On Prodigal Bridge Trolls & Homecoming Dances

When I first published Equivocal Destines, I enrolled it in Amazon’s Kindle Select program. They “recommended” it and after some quick research, it seemed like a good idea. I wasn’t happy about it’s conditions, but it worked out OK. In brief:

You enroll your book(s) in KDP-S and you get fancy benefits:

• You can set the price of your book to free for 5 days out of every 90 day enrollment – which is actually highly restrictive as most other sales channels will let you set your book to any price you want, including free, for as long as you want. It’s the only “free” option on Amazon though, so – in theory – good for marketing. I used this enrollment period to do a bit of free advertising (free book, not free service) and it all came to naught, so this isn’t worth squat in reality.
• You can lend your book to Amazon Prime and Amazon Unlimited customers. You still get about $2 for each copy lent. Now this was something I could really get behind. It was another way to make my book available to lots of people, for a better price, and I still get my $2. Awesome! In reality, I lent a whole bunch of copies and haven’t seen a cent from Amazon for all of it, but it’s a good, ethical theory. Amazon’s now changed the pricing policy, but that’s a topic for another time.
• You get prioritised advertising space – for whatever that’s worth for my completely unknown book. Not incidentally, that’ll probably be the topic of my next blog spew, so stay tuned.

There was also a single, massive downside. You have to make the book exclusive to Amazon for the 90-day enrollment. Now this is something that I find highly unethical and abusive. It was because of this rule that I removed my book from KDP-S and published it elsewhere.

Now, it feels good to have your book available in all of the stores, and it’s also a lot nicer and more ethical to have full rights to your work, instead of ceding some of those rights to Amazon or anyone else. The problem is, all of the other stores are completely ineffective. I’m going back to Kindle Select now.

Back into the fold

I was with KDP-S for 1 iteration of the standard 90-day enrollment period, then I didn’t renew it and published at Kobo and Smashwords, which in turn published my book pretty much everywhere else. In that 5.5 months, I’ve sold a measly 5 copies in stores that aren’t Amazon. I used to rent a lot more copies than that each month on Amazon, and that was only days after releasing my book and having done absolutely no advertising.

I recently read Mark Coker’s recent diatribe (from Smashwords) about KDP-S, and I agree with pretty much everything he says, from a ethical perspective, an industry perspective and a financial perspective. He’s absolutely right that KDP’s exclusivity clause is unethical (my words, not his) and needs to go. Like he admits though, I have prioritise the rent that I have to pay. More than that though, I have some serious misgivings about all of the other storefronts/sales channels.

1. Only Amazon actually makes a serious attempt to put unknown books in front of potential buyers. I’ve looked into the advertising options at Apple, Kobo, etc and found Amazon to be far superior, even in their evilness. Basically, Amazon’s better at making money for themselves, by (accidentally) making money for me.
2. It’s not even possible/easy to advertise outside of Amazon myself. I’ve used KBoards, ENT, BookBlow and BookGorilla and they all just want a direct link to your book on Amazon US. I don’t know how to advertise my book outside of Amazon, or outside of the USA. I have a proportionally much higher number of fans in the UK but I can’t even find an advertising service to reach more of them. All of the big services are USA-centric and Amazon-centric, so why should I care if my book’s on other sales sites if the advertisers don’t?
3. No matter what you may like or dislike about Amazon, they’re still the place to be. Sorry, but it’s true. I wish the other sites would put as much effort into the whole process as Amazon does, but they don’t, so Amazon it is for me, and if it’s going to be Amazon, and Amazon is willing to give me more for free by rejoining KDP-S, then so be it.

I’ve done a bunch of rounds of advertising but my book’s still languishing in obscurity. This isn’t the place to speculate at length about why (dark cover art, unadvertisable genre…), but it does provide an opportunity to really test the pre-KDP-S vs. post-KDP-S landscape. I’m going to re-enroll and just leave it for a few weeks to see if my sales (and rentals) magically increase. If they do, with no further input from me, then we’ll all know that Amazon’s background magic actually does alter your book’s placement by being in KDP-S. A lack of movement might just mean my book’s not appealing, but time will tell.

On KBoards Book Discovery as a Bridge Troll Catapult

Welcome back to my (so far brief) floundering series on promotional sites and their effectiveness. Most recently I’ve tried the KBoards “Book Discovery” promotion service (http://www.kboards.com/book-discovery-promo/). As they say, it’s a promotion opportunity “for newly-published or overlooked books”. Well, due to my utter failings at promotions (I’ll have to change tack again soon) this is exactly what my book needs.

First up, what’s their deal?

I’ve pulled this, almost verbatim, from their website.

What you get:

• Inclusion in our Book Discovery Days post in the Kindle blog. We post these on Tuesdays and Fridays at about 4pm Pacific. The table is limited to 16 books or fewer, and includes a clickable book cover, links to your book’s page on Amazon, and a synopsis describing your book. The synopsis is pulled from the first 500 characters of the description of your book on Amazon.
• A Facebook post about the blog post. The Facebook post may include an image showing book covers; for space reasons it is not guaranteed that your cover will be among those.
• A tweet about the blog post to our KBoards Twitter followers.
• An alert about the blog post in our daily e-mail newsletter.
• A “KBoards Featured Me” badge to include on your author website.

Requirements:

• Our family-friendly guidelines apply. No erotica – sorry!
• Fewer than ten reviews on Amazon *or* an Amazon ranking of higher than 100,000.

To me, this sounds like an excellent opportunity, and the price is awesome. It cost me only $US15. The “What you get” list is very generic in its offerings, but this is to KBoards members, which, in theory, are dedicated bookies and so should be on the lookout for good deals. If you’ve read my previous blow spews about this type of advertising, you’ll know I’m highly skeptical of FB and Twitter spamming, but to this directed audience, it might be more effective that to the world at large. The KBoards blog inclusion and the alert sound very helpful though.

The requirements are awesome, and I’m highly appreciative to KBoards for even setting up this type of promotion, for this type of author. I really wish more services would try to help those at the bottom of the ‘recognisability’ spectrum, instead of only catering to those who can already afford to pay wheelbarrow-loads of cash to bump their books from 25k to 5k on Amazons lists. This alone makes the KBoards Book Discovery promo a great idea.

I just wish it was successful.

How’d it go for me?

Complete and utter failure!

More on why in the next (small) section, but first I need to deal with my numbers, or complete lack thereof.

Now, I did sell more copies during the time period of this promo, but 40% of them were before the promo even went out. I followed my usual process of keeping the promo separated from any other activities so I can see the effects of the promo in isolation, but I did reduce the price of my book and update the blurb on Amazon to add a heading line saying it was on sale for that week because of the KBoards sale. I then sold 40% of my extra copies before the promo, but after the price reduction and headline change.

I can only assume it was the headline that attracted (most of) my extra sales, not the KBoards promotion. How disappointing 😦

Why the crap results?

I have to be fair to KBoards and all of the other services that I’ve tried and lay the blame for my relative failure at marketing directly on my book, not these services. Even with ENT, my results were poor compared to the others in the same promo, so it must be my book, not entirely the service.

I’m looked at this topic before, and no doubt I’ll look at it again, but it’s the cover, mostly. My cover artwork is pretty well done (I like to think) but trankly, too dark (too much black) for the primarily US audience of these services. I’ve gone back to my cover artist a couple of times to get the artwork updated, but if you’ve ever dealt with a cover artist… well…

So look, don’t blame KBoards for my pitiful results, but also, do blame them. After all, half of their promo service is FB and Twitter based, which is pointless. No-one in history has ever bought a book based on a FB or Twitter blast from an advertising site. It just doesn’t happen. So it looks good on the promo site but doesn’t actually achieve anything or the author.

I also have to wonder about the effectiveness of the blog inclusion. Does anyone read that blog or those emails? I don’t know. KBoards is a massive website and is hugely popular (and deservedly so, because it’s excellent) but I’d guess people go there for the threads, etc, not for their blog. My completely unauthoritative guess is that the blog sits at the side of the site and is significantly less popular than their highly popular forums.

