Defining a winning strategy – update

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about defining a winning strategy. I laid out my ideas, and explained my thinking about pricing. I decided that today it was time for an update. (You can find the original post HERE if you haven’t read it.)

Some of you eagle eyed readers may have noticed that – contrary to my last post – from 1^st May the price of Only the Innocent and The Back Road both dropped to £0.99. You can check them both out by clicking the title links, but I thought I should explain what has happened.

This is an intrinsic part of my strategy, and not a change of heart!

I have to admit that after my last post, the temptation to drop the price of The Back Road to 99p did prove quite hard to resist, once I’d realised that only books that were either extremely well known or under £1 had much of a chance in the Amazon chart. But I did my sums, and I decided that 70% of £1.99 would overall bring me a better financial return than 35% of 99p – despite the much higher sales figure of books in the top 5. Quite how long I would have hung on to that stubborn resistance if my book had fallen out of the top 100, I don’t know – but fortunately for me, it didn’t. For any of you who aren’t aware, Amazon has two different royalty rates depending on the price of your book. The lower prices attract a 35% royalty, whilst anything over £1.49 is paid a 70% royalty (less a few pence for distribution costs).

So why are both books 99p now?

One result of maintaining the higher price has been that I have been selected for an Amazon promotion. There is a “100 books for under £2.99” promotion each month, and to be selected, a book has to have a price that Amazon can effectively reduce. They select the price point, so I waited with bated breath to find that they have reduced both The Back Road and Only the Innocent to £0.99.

The advantage of this promotion is that even though the price is reduced and my royalty is based on 99p, I still get 70% of that price. I was delighted that they agreed to do this for Only the Innocent as well as The Back Road, because to be honest I had decided that Only the Innocent was now an ‘old’ book, and had more or less stopped promoting it. The major discovery in all of this has been that the books really do sell each other – when The Back Road hit the number 2 spot, Only the Innocent raced up the charts to number 30.

The timing for the price reduction is good. The Back Road has been out for six weeks now, and has started to be mentioned in a few forums. It has been selected as one of the four “Books for May” in the Goodreads UK forum, and been awarded “A MUST READ” status by the reviewers. It’s had a few reviews on blogs – and great reviews on Amazon. However, I have to say that it’s been more difficult to generate buzz about the book than I would have expected. Much of this is down to the changing face of the forums.

When Only the Innocent was launched, I know that some of its success was down to lots of chatter on key forums – but it all feels a little different now. People used to chat a lot, get to know each other, buy each other’s books. Now it seems that most people just post their promo and move onto the next thread where they can post exactly the same thing. I was suckered in to doing something similar – it seemed the way to go. But it’s not particularly effective, because few people are reading what other people post.

As a result, yesterday I set up my own discussion group on Goodreads, and there are already 41 members. We can chat about books, and other authors can join in too. You can check it out here if you’re a member of Goodreads. I’m going to generally stick to places where I can chat and share information and thoughts with others now.

I have to admit that in spite of not achieving the buzz that I had hoped for in the forums, the result of dropping the price has been pretty impressive. The Back Road has gone from around position 70 in the charts to number 11 today. Only the Innocent has risen from 277 to 24 since the 1^st May – just 4 days ago.

It would, however, be a mistake to suggest that this is purely down to an Amazon promotion. The third highest rated title (after my two) in the Crime, Thrillers and Mystery category of the promotion is at number 157 in the charts, so currently quite a way behind.

The stark reality is that to gain visibility for a book, the vast majority of the work is still down to the author. Once it gets into the top 10, I think an author can have little impact, because the sales numbers are high, and it’s unlikely that a Twitter or Facebook campaign would significantly impact upon those numbers. But to get there in the first place, there are no short-cuts. Amazon promotions will undoubtedly help – particularly if they are tied into email campaigns – but any hopes I had of forgetting all about marketing and getting on with the next book have actually proved to be little more than a pipe-dream.

So – that’s my update. The key findings are:

• financially I’m very happy that I stuck to the £1.99 price
• it’s very clear that a sub £1 price is very attractive to readers, who are more likely to take a risk on an unknown author
• the forums are not as useful as they used to be
• it’s harder to create a buzz about a book
• there is no shortcut to marketing
• books by the same author sell each other

The conundrum comes in the last two, of course, because whilst marketing – I’m not writing the next book!

As always – comments, please!

And if you would like to benefit from the current 99p price point, click on the book covers below to go to Amazon.

Two Sides of the Publishing Coin – a guest post by David Treanor

As the debate about traditional vs indie publishing goes on – and probably will do for some considerable time – it was great to hear from one author who has experienced both. Author David Treanor has kindly given us his perspective on the two sides of the publishing coin.

In my old life as a BBC journalist I would occasionally have to interview people for jobs. I’d take home a stack of application forms — maybe a-hundred or more — and try to draw up a shortlist of twelve. I used to like it when people made spelling mistakes. It meant I could rule them out right away. But I know I didn’t always get it right. Then would come a couple of days of interviews. Sometimes I felt that half the people I’d seen would be great at the job. But there was only one vacancy. So I did my best. But I will have made mistakes again.

I feel traditional publishing is like that. Far too many submissions, far too few opportunities to get into print. And those taking the decisions will have made mistakes. We all know the stories of the best sellers rejected a dozen times.

Five-Star Book Corner – a guest post from Victoria Twead

I was fortunate enough to come across Victoria as recently as a couple of weeks ago. She runs a great site, which is dedicated to books with more than 25 Five Star reviews – a great place for readers to visit, and a brilliant opportunity for authors. I invited Victoria along to tell us all about it. 

