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Promoting a Series: What I Learned from David Gaughran

Recently I had the honor of attending my first Novelists, Inc. conference. It is a “must-attend” annually for me from here out. My head is spinning with ideas and information that will change strategy and tactics for me, in big and small ways.

One thing I’m wrestling with is the insight David Gaughran shared about promoting a series, and how strategy differs based on whether the series is part of KDP Select versus wide distribution. (He did not promote one strategy over the other, although he is in the process of moving his books out of KDP Select). I blogged recently about how far my Amazon income has fallen, and the impact that has on my overall income. I definitely learned I am not alone in this boat from other authors, but I feel now I have new strategies I can pursue.

In a nutshell, David advises that for wide distribution, first in series still works well on non-Amazon sites, and that the primary strategies for promotion are:

  1. BookBub or the few other online promotions that really work, any time you can get one, especially for first in series, and pursuing opportunities for promotion by Kobo and Apple.
  2. Mailing list, mailing list, mailing list (and all the strategy inherent in how you obtain subscribers, keep them, and get them to open, and act, which is the topic of future blogs). He also recommended newsletter “swaps” with other successful authors for them to announce your new release and you theirs. He talked about the importance of reader magnet content to keep readers engaged with the newsletters (maps, alternative endings, short stories: all = exclusives).
  3. Facebook ads (again, the topic of future blogs, as he is a proponent of push-pull marketing to very, very targeted audiences and had some specific suggestions in a different session at the conference). He suggests micro campaigns targeted to your ideal reader by geography and retailer, like $5 a day, and tweaking but never turning them off.

He calls this the “many streams make a mighty river” approach, and likened visibility/promotion to drip, drip, drip. 🙂 I also attended sessions by Kobo and about Apple, that led me to conclude there are ways to increase presence and sales on those sites. Topics for future blogs 🙂 I did not attend the Pronoun or Draft2Digital sessions, but I’m waiting on the follow-up notes for those and the newsletter session, so I can possibly implement some new strategy about how to go even wider on distribution, and combat the pricing vagaries of Google Play, so stay tuned.

For KDP Select series, he recommended a regular promotional blast, done once a month, doing it all at the same time, aggressive with pricing, and the rest of month coasting on that rank.

Example (done all at the same time):

Book 1: 5 days of promoting is as free with best promotions you can book

Book 2: Kindle Countdown, 5 days of promoting it

Book 3: New release in a mailing list blast (mentioning other promotions) split over multiple days.

He talked about enhancing these efforts with Facebook static image and carousel ads and BookBub ads, if you’re really “all in”. To him, the key is to sacrifice money today (leave prices down for at least a week) for visibility tomorrow, keeping price DOWN, and going for Amazon-generated recommendations and page reads ongoing.

Personally, I have not mastered Facebook ads yet, so I am going to start experimenting with them again. I am wide distribution. I’ll report back on how that goes when I blog on more of the FB ad ideas shared at the conference, and much more. These blogs will have to take David’s drip, drip, drip approach 🙂

Until then,

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like What Doesn’t Kill You, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace (e-book free everywhere) and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trails with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, horses, donkeys, goats and whoever else wants to tag along, traveling in the Bookmobile, and experimenting with her Keurig. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

Tips for Successful Audiobook Production Using ACX


So you’ve written a book. You’re selling it in ebook and paperback, and you’ve been hearing that audio is an expanding market and you want in on it. You’ve listened to a few audiobooks from big name authors with big dollar big publishing contracts and big celebrities narrating them, and you enjoyed the experience. You know that ACX.com is a platform that allows any author to post their books for auditions and enter royalty share and/or pay by the production hour deals with narrators.

But that’s all you know, and you know that what you don’t know is what you need to know.

First, how do post. ACX is owned by Amazon. If your book is on Amazon (pre-order Kindle and/or for sale in e-book or paperback form), you can sign up for an ACX account and “claim” your books. Then you can offer them up for audition as a step in their production.

Discouraging Fact #1: ACX has a stipend program which helps you get better narrators by ACX fronting money to them to sweeten your deal (you don’t even have to apply for it–they consider your book automatically in its first two weeks), but you won’t get it if your book isn’t selling and doesn’t have a number of good reviews. And this means you won’t get it during pre-order, either.

Discouraging Fact #2: new authors will barely get any auditions.

How do you over come these two discouraging facts?

