Retirement
I’m a long way off from retirement, but I couldn’t think of anything else to title this post. The subject came to mind as I was thinking how I’ve published a couple of books in the past year and wondering if that’s something I’ll keep doing or if at some point I close up shop. I’ve always kind of assumed I’d never stop writing. Heck, I’ve been doing it in some form or other for most of my life. And the thought of having all day, every day, to write…well, that’s just a nice thought. Maybe it’s actually a two-part question. Will I ever retire from writing? Doubtful. I don’t see how I could. Will I ever retire from publishing? That could very well happen, at least as to how I publish books in their current form. When I get to that magic retirement age and can afford to leave behind the corporate life and steady paycheck, I’ll live on a fixed budget. I mean, that’s kind of the case now, but you know what I mean. As I’ve mentioned before, publishing and marketing a book is expensive. Maybe there will come a time when I can’t afford that kind of financial outlay, in which case how I publish a book changes drastically. Fortunately, we live in a world where if I want to, I can do all the formatting and design myself and upload a finished product to Amazon. But even that still requires an investment to promote a book or else it dies in the Kindle store, lonely and unread. Again, this is all way in the future and maybe by then publishing a book will look way different than it does today. Food for thought.
Sales Update
Time for a look at how sales went last week after lowering my ad expenses. As expected, sales for both First and Next Time fell lower, but not as low as I expected. That was probably because I reduced the budget on Thursday, so sales for the first half of the week remained at the previous level. This week will be the real test and just based on the Amazon rankings so far, I’ll have more sales than I did back in the early part of the year before I discovered BookBub, but far less than a month ago when the budget was much higher. I’ve also thought about raising the price of the book, but I didn’t want to mess with both the ad budget and price at the same time. That’d probably see sales fall right off a cliff.
Chaos Theory
I might’ve written about this before, so apologies if that’s the case: in writing the sequel to First, I’m trying to embrace chaos theory. In my mind it means that if something bad can happen, it should. I know at times I tend to write safely, meaning that at various junctures I’ll make things go smoother than they should. We try to do that all the time in real life, but in a book it’s not exactly an engaging strategy. Let me give an example. I came up with a situation in the new book where a judge issues a ruling suspending activities by a certain entity. We’ve been taught in these situations to sit back and let the lawyers do their thing. That was where I started heading in the narrative as I wrote the scene, but then I realized this was an opportunity for chaos. If the characters do the exact thing they shouldn’t do, that introduces a whole new thread into the story. Plus, it’s more fun. After all, this is supposed to be near-future sci-fi. Who wants to read about a bunch of lawyers and their endless parade of court filings? Bring on the chaos.
Progress
How's it going on writing the sequel to First, you ask? After that flash of inspiration while you were running, it’s been strangely silent, you say. Great question and astute observation, Gentle Reader. The short answer: going very well. The longer answer: I’ve been busy ripping and replacing every other chapter of what I’d written. The story has two narrators, one of which I changed the situation and consequences from the end of the first chapter forward. I already like it better, which is a good sign. I wrote some brainstorming notes before beginning the revisions and once I started writing, deviated immediately. They were good deviations, though, upping the danger and tension as well as creating repercussions in the alternating chapters from the other narrator’s POV. I don’t know if that explains it very well, but all that to say, it’s progressing and I’m much happier with the story itself.
Sales
One of the questions I had when I started independent publishing with First last October was this: how many books am I going to sell? I did a little research (as can you) and found the consensus is that on average, an independently published book sells 250 copies. When I published my first three books on Amazon over ten years ago, I did it for fun and so friends and family members could read them. Since I wasn’t distributing to other booksellers, they went on Kindle Unlimited where people could read them for free with their KU subscription. I guarantee you that way less than 250 people read those books. I never advertised them and thus they languished on Amazon’s site, occasionally noticed by some solitary soul.
Fast forward to 2023-24. My aim with publishing First in late 2023 and now Next Time about seven weeks ago was to get readers. Both have sold reasonably well, considering I’m only doing ads and promotions. Way more than 250 each, which is gratifying. But as I mentioned in my previous post, that minor success comes at a pretty steep price. As I found a decade ago, it’s not enough to just put my books on Amazon and wait for people to notice them. That’s not going to happen and I never fooled myself that it would. This writing and publishing thing is a hobby, and hobbies cost money. I’d estimate that every book I’ve sold costs me about seven bucks a copy. Yes, you read that right. I’m not making that much per copy, all the expenses have added up to that much out of my pocket. Those sales are greater than 99% eBooks, so you can deduce the inflow is way less than the outflow. Let’s not consider all the time spent writing and editing. If I added in those hours at even a greatly reduced rate, the cost of this hobby would make me question my sanity. Has it been worth it? That’s a question for another day.