Where will I go from here?

I have 2 plans for the immediate future, which are relevant to you, if you’re reading this.

1. I’ll research more promo services and try them out. I have the spare cash to give them a go, and the patience to try them all in isolation. It’s helpful as most other people don’t want to blog about these things unless they’re wonderfully successful.
2. Perhaps more useful, I’ve got a thriller/crime novel coming out in a few months. I’m going to get professional, colourful cover artwork done, etc, and it’s much more “in” the genre which these services claim are the most successful. So I’m going to really push my thriller, by advertising it across all of the same services I’ve already tried with my fantasy book with the darker cover art. You should definitely check back in in a few months to see how all of these services, including KBoards, fare with a brightly artworked thriller.

I have to be fair to these services. I don’t like to unfairly crap on advertising services which in all probability work wonderfully for different genres with more competent advertisers (i.e., me), but in my case, this service did, legitimately, fail dismally.

On Pimping a Bridge Troll to BookBlow with a $30 Tithe

Next in my ongoing saga to promote my pretty, little bridge troll (Equivocal Destines) is my just-completed promotion using BookBlow Book of the Day.

Right from the beginning, I should make 1 very important thing clear. This promo didn’t go well, but I don’t blame BookBlow for my results. This is a test of the methodology for me, and I think any and all book promotion services that use this methodology will have the same issues as I experienced. I considered leaving BookBlow’s name out of this completely, as I want to look at the methodology, not the service but I’ve included so much detail about BookBlow that anyone could find out who I used in no time, so I’ve added their name anyway.

My BookBlow Tasks

I did nothing. Seriously. Well, I submitted my book using their form – http://bookblow.com/submit-book/ – and paid them the money, but that’s all. My book was already discounted at Amazon.com. No wait, I changed the description to remove the “ENT Promo” text. More on that later. I decided I couldn’t really promote my promo elsewhere because it’s too close in time to my previous promo, so anyone who sees this announcement would probably have seen last week’s announcement and get Equivocal Destines fatigue.

The BookBlow Process

BookBlow uses a very different promotional process to ENT, my previous promo experience, which is why I was keen to try it. The gist of it is as follows:

1. Twitter blasts
2. Facebook group posts

Here’s what they actually say. I copy-and-pasted this directly from their page above:

– We tweet 3 times to more than 350,000 readers from these accounts- Our Twitter allies

– We post your book as “Book of the Day” on our Facebook page. BOOK OF THE DAY

– We post on Top 50 book promotion groups on Facebook. Check Top 50 Book promotion Facebook groups

Now, I’ve never been highly convinced that either of these tasks will actually result in sales, but it still needs to be tested, so that’s where we find ourselves now. If one of them’s going to be successful, it has to be the Facebook groups, surely? After all, that’s what Facebook groups are for. Let’s look at their process in more detail, and I’ll add what they actually did for me.

Twitter Allies

My promo was tweeted 3 times, as advertised, by 18 twitter accounts. All 18 Twitter accounts tweeted exactly the same things, at exactly the same times.

1. Beautifully written and so easy to become lost inside this amazing world. @RClarkeAuthor #kindle http://amzn.to/1N1DNZJ
2. Exotically-set, full of surprises, and exceptionally well-written, @RClarkeAuthor #kindle http://amzn.to/1N1DNZJ
3. The book reads quite quickly because it’s hard to put down. @RClarkeAuthor #kindle http://amzn.to/1N1DNZJ

All of the quotes were cribbed directly from my reviews, which I guess is a good way of finding legitimate quotes for the tweets, as long as your reviews are legit (mine all are). I’m very disappointed with the timing of the tweets though. It isn’t difficult to schedule the tweets to go out at randomised times. Hell, I could o that with the free version of Hootsuite in 5 minutes. Blasting out the exact same tweet on 18 accounts at the same time is just spam.

Here’s my next problem with tweet blasts. I’m currently following all 18 of these promo accounts (and more) at the very least so I can see if/when any of them mention my book. How many of the followers of these accounts do you think are actual customers looking for deals and how many are other authors doing the same as me? My main problem with tweet blasting is that I strongly suspect it’s all just spamming to the choir.

Anyway, here’s what happened. I can’t give impression counts as I don’t own these Twitter accounts.

Twitter Ally				Tweet #1		Tweet #2		Tweeet #3
Name	Address	Followers	Listed on Site?	Time	Impressions	Time	Impressions	Time	Impressions
AHA Program	@ahapartners	14.4k	6	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:51 PM
AHA Program	@Ahaprograms	4.1k	10	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:51 PM
AmazingAuthors	@AmazingAuthors	10.5k	4	7:50 AM		10:51 AM	1 retweet	1:51 PM
Author Giveaway	@Authorgiveaway	2.5k	12	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:51 PM
Book of the Day	@BOOKOFTD	43.5k	no	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:51 PM
Author RTS	@authorRTS	9.1k	9	7:50 AM		10:51 AM	1 favourite	1:51 PM	1 reply
Book Blasts	@bookblasts	4.2k	13	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:51 PM	1 favourite
Book Blow	@bookblow	54.3k	1	7:50 AM	2 retweets	10:51 AM		1:50 PM	2 retweets
Book Tweet Lady	@Booktweetlady	9.1k	11	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:50 PM
Free Book of the Day	@FreeBookDeals	7.1k	no	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:50 PM
Book Deal	@BookDealsPromo	12.7k	no	7:50 AM		10:51 AM	1 retweet (same person)	1:50 PM
EBOOK PROMOTER	@ebookpromoters	75.5k	no	7:50 AM		10:51 AM	1 retweet (same person)	1:50 PM
KINDLE EBOOK REVIEW	@reviewmyebook	63.8k	no	7:50 AM		10:51 AM	1 retweet (same person)	1:50 PM
Book Tweep	@booktweep	57.1k	3	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:50 PM
Book Pluck	@bookpluck	13.6k	7	7:50 AM		10:51 AM		1:50 PM
<doesn’t exist>	@Book_oftheday		2
<doesn’t exist>	@bookdeal02_my		5
<doesn’t exist>	@pingbooks		8

Twitter Promo Account Activity

Here’s a thought – if this is MY Book of the Day promo, let’s see what else these Twitter accounts were up to on MY day.

First, I checked @ahapartners, because it was first on my list. It was tweeting 8-12 times an hour, on average. It tweeted 14 times during the hour of my third promo tweet. My BOTD promo was 1 of, what, 100-150?

What about the biggest account on the list? @ebookpromoters was significantly less busy but was still tweeting a few times an hour, including 4 tweets during my third promo tweet.

I found a bigger problem than the frequency of tweeting though. The tweets were most definitely copy-and-pasted from the books’ reviews – typos and spelling mistakes included. This wasn’t true of my promo tweets, but other tweets, for other books, had obvious errors in them. Surely we should expect the promo site we’re paying to polish their output instead of blindly copy-and-pasting the semi-coherent ramblings of our fans!

Facebook – Book of the Day

When I checked, https://www.facebook.com/Mybookoftheday didn’t exist!

Top 50 Facebook Book Promotion Groups

I can’t give you any useful information about BookBlow’s promotion of my pretty, little bridge troll on Facebook. Facebook won’t notify me of anything and goes to great lengths to manipulate what people see on the various timelines. Here’s some important notes on the situation though.

• Most of these groups are 75% full of cookbooks, erotica and zombie novels. Seriously. My book seems a bit out of place.
• I keep seeing the same group of books cross-promoted on all of the Facebook groups that I check, and they’re all being directly posted by the authors.
• I stumbled on an ad (direct from the author) for a book I see spammed all across Twitter every day too so I checked its ranking on Amazon but it’s about 250k, so all of that intrusive, annoying ad-spamming on all of these social media platforms are giving it about as many sales as my book historically got.
• I just wasted 30 minutes scrolling through the last 24-hours of the top 5 groups and couldn’t find a single post about my book anywhere in any of them. Now, I’m not implying BookBlow’s done anything wrong (I did see the post about my book yesterday). More likely, it’s just how Facebook reorders the timeline, only shows certain posts in the timeline and a bunch of other guff like that to manipulate what we see. Who knows, maybe Facebook wasn’t showing me the post about my book because it’s worked out it’s about me so assumes I won’t need to see it. The point is, these groups are flooded.
• If these 50 groups are actually “Top” groups, as BookBlow claims, why do most of them not even have dedicated group names? Check my table below. It’s easy to go to https://www.facebook.com/username and assign a name. The group owners who haven’t done it must not take their group too seriously.
• The fact that so many of these groups have approx. the same number of members makes me wonder (like Twitter) if it’s mostly the same 12-13k authors joining all of the groups (like I did) for the purposes of advertising, community-building, etc – ie not buying anything.

