List

Next Time is now on my lists. By that I mean it’s showing up in my dashboards in various places, like Amazon Author and Goodreads. Apparently, it even sold a paperback copy since on Saturday Amazon had it ranked, which surprised me a little bit. But certainly a big thank you to whoever pre-ordered it! I started working on pre-order ads last week and will likely start pumping those out in a couple of weeks. It’s kind of exciting to see the book in my lists and enjoying the little jolt of seeing it and still being surprised that it’s showing up. Oh, there’s still a lot of work to do, but at least there are moments of happiness along the way.

Worldwide

The nice thing about going through a publisher who distributes your books is the global reach. The additional bonus is using BookBub for ads, since they can advertise in multiple markets and get sales in those other regions. I checked my publishing account this morning and sales from March had come into the accounting dashboard. It was kind of nice to see sales from the UK, Australia, and Canada, and know that I have readers there. I mean, I’ve known it at some level, but it’s nice to see in black and white. The other interesting tidbit is that those sales were through the Apple Bookstore. Everyone concentrates on Amazon, which is fair since that’s where most sales take place, but the opportunity to advertise and get people using other eReaders, like iPads or Nook or Kobo, shouldn’t be ignored.

Videos

Last September-October, when I was preparing to publish First, I did a series called 20 Questions in 20 Days. Looking back, it was a handful. Probably too much, but hey, I was excited to get my book out and wanted to be visible. I shared the questions on social media, and I think I’ve commented before that the best exposure I got was on LinkedIn. This time around I decided to be a little less obnoxious about it, and use a video format instead of text. Let’s be clear: that’s not my first choice. I’m not keen on being on camera or in pictures, but I decided to do something different and out of my comfort zone. I posted the first one yesterday to Insta, FB, and LinkedIn, and so far the reaction has been positive. I noticed last evening that the last five seconds of the video were cut off, which means either I inadvertently edited the video, or the upload had a hiccup. Next week I’ll try to keep it shorter and then do some quality control.

Still Writing?

One of the questions I tend to get from people who know my hobby is writing is this: are you still writing? Or a variant like, are you working on something new? The answer is that yes, I’m still writing, but not as much as I’d like. It’s honestly been hit or miss since First came out. I’ve spent a lot of time on researching and doing ads and promotions, as well as getting Next Time ready for publication. I certainly don’t feel any continuity in the stories I’ve worked on, which is probably one reason why I put aside the series I’d hoped to start in favor of working on the sequel to First. I wish I could say I had more to show for the last 6-7 months in the form of writing. Maybe I need to come up with another way of working, much like I did in getting a better cadence with writing in the first place. Maybe a M-W-F schedule for writing and T-Th for other stuff, or vice versa. Now that I’ve identified the problem, it’s time to come up with a solution.

Box o’ Books

My author’s copies of Next Time arrived early! They weren’t supposed to be here until today, but apparently someone at UPS is an overachiever. They actually got here a couple of days ago while I was out of town. The Wife showed great restraint in not opening them herself. This time around I had her take a video so I could post it on social media, and that seems to have worked well. I think I’m going to try the same thing with my Seven Questions in Seven Weeks series, which I’m starting next Tuesday as the countdown to the release date. Less questions, more video. Maybe that’ll be my tagline for the videos.

Contests

I’ve already entered Next Time in several contests. One I mentioned previously, and now I’ve entered the book in a couple more since it’s now live on Amazon and I can link to it in the entry forms. It’s a little odd this time around since the category is usually something like “Romance-Sci-Fi/Fantasy.” Maybe it’s a good thing, since hopefully the pool of contestants is lower than some of the bigger SF categories I’ve entered before. The good news is I’m starting to get the book out there, but the downside is that the contest winners are announced later in the year. In the meantime, I need to start getting it in the hands of reviewers.

New Tool

Last week, after doing some research on how to better utilize keywords to optimize search results, I ended up with a new tool. Publisher Rocket helps narrow down relevant search terms for your book, even to the point of telling you how many people use a search term on Amazon in a given month. It also shows things like how many competitors are in the running for each term or phrase, average price of books, and even average monthly earnings for those books. It’s an interesting tool and I have a lot to learn about how it dissects the data and how I should interpret all the components. It was a little pricey, $97 for a perpetual program to install on your computer instead of a subscription to a web-based interface, but let’s see if it pays off. I’ll let you know how it goes.

All the Things

Now that we’re in the run-up to Next Time’s release date, I’m recalling all the things I had to do with First. Fortunately, I have a list, but it seems I didn’t put every single thing on that list. For instance, the book page is already live on Amazon, at least for the Kindle version. I need to link it to my author profile on Goodreads and Reedsy, among others. And update my author bio everywhere to reflect the release of the new book. I also need to spend some time changing metadata and probably the book description. Lots of details to take care of, but that’s part of the fun, I suppose. In other news, I’m up to 38 reviews on Amazon. Almost to 40! And maintaining a 4.5 out of 5 stars. That means a lot to me. 60% of the ratings are 5-star, and 88% are 4-star and above. I’m so glad people are getting some enjoyment out of it.

Bump and Pub

Yesterday’s promotion campaign seems to have worked. I got a nice bump in the Amazon rankings, shoving First up to the highest point in the Space Exploration category that I think I’ve captured so far. This morning it was at #66, although I think it must have been a little higher since the overall Kindle rankings are down about 3,000 spots since yesterday. I also had good response to my BookBub ad, but based on the stats I can attribute the overall bump to the promotion.