Ad Cost
One thing to know about independent publishing is that it’s not cheap. Beyond the cost of actual publishing, advertising and promos take up a lot of money. So much, in fact, that I’m going to dial it back for the next few months. It’s been incredibly exciting to see my books at the top of the rankings on Amazon and selling well on Apple, but it comes at a big cost that’s not sustainable. As an author, you hope that your sales snowball and become self-sustaining. Even then, I think there’s still advertising and expense. But I have a finite amount of money and since I want to do some promos and ads around the holiday season later this year, I’m going to dial it way back on the ad expense. I’m also thinking of raising the price for a few months. That would likely throttle down sales, but since I’m not going to be advertising as much, maybe it’s the right time to do it. The other benefit would be that when I do start holiday sales, I can lower the price and tout the book as lowest price in X number of days. Yes, that’s an artificial approach, but go complain to your grocery store since they do the same thing.
In this week’s dose of good news, I hit 100 ratings on Amazon for First. It maintains a 4.5 score and I’m very proud of that. Even with awards and great reviews, it’s gratifying to get the pulse of readers, the people who invested a little bit of money and a whole lot of time in reading the book. I appreciate every single person who clicks on the rating and especially those who leave a written review.
Better
As mentioned in my previous post, I came up with a better idea for the book I’m working on, the sequel to First. The past couple of days I wrote the first chapter. Or more accurately, rewrote it. I can already tell it’s going to be better, a more compelling story than what I’d previously written. I typed a few notes into my brainstorming document and then started writing. It didn’t take long for the story to branch in a different direction than the notes I’d just written, but that’s okay. The change created more chaos as well as urgency in the storyline. That’s a good thing. What I’d previously written seemed too routine, like the characters spun their wheels too much. That’s why I knew it would require a lot of editing, but this new course is hopefully going to solve those problems.
Perspiration
Yesterday afternoon I went out for a run, a habit I’ve had for going on two decades now. In Texas a run in July usually means scorching hot temperatures with a nice dose of humidity. This week, though, temperatures are unseasonably cool, ratcheting up only into the upper 80s on the Fahrenheit scale so far. Anyway, running several miles usually clears my head and at times the perspiration seems to bring inspiration. That was the case yesterday, which was nice because it seems like I’ve been so concentrated on selling and marketing First and Next Time that my well of creativity has been running a little dry. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on the sequel to First and have tried a few ideas with nothing to my liking so far. The current iteration is almost 50k words and it feels like it’s going okay, but I also have the sense it’ll need a lot more work. Plus, there’s that nagging feeling it’s not as good a story as I want it to be. About a mile into my run yesterday, the solution hit me. It was one of those aha moments, as well as a “why didn’t I think of this before?” moments. Yes, it means I totally have to rewrite half of what I’ve written so far. But it’s also going to be so much better. I’m glad a little sweat ended up providing the missing ingredient for this book. Okay, that sounds a little gross, but you get my point.
#1
It was a good weekend. A couple of great things happened on Saturday. That afternoon I discovered that Next Time won another award, this time the Best Book award from PenCraft. They do a seasonal awards competition and my book won for Romance - Fantasy/Sci-Fi. Interestingly enough, I still haven’t received a notification from PenCraft yet. I had a note in my tracking spreadsheet that winners would be announced July 20th, and I found out I’d won when I checked their site. Anyway, no matter how many awards my books receive, it never gets old.
The other news came that evening. I’ve been monitoring the ranking on Amazon, as most writers do. The rankings for the US and UK bookstores are easily accessible, but I have to click through my ad manager to get to the rankings for Canada. That paid off Saturday evening when First hit #1 in the rankings for Canada’s category of Science Fiction Space Exploration. As I joked to my wife, I can now say the book is an international best-seller. All joking aside, it’s actually pretty cool. I grabbed a screenshot, of course! I don’t know what that means in actual sales. It does mean the ads have been effective and going #1 along with being in the Top 20 in the UK is pretty heady stuff.
Canada
Gotta hand it to my friends to the north every time I check the rankings for my books on amazon.ca. Last night First was #3 in the Space Exploration category, and as I’ve probably said before, Next Time has been in the Top 10 Time Travel Romances on several occasions. I was a little surprised to see First doing so well, but honestly, sales have been good the past several weeks. Seems like the ads are finally starting to produce consistent results. Some people might say, what’s the big deal? Canada is just a lot of trees and lakes and mountains. But you’d be wrong. Toronto is the fourth most populous city in North America, a face that somehow escaped me until I visited there last year. Which means there are a lot of book-buyers there and scattered across the country. The books have also been doing well in the UK, so it’s not just a Canada thing. When it comes to selling books, I’ll take every bit of good news, no matter where it comes from.