First, don’t post your book for auditions until you have established sales and reviews. You’re not going to get the stipend for your narrator that way. Good things come to those who work hard and then wait a little while.

Second, but don’t wait for auditions. ACX allows you to search for your own narrators based on parameters like genre, age, gender, accent, style, and method/amount of payment (you may be searching for a straight 50/50 royalty split, you may be looking for more exclusive narrators who only take cash, or some combination of the two). From your search results, go to their pages and listen to their samples. Message them through ACX, if you like them, and invite them to audition. Most won’t. Some will. Keep after it until you find someone you can work with.

Keep your expectations in check. You can’t afford Kristin Bell. Your readers expect quality, but you’re not angling for the crowd that only listens to famous actors. You’re angling for the crowd that buys your indie books.

Work with the narrator. Tell them what you want, ask them to re-audition if the first one was almost but not quite. Accept that you aren’t going to find that perfect voice in your head. Close is awesome. Close works. Say YES to close, if the sound quality is good enough (never compromise on sound quality). Expect your narrator to be accurate and to be able to read with character voices, but one narrator— for the amount they’ll make from your book—cannot be expected to create a dramatic production that sounds like it was produced with a Random House budget.

When you have a narrator and have negotiated your deal, enter a contract through ACX. It appropriately sets rights and expectations. You’ll set a deadline. Make sure it’s one you can both work with. You’ll also choose whether to distribute exclusively through Amazon/iTunes/Audible or not. You get a higher royalty if you go exclusive. Unless you’re planning on selling CDs from the trunk of your car, I can’t figure out why you’d do non-exclusive, since the market share of Amazon/iTunes/Audible is enormous, but it’s up to you.

Work with the narrator as you go. If they post a chapter, go listen to it and offer quick feedback so they can recalibrate as they continue to record. If you wait until they’re done with the book and then decide on a change that affects every single chapter, you’ve created a lot of extra work for them that you could have helped them avoid if you’d worked within the schedule you set, which really isn’t fair. If you’re not available to critique as they record, either ask them to delay their work, or find someone to do it for you.

Expect errors. Expect that when you alert the narrator to them, they’ll be fixed. These include saying words wrong, saying wrong words, and production issues (editing noise, sound quality, or background noise). Don’t nitpick. If they get a word wrong that doesn’t really matter, chilllllllll. 🙂

Meanwhile, get your audio cover ready according to the ACX guidelines. Don’t just use a square cutout from your front cover. Get your cover artist to reconfigure so that it works in the new shape and size.

When you’re all done, you submit it to ACX. It takes about two weeks for them to approve it (or ask for changes). They choose the price, you have no input into that. But they send you free download codes you can use as giveaways to reviewers, or whoever you’d like. I use them with my subscriber list.

Then you promote the audiobooks. For great tips, see this Joanna Penn post and another by Elizabeth Spann Craig. I’ve found unexpected success with audiobook sales in conjunction with free Kindle ebook downloads. Amazon offers a big discount on the audiobook and then readers can move back and forth between audio and ebook with each keeping their place. Power readers love this. While I don’t make much money from it, it’s a nice surprise when you’re running a free promotion. If you write series, the love continues as the readers move through the series.

I’m not getting rich with audio. I make a few thousand dollars a year at it, though, and at the same time I satisfy readers who prefer that format and work myself into the fastest growing segment of our market. It’s a vital part of my strategy, and actually a lot of fun as well.

I’d love to hear about your experiences, below.

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like What Doesn’t Kill You, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace (e-book free everywhere) and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trails with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, horses, donkeys, goats and whoever else wants to tag along, traveling in the Bookmobile, and experimenting with her Keurig. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

Learn how to be a writing, publishing, and marketing rockstar.

Join the SkipJack Online School for courses as inexpensive as the free “5 Simple Tips to Sell a Ton of Books” to $5 individual classes or $50 for the whole writing, publishing, and marketing bundle. Selections below. Taught by the best-selling, Silver Falchion-winning, What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes-writing mystery author, Pamela Fagan Hutchins. Click images for more information, and swim with the cool school.



Tell us: how are your Kindle sales?

Over the years, I’ve been very open about my sales success with e-books. A few years ago, I made the decision to opt-out of KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited, in favor of giving readers choices of who to shop with. Since then, month-in and month-out, my Kindle sales have fallen. Over three years, they’ve fallen a whopping EIGHTY PERCENT. My numbers have improved on other sales sites, but not enough to offset the Kindle free fall. I don’t completely pin it on KU. I think there’s also a glut of free and discounted books, such that some people successfully employ the “wait for the free books” strategy in addition to those who use the “only consume what I can download under my KU subscription” strategy.