So here’s my main problem with Facebook groups. If most of the posts on all of these groups are directly from the authors of the novels being promoted, what do I need BookBlow for?

Here’s the Facebook groups BookBlow uses anyway.

Group #	Group Name	Website	Members
1	BOOK REVIEW & PROMOTION	https://www.facebook.com/groups/bookpromo.review/	29.4k
2	Books, Books and more Books!!!	https://www.facebook.com/groups/320356974732142/	33.3k
3	Book Club	https://www.facebook.com/groups/187547284642012/	14.7k
4	Promote Your Book!	https://www.facebook.com/groups/205686289555465/	16.1k
5	Authors	https://www.facebook.com/groups/179494068820033/	27.4k
6	Amazon Kindle Goodreads	https://www.facebook.com/groups/kindle.goodreads/	21.6k
7	Book Lovers	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2204565182/	20.7k
8	Book Junkie Promotions	https://www.facebook.com/groups/bookjunkiepromotions/	22.3k
9	Aspiring Authors	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2204546223/	22.6k
10	Books	https://www.facebook.com/groups/29851114873/	19.9k
11	Writers and Readers Unite	https://www.facebook.com/groups/69073710111/	25k
12	Writers’ Group	https://www.facebook.com/groups/memberswritersgroup/	28k
13	Authors and Book Lovers Discussion	https://www.facebook.com/groups/authorspostyourbooks/	21.3k
14	All About Books	https://www.facebook.com/groups/AllAboutBooks2009/	20.6k
15	BOOK PLACE	https://www.facebook.com/groups/bookplace/	22k
16	Passion for Books	https://www.facebook.com/groups/passionforbooks/	29.3k
17	Books Gone Viral	https://www.facebook.com/groups/booksgoneviral/	21.5k
18	Celebrating Authors	https://www.facebook.com/groups/157960580960255/	14k
19	Indie Author Book Promotion Page	https://www.facebook.com/groups/571135069563269/	26.2k
20	SUGGEST ME A BOOK	https://www.facebook.com/groups/135014283196453/	13k
21	A new place to advertise books for sale	https://www.facebook.com/groups/aplacetosellbooks/	11.1k
22	I love books	https://www.facebook.com/groups/iluvbooks/	12.3k
23	Urban Author’s E- book club	https://www.facebook.com/groups/178147335598872/	11k
24	The Kindle Hub	https://www.facebook.com/groups/327660353939762/	11.1k
25	Kindle readers and authors	https://www.facebook.com/groups/337141432986476/	15.7k
26	Kindle Publishers	https://www.facebook.com/groups/512098985483106/	17k
27	The Facebook Book Club	https://www.facebook.com/groups/8211764644/	11k
28	Book marketing & review exchange	https://www.facebook.com/groups/bookmarketingandreviews/	35.3k
29	The Literary Lounge authors, writers, publishers, and illustrators	https://www.facebook.com/groups/135486133130440/	13.3k
30	Novelspot Readers	https://www.facebook.com/groups/NovelspotRecommendsbooks/	13.7k
31	All Things Books	https://www.facebook.com/groups/allthingsbooks/	17.6k
32	Kindle …	https://www.facebook.com/groups/acrebooks/	13.3k
33	Hot Reads	https://www.facebook.com/groups/429922670407471/	12.6k
34	The Book Nest	https://www.facebook.com/groups/booknest/	12.2k
35	Advertise your Book	https://www.facebook.com/groups/177830275661611/	10k
36	Author Promo and Book Sales Group	https://www.facebook.com/groups/147716185430164/	11.6k
37	Books that will free your mind.	https://www.facebook.com/groups/217829088277112/	16.9k
38	Book Promotion & Links	https://www.facebook.com/groups/303475983057542/	5k
39	HONEST KINDLE BOOK CLUB	https://www.facebook.com/groups/715699865117336/	6.5k
40	Kindle Book Sharing	https://www.facebook.com/groups/367069680033403/	6.3k
41	Aspiring Novelists	https://www.facebook.com/groups/aspiringnovelists/	6.6k
42	Indie Authors International	https://www.facebook.com/groups/160213917377540/	8.8k
43	Writer and Authors and Readers unite and rejoice	https://www.facebook.com/groups/476236565733229/	8.8k
44	The Writers Connection	https://www.facebook.com/groups/WritersConnection/	7.6k
45	PROMOTE YOUR BOOK	https://www.facebook.com/groups/201856639887358/	7.5k
46	Amazon Kindle/eBook Readers UK/Europe/Asia/Africa/Elsewhere	https://www.facebook.com/groups/129536203777715/	9.6k
47	Amazon book and ebook readers	https://www.facebook.com/groups/419504758165134/	16.4k
48	Reviewers Roundup	https://www.facebook.com/groups/ReviewersRoundup/	13.5k
49	Author Meeting Place	https://www.facebook.com/groups/authormeetingplace/	4.4k
50	Support An Author	https://www.facebook.com/groups/supportanauthor/	7k

What about my book description?

I mentioned earlier that in preparation for my BookBlow sale, I removed the ENT promo text from my Amazon book description (and Kobo and Smashwords). Here’s the thing – this appears to have actually had a negative impact on my sales. Seriously. You’ll understand more in the next section.

Results

So, after all of that, you have to be desperate to know how many copies of my pretty, little bridge troll I sold, and how much profit I made, through my BookBlow promotion.

0

Yep, seriously. For the whole 24-hour period after the first tweets of my BookBlow promotion, I sold a grand total of zero copies of my pretty, little bridge troll.

W.T.F !!!

An endless series of “WTF” statements…..

What lessons can we, should we, learn from this complete debacle? My personal choice – what I assumed from the beginning:

1. Tweet spamming doesn’t sell books. Everyone knows this, as far as I’m concerned, I just proved it. My Twitter follow list is full of authors, and I assume so are those of the Twitter accounts the advertisers use.
2. Facebook was – past-tense – a great place to promote your wares, but this is (apparently) no longer true. The grapevine says Facebook’s no longer a social network, but is now just a sales machine for people who aren’t you or me. Everything’s geared towards Facebook helping people sell things when they pay Facebook, which I didn’t, and I doubt would work anyway. Word is, Google+ is the new place to go. I’ll test that later.

On Pimping a Bridge Troll to ENT with a $20 Tithe

My blow spew titles are getting weirder and weirder, which is OK with me. So here’s the deal. On Wednesday 24th June 2015 I ran a promotion with Ereader News Today. I’m running a few promos for my pretty, little bridge troll, Equivocal Destines, over the next few months, and ENT is the first. Why ENT? Because the word across the various blogs is that ENT is 1 of only 2 promo sites that reliably produce positive results – ie that actually make you more in sales than the promo costs you. I’ll be trying out some others too (I already have another scheduled) but ENT is an excellent place to start.

First, a word about my Amazon ranking

I recently organised and went on my honeymoon. In Equivocal Destines, I proposed to my girlfriend Paulina, who was, lets say, quite surprised to see my proposal in print when my paperback copies arrived – weeks after I published it. Anyway, so she said yes and we went to Crete. Check out my Twitter feed for dumb ego-posts from there. The point is, while doing all of this, I pretty much ignored my book, sales plummetted and its ranking nosedived. I regret nothing – some things are more important than sales and rankings.

Feel free to skip these points as they’re in my table below.

