Killing Time

I’ve been writing to kill some time between approving/rejecting proofs and waiting to kick off the campaign for Next Time. I’ve gone back to the story I liked best so far for the sequel to First. Right now it seems a little chaotic and what I’ve written will take some tightening up, but at least I’m getting some words on the page.

In other news, I need to decide what to do with the price point for First. Right now the eBook is selling well at $0.99 but it’s also not making me any money as ad expenditures are outpacing sales revenue. That’s fine for the moment, since I want to get the book out there and more visible, but it’s not a long-term strategy. One idea is to raise the price in a few days since it’s almost been a month of the discounted price, and then lower it again in conjunction with the new book release, probably in May. The problem is that I don’t want to crash the momentum I’m seeing. Sometimes the best thing to is…nothing.

Numbers

As I mentioned last week, I signed up for an email blast that seemed to work. When I got the report on Monday on number of books sold last week, it was the most since First was released. Who knew that dropping the price and advertising like that would work out? I’m pleased with the sales of the last three weeks.

The book also seems to be doing well in the UK. I’ve been targeting BookBub ads that show the reduced price toward that market and the trending reports show that it’s keeping steady with sales every day. Let’s keep that trend going, my overseas friends.

The other thing I’m trying this week is the US targeting. In BookBub you can choose readers of similar authors, meaning your ad is more likely to be clicked on since theoretically those readers share the same interest. For the past few months I’ve used roughly the same batch of authors, but this week I selected about 7-8 authors I hadn’t included before. The first couple of days didn’t go well, meaning the CTR (click-through rate) was low, so I’ve changed the ad copy. The great thing about this approach is I can try multiple ads at no extra cost other than paying when someone clicks on an ad. It also helps narrow down whether the issue is the ad or the readers of the authors I’ve targeted. Heck, maybe they don’t share the same interests. This is how you find out.

The Proof

I finished proofing Next Time this weekend and I’m glad I did. As I mentioned in the previous post, the eBook will be read by more people than the hard copy. Sad to say, I found two errors that needed correction. Sure, I contemplated leaving them since both were very minor, but putting out a product with known flaws would gnaw at me. The first was a similar error I found in the First manuscript, which makes me think I need to be sure and check for this situation next time around: an extra space after a period at the end of a paragraph, causing the closing quote mark to drop to a line by itself. I totally missed it during my numerous manuscript reviews and even in the print copy proof, probably because the human eye and brain are in a conspiracy. The second error I found was a complete miss of a possessive, another instance where my brain filled in the missing apostrophe-s. I’ll feel better getting these errors fixed. Can I guarantee the book is now completely free from errors? Goodness, no. It’s about as close as you can get without paying someone to proofread your book, though. I know, all the experts say to not do it yourself, but I have a feeling I read through my manuscripts more times than a lot of other authors, including reading it aloud at least once. That seems to do the proofreading trick.

eBook Proof

I got the eBook proof for Next Time yesterday and am now going through it. So far, so good. I could load it onto my Kindle Paperwhite or onto my phone so I can read it in the Apple Books app, but instead I’m using the Kindle Previewer. It emulates - what else? - a Kindle interface and lets me read through the book. It’s a pretty nifty free program that allows me to change the font size and test everything, including the ToC links to make sure they work as intended. I could just flip through it quickly, but since this is the version more people will read, I feel like I should make sure it looks good all the way through. I might still copy the .epub file to my phone to see how it looks there. Heck, I even have a first-gen iPad I could fire up and try it on. That’d be worthwhile to make sure the old tablet still works.

Email Blast

I signed up (and paid) to be included in an email blast by another site, different from the one I used last week. Also different were the results. First received a noticeable uptick in sales on Monday. In fact, they put it higher up in the Amazon rankings than anytime in the past, even when it debuted last October. Not sure how many copies that translates into, but the takeaway is that this time around was more effective and I’m getting copies into the hands of readers. The book cracked the Top 100 in its category. I have a feeling it went higher than what I saw, but Amazon’s rankings systems seemed to crap out most of the day and it wasn’t until evening that I saw results. Regardless, I’m happy with this email blast and will use it again for Next Time.

