Writing Articles

D2D vs. Smashwords: My 1-Year Experiment

12/10/2015

This year I switched over to D2D from Smashwords.

D2D, or Draft 2 Digital, is a service that authors can use to get their books on iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and some other retailers.

I switched over this past spring, though I’d been considering it longer than that.

You might remember the posts

I Unpublished 12 Books Today (Dec 9, 2014)

I Think I’ll Leave Smashwords This Year (Jan 25)

Going with Draft 2 Digital for eBook Distribution (March 14)

For the year, I made the following income from D2D and Smashwords:

Smashwords: $352.31
D2D: $745.99

As you can see, I made twice as much off of D2D as Smashwords.

Why is that?

I think it’s because D2D does a better job.

Now, it’s important that I say what this income is.

For Smashwords, I got paid in both the first and second quarter of 2015. That first payment was my sales from October, November and December 2014.

For D2D, I got paid for April through December, as I didn’t get on the site until March.

I will also add that around the end of summer or into September I took all my fiction off D2D and put it exclusive with Amazon.

This lowered my earnings somewhat for D2D, as you can see in this table from my yearly income statement:

My 2015 D2D Earnings

Some of the main benefits of going with D2D are the better interface, the easier uploading process (no meat grinder), and the faster pay.

I like the reporting too, but the pay is the thing.

For some reason, Smashwords will only pay you once a quarter. D2D will pay you each month, the first full week’s Wednesday.

Yes, you know when you get paid. With Smashwords it always was a guessing game for me. I knew it’d be around the end of the first month of the new quarter…but that’s it.

D2D doesn’t give me those hassles. They also make it easy to tell what my pay will be by sending me each retailer’s monthly royalty report.

I actually made up this table on my eBook sales spreadsheet to keep track of this better:

Figuring out the D2D payment schedule based on retailer

Tables like this make financial planning easier

That helps me make up this simple box that tells me what I’ll be getting paid…and weeks in advance.

That’s nice. I like it.

Why doesn’t Smashwords allow me to do the same?

It doesn’t really matter – I won’t be going back to that service. Nope, D2D is for me. I’ve had no problems and their customer service is helpful.

I just like them better.

And on top of it, my books sell better when going through D2D than they did when going through Smashwords.

I don't know why that is, but I have no problem with it.

I’m sure that bothers Smashwords, but so what? Why should I care?

I need to look out for myself this year, and I’ll be doing that. I need to get my books where they can sell.

Overwhelmingly, by a 2-to-1 margin, that’s D2D.

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How to Rank Higher on Amazon’s Historical Fiction Charts

11/14/2015

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How do you break onto the Historical Fiction charts on Amazon?

Damn it’s tough.

The Historical Fiction genre is one of the most competitive in all of literature, and the rankings prove that.

The #1 Historical Fiction book is currently The Empty Throne: Saxon Tales Book 8 by Bernard Cornwell. It has an overall Amazon rank of #31.

According to this helpful chart, that means the book is selling about 500 copies each day and had to sell 2,400 copies to get there.

Looking at the publication date I see that it’s January 6 of this year. That tells me that this book has sold approximately 182,400 copies.

Top ranks on Amazon for books, and how to get there

Pretty good info to know, huh? That’s what experience in the eBook market gets you.

So…about that genre?

Yeah, it’s a real bitch to break into, and one of the main reasons for that are romance novels.

Yeah, those pernicious romance novels.

I have to say – I have a lot of respect for romance writers:

They write quickly and publish quickly;

They do great covers that their readers eat up;

They keep their nose to the grindstone and build backlists to drool over;

They have the sales to look you in the eye and say, ‘fuck off, bub.’

So I have respect for romance writers.

What I also have is a lot of frustration on how they eat up a lot of sub-genres…especially some I’d like to compete in.

We discussed all that in my post on how to rank in the Westerns Genre on Amazon.

For today, let’s break down the Historical Fiction subgenres. There are 25 of them.

Here’s what that looks like:

How to rank in the Top 100 Historical Fiction novels on Amazon

So, again – what I’ve done here is go to the #1 and the #20 and the #100 book for each of those subgenres.

I did this because if you can get on the Top 100 for your genre you’ll have constant visibility. That’s how I sold enough copies of Colter’s Winter this year to make it one of my bestselling books to date.

What I’d do is figure out how you can boost your book into one of those subgenres through some fancy marketing.

The trick is getting enough sales to rocket onto a harder-to-reach subgenre in that chart.

If you’re a British Historical Fiction book you’ll need to rank at #23,679, at least, just to be seen on the Top 100 chart.

Now, I know today that you can see the rank of a book up to #1,000 (for the list) or higher on those charts. The thing is, readers can only browse through the 5 pages that Amazon gives them, and this is the Top 100.

If you’re a Short Stories historical fiction book or anything under that on the chart, you have a pretty easy time. You just need about 2 sales a week to maintain that visibility.