• Historically-speaking, my ranking has been hovering around 150-200k.
• After 1-1.5 months when I had more important things to do, with a grand total of about 3 sales (1 to a student, I found out later) my ranking had dropped to 900k.
• I organised my ENT promotion and manually dropped my price on Amazon to 99c. At the same time I updated the description with info about my promo and promo price.
• A day later I sold a single copy. My ranking went up to somewhere around 400k. I don’t remember exactly.
• On Sunday and I sold 1 copy (the price was already 99c) and my ranking jumped again to just under 150k.
• I sold a copy on Monday (in the UK) but the money didn’t appear on the KDP report until Tuesday. In the 12 hours between KDP reporting the sale and the money, my ranking dropped from 150k to 260k, most of that overnight. Beware – it seems that sales in the ‘other’ markets don’t help your ranking in the main store at all. My rank at amazon.co.uk dropped to under 100k though. My ranking is always better at amazon.co.uk. Check out my blog on that topic for my reasons why.
• On the day before my promotion (Tuesday), I sold a copy in the main store. My rank dropped from just north of 300k to 157k.

That’s what’s happening before my promotion. The ranking jumps up a lot with single-unit sales. Check out my older blog spew on my thoughts about Amazon’s ranking system to see why I think this is the case.

My ENT tasks

I actually did very little to promote this sale. As mentioned above, I had more important things on my mind.

Date	Action	Result
Weeks ago	Completed the form to advertise Equivocal Destines on ENT. It’s a standard, 99c promo which cost $20.	The promo was approved a week or 2 later.
Last week	Updated the blurb / synopsis at KDP, Createspace and Kobo to be more positive and proactive. See my blog spew on the topic.	Approved and visible a day later on Amazon. Instantly updated on Kobo.
Fri 19th	Updated the blurb / synopsis at KDP, Createspace and Kobo to include a notice about my ENT sale. I made th font red on CreateSpace and bigger on both CreateSpace and KDP. Kobo doesn’t seem to allow any pretty formatting.	Approved and visible a day later on Amazon. Instantly updated on Kobo.
Fri 19th	Manually reduced the price on KDP to 99c and adjusted to x.99 across all markets.	Approved and visible a day later.
Fri 19th	Setup promotional prices on Kobo for the 24th and adjusted to x.99 across all markets.	This worked as expected, and Kobo’s system of setting up promo prices is actually very cool. I didn’t sell any copies on Kobo, but ENT was only promoting my Amazon link, so I didn’t expect to.
Sat 20th	Sent out the 1st of (hopefully) many polite promotional tweets with an attached image of the book cover, which will be auto-spammed onto Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. My #ereadernewstoda #99cents promo is Wed 24th, but the discount’s up now! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SZ63XY6 #AHAprogram #IARTG	Yep, it happened. der
Sat 20th	Pinned my spammed tweet on Twitter and Facebook.	Impressions = 581 Total engagements = 8 Retweets = 4 Favorites = 2 Hashtag clicks = 1 Detail expands = 1
Sat 20th	emailed my (puny) mailing list about a blog post and added an extra section to the bottom about this promo.	This will have no effect what-so-ever since my mailing list is so new, but it’s a good habit to get into.
Sat 20th	Posted about Fallen Victors to the “Promoting OTHER Authors’ Books” thread athttp://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors	This has nothing to do with my promo. I just saw the thread and thought it was a nice idea.
Sat 20th	Posted to the “only 99c” thread at http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors: My pretty, little bridge troll’s having an Ereader News Today sale this Wednesday, but I’ve already manually reduced the price so you can grab it for 99c now. [[ASIN:B00SZ63XY6 Equivocal Destines (Upheaving Nidola Book 1)]] Here’s the first part of the blurb, so I don’t waste too much space in this thread:	I can’t find a way of verifying if this actually did anything. There’s no read counter and you can’t enter custom URLs based on short links that you can track.
Sat 20th	Added a thread to “The Book Bazar” http://www.kboards.com/index.php/board,42.0.html then quickly fixed it because I forgot to add a direct URL, again. [b]My pretty, little bridge troll, [color=navy]Equivocal Destines[/color] ([url]http://authl.it/B00SZ63XY6?d[/url]), is discounted to [color=red]99c[/color] until Wednesday 24th June.[/b] [table][tr][td]In a world plagued by hordes warped by magic into creatures hell-bent on the destruction of mankind, where [i]elemental magic[/i] holds sway and determines your lot in life, Taal is [i]of the water[/i], which should assure him a place among the revered rudas, protecting his city and assuring him the wealth it bestows. But centuries ago, it was a water wizard who caused [i]The Change[/i] that precipitated all of the disasters that followed, and now, being a water wizard is the lowest of the low. With dreams much bigger than life in Takelberorl will allow a lowly water-boy, Taal sets out on a journey that will change his world forever. In reality, he’s a typical, 16yo boy who’s only following the pretty girl, but those electric-blue eyes (and said pretty girl’s older brother) just won’t let up on the whole Destiny thing. From the battle-scarred plains that surround the place of his birth, through regal cities and across pristine mountain wildernesses full of mysterious forces, Taal and his makeshift band of renegades search valiantly in a quest to unmask the evil forces conspiring to annihilate all races. Taking heart-pounding risks and suffering tumultuous trials, the team experiences both horrific battles and unexpected delights. Powerfully descriptive and yet lyrically poignant, Clarke reveals the land of Nidola as one of not only diverse wonders and startling beauty, but also exposes a world where seemingly benign occurrences have often surprising and even deep meaning. The radiant and dynamic characters transverse exquisite landscapes that are both hauntingly beautiful and fiendishly dangerous. Adventurous and exciting, yet thought-provoking and memorable, Taal’s adventure transports the reader to a unique place that won’t soon be forgotten. [i]Universally agreed – and reviewed – as highly unique and entertaining, with deep and well-developed characters, Equivocal Destines is an excellent choice for anyone looking for something different. There’s elves and dwarves; swords, magic and action, but all set in a cohesive world unlike any other, with a full cast of original creatures, instead of relying on the stock fairytale cliches of dragons, warewolves and vampires. Professionally-written, proofread and edited, with appropriately-themed cover art worthy of store shelves, Equivocal Destines is a quality read that shouldn’t disappoint.[/i][/td][td][img]https://raymondclarkeauthor.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/equivocal_destines_cover_for_kindle.jpg?h=300,w=150[/img][/td][/tr][/table]	203 Views This got merged with the post I made for a previous, free promo. That, I guess, sort of killed it as it had a bad subject line. Anyway, by the time I’m writing this, it’s on page 7. It got 203 views, but those are shared with the previous promo.

My Results

The results of my ENT promo were generally positive, and I definitely recommend ENT to any other authors who’re looking for advertising ideas / locales. There’s a couple of caveats, as always:

• ENT says on their site that they’re most successful with thrillers and romance titles, and this is what I found too.
• I’m thinking (but can’t confirm) that where your book lists in their email out is very important. My book was #8 of 14, which isn’t a very good placement. Couple that with my almost non-existent placement on their website, which is part of the package, and I’m thinking I was modestly hamstrung by bad placement. I think they do a first-come, first-served method of choosing the listing order, so book your promo early. I had trouble even finding my book on their site, which says a great deal about late setups.

So here’s my results, in painstaking detail. It includes the sales listed in the notes above. I’ve included my ranking at random points along the way to give you all an idea of efficacy – in the fantasy genre – but this list is based on whenever I happened to check, which I did mostly to compile this list.