Sequel

As I mentioned last week, I spent some time scoping out the sequel to First. I’ve had a couple of ideas and even wrote a few chapters for one of them but got distracted by other things. Plus, I’m not sure it was working the way I intended. I think I have a good concept this time around. It’ll allow me to totally change the setting for most of the story and bring in some surprises and twists at the end. It also allows me to use a different narrator and add a totally new point of view to the First universe. One thing I’ll have to do is make the narrator’s voice is distinctive. I mean, that should always be the case, but I don’t want it to come across as a new book with Lewis narrating, just with a different name. That part will be challenging, but that’s what makes writing interesting. If I don’t set up some sort of challenge for myself then it becomes effortless. And what’s the fun in that?

Effectiveness

I’d bought and read a deal a few weeks ago about marketing your self-published book, which I think I mentioned at the time. It recommended a couple of mailing lists where an author can pay to have their book included in an email blast by the list owner. I signed up for two in order to try them out. One went out on Wednesday and judging by the results, had no effect whatsoever on sales. I’m not terribly disappointed since it was a minimal investment, but it would’ve been nice to see a little bump. I purposefully spaced that one several days from the other mailing list in order to know how each one worked, or didn’t. Pretty smart, huh?

What has been effective is changing up my ads. I think I’ve run five different ads this week on BookBub and it’s helping me find out what’s more effective. There’s one I’ve been running all week in the UK that is targeted specifically to readers there with the original price and discounted price in English Pounds in the ad. It’s doing pretty well as far as clicks. And I just found this out - I thought I had no way of seeing UK sales rank because of reporting limitations on Amazon, but it turns out I do. On my Amazon Author page I can change the region dropdown to display the UK trends. Wow, I learned something new today. And the sales ranks there are encouraging.

Finally, I’m up to 25 reviews on Amazon, with a 4.4 average rating. I’m very grateful for that, and to the people who’ve left written reviews.

Metadata

To quickly define terms, metadata is the info the publisher puts out about your book that populates the online stores. Things like the category of the book, search terms, and even stuff like the book description and author bio. A lot of it is set at the time a book is published and not changed after that.

When I published First, I submitted a book description and the publisher jazzed it up. At the time it seemed okay, albeit a little like an AI had gotten its hands on the description, so I let it go. TBH as time passed by I liked it less and less, and started to wonder if it was the reason I could get clicks on the ads I’ve been running but not as many purchases as I’d expect. To be fair, I don’t really know what the clicks to purchases ratio should be, but I always thought it could be better. I have a couple of big ad campaigns this week and next and it seemed to be the right time to change the book summary. I did that on Monday and it propagated to Amazon by yesterday. I like this bit of metadata much better and now we can see if it makes a difference. Fingers crossed.

Pause

I was thinking yesterday evening about the book I’m currently writing that’s meant to kick off a series. I like the concept I have, but as I’ve mentioned before, I still feel like there’s something missing. Which makes me think it’s time to pause the story and go back to something else. I have a couple of stories started for the sequel to First, so maybe I should revisit those and see what lights a fire in my brain. Although I’m not sure how deep into it I want to get since Next Time will be coming out in the next few months and I’ll need to concentrate on that. Today I’ll do some more deep thinking and see what I can come up with.

Missed

I’ve been so busy with ads and socializing the awards from earlier this week that I missed posting here yesterday. I usually blog here on a M-W-F schedule but it never crossed my mind. Anyway, what’s going on around here? I’m still messing with ads and yesterday split out an ad that goes to US, UK, Canada, and Australia readers. The one I made its own version is for UK and shows their currency instead of US dollars. So far it seems to be reasonably successful as far as clicks go, but the proof will be in the actual sales.