Spelling
The topic of this post might be a bit misleading. Yes, spelling counts. Especially in writing. However, in this case I’m talking about spelling in the context of ads. Yes, I have a story to tell. Yes, it’s embarrassing. It happened with a couple of ads I put together for the launch of Next Time. I used a quote from Independent Book Review. I checked and double-checked to make sure I got the quote exactly right. What I didn’t realize was that I’d misspelled “Review” as “Revew”. I didn’t catch it until two weeks after the book launch. Talk about feeling like an idiot. Here I am, trying to promote my new book to an audience of book readers, and I can’t even get the spelling right in an advertisement. I’m sure anybody who read it and noticed the misspelling thought the book probably consisted of the same low quality. Not my greatest moment. And now I’ve ruined the image and you know I’m not perfect. Why do I share this? Just as a case study that in making sure you’ve done all you can do, sometimes you still miss something. At least I finally noticed it and sales have improved since then.
Money
It’s time to cut through some of the ads I see on Facebook and Instagram about how to become a bestselling independent author. While I appreciate people sharing their expertise in order to help others, I also recognize that there are many ways to sell books. I’m still figuring it out. But what those ads remind me of are the people who hold seminars on how to get rich investing in real estate or stocks. Are they out there telling you to do it because they’re altruistic? Or are they doing it because they found they could make more money telling people how to do it than actually doing it themselves?
Regardless, what I’ve found so far is that you have to spend money to be even on the bottom rung of success. Or even seeing the bottom rung from below. If you do an Internet search, the average independent author sells 250 copies of their book. I’ve sold quite a bit more than that, but I’m still not making any profit. The reason is I have to pay for ads and promotions. That’s the only way I’ve found so far that lets me get people to even consider my books, but it’s pricey. Building your website, your brand, your mailing list - those are all the things the experts behind those ads will tell you if you pay for their materials or online classes. And they’re fine, but you can get all the info you need on how to do those for free from multiple sites. You’re going to spend money to sell books. Do you want it to go to someone telling you what to do, or do you want to spend the money directly on activities that’ll get you direct results?
Readers
Since in my previous post I talked about how the book is doing in other countries, I should probably take a few minutes and mention readers’ sites like Goodreads and Reedsy Discovery. Both of my recent books are doing well on Goodreads. In fact, yesterday three readers gave Next Time five-star ratings. Small sample size, but right now the book’s average is 4.92. It’s gratifying to see people who take the time to register on a readers’ website rating the book so high. Reedsy gets less traffic, at least in my experience, and it works a little differently with Upvotes alongside reviews. Next Time was upvoted enough to be featured by Reedsy a few weeks ago, but the number of overall reviews is a lot lower than Goodreads. First received no reader reviews on Reedsy and a middling site review, and I almost didn’t send Next Time to them. However, it worked out and Next Time became a must-read. Both sites are worth checking out and finding what bibliophiles say about my books.
Charts
I continue to learn more about book sales than I ever wanted to know. And not nearly enough. As mentioned before, I’ve been running ads through BookBub which reach not just US but international readers as well. That includes Canada, the UK, and Australia. The ad links to the reader’s preference, meaning if I live in Australia and my preference is Apple Books, a click on the ad will take me to the app or site for Apple. What I should’ve figured out earlier, or at least been more consistent in checking, is looking at rankings on sites outside the US. I’ve found over the last couple of weeks that Next Time has basically been a bestseller in Canada and the UK, ranking as high as third in Canada in its category. As a bonus, Amazon also lets you click on Hot New Releases in a category, and Next Time has been #2 several times. Not sure how to use this yet in my ads and not sure I feel comfortable calling it a bestseller. Still, it’s a pretty big deal and something I should have been keeping an eye on a lot sooner.
Medal
Friday late afternoon I received an email notifying me that Next Time had been selected as a Gold Medal Winner by Literary Titan. If you recall, they previously did a very nice 5-star review and posted some author interview questions that I’d answered. That’s the first award for Next Time, and I hope many more follow. I feel quite honored that the book, which of course I think is good, is seen that way by others. It’s also been getting positive reviews on Amazon, including a couple written. I’m monitoring Goodreads and Reedsy as well. So far, the book is at 4.6 Stars on Amazon and 4.89 on Goodreads. It really is helpful to get feedback, whether it’s in the form of a medal or somebody who clicks the stars when they’ve finished the book.
“Instant Classic”
I added another link to the main page of this site for a review that came in this week for Next Time. This one’s from The Bookish Elf, which I ran a promo with, mostly involving social media. I saw part of the review yesterday on the Instagram posts, and this morning the full review on their website. It’s a nice, detailed write-up and as always, I’m happy to read what people think about the book. The reviewer used phrases like “instant classic” and “a gorgeous, affecting read.” You can be darn sure I’ll be using those phrases in my upcoming ads. Speaking of ads, people in the US are clicking the hell out of my Next Time ad. Every day the budget is drained, usually by mid-afternoon. Last week it paid off in a lot of sales and hopefully this week is even better.