Time & Day	Cumulative Sales Totals	Sales Ranking	Notes
June 17th	0 sales for 1 month	900k	I had more important things to worry about – my wedding and honeymoon. The point is, if you don’t advertise (for any reason, legitimate or not), your sales and ranking will suffer.
June 18th	0 sales for 1 month	900k	I organised the ENT sale earlier but only manually changed the price on June 18th, in preparation for the sale on the 24th (Amazon warns you that their changes can take 5 days to propagate, but in practice it always updates within a few hours.
June 19th	1	approx. 400k
June 21st	2	approx. 150k
June 22nd	3	approx. 260k	This sale was in amazon.co.uk so didn’t help my amazon.com ranking at all. Lesson re-learned!
June 23rd	4	approx. 157k
Wed 24th June	23	29,442
Wed 24th June	24	16,402
Wed 24th June	25	14,300
Thu 25th	29	14,852
Thu 25th	32	12,349
Thu 25th	32 but later	11,854
Thu 25th	33	11,902
Thu 25th	36	12,352
Thu 25th @ 1:30pm	36	16,142
Thu 25th @ 3pm	36	21,804
Thu 25th @ 4:50pm	36	22,562
Thu 25th @ 11pm	36	24,838

One final thought on ENT’s sales. I must admit I was expecting a dramatic increase in sales (which I saw) and a more parabolic decrease in sales over 3 or maybe 4 days (which didn’t happen). I don’t know about you, but I often check my ENT emails a few days after I receive them and possibly buy a book later. Yep, I’ve used ENT as a customer too. I was expecting a lot of other subscribers to buy books over a few days, but I didn’t realistically see it. I have to assume either people think the book won’t still be on sale in 3 days or there’s just so many good books that most people don’t bother with anything but the latest email. Either way, factor this into your marketing plan.

How do we judge success?

What’s your goal from a marketing campaign? What’s mine? Here’s my thoughts.

Making a profit

If my goal was to make an immediate profit, I failed. I spent $20 and made about $15, depending on whether or not you count the before and after sales. I do.

Increasing visibility

If my goal was to increase the general visibility of my book so that potential customers can see it on Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” list, then I also failed, sort of.

My list was, I think, 5 pages long. Now it’s 8 pages long. So there’s more books on my list. I’m linked to a wider selection of titles. I checked though, these books appear on my list, but I don’t appear on any of their lists, so my book’s still invisible. How is this possible? Because not enough people have bought my book yet. The correlation has to be strong in 2 directions to be useful, or at least 1, but the other direction. 100 people bought Book X and a couple of those people bought my book, so Book X is on my list, but with only 2 people buying mine, my book’s not on Book X’s list, yet.

Let’s not be too cynical about this though. Do any of you really expect a single round of advertising to catapult your book to stardom? Yes? Then you’re an idiot! This is round 1 of a long process for me, and I’m confident that it’ll end in success, but it’s not here yet. I really do believe that ENT will help my book, but in the long run.

Bragging rights

What about bragging rights as a goal? If this is the case, then I’m a jackpot winner. Check this one out. There’s my novel, Equivocal Destines, on the same page as all of the Harry Potter novels. How awesome is that? It was only there for a few hours, and it’s long gone now, but I get those bragging rights forever with this (non-photoshopped) screen scrape.

Conclusion

ENT is a winner. Less so if your genre’s fantasy, more so if it’s thrillers or romance (see my next post in a few days for details) but it’s definitely worth your 20 bucks, in my humble opinion.

Catapulting Bridge Trolls onto Foreign Soils: Destination Kobo

My first novel, Equivocal Destines, has been available on Amazon for 4 months. I originally signed up to the Kindle Select program which gave Amazon exclusivity for 90 days. As this exclusive period has now ended, I’m belatedly adding my book to the other main sales channels. The first one of these, Kobo, has turned out to be a very different process to Amazon, which has made me think about writing a blog post on my experience with each sales channel.

Here’s my little bridge troll on Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/ebook/equivocal-destines

First up, a word about Smashwords

Strangely, to talk about Kobo, I first have to talk about Smashwords. You see, Smashwords appears to be an excellent, trustworthy, online, ebook store with credibility and a great feature that the others lack – if you publish to Smashwords, they’ll distribute your novel to (almost) all of the other sales channels. Excellent, right? IMHO, yes and no. If you’re technophobe, lazy or busy, definitely do this. The problem is, they take a 10% cut of your sales for the privilege. Now, I imagine for most authors this is a price well worth paying, but I’m a little different/weird in that I’m comfortable formatting ebooks and I’m willing to spend the time doing it. This means that I can get 10% more money by publishing my book to all of the other main sales channels separately. I’m still going to make use of Smashwords for their direct sales and the minor channels (which aren’t worth me spending too much time on) but I’ll do the main ones myself. This includes Kobo.

How does the Kobo publishing process compare to Amazon?

Let’s compare Kobo to the 800 pound gorilla in the room, Amazon. Smashwords doesn’t ship to Amazon unless your book becomes very popular  (because Amazon doesn’t supply an automated transfer system, it’s not Smashwords’ fault) so most indie authors are going to want to publish directly to Amazon anyway.

Amazon’s publishing process is very slick and highly automated. You follow the prompts, upload your cover image and your complete document, and Amazon does the rest. I found it to be fast, painless and accurate. The process to look maybe a day, including Amazon’s processing time. It took me a lot longer to format my book according to Amazon’s template document, but that’s expected.

Kobo uses a different system which appears to be based on a different philosophy. They still have a system where you upload your cover image and source text but it then opens in a web-based editor so you can edit the document online. I found the conversion process to be highly inaccurate and the online editor clownish and immature. Please keep in mind that I’ve only tried this with one source file so I can’t realistically speak with any authority, yet. I will say though that my source document uploaded perfectly fine to Amazon and is designed according to Smashwords’ excellent style guide.

I checked out Kobo’s Content Conversion Guidelines (http://download.kobobooks.com/learnmore/writinglife/KWL-Content-Conversion-Guidelines.pdf) and found the document to be a waste of time. Seriously, use Smashwords’ formatting book. It’s infinitely better.

The online editor is also very limited in its options, and if you use it your book will probably end up looking simple and maybe even amateurish. I’m wondering if this is deliberate. Maybe Kobo hardware has limited display options. I don’t know. I highly recommend doing all formatting in Word then simplifying as necessary to get Kobo’s system to accept it. Or, better yet, find a separate .epub creator and upload the finished product, bypassing Kobo’s frustrating system completely. I’ll do this next time. Amazon doesn’t let you do that – they use .mobi files, but you can’t upload those there either.

---

2 days after publishing to Kobo, I’m still having problems. I found the title of my book seris  – Upheaving Nidola – keeps getting changed to “Up heaving Nidola”, which could be an auto-spellchecking problem which I can’t figure out how to turn off, but the publication year – 2015 – is also changed to “201 5” in 3 places on the copyright page. These types of errors shouldn’t happen. I’ve confirmed my source document is correct and contains no hidden formatting to make this happen, so it’s just a Kobo problem.

I hate Kobo!

---

Once the book content is uploaded, things change dramatically. My limited experience so far shows that Kobo is more flexible and fair on pricing and distribution. Kobo gives me 70% of the sale price for all books sold in all regions that they sell to. Amazon has more local markets, but this is the Internet where anyone can buy anything from anywhere so I don’t see that as too important.

Most importantly for me, Kobo is much more reasonable on payment. I am Australian but I live in Poland. My only option for payment from Amazon is an expensive cheque sent by mail in US dollars. Amazon applies an $8 processing fee to the cheque and the process seems to be very slow and cumbersome. Kobo, by contrast will send the money directly to my Polish bank account in Euros. Simple and effective.

I already prefer Kobo.

---

Update 1 – Fri 29th May 2015

I emailed Kobo about my problem with their system. I got this reply:

Hello Raymond,

Thank you for getting in touch with us.

Our instant preview function is relatively new and we are still working out some of the kinks. Currently, it can take a few days for updates to go through to the instant preview, although updates are reflected in the actual file within a few hours of make the changes.

My sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

Best,
Vanessa

OK, so, long story short, I was inadvertently using their systems incorrectly because they failed to inform their authors that the Preview function has a delay. I can live with that. I really appreciate the speed and actual usefulness of their email-based customer support. I worked in IT back in Australia so I can assure you of this simple fact – every system will eventually fail / have a problem. What’s most important is the quality of the customer service when this inevitable problem rears its ugly head.

I appreciate Kobo’s customer support now. My simple experience was waaaay more positive than what I naively assume I’d get from Amazon.

