Self-publishing thoughts 2013

by theworm · Published January 4, 2014 · Updated July 17, 2014

I thought it may be useful and illuminating if I released sales figures for my books (predominantly Powerless) for 2013. There are already some authors who do this, notably J.A. Konrath who has been blogging about his self-publishing efforts for many years, providing an illuminating insight into the whole scene. My sales figures are a thimble of tea in an ocean compared to his, but may be a useful comparison for those thinking of dipping their toes in the same waters and looking for some more information.

I’m going to do two posts – one just the numbers and relevant info, and another based on my thoughts on them, what I did right and wrong, and what I’m planning for 2014.

Things that happened in 2013:

I released Powerless in January. It took me a year to write in my spare time and I was glad to see the back of it 🙂 (although I was uploading typo and grammar fixes for weeks).

I tried to promote Powerless twice on BookBub but was rejected both times by their editorial team.

I made a slow start on the sequel Killing Gods. Slow because the story is more complex and I had to do a little flowchart to plan it out, plus I needed a bit of a break after just finishing the first book.

I did a second edition of Powerless in October with a much, much better cover (thanks Harry!), additional content and generally fixed some layout stuff.

I ordered 60 copies of Powerless and 60 of the Killing Gods preview for the MCM Birmingham ComicCon. The Killing Gods ones arrived two days before the event. I have never been so happy to pull a back muscle lifting a box into my car boot.

All independent titles were dropped from Kobo because of a website search results non-story. As a result I withdrew Powerless from their store and will not sell through them again. How can I trust a store with such a cavalier attitude to a group that makes up an increasingly large proportion of their sales?

I booked a dealer’s table at the MCM Birmingham ComicCon and had a ‘more fun and less stressful than I had predicted’ time there.

Things I learned in 2013:

I shouldn’t have booked a dealer’s table at the MCM Birmingham ComicCon

Firstly I should have gone for a table in the Comics Village (which aren’t bookable through the dealer’s booking page, but by an email link on the public information page about the Village which, of course, I hadn’t seen). This would have saved me £140 in fees alone.

Secondly, these ComicCons are tied to Memorabilia events and as such are more merchandise sales opportunities than specific SF/Fantasy Cons for fans. If the opportunity for a Comics Village table comes up in future I may grab one as they are very cheap (and go quickly) but I won’t expect huge sales or interest as the people there are not specifically visiting to meet creators. I did fairly well out of it, nearly making my table money back and met some really nice people who I chatted to about my book and stuff, but I think it’s the wrong venue for an author.

Always order a proof copy of your printed books

I didn’t have much time to order from Createspace before the ComicCon, so had to skip the proof copy part. Wish I hadn’t. Nothing huge, but the cover came out much darker than it appeared on screen which meant it lost a lot of the subtle mid-tone detail. Still looked 1000% better than my cobbled-together first attempt though.

There’s a knack to Google adwords

My first ad ran for four weeks between March and April with a 99p offer – I averaged 22 sales per week on the UK site (up from 2) with a slow tail off that was seemingly unaffected by returning my price to £1.99 for the next month. On the US site I averaged 2 sales per week, which was a 100% increase in sales! 🙂
During this first ad run, I reached #7582 overall on the Amazon Kindle Store, which I was pretty impressed with.
The second ad run was UK only and ran for just over a week in October/November with no sale price (£1.93) and I saw no corresponding uptick in sales at all. The only reason I did this one was because Google were doing a ‘£75 free if you pay in £25’ offer and I thought I’d give it a go to get some more data from them.
Conclusions: if you’re going to do adwords, you need to commit for at least two weeks and tie it in with a price offer. The problem is even though I maintained my campaigns, weeding out keywords that weren’t doing well or costing me too much per click for example, it was still very costly. I haven’t made that money back and probably won’t this year either, notwithstanding any extra campaigns I run. But what I’ve worked out is that this is a long-term investment. It helps build up your reader base while not making you an international best-seller. However by the time the sequel or any other work comes out, if those readers enjoyed the first one, they will be more inclined to buy the second and so on. I think of the process like climbing Everest in small chunks, hitting camps along the way, as opposed to being blasted off in a rocket to the moon.

Amazon categories are a pain in the arse

When you upload an ebook for sale on the Kindle Store, the only book categories available to choose from are the print book ones. There is something in the KDP help pages that mentions adding keywords that will magically get you into categories relating to them, but that magic never happened for me 🙂

For niche titles especially the category you choose is vital for getting the right eyes on it. It’s how your book gets to be seen next to similar titles during searches or after purchases etc. Currently the only way to do it is to pop your book into some loosely related print book category then bother another human being to put it in the correct one for you. This seems oddly backwards since the KDP site is geared towards uploading and publishing ebooks, which you can then tie to print books afterwards. So surely having Kindle categories by default would make more sense? If you then went and tied it to a print version, of course the print specific categories drop-down would appear also.

The outcome is that if you have a niche title (e.g. Superheroes) you have to find the correct Kindle category for your book and send the support team a message to ask them to put you in it. Not the end of the world, but an unnecessary extra layer of hassle to deal with.

Plans for 2014:

Finish writing Killing Gods
Edit Killing Gods
Publish Killing Gods (sometime around May/June if the winds are in the right direction)
Get Married (sometime around May/June as I think my calendar is free…)
Go to some more Cons! I’ve looked for as many relevant SF/Fantasy/Book cons as I can find and pinged off emails of interest. As soon as any are confirmed, I’ll let you know.
Make a start on the third book, oh yes 🙂