As far as other distractions, I entered a couple more contests and packaged up the books yesterday and mailed them. I realize this is not news, but my trip to the post office was excruciating. They are THE model of government inefficiency. I stood in line for a few minutes, gave up and tried the self-service and was rewarded with an experience so bad it made me go get back in line, and then had to endure another twenty minutes of waiting and dealing with an especially indifferent clerk. My favorite part was when the address for one of the packages didn’t show as valid. I had to ask if I could go ahead and mail it anyway, receiving a shrug. I know I’m not the only one to complain, but oh my gosh. Oh well, life goes on.

Doings

It’s been a busy couple of days. After the awards notification on Monday, I spent yesterday morning (during my normal writing time) socializing the news on various social media platforms. I also created a new ad to run on BookBub and got that out there. It also coincided with dropping the price of the eBook to try and drive more sales and visibility. I figure that’ll be useful in the run-up to the release of Next Time.

In other news, I submitted the proofs for Next Time on Monday. The timing worked out since I was able to change some text on the back cover and the blurbs page to include phrases like “award-winning author” and such. Before Monday I wouldn’t have been able to do that. So yes, it’s been busy. But the good kind of busy.

Award

First is an award-winning book! The Reader Views list came out this morning and my book won a Silver Award in the Science Fiction category. They’re the ones who gave me such a great review recently, and I’m thrilled to have a book that earned some recognition. You better believe I’m going to socialize the heck out of this award. Very exciting!

EDIT: Actually, First won two awards in the competition! In addition to the Silver in Science Fiction, it won a Regional Award. I didn’t notice the second nod until I was searching the awards page for BookBaby, the company I used for publishing, to see if any other of their books made the list. Looks like I’m the only one. Double-exciting!

Ongoing

The proofing of Next Time is still in progress. I’m a little past a third of the way through it, and so far I’ve discovered one typo, which I’m very grateful to have found, and two word choice changes to avoid repetition. These changes add a little bit to the cost, but they’re worth it in order to put out a quality product. In the meantime, I ran the cover art past my sisters and they all liked it, another good sign. I don’t know how much of the manuscript proofing I’ll get done over the weekend, so it might end up going into early next week. We’ll see.

Proofing

The proofs arrived late yesterday afternoon for Next Time. I have to admit it was a bit of a different experience than with First. Nothing bad, mind you, but my reaction was less of anticipation and more of curiosity. I suppose that’s because this is not a new experience, plus I was also working and didn’t peek for a while after seeing the email come in.

Anyway, the big reveal is always the cover. WIth First, I was blown away when I saw the artwork and instantly knew they’d nailed it. What did they come up with? Will I like it? Was my idea stupid? My reaction on seeing the cover for Next Time was more restrained, but I quickly realized they did it again. It contains details I’m still finding. Looking back, I think my reaction was somewhat different because Next Time is a different genre than First, and let’s be honest here, not a genre I normally read. Therefore the design has to fit within what’s normal and what sells within that genre. The Wife really liked it and that’s a good sign. I’ll spend the next several days reading through the manuscript proof and providing my feedback, likely by the weekend.

Quantity

One of the questions my friends ask me the most about First is, “How many books have you sold?” I wish I had a good answer. What I’ve found is that the reporting of sales lags quite far behind the actual sales themselves. This in turn makes it difficult to see how effective (or not) an ad campaign turns out to be. For example, the release date for First was October 10th. I didn’t start seeing sales data until late December, about two-and-a-half months after that. I know that bestseller lists are tabulated weekly and Amazon sales ranks are updated hourly or so, but the actual sales should be quicker to put together than ten weeks after the fact. Granted, this is a minor complaint, but we do live in a world of computers where data can be processed in near-realtime.