On Unsupported 99c Promos

A week or so ago I ran my next marketing experiment for my novel Equivocal Destines. My previous 2 experiments were with free promos. Having judged them worse than useless, but actually counter-productive, I’ve moved on to 99c promos. Michael Bacera pointed out a piece of sagely wisdom to me a while ago, which is effectively that free promos are going out of fashion, presumably, because they don’t provide a marketing boost, sales boost or even a reviews boost for your book. My research has shown they actively decrease the popularity of your book by reducing your Amazon ranking. After all, while you’re giving away copies (which don’t result in reviews or post-giveaway sales) you’re not selling copies, so your ranking plummets. Good advice. So, what about 99c?

Well, here’s where I ran into a huge problem. It turns out Amazon has no intention of helping me out here. I’ve removed my book from the Kindle Select program because of its demand for exclusivity. I’d rather also be allowed to sell my book on Smashwords, Apple, Google, etc than use Amazon’s promo infrastructure and rent copies. Maybe it’ll work out badly, but that’s my next experiment. Without Kindle Select, there’s no option within the system to run any promos at all. I was left with the choice of doing it manually, so I did.

1. I reduced the price to 99c, manually.
2. I updated the text of my Book Description with bolded text saying it was discounted, etc.

The problem is, all these manual changes do nothing to promote the promo. If I could use Kindle Select’s mechanisms, Amazon would put in a bit of effort and all those promo websites would scan and find it. No such luck for me, I was on my own. So here’s what I did to advertise. It’s a copy of my previous promo task list, but updated, and looks really pathetic. My self-imposed remit was to not spend any money though, which severely limited my choices.

When	What I Did	How Effective It Was
Sunday	Update book and release 2nd Edition at 99c	Went live within 4 hours
Sunday	Write  blog post bout the promo: https://raymondclarkeauthor.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/a-rare-sales-pitch/	A couple of people viewed it
Sunday	Tweeted & Facebooked the blog post	A couple of retweets and views
Sunday	I added a comment to the “Under $3.00 Kindle downloads” thread on http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/	It got swamped out quickly
Sunday	I added a forum post to http://www.amazon.com/forum/meet%20our%20authors/	This forum is so messy it’s impossible to find anything. I doubt anyone checks it and clicks through to purchase.
Sunday	Added a thread to “The Book Bazar” http://www.kboards.com/index.php/board,42.0.html	http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,213463.0.html 36 views in the first day It was read about 60 times by the end. I can’t guess if it led to any sales because there’s no timing correlation, but it could only be 1 or 2, max.
Sunday	Confirmed I’m still registered at indiebookdiscovery.com	Yep, it’s still there, but there’s no way to update the profile to say “On Promo” or anything, which is a deliberate design choice of theirs that I actually like (read their info) so what more could I do.
Sunday	I searched Twitter for “book suggestions” and replied to every tweet I could find where someone was asking for a book suggestion and I thought they might be interested.	Max 1 sale. 1 person replied, positively. When the book is free, this seems very effective, but with a 99c promotion, this was very ineffective. My guess is this netted me 1 or 2 sales, for maybe 30-40 tweets. It also took a long time to do it nicely, reply to anyone (almost no-one) who replied to me, etc.
Monday	Sent out a few funny advertising tweets with hashtags: #IARTG, #BookBoost as well as the usual #RT, #free, #fantasy, #99cents, #99CentsKindle, #Amazon	The free retweeters seem to only retweet once a day
Monday	Fixed my forum post at “The Book Bazar” http://www.kboards.com/index.php/board,42.0.html because I, stupidly, forgot to add a direct authl.it link	It had 36 views at the time of the change but had generated max 1 sale.
Monday	Emiled http://www.authorjd.com/aha-program/ for a free tweet promo to 250k.	This tweets to: http://www.bookpromo.in/   @Ebookpromoters   Cheapest deal is $9.99 http://www.bookpromo.in/   @Reviewmyebook http://www.bookpromo.in/   @Bookblows https://www.facebook.com/Mybookoftheday/info   @Book_oftheday http://www.bookpromo.in/   @Bookblow @Jdshouts http://enasreviews.blogspot.in/   @Enasreviews   3-5 star reviews for $19.99 @Bookdeal01_my @Bookdeal02_my @Bookdeal03_my More on this guy after the table! I had 2 sales the day of his tweets.
Monday	emailed ebookpromoters@gmail.com from https://www.facebook.com/Mybookoftheday/info to see if they’ll consider advertising my book	I heard nothing. @book_ofTheDay tweeted my book out on Friday 1st May to 42k, but this isn’t the same group. This came from @Jdshouts (see above). Friday saw 2 sales.
Monday	Filled in the form at http://www.bookpromo.in/p/about-us.html for a free tweet.	@ebookpromoters @Reviewmyebook @BookBlows @BookBlow free Tweets to 151k USE – Upload a message on http://www.bookpromo.in/p/about-us.html
Tuesday	Submitted an application to ENT	It was rejected, a week later. As I suspected, I was too late in applying.
Tuesday	Posted an entry to http://www.indiesunlimited.com/category/indies-unlimited/thrifty-thursday/	I heard nothing
	I didn’t bother rebranding all of my profiles.	It achieved nothing during my previous 2, free giveaways, so it just seems a waste of time. None-the-less, I should have put together a sort of banner to attach to tweets and blog posts.
	Infrequent Twitter and Facebook spamming.	To be honest, I really didn’t have the heart to do this much. It just doesn’t seem effective either. I gave it  lighthearted try, but achieved nothing.
	I checked in on the retweeting retweeting accounts and tailored my tweets to use the better ones. This basically means adding #IARTG, #RT and anything else useful to tweets.	This generated a lot of retweets which were potentially seen by over 100k people, but generated no sales. This shouldn’t be surprising since most of the recipients were probably other authors.
	I checked a bunch of sites that automatically scan Amazon for free books.	Yes, this one includes the word “free”, so I didn’t expect my book to be listed, and it wasn’t. I also searched for sites that list discounted books, but came up with nothing. This method’s only useful for free books.

A quick note about @Jdshouts. I found him (he found me) on Twitter and offered free advertising of any book. All you have to do is ask. Then his website says you should start by buying the pre-release of his book and email him the proof of sale. This sounded really dodgy to me, and possibly a bit unethical, but a test’s a test so I diligently emailed him, following all of his rules, which included only mentioning his book in the email, not actually buying it. I expected nothing back, but true to his word, he did tweet my book out to 250k or so people over 10 accounts, some of them very well-known. I was surprised, but pleasantly so. Not dodgy at all.

His help gave me a very important piece of information too. As my table above shows, I ended up with 2 sales the day of his 10 tweets. ummm… Twitter spamming isn’t effective. I’m really grateful to @Jdshouts for the help. I just wish it had been more effective.

I might even consider buying the pre-release of his book as it sort of sounds interesting. Now that I’m in no way bound or obligated, I’ll give it another look. The couple of grammar mistakes on his website though don’t bode well for the book though.

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So, what were my results. At this point, I’d usually add a table breaking down my sales by day and region, but they were so woeful that it’s not worth the effort. I sold 1 or 2 copies a day, which raised my Amazon ranking from 200-250k to round 100k on amazon.com and 80-90k om amazon.co.uk, and achieved SFA else. It was a complete washout.

Now, I guess I could have put a lot more effort into the advertising side of things, but it really was a disheartening experience (as I sort of expected it to be) with a fair amount of work and nothing to show for it. I simply don’t think free advertising’s effective in any format or context.

My next experiment will be with paid advertising. There’s some more permutations of free that I could try, but I doubt they’ll achieve anything more than this one.