That comes out to 104 sales a year and many authors would die to have that.

If you’re an author you probably know about rankings already.

Let’s say you’ve got a book that steadily ranks around #50,000 to #75,000.

One option is to experiment, moving your book into European, Scottish, Biographical, or even something a bit lower on the list.

That gets new eyes on your book. The trick is finding an element that your book has that appeals to that genre.

If your book is set in America but has a French character (like my book Colter’s Hell) perhaps a jaunt in the French subgenre is in order).

Bottom line – you have to rank. If you don’t rank you’re invisible and you’ll get no sales.

When you know your category and the subgenres and how to manipulate keywords on Amazon to get onto those subgenre lists, you can get continual sales that allow you the steady income you need in order to quit that day job.

Whew – that’s a lot!

You can do it. Make sure you do market research. Look at the top books in your genre…or just use the lists I’ve made.

Here they are…cheers!

Top 100 Rankings for how to rank on the Amazon sci-fi charts

Top 100 rankings for fantasy charts on Amazon (made 2014)

Top 100 for the Westerns genre on Amazon

Top 100 chart for thriller novels on Amazon (early 2015)

How to rank in the historical fiction categories on Amazon

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Researching Your Genre So You Can Write the Perfect Amazon Blurb

11/2/2015

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Sam Cherry art, c 1940

How can you convince someone to buy your book?

It’s hard, damn hard.

Most of the time you have three things:

Your cover;
Your Look Inside;
Your blurb.

It’s that last one we’ll talk about today.

An Amazon blurb is nothing more than the product description. It’s what potential buyers read when they want to know what it is you’re selling.

For books, think of it like that short bit on the back cover, the kind you’d read over when you still bought books at the bookstore.

I remember spending a lot of time in the fantasy section of Waldenbooks back in the 90s. I’d pick up this book, pick up that book, gaze at their covers fondly, and read the back.

All of that would take a long time, and for good reason – a book was about $7 to $9 and I could only get one.

So I did my homework, and for a young teen or pre-teen, that meant staring at covers, reading the back, and wondering…which of these is the best?

Readers are doing that on Amazon today, but for eBooks we call that back cover a blurb.

You need to get that blurb the best it can be.

How do you do that?

The first thing I’m going to do is go to Amazon’s Kindle section for books. I’ll find the Westerns genre and all of its subgenres, which look like this:

From there I’ll click onto the relevant subgenres. I say relevant because I know things like “Frontier & Pioneer” are taken up largely by romance novels. That’s not my audience so I won’t waste my time there.

What I will do is check out “Classic” and the main “Westerns.” That’s where the top books are ranked, and those pages look like this:

Westerns Category

Westerns Category, Classic sub-genre

What I’m showing you are the top 20 books, though just the first few in this screenshot. This is where most readers will look.

Many won’t look past those Top 20, so you want to be there.

Here are a few authors that I’ll check out:

Click on those links to see the authors I’m talking about, and all their books.

I know these are top authors from the 6 months I’ve been ranked in the Top 10 for Westerns – Horror.

What I want to do is look at the blurbs for those top-ranked books. This will tell me the following:

Length of the blurb;
Keywords in the blurb;
Categories in the blurb;
Proper nouns in the blurb;
Hook of the blurb;
Call to action of the blurb;
Amount of story given away in blurb.

From there I can start to craft my own blurb. Here’s how I’ll do that:

Length: Based on the blurbs you see below, I’ll figure out the proper length for my book’s blurb. Personally, I think these books are a bit long, except for Legg and Cunningham. Louis L’Amour category books are even shorter.

Keywords: You get 7 keywords from Amazon, but that doesn’t mean you have to put them in your blurb. Many authors have some, however. What are the main keywords that these authors are using? Usually these aren’t in the blurb and I don’t see any for these top books.

Categories: You get 2 categories from Amazon. These correspond to the list we saw above, such as “Classic” and “Frontier & Pioneer.” I don’t see those in any of these top books.

Proper Nouns: These are words that can be keywords but which will usually not come up in search. What I mean is, readers will rarely type them in. For the most part, these can help with people already reading the blurb and deciding if they should buy. Looking at the 5 blurbs below I see that we have Confederacy, US Marshall, Oregon, Missouri, Apache, Idaho, Pacific ocean, mountain cabin.

Hook: How do these popular authors hook a reader with their blurb? One has a widow about to die by Indians and one has a quest for gold. Quite a few don’t have much at all.

Call to action: One uses ellipses to trail off, and I’m not sure that convinces your reader to buy. Well, this is a top book, so maybe. Others have “the likes of which you’ve never seen” and that’s about it. You get buildups, not a “buy this now.” Remember, these are bestselling books – no need to pander.

Amount of story: So how much is given away? You want to hook your reader, after all, not tell them all. Most of the books listed here seem to give away the first act and the inciting incident. They’re wetting the reader’s appetite, making them eager for more. They’ll get a bit more in the Look Inside (especially the print version) and that might cause them to buy.