Purchase

The other day I scrolled through my Facebook feed and ran into an ad that I actually clicked on. It was for a kit about publishing and becoming a bestseller even when you don’t have a massive mailing list or connections to do a ton of interviews. So, I purchased it. The cost was low and I thought, hey, why not see what they have to say. The delivery was quick, via email. I won’t say it solved all the world’s problems, but it did point me in the right direction for some additional advertising. It also suggested that you publish your book on a certain date (always a Tuesday) and launch your book two weeks later with announcements and ads and such. I’ll have to think about that part some more, since it seems to me you want people excited about the actual publishing date and pre-ordering your book. And activities will continue in the weeks after that. Anyway, just like most other writers, I’m still open to learning what works for some people and improving my sales.

Premise

Yesterday I was talking with someone who’s reading First and he asked if was writing something new. I told him yes, I am, and I also have a book at the publisher to come out within the next few months. He asked what it was about and so I gave him the premise of Next TIme. I haven’t really told a whole lot of people about it yet, so it was interesting to gauge his reaction. It was positive, by the way. We talked about other time-traveling books and movies for a bit. My summary of the story intrigued another person nearby, another positive sign. It’s interesting to tell people about it since it’s lived in my head and on virtual paper for the last 18 months or so. Based on my conversation yesterday, I think the book has cross-sectional appeal and I need to make sure it’s not pigeonholed as a romance. Not that that category’s bad, but it does narrow the audience. Things to think about…

Didn’t Work

How about those ads that didn’t work? I played around with colors on a couple of them, especially on one idea I had when a cold snap hit the U.S. I tried an ad that said, “Want to get away from the cold? Try Proxima Centauri. It’s nice this time of year.” I thought it was humorous and relevant, but apparently not a lot of the people who saw the ad thought so. Plus, I used a light blue-ish background, which was far different than what I used on successful ads.

The other ad that surprised me a little was the one where I displayed the 5-Star medallion from Readers’ Favorite. Maybe it was a little overbearing. Maybe the accompanying text didn’t hit the right note. Looking back, it wasn’t my best ad design. Lesson learned. When I got the 5-star rating from Reader Views, I pulled a quote and kept the ad simple instead of putting in the new medallion. That ad seems to be working much better as far as exposures and CTR.

Ads Update

You’re probably wondering to yourself: Self, how are the advertisements for First doing? Glad you asked. It’s been an interesting experience. I’ve learned a few things along the way with some ads that worked and others that didn’t at all. I’ve done around ten different ad campaigns, two of which are live now. The ad producing the most click-throughs has been running since the day after Christmas. I keep thinking about pausing that one, but it continues to produce a decent CTR (click-through rate). Plus, and this is what I think works for it, is that the ad shows the book cover and all the text says is, “Second is not an option.” See what I did there? That seems to work.

The newest ad has a blurb from that awesome review I got last week. I also changed the background image to zoom in on our hapless little astronaut floating in space, and the book title and my name are nowhere in sight. Just the text and button for clicking to buy First. It’s only been a week but the CTR is pretty good so far. I had another that featured another plan on the title which said, “Sometimes being first isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” I let that one run for a few weeks but the number of impressions dropped and I moved on to a different approach.

Does all that mean I’m a marketing genius? Not even close. At least with the BookBub platform I can experiment and quickly pull an ad if it’s not doing well and try something else. And if something works, I can ride it for a while. Like almost two months in the case of the first one I talked about.

What about the ones that clearly didn’t work? We’ll talk about those next time.

Details

I got an email from the publisher on Monday that I needed to take care of a couple of things. The first was that they determined the page count of Next Time would be slightly higher than originally estimated. That’s probably because I had put in a blurbs page and another one listing my other books, neither of which was in my original word count. That incurred a bump to the cost of about 4%. I can live with that.

The other issue was my author’s photo for the back cover, a small profile pic that I’ve used for years on the web. For print, it needs to be 300 dpi, whereas the original is only 96 dpi. How did I fix that? I used Canva to size the picture and export it as a PDF, but at Print Quality, not just any regular PDF. Then I searched online for a converter and 30 seconds later had a 300 dpi picture. Overall, it took longer than a few minutes as I figured out how to do it all since Canva doesn’t natively support 300 dpi. In the end, it worked and I took care of business.