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My Cumulative, Take-Home Advice

1. Free promos in all their forms are detrimental to your sales efforts. See all of my recent posts for my proof.
2. Kindle Select is a great idea, but implemented badly, because it restricts the author and is therefore unfair. It’s not unfair of Amazon to offer it, but it’s unfair to you if you use it. (Keep in mind, as far as I know, Apple has a similarly restrictive policy where they force you to register a piece of Apple hardware with your account to sell your books in their market, so Amazon’s not alone in their restrictive tactics. I think Smashwords can effectively get you round this pointless limitation by publishing to Apple on your behalf. More on this in a week or 2.)
3. Twitter advertising is pointless. It’s easy to put a tweet in front of 250k people, but results in nothing. This shouldn’t be surprising since most of those 250k users are probably also other authors hoping to use those same sales channels to sell their books.
4. Banner ads are a waste of time. End of story.
5. Pretty much all forms of free advertising out there may be well-intentioned, very nice and ethical, but they’re bound to be ineffective with so many books flooding the market.

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On Cloned Bridge Trolls and Irregular Heartbeats

Anyone interested in a quickie? Well, probably not.

Here’s one a lot of (indie) authors may have not thought of. Amazon.com isn’t Amazon. They’re very different beasts. Let me give you my latest data up front. As always, it’s based on my novel, Equivocal Destines.

Site	Reviews	Amazon Best Sellers Rank	Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
www.amazon.com	5	#353,322	19
www.amazon.com.au	0	#278,653 Paid in Kindle Store #3082 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Epic #7327 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure	21
www.amazon.de	0	#477.161	76
www.amazon.ca	1	#244,849	19 – exactly the same list as amazon.com!
www.amazon.co.uk	1	#70,825 Paid in Kindle Store #92 in Kindle Store > Books > Children’s eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Scary Stories > Fantasy & Magic > Sword & Sorcery	57
All other Amazon stores		no data	no data

Well… Any questions? I’m obviously very proud of my sub-sub-sub-sub-genre ranking of 92 in the UK, although I hope my other rankings’ll increase a lot sometime soon too. I can tell from my reports that I’ve sold a disproportionate number of copies in the UK. Here’s my sales numbers, listed as percentages. Any market not listed has generated 0 sales.

Market	Free %	Paid %
Amazon.com.au	4.5	6
Amazon.com	80.9	57.5
Amazon.de	2.5	3
Amazon.es	0.3	0
Amazon.co.uk	9	27.2
Amazon.in	0.3	0
Amazon.ca	1.9	6
Amazon.co.jp	0.3	0

So, clearly amazon.com generates the most sales – both free and paid – it’s also a much, much larger market. In reality, 400-500 hundred million. In theory, billions. The UK, with it’s, what, 60 million, is a smaller market with fewer overall sales so my sales as a percentage of that market, are much higher.

As an aside, my first table strongly implies that people in Germany and the UK read a lot more books.

People, don’t just focus on American customers on amazon.com. It looks like you might get more traction focussing equally on the UK, and even Germany where practically everyone under 30 speaks a serviceable level of English (of course, my German friends dispute this generalisation).

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Seriously, one day I’m going to have to write a blog post on the rationale behind my ridiculous naming ideas.

On Prematurely Spawning Forth New Bridge Trolls

I apologise in advance for this long, rambling mess, but it’s an important, and often discussed topic.

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Writing  novel is both much easier than you think and much harder. I have so many people tell me that putting 80k words on paper would be too big a challenge while most people seem to think that coming up with a winning idea isn’t that much of  problem. The opposite is actually true. Everyone has a book inside them, or so the oft repeated phrase goes, but most of them shouldn’t ever try.

I’m a (drum roll please) published author, which is a phrase bandied about on Twitter like it’s in some way related to winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Not only am I a writer, but I’m also published, which is a distinction most writers never attain. Well, I called myself an aspiring writer until I published, and only now do I dare to call myself a writer. I hope to add successful to that label later.

Here’s the point. Writing is easy. Type words into a keyboard. Good words? Excellent. Bad words? Please stop embarrassing yourself. Acceptable words that are in desperate need of good editing? Good enough! What’s difficult isn’t the writing, it’s the planning.

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Now that I’m published, I get people asking me for advice on writing. Like I’m suddenly, miraculously, some sort of expert. I’m not. Most recently, my sister send me the alpha of the beginning of her work-in-progress.

My sister wanted to know a single, important thing:

• Does her story have potential?

Wrong question. I can’t answer my sister’s question based on the alpha she sent me. It’s just not complete enough yet. And anyway, how the hell would I know? Here’s a few better questions:

• Does the story, as presented so far, seem interesting and/or compelling?
• Is it cliche or is it in some way unique?
• Does it have enough conflict to form a full story?
• Does the author seem to have enough talent to pull it off?

Answering these questions, I’ll say that my sister should continue working on her story and (in my humble opinion) I think it could turn into a good book. With that in mind, (I’m sorry to say this, but) my sister represents an excellent case of what not to do when writing a novel. Let me explain.

1. She sent me the alpha text. It’s 16 pages long. It has a few problems:
   1. There’s basic spelling mistakes throughout. Sure, it’s an alpha, but F7 is a pretty simple button to find.
   2. There’s a bunch of comments saying things like “How will character A’s presence affect character B?” We’re talking about main characters here so how can this question not have been answered yet. More on this in minute. This is the important bit.
   3. The document doesn’t even include half of the names. You need the names up front. The names help define the characters, cities, rivers, etc. If you don’t know the name, you don’t understand the character/thing.
   4. Chapter 3 doesn’t end. Instead, there’s a note saying “To be continued”. It then goes on to chapters 4 through 7. If she hasn’t finished chapter 3 I’m not going to continue reading. I’m not trying to be an arrogant douchebag, she’s just spoiling the story for the alpha reader. How can I evaluate an incomplete storyline?
2. She sent me a map in .odg format. How many people can open that? As it happens, I can, but only by accident. .gif/.jpeg/.png please. It’s a simple thing, but makes a big difference to the average tech-illiterate. My tablet can’t open that file even when my laptop can.
3. She sent me an 86 page planning document. Seriously. Problems:
   1. As an alpha reader, I don’t need it.
   2. As an alpha reader, I shouldn’t see it.
   3. It’s a template from some website which is almost entirely empty anyway. This document is my main concern, and what I plan to talk about from now on.

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So, my sister’s writing  novel. Excellent. Will it be good? No idea, but potentially, yes. All of the problems I wrote about above are completely irrelevant. I promise you that my novel, Equivocal Destines, looked exactly like that for a long time. So why complain about these very normal, and very temporary problems in a public blog post? How can others actually benefit from this? To put it simply, polish the alpha into a beta before you show it to anyone.

Here’s the thing…

The problem is my sister probbly has too little confidence in her writing, but she should. Her idea is fairly unique, her descriptions, when included are clear, her characters interesting so far. Who knows if she has talent (probably, yes) but people, please, ditch the formality, the planning templates, the special writing programs, and all that junk. Put words on paper (as my sister’s done) and get the idea down – this is most important – but don’t let all the other stuff get in the way, and don’t seek confirmation until you have something confirmation-ready.

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When I first moved to Poland (I always find an excuse to mention that) and started telling people I was working on  novel, I had 30 of these conversations:

ME: I’m planning a novel

THEM: How much have you written?

ME: Nothing, I’m still planning it.

THEM: How long have you been planning it.

ME: A few months.

THEM: That’s stupid. Just start writing. That’s a better idea.

No, it’s most certainly not a good idea, but neither is endless planning. I have a planning document for Equivocal Destines that’s currently 49 A4 pages long. When I started writing the novel it was about 20 pages long. It’s growing with the novel as I add ideas while writing. I have to go back and update my plan at lest weekly.

For context, the book series, Upheaving Nidola, of which Equivocal Destines is book 1 will end up 5 books long. I’ve got character and various other profiles and at the end, 2 separate plans for the plot:

1. My plot outline is very high level, and only 1 page long. It lists everywhere the characters go, who meets whom and when, how to fix the grand problem, etc. But not much else. Everything else is details.
2. My story outline is broken up by book:
   1. The story outline for book 1 (completed and on sale) is 6 pages of bullet points.
   2. The story outline for book 2 (currently in progress) is 5 pages long and growing as I write.
   3. The story outline for book 3 is currently only 1 page long and only includes the specific plot points that I have to hit in a certain way because of what I’ve already written in books 1 and 2.
   4. The story outline for books 4-5 are skeletons.