Alright, here are some books and their blurbs.

Don’t feel that you have to read them, but maybe it’ll help you understand this process better if you do.

All of these books are priced at $0.99, so are they loss leaders? Perhaps

While you’re looking at your subgenres and the top books in them, I highly encourage you to make the following list:

What I’m doing here is looking at the #1, the #20, and the #100 book for each of those subgenres in the Amazon Westerns genre…as well as Genre Fiction and Literature & Fiction, the larger category that Westerns is in.

When I do this I know what I need to rank as in order to keep up the continual visibility that being on the Top 100 charts of Amazon brings.

Clearly the easiest categories to rank in are Classic, Science Fiction, and Horror. For that last one I only need to sell one book a month to rank (at the bottom), or close enough.

If you know that information you’ll also know what you need to do in order to boost that ranking with a promotion.

Really, though – I’m constrained by this category.

First, many subcategories are romance-dominated, meaning that I’ll never be able to compete with those “women-friendly” books. My books would not appeal to those female readers, for the most part.

Next, Louis L’Amour is not a category I want to play with. I could offend readers, people that will give me a bad review just for being there.

Then, Christian is another romance-dominated subcategory and Short Stories doesn’t apply to novels. Sure, I could put my books in the latter, but again, it’s just not the right spot for them.

Finally, Classics and Westerns are where it’s at, but since you’re already in the Westerns category you don’t need to waste keywords. Instead focus on these smaller categories, and think about branching out into something else. I like Native American as it goes with my books and gets me even more visibility, often with a different demographic, though one that’s still interested in what I’m doing.

Conclusion

Those are the bestselling books in the Western genre, a genre that I’m trying to break into.

I’ve managed to do that somewhat, but if I want some real staying-power I need to craft my book’s message so it follows a message similar to these books.

When I can do that I’ll better convince readers that my book is the one they should pick up.

Just like with those bygone days at Waldenbooks, I need to convince those Amazon shoppers that my book is the one they want to buy, not the other guy’s.

Blurbs help with that. Find some commonalities and characteristics of all the blurbs in your genre.

It’ll make it a lot easier to craft that perfect blurb of your own.

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Why I Will Never Advertise My Books with Book Basset Ever Again

10/28/2015

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I will never spend money on Book Basset’s services.

Why?

Because they fucked me.

Today I was supposed to have a Featured Author post, one that ran 5 of my books.

This is a good deal and you typically have to book it 5 to 6 weeks in advance.

It’s a pretty affordable deal, too – just $21.99.

I went ahead and sent in my books and paid them on September 23.

That same day, a bit earlier, I’d set three of my books to Kindle Countdown deals.

These were the book I was to promote today:

The last one is free and Bring Back Our Girls is always $0.99 so there was nothing to do on either of those.

The first three books, however, were on Amazon Kindle Countdown deals which could not be changed.

My post was supposed to go on their site between 9:30 and 10:30 AM Pacific Time.

It did not. Instead we saw 5 books by another author go up.

My books were not listed on the site, my books were not put on social media, and my books were not sent out in the daily email.

I will never use Book Basset again.

Am I being a bit harsh?

Perhaps if this was the first time this had happened, then yes. But it’s not.

The same thing happened to me in July 2014, as you can see from this email:

I emailed the site and sent them a Tweet soon after it became clear to me that my books would not be promoted.

It took an hour for me to get a response. This is what that looked like:

I asked them to run my books and send them out to their email list today, not some future date that they want.

Since my Kindle Countdown deal would be over tomorrow there was really no choice but to do this – I can’t reschedule that.

Thankfully the daily email hadn’t gone out. The books will go up. I will give them that – they didn’t fuck me when it was all said and done.

But why do I still feel bad?

I would encourage you to not use this site.

As you saw, this was the second time in little more than a year that they’d done this to me. I can’t help but think other authors have suffered the same fate.

The site blames this problem on WordPress.

Fine, they can do that. It doesn’t matter to me what they blame things on – my books were not promoted, despite following all of their rules and guidelines.

I’m very disappointed and this has ruined my day. I was expecting little in the way of sales – maybe 10 if I was lucky – but there would be something.

For awhile it looked like there’d be nothing, nothing but a deep feeling of depression at being another worthless author that no one gives a shit about. I can’t even pay people to give a fuck about me.

These are the days when you want to quit, they really are.

What do you do in the face of that? These are some things I’ll do:

Take a break: Find something besides your current work in progress to work on. I always have multiple projects so today I’ll focus on something back-burner, maybe even some edits somewhere.

Put it down: I’ll probably do a bit more with reading or doing a puzzle or maybe even watching a movie today. When you’re in a sour mood and the world is against you, it’s often best just to get away from the offending source, which in this case is writing-based.

