Jan Ruth's Blog: Words From the Welsh Hills - Posts Tagged "promotion"
The Value of Free Books
'You’re giving away your latest title? That’s crazy!’
I agree. However, the indie industry is still relatively new and as with all things Internet, the goal-posts are forever changing. Even in the ancient days of traditional publishing, books were gifted in an effort to raise profile, so paying for promotion and offering free material is not going to go away. My experiment was more about the quest for visibility.
Controversial…
Giving away books remains a controversial argument. I admit, I find it hugely discouraging that, as indie authors, we are expected (quite rightly) to present carefully edited books with professional formatting and covers… but for free.
I’ve never done it, not with a full-length novel which has taken me a year to produce. I have a set of short stories long-term free, but I’m not convinced it directs readers to seek out my other titles, no matter how much they enjoyed the material. Why should they? All readers need to do is wait for the next email from Bookbub or Book Blast and choose accordingly; they don’t even have to wade through Amazon’s list of free books, because their preferences are catered for and sized down to a couple of choices a day. Two clicks, and their reading material is sorted for the following week.
My Approach to Free
From the author’s standpoint, this is a double-edged sword. I’ve had good results with both these promotional tools, but constantly relying on paid promotions is not really a viable long-term strategy. There has to be a bigger picture!
I chose to promote my latest title in this way partly as an experiment, because this time I wanted to split the performance between my own efforts through Twitter and my Facebook Author Page, and Book Blast. I did it this way because I wanted to achieve something long-term, I wanted to attract readers who would hopefully stay engaged and add to my slowly growing audience, my personal readership.
Over the three years I’ve been self-published, I’ve heard various reports about Facebook and Twitter being no good for authors. I’ve never quite believed this because these two mediums are immensely powerful in the commercial world. Companies with far more sales awareness sink considerable funds into Facebook and Twitter. I suspect the real truth is that they are either under-used, or misunderstood and not used properly. Yes, I fell into these categories!
Facebook Author Pages
I was most certainly under-using my author page. It had some 500 likes on it – peanuts, and mostly other authors. I was talking to myself. Thousands of readers who may be interested in my book didn’t know I was there, so I began by building the audience on my page by Promoting the Page. Facebook gives the option of targeting to subscribers who have expressed an interest in various subjects, so I chose keywords such as Kindle, reading, fiction, Snowdonia, and so on. Then I targeted the age and gender.
This cost something like £25, but I’m hoping this will be a long-term investment, reaching beyond the promotion of a single book. While the likes were building, I concentrated on garnering well-penned reviews from bloggers and beta-readers and posting these on the page, along with chat and photographs relating to the locations of the book – a soft sell approach. I created a pinned post about the upcoming free book. I was careful not to share items or books that were unrelated.
I did something similar over on Twitter, increasing the quality of tweets and the regularity of the flow, with Feed 140.
Selling My Brand
It’s very easy to get lazy with all this stuff and turn it to spam, so I gave it some thought. I wanted to sell me: my books, my brand. This is an important point. I’ve spent considerable time (and money!) on creating my look, my branding and who I am. I wanted to key into this, to make my products work harder. It was labour intensive, but I actually enjoyed it, because it felt like a real investment.
What happened?
I promoted the book in two phases.
I set up Book Blast to mail out Silver Rain on Valentine’s Day only, which means in the UK the promotion didn’t go live until 5pm. To cover all bases with different time zones, and to be able to split the experiment with Facebook and Book Blast, I used 3 free days in KDP Select(13th-15th).
Day One: Facebook Promotion.
On the 13th, I stopped promoting the page and instead drew direct attention to the pinned post advertising Silver Rain as being free. This meant selecting Boost Post. This is the direct promotion of the free book via the pinned post, to all those people who have liked the page PLUS their friends. The estimated reach was something like 11,000. I was er… sceptical! There is a lot of data collected by Facebook during these types of promotions (see insights) and it was interesting to cross-reference the information with the use of Bitly. I could see the sales links clicks were telling the same story.
Silver Rain, at a price of £2.50 and a ranking of 250,000, was well down in the charts. I wanted to see if my efforts with Facebook (and a tentative dabble with Twitter) could bring the book out of obscurity before the paid promotion took over.
The results were astonishing.
