have had it, right? I mean, they are done. There are more enjoyable things to do with one’s day, like scrubbing your floors with a toothbrush, or going in for that quadruple root canal you’ve put off for six months.

Maybe there are better people in the world to post reviews than family, too — well, undoubtedly there are — but my point is this: Amazon is not allowing legitimate reviewers who are permissible under their own policy to review my books. Total count of yanked legitimate reviews on Saving Grace: 3. We won’t count Eric’s because we concede his. I went into my free promo period with 19 reviews. It should have been 22. I now have 31. I should have 34. Reviews beget sales beget rankings beget more sales. And more reviews, too, because there’s safety for the timid in a crowd.

I think this stinks.

It didn’t stop there, though.

Once Amazon decided to black ball my step-daughter, mother, and uncle, they black balled anyone with the name Hutchins or Fagan, or that had any connection to us. From what we could tell that included IP address , which knocked out my little “here’s how to review a book” party results, which I had thought was a damn good idea. You know what’s funny? The people there had bought MULTIPLE copies of my books off Amazon. Ah, the laughs I have had over this. NOT. And this was retroactively, off my nonfiction books.

Then they yanked reviews by reviewers I’ve never met, for good measure. Vidya Sury posted a fabulous review of Puppalicious And Beyond last June, and she reviewed it on her blog, too. She lives in Bangalore India. Why did Amazon pull it??? (Vidya reposted it yesterday, and we’re on pins and needles to see if it survives.) So my 11-15 reviews each on my nonfiction books, which were even harder to get than those on Saving Grace, suddenly become 6-9 each. Again, we’ll concede on the reviews by my husband. All the rest were, per their own policy, legitimate reviews.

And they’re gone. It’s not like Amazon kindly reinstates them once you raise it to their attention. You have to try again. But we’ve seen over and over what happens when you do: Amazon gobbles them up like a big meanie.

Now my planned free Kindle ebook promotion of my nonfiction books is a nonstarter. I could still do it, but why bother? I don’t have enough reviews anymore to obtain the paid promotion that I know is required for a successful free-ebook iniative. Without attracting a large volume of new readers with the promo, I’m better off just selling to my modest following.

I could go get more reviews. In fact, that is what I have to do. But why should I have been put in this position when I had legitimate reviews up in the first place? And soliciting reviews takes a lot of time, effort, and social capital. I signed these books up for the 90-day exclusive KDP Select with Amazon because I planned to do a 12-week promotion, giving away one book every other week. (Frankly, I also just went to the well with a vengeance for Saving Grace and my followers shouldn’t be subjected to it again, especially since it would be the same push I made last summer for the five nonfiction books, to which they valiantly but fruitlessly responded.) I’m stalled out now on promo after book 1 of 6. I could have left the nonfiction books nonexclusive, outside of KDP Select. They were selling great on Apple iBooks and decent on Barnes & Noble. I gave that up so I could do the free promo.

Except that now, I really can’t.

Taking a step back for perspective, Amazon has made it possible for indie authors to sell their books. I am an indie author. I am selling a lot of books on Amazon. I made $1000 off Amazon alone this month. This makes me wildly successful (if not yet profitable — it takes time to recoup publishing outlays, folks, lots of time) by indie standards, and I am grateful to Amazon for that. But how much more could I be making if I hadn’t lost more than 20 legitimate reviews of my books? WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE HARDER THAN IT ALREADY IS???? Being beholden shouldn’t have to mean I grovel, whimper, and say “more please,” either. I really want answers to these questions.

Or maybe I’m full of crap. Maybe I shouldn’t whine about reviews posted by my mommy, my uncle, and my adult stepdaughter, even if they were legitimate by Amazon policy.

But even if I fold on those, I think I have a real beef about Vidya and a few others like her. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that I should have been taking screen shots of reviews and date-marking to use in their defense later, so I’m truly not even sure if I’m aware yet of the entire scope of the reviews that I lost. I think that bites.

Thoughts? Issues? Rants?

Pamela Fagan Hutchins

 

To KDP Select or not to KDP Select?