Shrug it off: Later tonight I’ll probably shrug this off and get back to something. I already feel better just writing this post, which took me 10 minutes so far. I don’t think anyone at Book Basset can write that fast, and without error.

Well, there you have it – a big spiel, depressive bit, and then some crawling out of the hole.

This is what being a writer is all about.

If you’re lucky, don’t give up, and keep at it in the face of these bozos – like Book Basset – you might get to this some day:

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Using Facebook Ad Metrics to Determine Your Ideal Audience

10/5/2015

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Is Facebook advertising worth it?

I wonder that a lot, mainly because mine doesn’t seem to work.

Yep, I do a bit of marketing for my novels. Not much, just $20 here and there. Lots of others do the same.

An article in September tells us that “CPC prices rose by approximately 40%” from 2012 to 2014. A big reason for that is the increased demand in online advertising to sell products and services.

One of the suggestions for dealing with this is to focus on long-tail keywords with advertising.

Another strategy is to go through a “non-Google company” for your advertising.

The article recommends Bing, Yahoo, or Ask and those are all great ideas. The way social is taking off these days, however, maybe your advertising dollar is better spent there.

Lots of people think that, and Facebook is making a ton of money because of it. Some of it is mine, as I said.

I spent about $60 last month to advertise some of my books.

I figure it's given me about $5 to $10 in return.

I suppose you can't measure visibility, but that's more of a selling point that Facebook can use. I feel that it's been a waste of money for the most part.

There are so many advertisers on Facebook competing for the same narrow audiences. Those with more money to spend will drown out people like me that have little.

Maybe businesses can do well with Facebook ads, but I'm not so sure individuals can.

We’ll talk about that in this post, as well as what you can do about it. Besides that we’ll look at some of the metric, analytics, and audience base from my recent Facebook advertising campaigns.

I want you to get a good idea of what the outcome can be if you choose to try Facebook Ads.

I think if you’ve done Facebook marketing you’ve found that you have to run a few ads to really get a feel for the editor and how you can narrow your audience.

That’s why I want to go backwards today. Let’s start off with some analytics and then move back to selecting our audience.

Confused? It’s alright – most people are when they try Facebook Ads for the first time.

Hang on and let’s dive into new ways of looking at your Facebook ad campaigns.

The Main Facebook Ad Screen

First of all, you want to get to Facebook’s Ad Manager, which will look like this:

I have quite a few old advertising campaigns there. You can see when I took this screenshot that 3 of them were still active.

There’s really not much here – just a rundown on the clicks you got, the money they cost, and how long the ads ran.

Let’s move on.

Examining a Facebook Ad Campaign’s Demographics

Let’s go ahead and look at one of those campaigns, and older one for my book The Hirelings.

For this one I managed to reach 1,448 people but of those just 14 clicked the link to the book on Amazon.

I was only targeting men on this campaign as I feel the book appeals to them more.

For the male demographic, this ad was most popular for the 18-24 age range as well as the 25-34.

Actually, that’s what I chose to target it at, and I know that next time I might just want to stick with the 18-24 group, as that gave me a little better result.

Overall, it cost me $0.92 a click on this campaign as I spent $10 for the one day that the book was priced at $0.99.

That’s the thing with eBook marketing – I’m only getting a $0.35 royalty when I sell a book at that price.

What I’m trying to buy is visibility. That might get me some new fans, people that buy this book and like it and then buy the next one, or one of my many backlist titles.

Examining a Facebook Ad Campaign’s Ad Placement

You know how to target your ad’s age range a bit more. How can you go about targeting which area of the screen is ideal for your ad?

Now that we’ve determined who the ad was reaching, let’s determine exactly where on the Facebook screen they saw that ad. This is referred to as Ad Placement.

Facebook measures all that for you on a separate tab of your ad campaign performance window. This is what that looks like:

Clearly, desktop is not effective at all. The reach was slight and there were no clicks.

What is getting action is mobile, and you can see those long bars are showing both reach (teal) and clicks (blue).

Mobile News Feed and Audience Network placements are the best for my books. I see this here and I’ve seen it on other campaigns. Here’s one for my book Dulce Base:

So what does that mean, Mobile News Feed and Audience Network?

Clearly the Mobile News Feed is the best place for my ad on Facebook. Also, the third-party mobile apps that the Audience Network bar represents is also good to me.

Those are giving me the largest reach so the next time I do this ad, or others, I’ll want to just focus on that placement.

When it comes to Facebook Ads, Desktop Feeds do not help me at all. I’ll do best by cutting those out entirely…if I can.

The good news is that you can change the placement of your ads, and you can do this when you edit an ad. Even if the campaign is ongoing, this can be done.

Determining Your Book’s Audience

One thing that’s extremely helpful with Facebook Ads for authors is determining your audience.

Yeah, maybe you’re writing the book you want, but you’re not sure exactly who will want to read it.

Take my book Tarot Card Killer. I figure this would appeal more to men, but I really have no way of knowing when I can’t see the analytics.

