Self-publishing thoughts 2014

I did this last year, and figured (see what I did there?) I would do the same again, now that I have two books released. There are already some authors who release this info publically, notably J.A. Konrath who has been blogging about his self-publishing efforts for many years. As last year, my years’ sales figures are probably a days’ sales for him, but I hope this is still useful information for someone.

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 2015.

Things that happened in 2014:

I finished, and released my superhero sequel KILLING GODS in July. Not only was I pleased with the story, I was glad to have a second book out there to continue the series and to show prospective buyers I wasn’t a ‘one book’ author. It seems readers consider you a more ‘serious’ writer if you have a series of books out there. I guess it shows you have more than just the one idea and are a reliable producer of work. Someone to follow.

Second only to the release of my second book 😛 I got married! If you’ve seen me at any of the Cons I went to, you will have seen my wife Lyn taking care of the money box while I did the sales pitch. She is grimly resigned to having to help me cart a suitcase full of books to these events, after all she did say ‘for better or worse’! 🙂

I went to a few more Cons this year. First was Bristol Expo in May. This was much quieter than I had expected, but then again my first con was the giant MCM in Birmingham, so that’s not much of a surprise. Next was BristolCon at the start of November, which was an even quieter event, but more focussed towards SF and Fantasy literature, so I ended up meeting some great people there. At the end of November I was back in Bristol again for the BackCover Promotions Book and Comic Expo. While the organisation exhibitor-side was fantastic, the actual con was a disaster. I think we only just managed double figures of visitors for the entire day. Still, it left plenty of time to chat and share contacts with other authors there.

I did some Google Adwords promotions again. Compared to last year, when they boosted my book ranking hugely, I hardly saw any movement at all. I spent less than half what I did in 2013, but I’d been seeing diminishing returns anyway. The first time I advertised, POWERLESS got to rank #7582 in all UK ebooks and was above #20,000 for months. Later in 2013, #20,000 was the top end of the ranking I got with a similar campaign. This year, the adwords campaign only boosted sales by 10,000 places to around #30,000. I’ve had higher placings by chance throughout the year, so any effect this promotion had was lost in so much noise as to have been completely ineffectual. As with 2013, I’m not sure I’ll ever get back when I’ve spent on these campaigns, so I’ve decided to not bother this coming year.

One specific promotion I did in August was with Kindle Nation Daily. I went for their “Kindle Fire KND Book of the Day” promo and in the end got a 1.27% boost in sales. It wasn’t worth it. Now I lowered the price to the recommended $0.99 and plenty other authors have had superb results with the same and other promos, with sales boosts in the 1000%+ region, so the only factors I could think of were:

• Lack of reviews (they feature Amazon US links only) where, at the time, I had a single ‘comedy’ review of 1 star
• Niche ‘genre within a genre’ again

In fact, a recurring theme is that many of these types of promos will only let you choose the US version of the book. Of course, I’d love sales to take off in America, but for a British set book written in British English, I’d love some options to be able to promote the Amazon UK version. They just don’t seem to exist.

Finally, I experimented with price points throughout the year, ranging from $0.99/£0.77 to $3.99/£2.40. To be fair, I had sales at every price point, but obviously, the most happened at $0.99/£0.77. And overall, I made almost twice as much from POWERLESS at $0.99 than at all the other prices combined.

Things I learned in 2014:

I need to book a dealers table at MCM Birmingham ComicCon

Yeah, this is completely the opposite to what I wrote last year, but that was based on a single Con. However, after having been to three others, I now know that I sold more at the MCM than all the others combined. It’s simply sheer numbers. This November’s Birmingham show garnered almost 35,000 attendees. So, while I won’t be going to the March one (already doing two in Feb), I will be heading to MCM next November and pimping myself hard with my now well-practiced sales pitch!

I need to do a smaller format version of my books and not use Arial font

The 6″x9″ format is the default that CreateSpace uses, along with glossy covers. In my innocence as a first time author, I just went with that. After some investigation (and comparison with other books on my bookshelf) it seems the 5.06″x7.81″ size with matte covers is the preferred format. I got proof copies of each of my books and apart from a doozy of a cover error on my part for one of them, they look really nice. Once I sell on the 6×9 ones, I’ll start ordering these to replace them. Oh, and yes, don’t use Arial font. It looks nice and clean on a monitor compared to Times New Roman, but in a printed book it just looks cheap and unprofessional.

You need to keep producing work to keep your ‘author visibility’ up

This one is hard if you’re in full time employement like me, and it takes you a year to do a 100k-word novel. In fact, I’ve read more than one self-published author blogging that they wished they hadn’t released their first novel as soon as it was done, but had waited until the second was finished and the third on the way so that they could have closer release dates between them. Trying to regain that interest in another novel when you have a year between them is as tough as starting all over again from scratch. Of course, the debut novel gives you the first handhold up, but the climb is just as long.

I should have price-matched ‘Making Gods’ sooner

I have a (very) short story collection called MAKING GODS which is free on Smashwords and all the ebook retailers they distribute to. However, unless you sign up to Amazon KDP Select, and limit your distribution to them only, you can’t price your books at £FREE there. I had however heard rumblings that their price-matching checked for £FREE too, so I had just left it at $0.99 and hoped that their system would eventually get round to it. It didn’t. It was only in December I contacted KDP and asked if they could price match for me. They did it in a day, and I’ve already had a massive number of downloads (particularly in the US) and hit #2 in the ‘Free Anthologies & Short Stories’ category. How much this will affect my priced book sales I don’t know, but the collection does contain the first three chapters of POWERLESS as a teaser, and any exposure is good exposure!

Reddit works

Nobody likes people spamming subreddits with promotional stuff (unless it’s specifically for that) but everybody likes something for free! After a bit of a hunt I found two subreddits for authors to promote free stuff: /r/FreeEBOOKS and /r/KindleFreebies. After a link submit in both of them, MAKING GODS jumped from 2-5 units a day to 87! Always read the rules of any subreddit you plan on submitting a link or comment to however, as they are all different. The last thing you want to do is get banned or cause a ruction with your potential fans.

Plans for 2015:

• Do more Cons – I’m already booked for two Cons in February, and hopefully another in May (which is dedicated to superheroes, so an ideal fit!). I’m down for BristolCon again in September and, as mentioned above, intend to set up my stall at the massive MCM Birmingham event in November.
• Do some shorter work – both as a break from big year-long novels, but also to have some book releases closer together
• Write more short stories – ongoing!
• Complete a short story collection – I’ll need to finish the above task before I can do this one 🙂
• Plan and write a novella – already got plans and dozens of story threads, characters and one-liners for a Sci-Fi comedy series. It’s just a case of writing it down now!
• Start writing the third book in the Powerless series – it’s all planned out, although the first rough chapter plan would make it somewhere around 185k words, so I need to trim it down a bit…