The other thing that happened yesterday was in setting a publication date for Next Time: June 11th. Last evening I sent it off to a reviewer that did me right with First, and I’m now scoping out dates for contests and other marketing plans. It’ll be interesting to try and keep two books going, but I’m excited to get this book out for people to read. Over the next few weeks I’ll be doing the cover reveal and promotions on social media and such. Which, of course, includes this website and blog.

Change

I think it’s time to change up the ads I’ve been running on BookBub. Since I lowered the price in February, I’ve been running pretty much the same ones. There’s one for all the world but the UK and another for just the UK that shows the price in pounds. Seems like they’ve pretty much run their course and I need something different. Plus, they’re both generated using the functionality of the site itself, which is fine, but I can make better looking ads using Canva. Beyond changing the ad itself, I can also change the audience. BookBub allows you target people who follow certain authors, and it’s been awhile since I played around with that. That’s my task for today.

Striking Out

Another ad promotion, another strikeout. That’s two complete whiffs this week. As I said previously, at least I’m figuring out which campaigns work and which don’t. The hard way. Every Monday morning my publisher gets the data for the previous week’s sales and I think this time it’ll be the lowest in over a month. I suppose that’s not horrible, but again, I’m looking forward to the big blast with “guaranteed” sales next Thursday. That campaign will run for 12 days and target different groups of eBook readers on different days, like Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android, Apple, etc. What I take that to mean up front is that theoretical sales won’t be concentrated on one day so I’m skeptical about how much it’ll impact sales ranking. Guess we’ll just have to see.

Bump?

Not sure there was a bump from the ad promotion for First yesterday. I don’t think there was, but I can’t be sure since I also had a lot of hits on one of my BookBub ads and the sales rank jumped later in the day. That timing tends to make me think it was the ad I ran, rather than the promo. Not sure what time they sent out their email blasts, but I do know my book was on their website early in the day. I have promotions running with other sites tomorrow, next Tuesday, and the big one next Thursday. I went ahead and pulled the trigger on that one, which guarantees a certain number of sales or they issue a prorated credit. They say that 92% of books reach the target. I’m hoping that one works and vaults First to the top of the charts. There must be some tipping point where books start selling with what I’d call maintenance advertising, but that point seems far off. Or, of course, publicity from being made into a movie or series. In the meantime, I have to resort to ongoing advertising to make any sales at all.

Routine

After several weeks of really good sales from really good promos, last week was back to routine. Seems like my BookBub ads struggled a bit and of course one of the email blasts I tried ended up not doing anything. This week I have promos for First running on Tuesday and Thursday. It’ll be interesting to see how those go since I expect some goodness from at least the one tomorrow. Then there’s one more a week from tomorrow, after which point I’ll need to decide what to do next. I entered it in a couple more contests, but those don’t announce winners until May and June. I did enter Next Time in a contest where they announce finalists on the 18th. I don’t have high hopes for that since all I could send at the time was the manuscript in pdf format, which I now know had a couple of errors in it. That was right at the end of 2023 with the deadline on 31 Dec. It didn’t even have a cover yet and I probably should’ve saved the entry fee. Lesson learned.

Expected

As I expected, the email and web promotion from the other day resulted in no noticeable sales. I read an interesting snippet from an article yesterday that advised combining all your promotions into a day or just a few days. Their reasoning was to vault your book up the bestseller lists with all the purchases occurring in a short timeframe. That makes sense, but the downside of that is being able to discern which ones were effective and which were a waste of money. Yes, I’d like to see my book at the top of the Space Exploration category on Amazon. I’m still working on that. But I’ve been tracking which ad campaigns I’d use again and those I wouldn’t. I’m treating it as not just selling more books, but preparing for the release of Next Time. That’s when I’ll use what I’ve learned and will combine the most effective to get the most impact on sales and rankings.

Blasts

Yesterday I spent time researching additional sites that send email blasts advertising books. I had some really good success with that a couple of weeks ago and would like to recreate that several more times. I signed up for one that will take place this week - today, actually. This is probably the one I expect the least out of, but figured it was worth a try since it’s inexpensive. I’ve submitted info to two other sites. One has to be approved and then paid for, while the other has been paid for and I’m awaiting confirmation they can put it up next week. As before, I’m trying to keep these separate so I can determine what effect, if any, there is on sales. While I wait on results, I got the revised proof yesterday for Next Time and I need to go through that again. Looks like the errors I found are fixed and this should be a short turnaround for approval.

Merge

Once again, an idea came to me while I was out running, this time a couple of days ago on Saturday. I have two book ideas in mind for the sequel to First: the one I’ve been writing and the other I’ve outlined but not written anything yet. As I mentioned in my last post, the one I’ve been working on seems chaotic in that I’m writing from ideas rather a particular destination I have in mind. And I’m not sure it’s telling a story worth telling. As I jogged along the path the other day the thought came to me: why not merge the two ideas into one book.

Certainly, this isn’t a revolutionary thought. It might not even be a good one. However, my brain immediately started thinking of ways to make it work. That’s a good sign. When the brain is engaged in the flow of ideas, it starts spending cycles on those ideas. Maybe that’s called creativity, I don’t know. Whatever it’s called, I’m going to explore that possibility and see where it takes me. Maybe nowhere. I can take what I’ve written so far, merge in the story ideas from my outline of the other, and trim out parts of both, hopefully making a better whole.

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.