The nice thing about Facebook Ads is that they give you the analytics, unlike other eBook marketing sites. That’s why I know a lot more women are interested in this serial killer thriller than men. Take a look:

I didn’t get a lot of action on this $0.99 ad promotion, just 9 clicks on a reach of 420 people, or $0.66 per click.

I spent $6 a day on this ad and it didn’t do too much…except tell me that I need to focus more on women in the 35-44 age demographic. I bet if I narrow interests down more as well I could get better results.

That’s what analytics are all about – studying results so you can see what works, what doesn’t, and what direction you should proceed because of it.

Determining the Best Age Range for Facebook Ads

The ad I ran for Dulce Base got 19 clicks on a reach of 937, or $1.05 per click.

The ad only targeted men as I figured this book would not appeal to women. For men, the 25-34 and the 35-44 age groups do really well.

Therefore, I might as well cut out the 18-24 and the 45-54 age groups so I can have more precise targeting.

Conclusion

Remember, you want to get your overall reach down to the smallest number as possible. A projected audience of 500,000 is too large to be effective, but 5,000 can get you some results.

Even better is getting it around 1,000 to 2,500 – when you can do that you’ll be targeting those that are most interested in your book.

Wow, we went backwards today, huh?

Instead of targeting age and other demographic characteristics, we went ahead and ran an ad and then analyzed the results.

From this we were able to determine that some age rages work better and some ad placements are great.

We also realized that I have no idea who my audience is.

Ouch, that sucks.

But the good news is that now I can target my serial killer thriller novel to women and my alien shoot-em-up at younger men. I know on both campaigns that mobile is the way to go and desktop can be cut out.

Hey, maybe if I do that next time I’ll get better results.

Yep, as for the books – I don’t think I sold a single one during these campaigns.

Oh well…back to the drawing board.

Using Facebook Groups to Get a Traffic and Sales Boost

Likes, +1s, and Favorites: A Lot Better than a “Fuck You”

Marketing Experiment with One Facebook Writer’s Group

Website Conversion Goals: Using Social Media Metrics

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Marketing Experiment with One Facebook Writer's Group

7/26/2015

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On Saturday, July 25, I decided to do a quick Facebook marketing experiment.

I did this with one group, The Writer’s Group, and on three posts – two of my own, and another on a woman who wrote about writing a NaNoWriMo novel.

These were the links I put in those posts, links back to my own site:

NaNoWriMo Strategies for Finishing a Novel in Less Than a Month

Are Your Novels Puzzles or Blocks?

Using Facebook Groups to Get a Traffic and Sales Boost

Here’s what the traffic for those articles was before I put the links:

NaNo: 69 hits;
Facebook: 68 hits;
Puzzles: 28 hits.

I was curious to see how the traffic would increase for those three posts over a busy Saturday when a lot of writers are messing around on social media instead of writing.

So how did the day turn out? I’d put those links up around 10:30 AM. When I checked my stats again at 10 AM the next day, this is what they looked like:

NaNo: 74 hits;
Facebook: 103 hits;
Puzzles: 54 hits.

So that’s quite the increase there on the last posts, but nothing much on the other one.

Besides that, I also got the following on those posts:

NaNo: Nothing
Facebook: 3 likes, 7 comments
Puzzles: 4 likes

This is just an idea of what you can do with various groups on Facebook. Here’s what my traffic looks like this month for referrals, based on Weebly analytics:

My referral traffic according to my site editor, Weebly

Here’s what my social media referral traffic looks like from Google Analytics:

My referral traffic according to Google Analytics

As you can see, social media is very important for a successful website. You generate sales, ad revenue, and increased Google rankings. You also gain fans. I bet a few of those writers today will add my site to their bookmark bar, like my Facebook author page, or maybe even buy one of my books. Hey, maybe not, but oh well – how hard was it for me to put those three links, all to content I’d produced months or years ago? It was super easy, and you never know what may come from that.

Still, compared to my organic traffic, social media doesn’t make a dent. Yeah, organic is that blue slice of the pie graph up there, yellow is social media.

Alas, I doubt you’ll be getting that kind of organic traffic unless your site has been up for awhile. You’ll also need some evergreen content. Chances are good that you’re a self-published author, probably just starting out. You’re not going to be able to get that organic traffic for some time, but you can get this social media traffic. Give it a try.

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Using Facebook Groups to Get a Traffic and Sales Boost

5/9/2015

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On Friday I decided to do an experiment with Facebook marketing.

I’m in several groups on the social network, mainly groups that revolve around authors and eBooks and selling on Amazon. I posted links to several of my blog articles, and I recorded where I posted them and what the analytics on those posts were. Here’s how things got started, with the group and the blog post from my site:

Fantasy & Sci-Fi Fans: Top 10 Reasons Fantasy eBooks Don’t Have Maps – 94 views.

Writers’ Group: How Much Will I Be Paid From Amazon? – 35 views.