We’ve wrestled of late with the question of whether or not to utilize KDP Select. Not familiar with the program? KDP Select is the Amazon/Kindle exclusive 90-day program wherein authors have the ability to promote their ebooks by making them free on Amazon for up to 5 days within the 90-day period. This allows authors to potentially interest some new readers, who may select to purchase their books in the future. In the meantime, it drives up the book’s ranking in the Bestsellers lists and Popularity lists on Amazon (and in Hot New Releases, if it is within its first 30 days). Another benefit is that authors share in a piece of the Amazon “prime” pie if they choose to make the title a part of the Amazon lending library, and the author’s slice of the pie is based on the number of lends for the title.

The exclusivitity does not extend to physical or audio books, so an author can still sell everything but ebooks anywhere and everywhere.

(To read a great article discussing KDP Select and promotions, we recommend David Gaughron’s Popularity, Visibility, & KDP Select. To see what Amazon has to say about their program, visit their KDP Select page.)

I can’t pretend to understand (yet) all the algorythmns for “Bestsellers,” “Hot New Releases,” and “Popularity,” but  do know that my combined sales on other ebook sales outlets are not enough to keep us from experimenting with KDP Select. Especially now that I have six titles. Why is the multi-title aspect important? Because each promotion period on each book hopefully impacts each other book positively. It’s a “multiplier,” if you will, as to the KDP Select benefit to us. Meanwhile, our long-range strategy is to help each book have long-term sell-abillity. We think of my writing and our publishing as an investment in our retirement, not as a “quit the day job” endeavor.

So here’s our plan for the next 90 days:

Remove our titles from all other ebook sales outlets

  • Begin with a 5-day free promotion of Saving Grace (we have missed the 30-day window by the time Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble release it for exclusivity in KDP Select — bad planning on our part).
  • Concurrently drop prices on other ebooks to $2.99 for the duration of the KDP Select “run,” except when those books get their turn at a free promotion.
  • Follow-up every two weeks with 5-day free promotions of Hot Flashes and Hot Ironmans, The Clark Kent Chronicles, How To Screw Up Your Kids, Love Gone Viral, and Puppalicious and Beyond.
  • Concurretly drop price of Saving Grace to $4.99 or lower for duration of KDP Select “run.”
  • Promote the free download periods like mad as each occurs.
  • Promote the lending library inclusion like mad concurrently.
  • Evaluate our strategy as of mid-January, and decide whether to remain in KDP Select or return to widest possible ebook distribution.

Our hope is that with this 12-week promotion of my books, that each will have some cross-pollination of the other, thus promoting me and lifting my author rank (which is quite respectable now) at the same time as lifting the rankings of each book. While we may have made this decision too late to impact Saving Grace in the Hot New Releases category, we aim to interest buyers leading up to the critical holiday sales period.

Wish us luck. And happy publishing!

Pamela

Getting Your Baby on the Shelves of Bookstores

I love bookstores. I love the way they look, the way the smell,and their colors. Visiting a bookstore is like going to a library, but without the mean librarian. A lot of people believe bookstores are going the way of the dinosaurs, but I am not one of those people. You heard it from me, it will not happen in our life time. People like me won’t let it.

Because they are here for the foreseeable future, they are still an important part of the sales options for an indie author, and I want to tell you how to get your indie book baby in those wonderful places.

[I should also clarify that I am NOT talking about Barnes & Noble here. That 300-pound primate will be the subject of a future blog.]

Let’s take it step by step.

Step 1:

Start with this simple truth: most independent bookstores have trouble making payroll. If you are an independent author without a proven market, there is almost ZERO chance an indie bookstore will be interested in BUYING your book to put on their shelves, AT ANY PRICE. They will, however, consider selling your book for you IF you are willing to accept all the risk and absorb the carrying costs. There’s a word for this: CONSIGNMENT. The majority of independent book sellers will accept your book on Consignment if:

A. The appearance is good (cover, print quality)

B. The subject matter is “acceptable”

C. A quick scan does not yield glaring errors

Many stores already have well-established consignment programs, and, in those cases, they will have pre-set pricing and terms. If they don’t, a typical arrangement is 60% of the retail price goes to you and 40% goes to the store, AFTER the sale occurs.

Step 2:

Drive sales to THAT store. Blog, email, call, beg, and do whatever else you have to do to get people to buy your book at that store. Remember what you are trying to do is establish a relationship. The best thing in the world that can happen is those four or five books you placed in the store sell out and the owner chooses to call you and ask for more.