I still find BookBub promotions, for free and discounted books, to be very successful, but their impact has a shorter life due to Amazon’s smoothing of its algorithms to account for short term sales spikes on rankings.

So why am I telling you this? It’s certainly not for sympathy; heck, I know I’ve still got it good, even after a 50% drop in overall income because of the deep gouge that Kindle Unlimited has taken out of my sales. But if you can empathize—if you’ve experienced something similar—and you’ve figured out how to reverse it, I’m all ears. Everyone I talk to who refuses to throw all their books in KU is going through something similar. And at the same time I hear rumblings of authors unhappy with diminishing KU/KDP Select income as well.

So, I’d love to hear from you: are you broad distribution or KDP Select? How are your Kindle sales? What are you doing that offsets the impact of KU on the broad distribution strategy?

Spill it, friends, spill it.

All’a we are in this together.

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like What Doesn’t Kill You, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace (e-book free everywhere) and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long trail rides and hikes with her hunky husband and pack of rescue dogs, horses, donkeys, and whoever else wants to tag along, traveling in the Bookmobile, and experimenting with her Keurig. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

 

What’s in a (character’s) name?

Shakespeare

When your imagination first gives birth to a story, the characters are nameless, and choosing names is an important step in fleshing out their identities. The names must fit the personalities. Huck Finn stiffens up if you call him Jackson Remington Pollack, III, and D’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers loses all his steam if you name him Humphrey Clinker.

Naming my death row inmate Kenneth Deatherage (pronounced “death a ridge”) in The Closing took me on a meandering journey. The surname was easy. I found it researching the ancestry of the Oder family. My ancestors were farmers living near Little Washington and Flint Hill, Virginia, in the 1800’s. Deatherages lived all around them, and I found gravestones near those towns bearing that name dating back to 1830. I was so familiar with the name when I selected it for my character that I didn’t realize until later how well it matched the accusations against him – Death rage.

To read more, click HERE.

ken-oderKen Oder, the author of the Whippoorwill Hollow novels, The Closing and Old Wounds, was born in Virginia in the coastal tidewater area near the York and James Rivers, where military installations during World Wars I and II fueled the growth of urban centers like Norfolk, Hampton, and Newport News. His father worked for the Navy Mine Depot in Yorktown and later as a Hudson dealer until he heard his calling and became the minister at Mount Moriah Methodist Church in 1960. The family moved to White Hall, Virginia, a farm town of about fifty people at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The mountains and the rural culture were a jarring contrast to the busy coastal plains, but once the shock wore off, Ken came to love it there. He found the mountains and hollows spectacularly beautiful and the people thoughtful, friendly, and quietly courageous. White Hall became Ken’s home, and his affection and respect for the area and its people have never left him.

Ken and his wife moved to Los Angeles in 1975, where he practiced law and served as an executive until he retired. They still live near their children and grandchildren in California, but a piece of Ken’s heart never left White Hall. That place and time come out in his stories.

Kobo Writing Life Podcast – Indie Publishing with Pamela Fagan Hutchins

Christine Munroe, US Manager, Kobo Writing Life
Christine Munroe, Kobo Writing Life

If you follow this blog, you know I’m a big fan of Kobo, for their international presence, their forward-mindedness with indie authors, and the human touch to their service. You can read about those things HERE and HERE.

I am also blessed to have spent time with Christine Munroe with Kobo Writing Life. She presented at the 2014 Houston Writers Guild Spring Conference, and we followed up with this conversation-turned-podcast a month later.

I hope some of our insights and thoughts are valuable to you in your publishing journey. Thanks, Christine, and thanks, Kobo Writing Life, for spreading the word.

To access the podcast, click below:

http://kobowritinglife.com/2014/08/15/kobo-writing-life-podcast-episode-020-with-pamela-fagan-hutchins/

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like What Doesn’t Kill You, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace (e-book free everywhere), 2017 Silver Falchion Finalist, Fighting for Anna, and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long trail rides and hikes with her hunky husband and pack of rescue dogs, horses, donkeys, goats, and whoever else wants to tag along, traveling in the Bookmobile, and experimenting with her Keurig. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

 

Voice Recording Tips For Drafting Your Book

pamela recording

Update: I have now talked-to-text three novels and one novella while walking, standing, and sitting in an infrared sauna. Multi-tasking rocks! I find the voice recognition feature spotty and the commands don’t always work as intended, but I know I can customize the commands when I have the time, and the time saver is enormously helpful.