Authors: Riding the Amazon Kids and Teens Categories – 7 views.

Authors: Comparing Amazon and Smashwords Sales – 17 views.

Indie Authors: Amazon Author Rank and Tracking – 20 views.

Aspiring Authors: How Do Amazon’s Ranking Algorithms Work? – 20 views.

Kindle Publishers: Choosing the Right Amazon Keywords – 52 views.

Authors and Book Lovers: Use Lists to Write More – 20 views.

Ebooks Rock: Using Your Writing Folders Effectively – 19 views.

Amazon Books: Split Infinitives – 12 views.

In addition to this, I also posted in three writer’s groups on Google, just to do some comparison. Those were:

Writing Resources: Is Free Fiction Worth Writing? – 12 views.

Writer’s Community: Should You Change Your Novel’s Cover? – 40 views.

Google Plus Book Club: Ancient China Thrilling Historical Fiction – 23 views.

So those are all the sites that I posted links to. After waiting about 24 hours I checked my analytics again, and this is how things turned out:

Fantasy & Sci-Fi Fans: 94 views to 408 views, a 434% increase

Writers’ Group: 35 views to 99 views, a 282% increase

Authors: 7 views to 10 views, a 70% increase

Authors: 17 views to 24 views, a 141% increase

Indie Authors: 20 views to 59 views, a 295% increase

Aspiring Authors: 20 views to 77 views, a 385% increase

Kindle Publishers: 52 views to 66 views, a 127% increase

Authors and Book Lovers: 20 views to 27 views, a 135% increase

Ebooks Rock: 19 views to 23 views, a 121% increase

Amazon Books: 12 views to 14 views, an 85% increase

Writing Resources: 12 views to 25 views, a 285% increase

Writer’s Community: 40 views to 48 views an 83% increase

Google Plus Book Club: 23 views to 23 views, a 0% increase

As you can see, some groups really give you some traffic boosts. That Fantasy & Sci-Fi Fans group really gave me a positive push!

I wish I would have tracked things the week before, as I put in a bunch of links for my author marketing books. Those really got boosted up the charts (3 sales and 6 borrows) over the weekend, and more than that, a few of the posts got shared several times. The problem is that I didn’t track which groups I’d posted to, so I didn’t know which groups were the most effective for me.

So it’s clear to me that I should focus my eBook marketing efforts to these groups:

Fantasy & Sci-Fi Fans;
Aspiring Authors;
Indie Authors;
Writing Resources (Google+);
Writers’ Group.

The other groups are pretty much worthless to me, except to promote my author books. It’s all about cutting out the dead wood. Those groups are completely worthless – just authors posting links blindly. There’s no engagement, no likes, and certainly no sales.

Those groups are wastes of time, and I typically leave those groups. In this case, however, those groups can help me. After all, pushing author marketing books on authors that don’t know how to sell is a strategy that works. Those groups are:

Authors;
Authors;
Authors and Book Lovers;
Kindle Publishers.

For you, however, most of these groups will be worthless. You can see which ones aren’t, and those are probably the ones you’ll want to visit and join.

So now I really know which groups will help me in which ways, and I can post the appropriate links because of it. For instance, pushing a marketing book in that Sci-Fi group probably won’t help me. But putting it in one of the author groups will.

This saves me time and gives me better results. Both of those things increase my likelihood of continuing in this racket further. Perhaps you need to do a little experimenting with your groups and communities too, huh?

Thanks for reading…and happy promoting!

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10 Signs It's Your First Book

5/7/2015

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Did you just put out your first book?

Congratulations!

Now, let’s take a look at everything that’s wrong with it.

#10: You have 28 million typos

Wow, looks like this book has never seen an editor. Chances are also good that you never went and read back through it after typing ‘the end.’ Hey, it’s a masterpiece…why ruin it? While it can be fun to rush a book out the door, the bottom line is that you’ll have to go back and fix all that stuff or suffer an endless stream of bad reviews. More than likely though, it’ll just be a lack of sales you have to contend with.

#9: You made the cover at home, in about 45 minutes

If you made your cover at home, then there’s a good chance that this is your first book or you just refuse to learn. It should be obvious with just a quick glance at the books on Amazon that your cover can’t compete. That means it won’t sell. I guess if you just wanted a book with your name on it, that’s fine. But you don’t want just that, do you?

#8 You spelled your name wrong on the cover

I’ve done this, and it wasn’t my first book – it was my 37th. Actually, it was the designer that did it, but I didn’t catch it and I put the book out. That book has never had very many sales, and I feel it’s because it was cursed. In fact, if you’re starting to think this is a negative post, just remember – I’ve done most all of these things!

#7: Your book's Facebook page has 800 likes

Hey, you’re a new author with your first book, but 800 people like it! Only Ted down at the pool hall and Aunt Betty bought it so far, but hey, people like it! More than likely, you found some guy on Fiverr that’ll give you 800 Facebook likes for $5. So now you have a book that won’t sell and a Facebook page proclaiming to all that you have no idea what you’re doing. Jeez, not a good beginning.