When we have identified a store that we want to carry Pamela’s books for the long haul, we will even send in a secret shopper from time to time to maintain a steady sales rate. Remember, we get back 60% of that sale. The difference is a very small price to pay for the long term value of having her books in that store. Sometimes we follow-up by donating the books purchased by the secret shopper to the public library, or we place them in a venue where they can drive readers to the books. For instance, we dropped them on the “library shelf” at an indie coffee shop in one town. Other times we drop them into waiting rooms (doctor’s, dentists, and veterinarian’s offices make great sites). And we put a big fat sticker on the “lobby copies” that say “available at the Such and So Bookstore, 150 BuyLocal Drive!”

Bookstore survival depends on the “instant gratification” customer. If your book is not on the shelf when someone is trolling for gratification, they will simply buy something else. Make it easy for them to spend their money on the right author.

Step 3:

Keep good records, and provide service to the store. DONT call them, interrupt what they are doing, and consume their time to ask how your book is doing. Go look for yourself, wait until no customers are around so you are not a distraction, thank them for giving you shelf space, and ask them if there is anything you can do for them. Be sure you have books and promotional materials with you so you can fill those needs.

Step 4:

If you prove to the store owner that you generate sustainable sales, ask them to consider stocking your book through direct purchase. In order for this to occur, there has to be one additional incentive and this is where careful pricing comes into play. Make sure the wholesale price they can obtain the book for is less than your consignment price, or there is NO reason for them to direct order. Why would they accept the risk and hassle otherwise? [The wholesale price will be dependent on a bajillion factors that are beyond the scope of this post. If you need info on this, comment or email. We’ll blog on this issue soon.]

You absolutely can get your books in bookstores, if your cover and quality are good enough, but you’ll need to be willing to work directly with the stores, generally by consignment. It’s hard and time consuming work, but it is a relationship building process that can snowball into something significant, possibly even direct ordering, if you support the stores as valued customers and intentionally drive buyers through their doors.

Eric R.

The gift that keeps on giving, to Amazon.

Just when you think you have the “system” figured out something comes along that makes you realize that you really don’t.

Amazon has this nifty feature related to Kindle edition ebook purchases. There is a yellow button over on the right hand side of the screen that allows you to GIVE AS AS GIFT.

As an Indie author or Indie publisher, gifting a book to a potential reader can be a pretty good choice. There are other choices in giving your book to someone, and we could get into a lengthy debate about whether it’s better to use Smashwords’ free coupons, send people PDF’s, or any one of numerous other options. There are arguments for each. But this post isn’t about that choice. It’s just about what happens when you do choose to use Amazon for your ebook gifting.

The “advantage” of gifting a Kindle edition ebook to a reader is that it should show up as a sale, thereby improving your Amazon sales statistics. Your book’s relative sales statisitics are so very important in driving future sales that it may be worth it to you to spend money on your own book. Think of it as a form of advertising. Bear in mind that, assuming you are in a price range to get a 70% royalty, (taxes aside) you are only actually paying 30% of the sales price of your book, since you get the 70% back in royalties. Thus, the cost of your advertising is 30% of the cost of your book. However, there is a catch. A BIG catch, which we only discovered a few days ago.

When you buy your own book and gift it to someone, Amazon charges your credit card the full sales price, and emails the link to the address you provided for the recipient of the gift. So, let’s say that Pamela Fagan Hutchins buys Saving Grace and gifts it to her grandmother. BUT, unless the ebook is actually downloaded, IT DOES NOT COUNT AS A SALE FOR ROYALTY PURPOSES. In other words, if Pamela’s grandmother can’t figure out how to download the ebook to her new, never-used Kindle lovingly given to her by her doting great grandchildren  (a likely scenario), it does not add to Pamela’s number of ebooks sold. ANNNNND, most importantly PAMELA DOESN’T GET PAID! Seriously, YOU the author, don’t get paid. Amazon, for the sale of your eBook, does.

Let me take a moment to let that sink in for you. AMAZON collects for the sale of your book, BUT THEY DON’T PAY YOU! Really.

So let’s put it in another context. Let’s say a friend of yours buys your book as a gift for someone else. But that gifting email gets forgotten, ignored or deleted. Again, a likely scenario. Your friend’s credit card gets charged. Amazon gets paid for the purchase of your book. You, the author, get nothing.