Thank you for inviting me to talk about this new free promotion opportunity for authors, Rachel. My Five-Star Book Corner is growing fast, and that’s thanks to fellow authors like you who are being featured and telling others.

Just to introduce myself, I’m a British author living up a mountain in Spain. I’m supposed to be writing the fourth book in my Two Old Fools series but have got a little sidetracked with this Book Corner project. But I’ll begin at the beginning, and explain how it all began…

I was shocked when I was browsing an Author Forum a couple of months ago. I read the comments in disbelief. Amazon now has five million books for sale? And they are publishing another 10,000 every month? My heart sank. I couldn’t even imagine that many books… How does an author get noticed amongst that lot, and how will anybody ever find my books?

Hooking Readers – The Power of a Great Book Blurb

A guest post by Mark Edwards

Writing a novel is hard. Writing a good synopsis is really hard. Writing a great blurb for your novel is harder still. And writing a fantastic single tag-line is almost impossible.

It seems that the shorter the piece of writing, the more difficult it is to do it well. Everybody will tell you that the most important thing is to write a good book, and that is true, but the sad truth is that good books don’t sell themselves. Great books do not sit on Amazon, or on bookshop shelves, emitting rays of goodness, drawing people towards them. You have to work to let people know that your work exists – only then, if people like it will they write reviews, tell their friends and do the hard work for you.

What next? A year in the life of a self-published author – Part VII

This is the final post in my series this week about all that has happened in the last year. I really hope that it has encouraged those of you who are just starting on the journey. It has been an astonishing year, if something of a roller-coaster ride for me. And as this is the last of my birthday posts, I can’t resist this loudest graphic of them all (should just be one candle, but still…).

I started the year with neither hope nor expectation of everything that has happened subsequently. From thinking that I would be spending my time writing a cookery book for fun (which was to be my next project), I have ended up spending the year glued to my computer screen, marketing for the first five or six months, and then editing Only the Innocent and starting (and almost finishing) book 2 – name to be confirmed.

A change of lifestyle: A year in the life of a self-published author – Part VI

You will notice that I am trying to find the loudest birthday graphics possible! This one is perhaps slightly more tasteful than most – but I can’t resist the glitter!

In one of my earlier birthday posts this week, I talked about the whole work ethic, and how it was necessary for me to work twelve hours a day for months after month.

None of this would have been possible without a decent support system in place. After all, we still had to eat!

What a difference an agent makes! A year in the life of a self-published author – Part V

Just a reminder to those coming to this series of posts for the first time, I am celebrating the fact that Only the Innocent was launched just one year ago, and I thought I would use the opportunity to describe the highs and lows of the last year. (And yes – the graphics are getting sillier!)

In my last post, I talked about the amazing amount of hard work that it took to market Only the Innocent to the number 1 spot on Amazon UK. It was relentless, but I was like a dog with a bone. Once I had decided that I wasn’t going to settle for just a few sales a day, I had to go for it.

The benefits of that success were far greater than just the financial ones and the amazing sense of achievement on the day that I got to number one. Mind you, that moment was something of an anti-climax. My husband is one of those people who has to get up at 5.30 am every morning. I can’t convince him otherwise, and he’s out walking the dogs in the dark come rain or shine. As a consequence, he’s usually asleep on the sofa by 9 pm. Understandable, but it can be frustrating.

Only the Innocent hit the number one spot at about 10 pm on 18^th February… and he was asleep. Nothing I could do would wake him up in order to speak coherently, drink champagne, or generally get excited. I was not best pleased – but we made up for it the next day.

Work, work, work – and get fat! : A year in the life of a self-published author-Part IV

In the previous post in this series to celebrate the first anniversary of the launch of Only the Innocent, I talked about the marketing plan.

But it’s one thing to write a plan. It’s a whole other thing to deliver it!

The one thing I learned in my previous career was that any sort of business plan is absolutely useless if it doesn’t have clearly defined objectives and a way of measuring them. They are often referred to as SMART objectives: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.  As with all business planning tools, there are always newer, more up to date versions and explanations, but for my purposes, SMART works just fine.

UK Indie Authors – Tax on US royalties

If you are a non-US citizen and you have self published your books in the US, you will already be aware that there is a 30% withholding tax applied by the distributor, and if you’re selling a reasonable number of books, that could be quite a bit of money!

But you CAN do something about this.

I put it off for far too long, and when I eventually got around to it, I found a website with a great article by Karen Inglis – and I followed her instructions to the letter. The whole process was straightforward, and so I thought I would ask her to write a post for me to share with you.

I should point out that I made the decision a few months ago to form a company for my publishing activities. That may or may not be the right way to go for you – it depends on a number of factors and the best person to advise you would be your accountant – but it certainly made it a whole lot easier to deal with the procedures in the US, as you will probably see from Karen’s article.

I hope it proves as helpful to you as it did to me.

3 Ways to “Automate” Your Social Media Efforts—And Why You Should

I’m delighted to welcome back a guest blogger, Nick Thacker, whose post earlier this year resulted in some interesting feedback. He has some great ideas here, many of which are new to me and I am already planning to try out.

 “Automation” is a word that tends to invoke thoughts of iRobot-style post-apocalyptic societies, machine-versus-human world wars, and other disturbing concepts.

It’s easy to see why: we’ve gone from an unplugged, eating-dinner-at-the-table family lifestyle to a smartphone-wielding, status-updating and Pinterest-crazed world. There are automated banks, door-to-door grocery delivery services, and machines that will eat your money and turn it into a hot and “fresh” hamburger.

But that’s just one side of the argument. We can’t forget that all of this automation and the fast-paced society we now live in have given us some remarkable innovations as well—including marketing innovations for authors.