#6: You have 10 reviews in the first week, all 5-star

Wow, those reviews really do come in, and the good news is that people don’t even have to buy the book! Yeah, but it looks a little odd having a book with a rank of #1,258,792 and absolutely nothing in the ‘also boughts’ or ‘also viewed.’ But you do have all those reviews. Hmm…using Fiverr again?

#5: You wonder why it's not selling

Your fingernails are gone and you’ve almost pulled out your last hair. For some reason though, this does not sell more books. Hey, welcome to self-publishing, where anyone can put out a book but few can actually convince anyone to take the thing for free and even fewer can convince someone to buy it…at any price.

#4: You check the sales report every 30 seconds

Despite all of those likes and all of those reviews, you come back home and sit in front of the Amazon sales screen hitting ‘refresh’ every 30 seconds. Alas, no new sales come about from doing this. What the hell is the problem?

#3: You've tweeted/shared your book's URL about 5,000 times

The nice thing about becoming an author is that you quickly learn the ins and outs of social media, like how to send the same tweet 5,000 times to the same 27 followers, or how to post the same link to Amazon on Facebook, oh, about half a million times. This is what authors do, and if they’re doing it in bright pajamas with an alcoholic drink in a funny glass nearby, so much the better. You’re one of them now, and it’s glorious. Shouldn’t everyone know that?

#2: Everyone says it's, like, the best book ever!

Ted down at the pool hall and Aunt Betty rave about your book, though they haven’t quite finished with those 5-star reviews just yet. The same goes for everyone at work, all your ‘friends’ and of course the family. The wind even blows when you think about it, and the trees rustle their approval. Even Milo the dog barks in the affirmative when you ask him. Yes, you have a book on your hand, and everyone agrees, it’s good.

#1: You think it might win the Nobel Prize for Literature

It’s really only a matter of time before the committee in Norway or Switzerland or wherever gives you a call. They might even send one of those eggshell-colored envelopes, you know, the one with the red bow tie around it? That’s class, and that’s what you can expect. Your book is great, has tons of reviews, and is selling. It’s been awhile since anyone from your country’s been chosen for the award, and certainly since anyone this young has. My, how far you’ve come.

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Making More Money from Your Createspace Books

4/5/2015

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I love using Createspace.

I can’t believe I’m saying that.

When I first started making print books with Createspace I hated it.

The site was hard to figure out;
The templates were a pain in the butt;
Getting page numbers to work sucked;
And don’t even get me started on pictures!

Yes, using Createspace when you’re new is tough, but it’s like that with everything. I decided to stick with it, and now I have close to 20 of my books in print format. What’s more, some months my print book income exceeds my eBook income. Pretty cool!

So how can you get your eBooks into print format, and is it really worth it?

In this post we’ll discuss Createspace for print books and if it’s a good idea for you. I’ll talk about some of my earnings, as well as some of the headaches I have. In the end, however, I think you’ll see that print is a good option for you, and using Createspace to get that option is a good fit.

To get the best fit, however, you need to maximize your Createspace earnings. That’s the real function of this post – to convince you to get your book in shape so it makes the most money it can for you. Let’s get started.

Here’s an image of what some of my Createspace earnings looked like for a couple months:

Making more money from Createspace

Here’s what they looked like for a single month this year:

Createspace monthly earnings

As you can see, I’m making some money. A lot of that money comes from just a few books, and one of the things you need to figure out are which books are making you that money. But don’t stop there! You also need to figure out how you can maximize those earnings.

Whoa, maximize Createspace earnings? How do you do that?

One of the things I like to do is formatting. I wrote about formatting my Montana print books awhile ago, and that posts shows you how I increased my royalties by around $1 on each title, just by reformatting. I encourage you to read that post to learn more.

Getting a POD proof copy is a great way to do a final typo check

One thing that I do when I work with Createspace is to order a proof copy. I like to do this before I put the book out there for anyone to buy. I enjoy sitting down in my chair and going through the book, finding typos, captions that aren’t centered, page numbers that are off, or other little things. Maybe there’s a sentence on one page. Sometimes I’ll take out a space under the chapter number to get rid of that.

The point is, there’s lots of little things you can catch when you do a proof review on Createspace. What’s good about this too is that you can get those proof copies sent to you in just a couple of days. It costs about $15 to $20 for shipping, but if you want to get a book out quickly, this is the way to go. I did that when I released Hustlers and Homesteaders last fall, and it was well worth it.

I want to get back to the idea of price, however. I really think it behooves you to get your book cost down, both to benefit customers and yourself.

Here’s a look of what I did with my book English Rocks recently. This is one of my best sellers, and if it’s going to get 20 sales a month, I might as well get as much from that as I can, huh?