From my Author Page alone: (and some Twitter)
US downloads 2,848: ranking at 44 free in store, 17 in Contemporary romance and 1 in Family Life
UK downloads 1,027: ranking at 27 free in store, 10 in Contemporary romance
Day Two: Book Blast Promotion
Book Blast increased these figures to:
US downloads: 5,500 ranking at 53 free in store
UK downloads: 2,500 ranking at 11 free in store and 5 in Contemporary romance
Conclusion
Facebook and Twitter can equal the power of Book Blast.
8,000 is a lot of downloads, and let’s be honest, half of those people may never read the book, BUT they helped push it under the noses of thousands of readers who didn’t know I even existed. I’m currently selling at normal price, with the book ranked in the top 3,000 overall and a small take-up of the other titles. I don’t think it made any difference whether the free book was my first, third or hot off the press. Those new readers will not be aware of any publication dates. All they see is the price, and then the cover.
What is interesting is that my sales in the UK have doubled, and I know this isn’t down to Book Blast.
Did I devalue myself? In a way, yes. It’s almost smelling like vanity publishing, and I’ve made more money from paperbacks purely because people will pay for a tangible item.
But this isn’t traditional publishing, and I think it pointless to compare with old methods. Experimentation with the tools we have available is vital. The only danger is to maybe exploit the reader or even ourselves, and this is where constantly offering free and heavily discounted IS under-selling and devaluing, but I can see how that black hole is ever-present and very easy to fall into.
Quality remains as my keyword, not only in what I produce, but in the way I promote too, and if used sparingly, I believe that free can be included under that umbrella.
Originally published for The Alliance of Independent Authors. 2013
I agree. However, the indie industry is still relatively new and as with all things Internet, the goal-posts are forever changing. Even in the ancient days of traditional publishing, books were gifted in an effort to raise profile, so paying for promotion and offering free material is not going to go away. My experiment was more about the quest for visibility.Controversial…
Giving away books remains a controversial argument. I admit, I find it hugely discouraging that, as indie authors, we are expected (quite rightly) to present carefully edited books with professional formatting and covers… but for free.
I’ve never done it, not with a full-length novel which has taken me a year to produce. I have a set of short stories long-term free, but I’m not convinced it directs readers to seek out my other titles, no matter how much they enjoyed the material. Why should they? All readers need to do is wait for the next email from Bookbub or Book Blast and choose accordingly; they don’t even have to wade through Amazon’s list of free books, because their preferences are catered for and sized down to a couple of choices a day. Two clicks, and their reading material is sorted for the following week.
My Approach to Free
From the author’s standpoint, this is a double-edged sword. I’ve had good results with both these promotional tools, but constantly relying on paid promotions is not really a viable long-term strategy. There has to be a bigger picture!
I chose to promote my latest title in this way partly as an experiment, because this time I wanted to split the performance between my own efforts through Twitter and my Facebook Author Page, and Book Blast. I did it this way because I wanted to achieve something long-term, I wanted to attract readers who would hopefully stay engaged and add to my slowly growing audience, my personal readership.
Over the three years I’ve been self-published, I’ve heard various reports about Facebook and Twitter being no good for authors. I’ve never quite believed this because these two mediums are immensely powerful in the commercial world. Companies with far more sales awareness sink considerable funds into Facebook and Twitter. I suspect the real truth is that they are either under-used, or misunderstood and not used properly. Yes, I fell into these categories!
Facebook Author Pages
I was most certainly under-using my author page. It had some 500 likes on it – peanuts, and mostly other authors. I was talking to myself. Thousands of readers who may be interested in my book didn’t know I was there, so I began by building the audience on my page by Promoting the Page. Facebook gives the option of targeting to subscribers who have expressed an interest in various subjects, so I chose keywords such as Kindle, reading, fiction, Snowdonia, and so on. Then I targeted the age and gender.
This cost something like £25, but I’m hoping this will be a long-term investment, reaching beyond the promotion of a single book. While the likes were building, I concentrated on garnering well-penned reviews from bloggers and beta-readers and posting these on the page, along with chat and photographs relating to the locations of the book – a soft sell approach. I created a pinned post about the upcoming free book. I was careful not to share items or books that were unrelated.
I did something similar over on Twitter, increasing the quality of tweets and the regularity of the flow, with Feed 140.
Selling My Brand
It’s very easy to get lazy with all this stuff and turn it to spam, so I gave it some thought. I wanted to sell me: my books, my brand. This is an important point. I’ve spent considerable time (and money!) on creating my look, my branding and who I am. I wanted to key into this, to make my products work harder. It was labour intensive, but I actually enjoyed it, because it felt like a real investment.
What happened?
I promoted the book in two phases.