I just finished rewrites on my 8th novel, Fighting for Anna, a romantic mystery. It’s the first one I’ve drafted entirely by voice recording, however, and I want to get my thoughts down for you guys fast while they’re fresh. It was an incredible learning experience, and I’ve already drafted (more successfully) a novella, and I’m starting another novel. That’s me, above, heading out to write a book 🙂

First, why I’m voice recording:

  • To get off my butt
  • To multi-task
  • To help my back (sitting is horrible for it)
  • To help my hands (they swell)

How I’m doing it: I tried a variety of voice apps, starting with the Apple voice recognition right on my Mac. But I was looking for the ability to record while I walked and drove, so the Mac was out. I tried apps like Dragon Dictate, but they gave me gibberish. And I became obsessed with trying to correct the gibberish. Also, I walk in the wilderness, where there often is no signal and thus no ability to record into one of the lovely little apps.

So, based on advice from a writer I respected, I chunked down a wad of cash and bought an Olympus DS-7000 Digital Voice Recorder. It’s handheld, great battery, lots of memory, and easy to use. I love it. But that meant I needed transcription, so I turned to romantic mystery author/publishing assistant extraordinaire Bobbye <3 who put up with my heavy breathing and the noises of animals, phones, and cars. Not to mention my ineptitude at recording!!!!

I do separate files for each scene. I also make lots of verbal notes, because I usually think of everything I should have said only after I finish a scene. Or when I start the next one. Bobbye keeps a master document, individual scenes, a list of my verbal notes (also leaving them “in place”), and a glossary of names of people, places, and important things. She also includes her own notes of suggestions, and she occasionally answers my verbal questions via email. She is DA BOMB.

Learning points:

  1. The most important thing I did was outline before I started recording. Not only that but I fleshed out the outline before I did each scene, and sometimes I carried bullet point notes so that I could stay on track.
  2. Don’t skip days. The worst thing I did was skip days or even weeks recording. Because we had Bobbye busy on other things, she didn’t transcribe in sync with me. Thus I had no written document to turn to to refresh my memory on where I was when I resumed. And I can’t abide my own voice nor did I want to waste time listening to 45 minute recordings. So next time, I CANNOT skip days, and transcription and recording need to be synced. It’s clear I retain best by handwriting things, second best by typing them, and least by saying them.
  3. JUST KEEP TALKING is my mantra now. Rather than going back and trying to re-record over something or edit something out, I just keep going. It doesn’t matter if Bobbye understands where I’m going with it. She types my words. It only matters that I can edit what I’ve said (and she’s typed) later. So by the end of Going by the Book I was recording a scene, then I’d record it again the way I wanted it. Which left two for Bobbye to transcribe. But that was okay. When I got to that point in my rewrites, I deleted the one I didn’t want. In the novella I just recorded, I decided to change POV halfway through. So be it. I didn’t re-record. I just kept going.
  4. Expect differences. I have diarrhea of the mouth. Recording this book resulted in a 115,000-word first draft. My normal first drafts are 70,000. OMG. But I found on rewrite that I didn’t cut much. We’ll see how readers like it. But I cranked out a book that was 30% longer in the same amount of time. I even considered breaking it into two books on the rewrite, but it didn’t feel right so I kept it longer and as one.
  5. Budget more time for your rewrite. Especially for the first few you do. Man oh man, it was a hot mess. I worried about Bobbye not understanding me. That wasn’t the problem. She understood me a lot better than Dragon Dictate or Mac’s voice app did. The problem was that whole skipping days and forgetting things stuff. Sometimes I took off in totally new directions. Lots of times I changed names of characters, even within scenes. It was the NORM that I didn’t remember earlier plot points and character development. Ay carumba. But I got it all straightened out eventually.
  6. I found myself talking directly to Bobbye. I also acted out my characters. She never mentioned this to me, but I picture her and her husband having a laugh as I bungled Lumpy, Michele’s next door neighbor. I tried NOT to. But I think that was a mistake. On my next draft, I am going to indulge it and let it rip. I think I write better that way. I guess in my head I’ve been doing it all along. So let your inner characters roar (unless Dragon Dictate or the like can’t understand your accent and colloquialisms, in which case, talk like a proper British school teacher).