Here’s what it looked like before I reformatted it and after:

Createspace royalties before reformatting

Createspace royalties after reformatting

Alright, maybe $0.51 isn’t that much, but when you do the math it can add up. Twenty sales is an extra $10.20 a month while 100 sales is an extra $51 a month. Let’s say I did that with 20 books, getting 20 sales a month. That’d give me an extra $204 a month with no work besides that initial reformatting. Over the year that’s $2,448 in extra income – all from the same books!

That’s what lowering your font size, changing your spacing, and decreasing image size can all do. It’s about getting that book to have fewer pages so it costs less to print and ship. That means you make more money as an author.

Now, just because you can do this…should you? What if your book is already 100 pages? Would getting it down to 80 pages help you?

No, because it’ll turn off readers. Who’s going to pay $9.95 for an 80 page book…and I’m sure you’re charging more than that.

I’ll tell you who will pay, no one. I know this because I have books like that (Ale Quest & Black Walnut). The point is, you have to balance the page count of the book with your need to make a profit. I decreased my book English Rocks by about 50 pages, but people keep buying it because it’s useful. But if it was 101 lessons in fewer than 101 pages? Well…I don’t think I could charge $19.95 for it, do you?

So balancing price and profit is a key part of being a successful POD author on Createspace, especially when you’re doing all the work yourself. But if you do it right, Createspace books are the gifts that keep on giving. They really do require little maintenance after being published, and each month you’ll get a few paychecks depending on how many countries you sell to.

If you’re still on the fence about Createspace, you shouldn’t be. Get your book out there to a wider audience – go POD today!

How I Work With Everyday People to Get Books on Amazon

Going With Draft 2 Digital for eBook Distribution

Comparing Amazon Kindle Unlimited with Smashwords

What’s the Best Size for a Novel’s Paragraph?

What are My Most Popular Books?

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Wow, Check Out These New Print Books!

3/11/2015

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English Last, now in print with original cover

Stop the presses – I have several new books in print format!

Yep, for the past month I’ve been uploading my eBooks into the Createspace template and getting PDF covers done as well.

Then I format and check and format again. It’s a pain, but eventually it pays off. Already in January my print income was more than my eBook income!

So I have some new books, and these ones are done, proofed, and approved. They are:

English Last: True Accounts of Teaching in China

Trouble in Jonguria

The Jongurian Resolution

Black Walnut

Ale Quest

Dulce Base

Stand Out: Your 2015 SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing Guidebook

Write to the Top: A How-To for Website Content Writing and Increasing Website Traffic

That’s 8 new books that are now in print, and I have a few more on the way. Altogether, that puts me up to 18 books in print or soon to be in print. Pretty good!

The real driver of my print sales is English Rocks. This book rocks, and gives me quite a bit of extra money. I wrote a follow-up to it and just put it into print, and I’ll talk about that next week.

Other than that, I don’t get that many print sales…at least compared to big-name authors. Last month I had 27, but in January it was just 7, Still, December was 36, and those sales add up, and pay out more earnings.

And I get perhaps 5 to 10 sales a month on my Montana books, which is where most of the sales for those books happen now. Yeah, I’m a self-published author that started in eBooks, but my most successful books are now print books – who would have thought!

All in all, this is another format for people to choose if they want to. Many don’t, and the books are never printed. It doesn’t cost me anything. But when someone does order one, it is printed and I get a few extra bucks that month…or 60 days later, to be precise.

So thanks for reading my books and telling your friends and family and anyone else that has money!

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D2D vs. Smashwords: My 1-Year Experiment

How to Rank Higher on Amazon’s Historical Fiction Charts

Researching Your Genre So You Can Write the Perfect Amazon Blurb

Conclusion

Why I Will Never Advertise My Books with Book Basset Ever Again

Using Facebook Ad Metrics to Determine Your Ideal Audience

The Main Facebook Ad Screen

Examining a Facebook Ad Campaign’s Demographics

Examining a Facebook Ad Campaign’s Ad Placement

Determining Your Book’s Audience

Determining the Best Age Range for Facebook Ads

Conclusion

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Marketing Experiment with One Facebook Writer's Group

Using Facebook Groups to Get a Traffic and Sales Boost

10 Signs It's Your First Book

Making More Money from Your Createspace Books

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Wow, Check Out These New Print Books!

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by Greg Strandberg

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​The Main Facebook Ad Screen

​Examining a Facebook Ad Campaign’s Demographics

Examining a Facebook Ad Campaign’s Ad Placement

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Determining the Best Age Range for Facebook Ads

Conclusion

You Might Also Like

You Might Also Like

Writing Blogby Greg Strandberg

Top Ten

Categories

My Books(By Publication Date, New to Old)

Archives

The Main Facebook Ad Screen

Examining a Facebook Ad Campaign’s Demographics

Writing Blog
by Greg Strandberg

My Books
(By Publication Date, New to Old)