Conundrum
I mentioned late last week that I was interested in seeing how many sales I got from Barnes & Noble for Next Time. The US ad seemed to be garnering a lot of clicks pointing to the book’s B&N page. When I got the results Monday, the weekly B&N sales were okay but not great. Doing some simple math, it seems like about 10% of the time someone whose preference is B&N got to the B&N page, they bought the book. In contrast, the Amazon ratio looks more like 20-25%, which isn’t bad. I mean, neither one is great and I should probably look up the standards so I know what’s normal. Not sure what to do about it on B&N since I don’t directly control the page. The book description and info about reviews is the same as other sites. Maybe I just need some people to leave their ratings and others will follow - again, something I don’t control. It already has 7 ratings on Amazon for a 4.6 rating, which I think helps others in their decision-making. I’ve also heard that people have to see an ad multiple times before taking action, which seems fair. Also, the ads overall seem to be doing quite well as far as number of overall clicks, and as we’ve learned from the past, don’t change them when they’re working well.
Halfway
We’ve made it halfway through 2024 already. Congratulations. This is usually a good time to take stock of what’s happened compared to the original plans for the year. For ease of reference, here they are, along with my comments:
Publish Next Time - Done! Released on June 11th
Promote Next Time and First - Yeah, been doing the heck out of that and spending lots of money on ads and promos
Do a featured advertising deal with First - Did several with varying degrees of success
Do a new release advertising deal with Next Time - I didn’t do the formal “new release” deal with BookBub, but I did do additional ads and budget for the first month of the release
Finish writing the first book in the new series - About halfway finished, but pivoted to writing the sequel to First. I can likely still finish this book in 2024
Write the second book in the new series - Doubtful, but you never know. The sequel to First is taking the place of this one.
Publish the first book in the new series - Also doubtful. It could happen, but it would be a change in my publishing schedule.
Set a publishing date for Assignment Day - It will see the light in 2025. By the end of this year I should have something concrete in mind.
Get a total of 500 reviews for all the published books across all sites where sold - This’ll be a stretch. I’m currently just below 90 total across Amazon and Apple, but if you add in Goodreads it’s another 50 or so.
Be a guest on at least three podcasts - I’m scheduled for an interview in a couple of weeks. I’ll have to work on the other two.
Not bad so far, but more work to do. Onward and upward!
Effectiveness
Sometimes it takes a few days for an ad to take off. Other times, they immediately start collecting clicks. And sometimes you’re surprised. The night before last I did a final evening check on the ads I have going right now and found all of them doing exceptionally well. That’s a good sign, but as we’ve discussed before, getting a click on an ad doesn’t mean somebody bought the book. Usually not, in fact. However, on this particular night I was excited to find Next Time had risen to #7 in its category ranking in the UK. I take that to mean the ad was effective enough for a good portion of people to buy the book when they got to the page on Amazon. And to be clear, the description of the book has to be effective as well or people will take about five seconds and hit the back button. I’ve also been monitoring the book’s Barnes & Noble page since the US ad has garnered a lot of clicks pointing to B&N. They don’t provide category rankings on the book’s page (at least that I can find), but the book’s Sales Rank has been steadily rising all week. Let’s see what the weekend brings.
Click Click
Those are the sounds of people clicking on my ads. Remember what I said in the previous post about the study saying people don’t read as much during the summer months? Based on the number of clicks my ads received the past few days, I’m not sure I agree with that analysis. Of course, mine is a sample size of one person. I’m running five ads right now: one global ad for Next Time, UK and USish targeted ads for Next Time, and UK and USish targeted ads for First. Both books jumped up the Amazon rankings yesterday, The Next Time ads are getting a lot of clicks to Barnes & Noble links, and I’m keeping track of the sales rank there as well. First crept up to #17 in UK Space Exploration Science Fiction, the highest it’s been by one spot. One reason for the high number of clicks, particularly for Next Time, could be that not only did I target the readers of certain authors, but I also whittled down the campaign to target people who read Time Travel Romances. In other words, they like that kind of book and are more likely to click on an ad for something in the genre.
Why did I use the term “USish” up above? Because I created BookBub ads specific to the UK, showing the cost in pounds instead of dollars. The other ad I run is not only for the US, but also goes to Canada and Australia. Those bookseller sites show the cost in dollars, so there’s no need to make ads specific to those countries. I mean, I could, but they’d be the same ad. Hence the term USish, which is easier to type than US and Other Countries.