By the way, Bobbye said that she often changed the speed of my recording as she typed. When she slowed me down, I sounded drunk. When she speeded me up, I sounded high. I think that’s pretty apt for how I felt at times doing this. At first it was super hard. It took about 100,000 words for me to really feel like I knew how to write my book this way. By then I loved it, but still knew I had that bitch of a rewrite to undertake. Luckily, I’m on the right side of that one and itching to start recording my next novel.

How has recording gone for you guys? Let us know your tips and learnings in the comments.

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins, winner of the 2017 Silver Falchion award for Best Mystery (Fighting for Anna), writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like those in her What Doesn’t Kill You world, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. You can snag her newest release, Bombshell, if you’ve already run the rest of the table. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it here on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes and trail rides with her hunky husband, giant horses, and pack of rescue dogs, donkeys, and goats. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

Pros and Cons of Pronoun

 

Lately, indie authors have been raving about Pronoun, and with good reason. You can publish your e-books on their Macmillan platform, absolutely free, and get them aggregated to the major e-book retailers, including Amazon Kindle, Apple, Barnes and Noble Nook, Kobo, and Google Play. They have some slick features and their customer service is fantastic.

But what’s the catch? And for you skeptics out there, what exactly are the benefits?

{Anytime I refer to books, I mean e-books, unless I specify audio or print, for purposes of this post.}

Pros:

  1. Macmillan owns Pronoun.
  2. Saving time and reducing possibility of error by administering all your retailers on one platform. Of course, you have this advantage on Draft2Digital as well.
  3. Keeping all your royalties, same as you would if you direct-published.
  4. Keeping 70% of your “35% range” Kindle royalties (under $2.99 and over $9.99).
  5. Receiving help with keywords and categories.
  6. Superb customer service.

Cons:

The cons are significant for multi-book authors, especially.

  1. Macmillan owns Pronoun.
  2. As with all aggregators, giving up some level of your prized control.
  3. You need a new ISBN on Pronoun, which means you start over at ground zero on rankings
    1. If you chose their free ISBN, your book appears to be published by Pronoun
  4. You must pull your books down completely before you can publish on Pronoun, which means you lose sales days.
  5. If you unpublish from even one sales site via Pronoun, you must pull all your Pronoun aggregated e-books down from all sales sites for a few days until their processing is complete.
  6. You cannot choose to enroll in KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited through Pronoun.
  7. If you author a series, Amazon will only create and maintain a series link if you publish all the books to Kindle under one account. Thus, if your series book are published outside Pronoun, any books you add to the series THROUGH Pronoun or move to Pronoun won’t be linked on Amazon.
    1. Example: We moved Pamela Fagan Hutchins’s Heaven to Betsy to Pronoun since it is a 99 cent book, to take advantage of the 70% royalties on Kindle. When we did so, Amazon broke the series linkage between all of the novels in the What Doesn’t Kill You series, and explained they would not be able to fix it unless she published the entire series from one account.
  8. If you sell audiobooks, the linkage between the audio companion add on feature on Kindles and Kindle apps doesn’t seem to work/promote in the same way as it does when you direct publish on Kindle.
    1. Example: Normally when we get a BookBub for a free download e-book, we sell 1000+ audio companion add-on downloads. But after moving Pamela Fagan Hutchins’s Heaven to Betsy to Pronoun, there were no additional audio companion download sales.

Until and unless things changes, our strategy tips are thusly

  1. If you write a series,
    1. For Amazon:
      1. If you want to do KDP Select, publish directly on Amazon Kindle.
      2. If you already publish directly through Kindle, don’t move your books.
      3. If it’s the first book in your series, consider Pronoun, weighing the pros and cons for yourself.
  1. For non-Amazon retailers:
    1. Consider Pronoun, weighing the pros and cons for yourself.
  2. If you don’t write a series,
    1. If you want to do KDP Select, publish directly on Amazon Kindle.
    2. Otherwise, consider Pronoun, weighing the pros and cons for yourself.

But don’t just take our word for it, listen to your peeps: what has your Pronoun experience been like? Any pros or cons we missed?

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like What Doesn’t Kill You, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace (e-book free everywhere) and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long trail rides and hikes with her hunky husband and pack of rescue dogs, horses, donkeys, and whoever else wants to tag along, traveling in the Bookmobile, and experimenting with her Keurig. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

End of Book Excerpts: Yea or Nay?