I set up Book Blast to mail out Silver Rain on Valentine’s Day only, which means in the UK the promotion didn’t go live until 5pm. To cover all bases with different time zones, and to be able to split the experiment with Facebook and Book Blast, I used 3 free days in KDP Select(13th-15th).
Day One: Facebook Promotion.
On the 13th, I stopped promoting the page and instead drew direct attention to the pinned post advertising Silver Rain as being free. This meant selecting Boost Post. This is the direct promotion of the free book via the pinned post, to all those people who have liked the page PLUS their friends. The estimated reach was something like 11,000. I was er… sceptical! There is a lot of data collected by Facebook during these types of promotions (see insights) and it was interesting to cross-reference the information with the use of Bitly. I could see the sales links clicks were telling the same story.
Silver Rain, at a price of £2.50 and a ranking of 250,000, was well down in the charts. I wanted to see if my efforts with Facebook (and a tentative dabble with Twitter) could bring the book out of obscurity before the paid promotion took over.
The results were astonishing.
From my Author Page alone: (and some Twitter)
US downloads 2,848: ranking at 44 free in store, 17 in Contemporary romance and 1 in Family Life
UK downloads 1,027: ranking at 27 free in store, 10 in Contemporary romance
Day Two: Book Blast Promotion
Book Blast increased these figures to:
US downloads: 5,500 ranking at 53 free in store
UK downloads: 2,500 ranking at 11 free in store and 5 in Contemporary romance
Conclusion
Facebook and Twitter can equal the power of Book Blast.
8,000 is a lot of downloads, and let’s be honest, half of those people may never read the book, BUT they helped push it under the noses of thousands of readers who didn’t know I even existed. I’m currently selling at normal price, with the book ranked in the top 3,000 overall and a small take-up of the other titles. I don’t think it made any difference whether the free book was my first, third or hot off the press. Those new readers will not be aware of any publication dates. All they see is the price, and then the cover.
What is interesting is that my sales in the UK have doubled, and I know this isn’t down to Book Blast.
Did I devalue myself? In a way, yes. It’s almost smelling like vanity publishing, and I’ve made more money from paperbacks purely because people will pay for a tangible item.
But this isn’t traditional publishing, and I think it pointless to compare with old methods. Experimentation with the tools we have available is vital. The only danger is to maybe exploit the reader or even ourselves, and this is where constantly offering free and heavily discounted IS under-selling and devaluing, but I can see how that black hole is ever-present and very easy to fall into.
Quality remains as my keyword, not only in what I produce, but in the way I promote too, and if used sparingly, I believe that free can be included under that umbrella.
Originally published for The Alliance of Independent Authors. 2013
Why Does My Book Not Sell?
I don't claim to be an expert on ebook sales, neither do I sell many thousands of copies; but I do receive a variety of emails relating to the subject, and I often spot frequently missed opportunities for sales and some rather more obvious reasons why books don't sell.
EDITING. The single most important process of publishing a book is structural editing and proofreading. The lack of consistent, industry standard editing will kill sales in record time. Readers can forgive a smattering of minor mistakes throughout an 80,000 word novel, but if the first thing they see when they look inside the book sample are glaring grammatical errors – then there's little chance they will buy. It's a false economy to skip the editing process simply because your sister said it was 'ok'. Or someone you met on a Facebook group said they'd do the entire manuscript for £100. Only employ a recommended editor with a good track record and be aware there are many, many plausible fakes out there. Be super critical and don't publish too soon.
FORMATTING. If you can't handle the formatting, then please pay someone who can. It might be the best story ever and perfectly well edited but if there are blank pages, irregular indents, or oversized margins, then after a while it just becomes too irritating to read. Your text needs to look consistent on a variety of screen sizes.
COVER. The cover can and should work in a number of ways to help sell your book. Mostly it needs to match the content and the expectations of the genre – ie: not a photograph which you happen to like and may be related to the material in some vague way, but means absolutely nothing to a prospective reader on the other side of the world. Do some research and look at other books in your genre. Unless you have an eye for design, understand book marketing, and own the relevant software to be original and creative; pay someone who does. Of course, it's perfectly possible to make your own cover with free software through Amazon's publishing platform or something like Canva, but if the end result looks homemade – and you want to reach beyond friends and family – then consider the commercial impact.
FONT. Often overlooked, but the font is a vital bit of selling kit. Nothing screams homemade more than a bog-standard font scrawled across a third-rate cover image. If the cover and the font look third-rate, then the reader is fully entitled to presume that the content is much the same. Do the research: you will not find a loopy font on a cold-blooded thriller. Consider the impact of this and apply accordingly.