Moral of the story: Do everything you can to insure that the Kindle eBooks you purchase (or others purchase) on Amazon as gifts to others are sent to people who actually download them. Only when they are actually downloaded from the link does Amazon count them as a royalty-worthy sale.

Tsk, tsk, Amazon. Not very nice.

Eric H.

You can help an indie author.

Do you love indie authors (or an indie author)? SkipJack loves indie authors. In fact, we love them so much, we publish them. Which begs the question of whether they’re really indie anymore once we do that, so we’ll answer it. Yes, yes they are.

We’re an indie author collaborative, and our authors have our help and meager investment, but not to the level of the authors published by traditional publishing companies. For instance, when an indie author releases a book, most of the sales are done online or in person. There is no mega-order from Barnes & Noble shipped out to all its bookstores by the publisher.

We’re an indie imprint, if you will, an indie consortium, an indie co-op of sorts. Our authors still spend their own coin, and, if they don’t shop it out, they slave over editing, cover design,  manuscript formatting and ebook creation. They just do it smarter and faster with our help.  🙂

As you can probably guess, since we love indie authors so much, we would like to show the fans and supporters of indie authors– whoever you are, stalking around in our cyberlobby — how to help indie authors succeed. And it’s all based around the most powerful and ageless concept in publishing: word of mouth.

We’ll cover a wide range of options in this long-ish blog post, starting with the simplest and moving on to the most complex ideas. I’m sure the indie author in your life would appreciate any efforts you make on her behalf, even if you stop after the first one. But, heck, why not try them all? Any of us can eat a very large elephant, if we just do it one bite at a time (and preferably utilize vacuum sealed freezer bags,  because it’s going to take you a while). I will not address the vegan/vegetarian ramifications of this last statement; suffice it to say that I truly meant “can” and not “will want to.” Now, back to the topic of promoting indie.

The Old-fashioned Way

Buy their dang books, people, in whatever form — print, ebook, audio, or whatever. But don’t just buy them. Read them. Tell everyone and their long-legged brother how much you loved them. Lend one to a friend, who might in turn buy the book as a gift for someone or tell five other people about it, who then go buy it. And there’s an idea — you can give them as gifts! Put one on your book club’s reading list; start a book club if you don’t have one. Ask your local bookstore to order it for you. Ditto your library. Your words are powerful. Use them.

 The Techie Way, but Low Techie

A. Subscribe by email to your favorite writers’ blogs and newsletters. Then forward them to other people, who might also subscribe or visit your authors’ websites. This connection can lead to book sales. While you’re at it, follow them on all forms of social media.

B. On Facebook, Twitter, and similar social media sites, post links to the authors’ books. Or share/retweet links posted by others.

C. Everybody uses Amazon. Logon to Amazon (http://amazon.com), and do several important things:

1. Visit their author pages. “Like” them. Share/tweet them. If you don’t know how to find their author page, then go to one of their books. If you click on their name below the title of the book, it will take you to the author page. If you don’t know how to find their books, you’re in trouble. No, seriously, just search for the book by name in the search box. It’s in the center of the page near the top.

2. Visit every one of their books. “Like” them. Share/tweet them.

a. If you feel favorably about the books, leave favorable “reviews,” with credible ratings. Write from the heart. It can be super short. Rate it, too.

b. OK, this next one is advanced, are you ready? Add “tags” (descriptive words) to each book page. Don’t be scared. It’s super easy, and, along with sales rankings, “likes,” and reviews, it is critical to the future sales of the books. Why? Because the tags/descriptive words are “searchable.” So, if the book is about dogs, you could tag it with dogs, but also with daschunds, dalmatians, and dobermans. Ah, so.

i. You get fifteen tags/descriptive words per Amazon user. Use them all. You want to get super-strategic? Tag the books with words about popular books, movies or authors that are similar to your authors’ books and would attract new searchers to them. Think of someone typing in a search for “Books like The Notebook” or “Nicholas Sparks,” and coming up with your author (who is not Nicholas Sparks and did not write The Notebook, or you wouldn’t be reading about how to help an indie author) …pretty awesome, huh?

ii. Where do you tag the books? It’s way down at the bottom of the book’s page, under “Tags Customers Associate With This Book.”