OK, so more of me talking about me, gain. What’s the point? I have a high level outline and 20+ pages of bullet-point detail about the characters in a 4-column table (including the critical characters who don’t appear in books 1 and 2) but I haven’t wasted months on planning things in such minute detail that I have no room for creativity.

Conversely, I have a plan! Without any sort of high level plan, how can you get your characters to where they need to be at each state of the story? Do you even know where they need to go?

You’re probably going to end up having to rewrite (maybe big) parts of your story (a few times) anyway, as you come up with cool new ideas while you write, but if you have a broad framework and a more detailed plan for it, then you know where and how to be creative and how to slot your new ideas into what you already have.

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1. Step 1 – Write a high-level plan so you know what has to happen, but don’t go into any more detail than you need to.
2. Step 2 – Figure out who has to do what. Build mental images and make them real. Not on paper, but to you. Names help.
3. Step 3 – Write the damned thing, at least to the point that other people can read it without your private notes, understand it, and give you useful, critical feedback.

You have to have confidence in your work, first and foremost, and flesh it out to the point that others can begin to enjoy it. Then let others tear it to shreds so you can improve it. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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On (Cryptographically) Shackling Bridge Trolls

I’ve been having a bit of an internal debate recently about the dreaded D-word (whispers “DRM”). I’m talking about Digital Rights Management, which is a fancy name for various different flavours of encrypting your digital words so people who get (buy, lease, borrow) copies can’t then go on to copy, print or otherwise redistribute them. Is this necessary or inherently evil? I’ve heard both sides of the debate.

Now, I’m a tech guy. Seriously, an actual tech guy. I worked as a Network Administrator back in Australia before moving to Poland and teaching business English. I’m Cisco certified and I have a decade of experience working in various IT departments it real, paying jobs. What this means is that, irrespective of my being an author, I actually, seriously know what I’m talking about with DRM. Why am I currently so vigorously pumping my ego? Because it’s useful for my (10) readers to know that what I’m about to say is the meandering thoughts of someone whose  meandering thoughts are worth listening to.

What is DRM?

Digital Rights Management, as I said above, is just encryption for your book (movie, song or any other digital copy). The goal is simple, to stop unauthorised copying, either digitally or onto paper or whatever.

How does it work? Let’s not go into details because every system works differently anyway. The methods are broadly the same and the goals are exactly the same.
The infrastructure provider (Amazon, Apple, Google, maybe Smashwords, etc) get the free text version of your masterpiece from you.

Note 1 – if you email a copy to anyone, all of your DRM is automatically dead. If you send a copy to the infrastructure provider over an unsecured network, all of your DRM is dead. If someone steals your laptop… you get the idea. The DRM only starts working after Amazon encrypts it. They still have an unencrypted copy too, so if someone hacks Amazon, you’re boned.

Now that Amazon (or whoever) have your text/images, they package and encrypt all of this. They’ll use some sort of public or shared key cryptography. Usually, they have an encryption algorithm which uses a master password to encrypt the document and it can only be decrypted with a second password – not their master password. They then put a copy of this second password in every device that needs to be able to display the book (or whatever).

Note 2 – If anyone ever disassembles even one of these devices and gets that password, every book is automatically completely unprotected. Amazon’s licensing terms state specifically that they provide no warranty about the integrity of their DRM system at all. i.e. Amazon says they don’t provide any security against theft or anything in their DRM. It’s all for show. Why? Because if anyone gets that key, everything’s up for grabs, and Amazon’s got millions of copies of that key on millions of devices all over the world. Now, realistically, each device type will have a different key, and possibly every model of every device, but that makes little difference.

So how does this prevent copying? Well, basically, only their devices and software have the password, so only their devices can display the content, and their devices don’t have copy and print buttons. It’s as simple as that.

Note 3 – There’s nothing to stop some weirdo who clearly needs a girlfriend from, instead, spending a month diligently transcribing your masterpiece into a new document by the age-old method of read, type, read, type. The content has to be unencrypted at some point, to be usable to the end user and at this point it can still be copied, if painfully slowly. This, BTW, is why DRM is doomed to fail for movies.

Should you use DRM?

The short answer, in my humble opinion, is yes.

There’s nothing to stop a determined copyright-infringer from getting their greasy mitts on your work and disseminating it for free, or charging other people directly. DRM will only ever stop what I’ll call casual infringement. This is where the average Joe has your book and simply makes a copy for his friends, because, you know, why not? These are the people who don’t specifically want to break the law or to profit from your work, but just don’t feel like their friends should buy your work after they had to. It’s the equivalent of lending a book/DVD to a friend, in their mind, but it’s not because the friend won’t ever give it back. If you want to make a living from your writing, you need to keep a lid on casual copying. If you want people to respect your copyright, etc, you need to actually do something to stop it. After that, you can only hope but to be so popular that the professionals try hard to get copies of your works.

What about fairness to readers?

My book is currently available on Amazon and I’ve setup these options:

• Anyone who buys the paperback can have a Kindle edition for free.
• Anyone subscribing to Kindle Unlimited (or whatever) can rent it for free.
• I’ve already done 2 free giveaways.
• I’m planning a 99c promo for sometime soon.
• I use DRM.

I really do believe that more people reading my book is (for now at least) more important than my making money (in the short term) because it leads to more awareness (popularity) and will lead to more sales of book 2 or 3, etc. That doesn’t mean I should leave my book open to being abused however. If you want it, I applaud you and I’ll help you as much as I can (with the above list) but still do it the right way.

You respect my time and work and I’ll try hard to make it easy for you to access my book. You treat me badly and I’ll try to stop you from overly abusing my work. I don’t think it’s unethical to use DRM. I think it’s worse to charge $9.99 for the paperback and $8.99 for the Kindle edition. That’s just disrespecting the readers, DRM isn’t, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the reading (like region encoding in DVDs).

On Free Advertising, update 1

A week or so ago I did a 1-day, snap promo of my novel, Equivocal Destines. I then wrote this blog post detailing what I did.

https://raymondclarkeauthor.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/on-free-advertising/

It was a quick decision. I did it with about 2 days prep time (during which I was working in my real job so didn’t even have much time to set anything up. I was a bit late with what I did too. It was still a modest success though, and achieved its goal. If you’re wondering what the useful results are a week on, here it is.

Sales

Flat. As in, no change, up or down. Not good. It’s what I expected though.

Rentals

My book’s available under Kindle Unlimited for people to rent if they subscribe. I get paid if they read at least 10% and by coincidence, the amount I get paid’s really close to what I earn on a sale of a Kindle edition in a 70% zone.

Rentals are up almost 300%. Excellent news. Well, not really. See below.

Amazon ranking

I said above that my sales are flat (i.e. not going down) but that’s an average over the week. I had my sales earlier in the week and the rentals later in the week. This has basically proven to me that rentals don’t count towards your Amazon ranking (which is logical since Amazon doesn’t know yet if they’ll read 10% so they don’t know if I’ll get paid) so my Amazon ranking is slipping slower even while I’m making more money than I did before my flash promo. I’ve slipped from about 120k to 362k as I write this. Both of those numbers aren’t good (neither are my total sales) but I haven’t done any real/paid advertising at ll yet, so I’m not surprised. It’s also not relevant to this post.

My thoughts

@MichaelBacera on Twitter (who has a really interesting book coming out soon BTW, follow him) said something really important (and in hindsight, obvious) to me a while ago, which I hadn’t considered at all.

If you do a free book giveaway it gives you  good Amazon ranking in the Free Kindle section.

This doesn’t affect your ranking in the main Kindle store at all.

This is very important, and from now on I think I won’t do any free giveaways. They get the word out, but don’t actually lead to sales, so it’s  waste of time. Paid advertising will more likely lead to sales (off topic) but even that won’t affect your Amazon ranking, which is more important for future growth than a few extra sales anyway.

Give up on the free promos. Do 99c promos instead, and give up on the notion that you can get way with only free advertising. The market’s probably just too saturated, but that’s only speculation. My numbers though show that free promos haven’t helped me much.