BRANDING. If you've got all the above in order then do also consider branding. If you write across different genres this can be difficult but covers which are easily recognisable as one of yours, do help follow-on sales – so at least consider keeping the font of your author name consistent. Four or five cross-genre books with variable cover styles are notoriously difficult to sell. Same applies to using more than one author or pen name. This is why traditional publishers like material which is easily branded to match their current list. It's easier to market and sell, and the reader knows what to expect.
SHORT LINKS. Every time you talk about your book across social media add the buy link! Potential readers will not go searching, and if you also use a pen name which is different to your social media persona, this can be an impossible task. Why make it so difficult and confusing? The social media audience has a very short attention span at the best of times. Make a short universal link – it's so easy – and use it. I can't recall the amount of times I've tried to find a book and given up because the author didn't use a buy link and I couldn't remember the exact pen name or the specific use of initials.
PRICE. Study the market and take note how much is free or priced at 99p. How much do you spend on ebooks? Personally, I'm cautious at anything over £1.99 if the author is unknown to me. It makes more sense to sell 10 books at 99p than one book at £2.99. Free books have lost their impact in raising visibility. Still useful if you're offering the first in a series as a free download – which hopefully will attract readers to buy the next, and the next. But always price the first book in the series less than the sequel – as a loss-leader – not the other way about!
KINDLE SELECT, CATEGORIES & KEYWORDS. The Kindle Select programme (staying exclusive to Amazon) is worth considering, rather than spreading yourself too thin and being available on every other sales platform. Amazon Kindle remains the most popular so why not use this to your advantage – at least initially – and use the free promotional tools available. Select also means you can enrol in other programmes such as Kindle Unlimited. This allows readers unlimited access to books in the Select programme and for the author, pages read can earn as much – if not more – than those elusive sales. Experiment with categories on Amazon, the smaller ones are more likely to get your book noticed. Likewise the keywords – it's worth doing some research, there are plenty of articles about keywords and words which are trending and are currently effective
SOCIAL MEDIA & WEBSITES. Build a social media platform before you launch the book, not as an afterthought a few months later because 'you really don't do promoting, advertising, Twitter, or all that stuff...' Your ebook is an internet-based product which is targeted at an internet-based audience who own an e-reader and therefore browse the internet for their next read. A commercial page – use your author name for this, not your book title – on Facebook and a website are both worth having because they are public sites and allow readers to discover you. They will not discover you via a personal Facebook profile. A website is more static – a 'go to' place to locate the books and hit that universal buy-link. Keep it clean and simple. Get rid of the dancing cats, change the white text on a black background to the other way about, and fix the links that don't work.
REVIEWS. Reviews do help to sell books in that they raise customer confidence in the product. Approach book bloggers and reviewers who are interested in your material and whose opinions carry some weight; they will also have a good presence across social media. Don't approach other authors or send multiple requests through Messenger to all your friends begging for reviews. And the other biggie: don't respond to negative reviews in public. Nothing looks worse to a prospective reader than to witness an angry response to someone who didn't enjoy your book. They are entitled to their opinion and if it's malicious then interacting in any way will add fuel to the fire. There are plenty of people who will enjoy a good to-and-fro at your expense. Not only does it look desperately unprofessional to join in, but it's wise to remember that reviews are not directed towards the author. Neither are they an easy, cheap critique service – they are there to help other prospective readers decide if they might enjoy the book. Only take them to heart if there are several reviews flagging the same issue. Get it fixed.
BLOGGING & NEWSLETTERS. The clue is in the title... these are not meant to be hard-sell sales platforms. Blogs are a good way to build a slow but sure fanbase, but your blog needs original and interesting content. Write articles you can share across social media and build followers. I've written some equitation based fiction so blogging about horses brings me into contact with the right audience. And if you cannot produce engaging, interesting, and informative content on a regular basis, don't start a newsletter. Sending advertising copy through email disguised as a newsletter is SPAM.
MARKET TRENDS. Are you writing fiction the public are looking to read? If it's a complicated contemporary romance set in Newcastle and your main female character is aged 45, it won't sell as well as a formula romance set in Cornwall with a heroine aged 25; even if your book is more original and better executed. Sadly, this is the way commercial sales and marketing works for the big guys, and the independent publisher can either try and swim with the mass-market tide, or accept that writing to their own agenda and enjoying creative freedom will always produce books which are more of a struggle to sell.