One piece of advice I’ve always received is to include excerpts from my other books at the end of each of my e-books to make it possible (and easy) for readers who wish to download any of others to do so. This is a post in which I’ll show and tell what I’ve down, explain how it’s worked, and seek your input on what you do, whether it works, and your opinion on my strategy. So here goes nothing!

Generally speaking, I include excerpts for the next novel in a particular series, the first novel in other series, and the nonfiction. To see an example—downloadable free anywhere—you can browse the table of contents of my novel Saving Grace, if you want. I don’t do the same thing in print books for a couple of reasons. First, it drives the price of the book up. Secondly, I don’t usually have my next novel finalized by the time one comes out. If we release later editions, I can add it, but we haven’t done it yet. I do think it would be a good idea to include if an author has it ready or for me if we release later editions.

Anyway, my royalties are high enough to support a couple of part-time employees and trickle an income to me, so we’re doing something right:

1. Releasing more than two novels in a series (my sales increase with each, and I’m releasing my ninth in July 2017)

2. Making my first in series e-book FREE

3. Promoting the first-in-series-free e-book and 99 cent specials for paid novels on BookBub and

4. Building my newsletter subscription and Bookbub lists.

(You can get advice on each of these strategies in the SkipJack Online School, HERE)

Other things are important, but they’re part of the ante-up, in my mind: writing your best book, not skimping on top notch editing, not skimping on your cover, entering (and hopefully placing well in) contests, pricing appropriately, and working hard to get reviews/ratings. I price to achieve maximum revenue, and the sweet spot I have found is $2.99 for my novels, although I’ve recently started offering pre-orders for 99 cents (a whole ‘nutha strategy discussion) and I still price my newest release at $3.99, although I’m not sure whether that does me any good.

My royalties are highest in the few weeks after a Bookbub for my first-in-series-free, and taper slowly until my next one, six months later, which is the time interval between which they’ll run a promotion for the same book. I usually run Bookbub on a discount for a paid book some time in that interim, but for purposes of this discussion, we’ll ignore those.

Less than two weeks before I was to run another Bookbub promotion in 2015 on my first-in-series-free Saving Grace, I received two messages two days apart:

Message One:

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Message Two:

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I believe all feedback is a gift, and that you have to look for the learning even if you have to wade through some people being too soft and others not so much ;-). In the first, it was “feel good” feedback, and obviously the reader had discovered others of my books (non-fiction), and enjoyed them. In the second, the reader enjoyed a novel but hated the excerpts, and made sure she took a chunk out of me in how she chose to tell me. My best guess is she is referring to my narrative non-fiction, the same praised by the previous reader. I must say that I a) wrote the non-fiction as self-therapy b) wrote it before my novels became successful. Anyway, I’m human, so I (just barely) resisted sending her back a message as direct as hers. But, in the end, I am weighing these two messages against each other and looking for the learning, if there is any. It’s always possible these are just two totally different humans, and that I can’t please everybody all of them time and all of that yadda yadda.

Which brings me to my question for you guys (think of it as your payment for all the amazing free strategy info I just synthesized for you!): what is your opinion about excerpts for other books by the same author, at the end of one? If you downloaded Saving Grace (free) and browsed the book excerpts I put in it, what do you think about how I did it? Would you do it differently, i.e., remove the non-fiction? Leave it the same? Not do excerpts at all?

Personally, I always read the excerpts at the end of a book, and I am much more likely to buy more from that author if there’s a sampler platter available to taste from. I may not like what I taste (a la Ms. Shaw, above), or I may love it (the website commenter whose name I don’t know). I think the push toward me buying/finishing is much stronger when I’ve started an excerpt. But does the good outweigh the bad? I truly don’t know and welcome your thoughts.

In the meantime, I hope the above outline of my current strategy is helpful for you guys.

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like What Doesn’t Kill You, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace (e-book free everywhere) and the 2015 and 2016 WINNERS of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy and Hell to Pay. She teaches writing, publishing, and promotion at the SkipJack Publishing Online School (where you can take How to Sell a Ton of Books, FREE) and writes about it on the SkipJack Publishing blog.

Pamela resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, Texas and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, Wyoming. She has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long trail rides and hikes with her hunky husband and pack of rescue dogs, big horses, donkeys, and whoever else wants to tag along, traveling in the Bookmobile, and experimenting with her Keurig. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).