3. Your author probably doesn’t make a lot of money if you buy on Amazon, at least not directly, but indirectly, your Amazon purchases improve your author’s Amazon sales rankings and that in turn can drive up their future sales. Which makes them more money than you just buying their one piddly book, right? Amazon controls the largest share of the sales in the indie book market, and sales increases on Amazon lead to increases in sales…on Amazon. Here’s how it works. Statistics tell us that for each page a book moves “up” in the sales rankings in different Amazon categories, that book gets a seven percent bump in sales. One page up — seven percent increase. Two pages forward — 14%. And so on. That’s because buyers get tired of paging through the rankings and either bail out or buy something they come on one of the first few pages. Make sense? Now, I’m not telling you to buy on Amazon. But I am saying that it could make a difference to an indie author.

Not High Tech, But For The InterWeb Savvy

A. People buy books online at other retailers, too, and the best places, besides Amazon, for an indie author are Barnes & Noble (http://barnesandnoble.com) and Smashwords (http://smashwords.com). On B&N, you can leave a review/rating, and that’s pretty much it. But on Smashwords, you can “favorite” the author, and “like” all their books, which is awesome. Unfortunately, you have to buy the book on Smashwords in order to leave a review. Ask your author friend nicely, and I’ll bet they’ll give you a 100% off coupon code to download the ebook in exchange for that great rating/review you’re eager to give. You can’t do 100% off coupons on Amazon, but Smash is great for this. (Authors, take a breath. I’ll address Kindle Select and free ebooks on Amazon some other time. This post is for your fan club, not you guys.)

Don’t forget to share/tweet the author and book pages on your social media.

B. There’s a virtual author/reader social club online, and it is a powerhouse: Goodreads (http://goodreads.com). Join, people, join. Here, you can “fan” your author, rate and review all their books, and even add their books to your “to-read” list. By adding their books to your to-read list, you are in essence recommending to the world that they all do the same. Or at least to the world comprised by your Goodreads friends. Goodreads is very helpful with friends, and allows you to send invites to all your Twitter and Facebook friends who are already on Goodreads, so you can bond with your homeys almost instantaneously. Your author might feed their blog through Goodreads, and, if so, be sure to stop by and like his posts occasionally.

Bonus: you’ll read more if you stop by Goodreads from time to time. The book discussions are scintillating and the offerings delicious.

C. Do you Pinterest? From a page with your author’s book and an image of its cover, “Pin it” and include a comment about why you love it. The power of the Pin.

D. Do you Stumbleupon? Again, from a page with something awesome about your author and their book, stumbleit.

Now I’m Talking To The Bloggers

A. Invite your author to guest post. They can whip up a custom confection for your site, or you can interview them.

B. Here’s an idea: you write about their book — as in, review it. I’ll bet your author friend will even give you one of those Smashwords 100% discount coupons so you’ll have an ebook for a giveaway. Don’t expect expensive loot, though. Indie authors are ramen-noodle eating, Salvatian Army clothes-wearing sorts of people whose kids walk uphill in snow to school, and like it.

C. Guest post on their blogs, which brings your traffic over to meet them, and potentially creates followers/purchasers.

D. Join Amazon Associates and make money by selling your author’s books directly from Amazon links/widgets on your blog. Do the same for the Affiliates Programs with Barnes and Noble, and with Smashwords (and any others).

D. And of course, share/post/tweet/pin/stumble like mad over all of the posts created above.

What have I left out? I’m not some sort of savant here, so pepper this post with ideas in the comments. And, readers, especially readers who subscribe by RSS or email, be sure to visit the the actual website version of this post, because the comments will contain the latest and great tips from those smarter than me.

Bonus: Here’s an author’s hyper-organized grass-roots marketing spreadsheets, for her “army,” free for you to download and emulate. If you hover your mouse over the icons below the frame, it will show you the options. The down-pointing arrow is for download.

Some of you are salivating with intention and I lost others of you at the first mention of booting up your computer. That’s OK. Send us an email with questions. We can walk you through it step by step. If you’re brave enough, leave it in the comments. That way everyone gets the benefit of our answers.

Now, let’s practice some of the skills we learned today, boys and girls. What are you going to do with this post???? (Hint: share/tweet/post/pin/stumbleit…) And be sure to subscribe to our informational Indie Publishing Blog while you’re here, and follow us on twitter (@SkipJackPublish).

Remember, we Skip all that Jack. So can you.