More Sales

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last sales update, so here we go. Last week trended upward a bit after the previous week. The lower ad budget remains the same, meaning clicks were probably the same or very close, but more people ended up buying the books. It’s interesting to me how effective these ads have been after I struggled a bit to find the right composition. I played with different color backgrounds, ad copy, and placement of the book cover (does it do better on the right? or on the left?). For both First and Next Time the best results came with a plain white background and a reviewer’s quote. Who knew? And apparently it doesn’t matter which side the book cover is on. Anyway, I’ll keep running those ads until they’re not effective anymore. And as I’ve been pondering, I’ll probably raise the price at the end of August. That’ll likely throttle sales, but it’ll give me good promotional material going into the holidays.

Ad Updates

Time to check in on how the ads for my books are doing. As I mentioned in a previous post, I couldn’t sustain the expense of the ads I was running, so I slashed the budget to less than half. As expected, sales took a corresponding dip. Last week was the first full week of running the ads with reduced funding, and I actually ended up surprised how many books still sold. Granted, it’s the lowest total in a couple of months, but overall I feel like it could’ve been worse. The ads are getting clicks and the budget is drained every day. I even had quite a few sales last week and this on B&N for First. For some reason, the ads I’d run previously didn’t generate a link for people who clicked on the ad with a preference for B&N, so this might be the first time in quite awhile that audience has seen these ads. I’ve been contemplating raising the price of the books, but I also have to be prepared for lower sales. The only reason to do it is for the longer-term where I can run ads at the end of the year showing a price cut. Still gotta think about that one.

School #2

Last time I wrote about the Creative Writing course I took during my last semester before graduating with an Accounting degree, so let’s continue that tale. I recall reading short stories from our textbook, probably some of the classics and maybe even some excerpts from longer pieces. Our instructor lives in my mind as energetic and encouraging, a far cry from the professors in the business college. We’d write our stories, read them aloud to each other, offer critique, and go back to the drafting board to incorporate suggestions. I also recall the quiet surprise of the other students when my writing didn’t suck as bad as they expected. Okay, maybe they didn’t expect it to suck, but I still inhabited an aura of something different. After all, I wasn’t one of their fellow English majors, much less in literature or something involving French novelists. I got an A out of the class and as I said previously, it ended up being my favorite college course. I don’t even remember what I read or wrote, but something good must have happened since I’m still writing all these years later. Not only did I not lose my love writing by taking the class, it’s actually a good marker on my way to having the confidence to self-publish my books.

School

School’s back in session here in Texas, which I don’t have to worry about since all the kids are grown. I have this recurring dream, a variety of which invaded my sleep last night, where I’m back in college again. The highlights tend to be that I’m in a class, that I’ve got one or more that I need to go to that day, and I don’t know what time and where they are. This is usually because it’s the end of the semester and I haven’t been attending classes, plus I have no idea of where my schedule is so I can’t find it to know where I need to go.

Anyway, this post isn’t about my dreams. As the wise sage Rhett Miller says, “Nobody wants to hear about your stupid dreams. We don’t even want to hear half the shit that happens in reality. Go back to sleep.” No, what I wanted to mention regards the Creative Writing class I took my very last semester when I needed three credits to maintain full-time status. I was an accounting major, seated in long rows in large lecture rooms where none of the students talked with other or interacted beyond assigned group projects, and sometimes not even then. Creative Writing provided a whole different experience, beginning with the fifteen or so of us around a large table where we had to look at each other and talk. I provided the fish-out-of-water participant since nobody believed a business school geek could write. I have fond memories of that particular time in school and always say it’s the best course I took in college. More next time…

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.