Writing Prep: A Hammer Works Until You Need a Wrench

Blog followers: our website was hacked and crashed. We apologize for the inconvenience. Here’s the blog post none of you got to read earlier this week.

A lot of blank space in this outline after eight days to work on it.
A lot of blank space in this outline after eight days to work on it.

One of the focal points of the writing retreat I hosted August 7-9 was how to get past the dreaded sagging middle. The first few novels I wrote fell apart in the middle. I write mysteries, and the tension fell off and the plot wandered and the books fizzled out. When I asked the retreat attendees what they wanted to talk about, three out of five wanted to know how to finish a book, follow through on the plot, and get past the dreaded middle. Boy could I relate.

On my third novel, I brainstormed plot with my husband then wrote a short synopsis in my protagonist’s POV, then a longer synopsis, then edited the synopsis as I wrote the book. I went back and rewrote my first novel, dividing it into two books that I brainstormed, synopsized, and outlined. I had discovered that I had some tools in my toolbox: brainstorming (hammer), protagonist synopsis (wrench), and outline (screwdriver). I did the same for my fourth.

By the time I wrote my fifth mystery, my husband and I had talked about the story (and the sixth and seventh to follow in the same series) for a year. I felt like I knew it well so I went straight to a chapter by chapter outline and quit about halfway through when the excitement to write took over, and got down to it. I did an even more abbreviated version of this method for number sixth.

And then came number seven. Oh, my, number seven. I am sitting here two weeks into “outlining” number seven. I put together a wonderful outline format that incorporated structure and story elements, but when it came time to fill it in with actual story, I just kept fizzling out. For two weeks I pounded away at that outline, somewhat chagrined because I had lectured on outlining for three days at the writers retreat, expounding on the virtues of prepping your story before you write it, of my hammer, wrench, and screwdriver methodology.

I really wanted to use the screwdriver/outline this time. But it wasn’t working, and none of my other tools felt right either. I even tried writing a protagonist POV synopsis longhand, but that didn’t help.

I got so frustrated and confused with trying to outline the mystery in my protagonist’s POV that I just told myself to tell the story chronologically–all of it, even the things my protagonist would never know. In other words, from an omniscient POV. Cramped into a tiny American Airlines regional jet seat last weekend, I typed using this new method as fast as I could. For three flights and layovers over eight hours, I typed and typed and typed and typed and typed. Then I verbalized it all to my plot partner, and realized that it clicked.

Finally, I understood my mystery, my plot, my subplot, my character arcs, my theme. Finally, I had a good enough grip on it that I could re-visualize it from my protagonist’s POV. Finally, I could sit down and write this *#%()&*() book.

Phew. Lucky for me, there was a pair of pliers in my toolbox.

If I had started writing two weeks ago, I would have wandered in circles with thirty thousand words which I would have inevitably found hard to delete when the time came that I recognized my story wandered off into oblivion. I’ve done that before. It wasn’t fun, and the result was no good. Instead, now I have a flexible story synopsis and outline that I know hangs together and I can write like the wind to catch up with my ideas.

I believe in the pre-write, but even there I encourage you to be flexible and dig deep in that tool box until you discover what works for you. Long hand character studies? Typed short stories about side plots? Spreadsheet plotting? Verbal brainstorming with a story group or partner? Long days thinking while you drink wine and dream up your story? All of these count as pre-writing prep, and they may be just the tool you need.

Yes, Steven King wings it. I applaud him. I just don’t meet many career writers (or fledgling writers) of full-length novels that use his method (or lack thereof) successfully. Especially those that want to write efficiently, and then get on to their next book.

What tools work for you?

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes overly long e-mails, award-winning and best-10006025_10152294921092604_1598429323_oselling mysteries, and hilarious nonfiction, chairs the board of the Houston Writers Guild, and dabbles in employment practices resources investigations from time to time. She is passionate about great writing, smart authorpreneurship, and her two household hunks, husband Eric and one-eyed Boston terrier Petey. She blogs on writing, publishing and promotion at Skip the Jack and on her beleaguered family, and much-too-personal life at Road to Joy. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start). Check out her USA Best Book Award winning novel, Going for Kona, her permafree mystery (and series lead), Saving Grace, her writing/publishing/promotion Bible, What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?, her newest mystery, Earth to Emily (Emily #2).