EDITING. The single most important process of publishing a book is structural editing and proofreading. The lack of consistent, industry standard editing will kill sales in record time. Readers can forgive a smattering of minor mistakes throughout an 80,000 word novel, but if the first thing they see when they look inside the book sample are glaring grammatical errors – then there's little chance they will buy. It's a false economy to skip the editing process simply because your sister said it was 'ok'. Or someone you met on a Facebook group said they'd do the entire manuscript for £100. Only employ a recommended editor with a good track record and be aware there are many, many plausible fakes out there. Be super critical and don't publish too soon.
FORMATTING. If you can't handle the formatting, then please pay someone who can. It might be the best story ever and perfectly well edited but if there are blank pages, irregular indents, or oversized margins, then after a while it just becomes too irritating to read. Your text needs to look consistent on a variety of screen sizes.
COVER. The cover can and should work in a number of ways to help sell your book. Mostly it needs to match the content and the expectations of the genre – ie: not a photograph which you happen to like and may be related to the material in some vague way, but means absolutely nothing to a prospective reader on the other side of the world. Do some research and look at other books in your genre. Unless you have an eye for design, understand book marketing, and own the relevant software to be original and creative; pay someone who does. Of course, it's perfectly possible to make your own cover with free software through Amazon's publishing platform or something like Canva, but if the end result looks homemade – and you want to reach beyond friends and family – then consider the commercial impact.
FONT. Often overlooked, but the font is a vital bit of selling kit. Nothing screams homemade more than a bog-standard font scrawled across a third-rate cover image. If the cover and the font look third-rate, then the reader is fully entitled to presume that the content is much the same. Do the research: you will not find a loopy font on a cold-blooded thriller. Consider the impact of this and apply accordingly.
BRANDING. If you've got all the above in order then do also consider branding. If you write across different genres this can be difficult but covers which are easily recognisable as one of yours, do help follow-on sales – so at least consider keeping the font of your author name consistent. Four or five cross-genre books with variable cover styles are notoriously difficult to sell. Same applies to using more than one author or pen name. This is why traditional publishers like material which is easily branded to match their current list. It's easier to market and sell, and the reader knows what to expect.
SHORT LINKS. Every time you talk about your book across social media add the buy link! Potential readers will not go searching, and if you also use a pen name which is different to your social media persona, this can be an impossible task. Why make it so difficult and confusing? The social media audience has a very short attention span at the best of times. Make a short universal link – it's so easy – and use it. I can't recall the amount of times I've tried to find a book and given up because the author didn't use a buy link and I couldn't remember the exact pen name or the specific use of initials.
PRICE. Study the market and take note how much is free or priced at 99p. How much do you spend on ebooks? Personally, I'm cautious at anything over £1.99 if the author is unknown to me. It makes more sense to sell 10 books at 99p than one book at £2.99. Free books have lost their impact in raising visibility. Still useful if you're offering the first in a series as a free download – which hopefully will attract readers to buy the next, and the next. But always price the first book in the series less than the sequel – as a loss-leader – not the other way about!
KINDLE SELECT, CATEGORIES & KEYWORDS. The Kindle Select programme (staying exclusive to Amazon) is worth considering, rather than spreading yourself too thin and being available on every other sales platform. Amazon Kindle remains the most popular so why not use this to your advantage – at least initially – and use the free promotional tools available. Select also means you can enrol in other programmes such as Kindle Unlimited. This allows readers unlimited access to books in the Select programme and for the author, pages read can earn as much – if not more – than those elusive sales. Experiment with categories on Amazon, the smaller ones are more likely to get your book noticed. Likewise the keywords – it's worth doing some research, there are plenty of articles about keywords and words which are trending and are currently effective
SOCIAL MEDIA & WEBSITES. Build a social media platform before you launch the book, not as an afterthought a few months later because 'you really don't do promoting, advertising, Twitter, or all that stuff...' Your ebook is an internet-based product which is targeted at an internet-based audience who own an e-reader and therefore browse the internet for their next read. A commercial page – use your author name for this, not your book title – on Facebook and a website are both worth having because they are public sites and allow readers to discover you. They will not discover you via a personal Facebook profile. A website is more static – a 'go to' place to locate the books and hit that universal buy-link. Keep it clean and simple. Get rid of the dancing cats, change the white text on a black background to the other way about, and fix the links that don't work.
REVIEWS. Reviews do help to sell books in that they raise customer confidence in the product. Approach book bloggers and reviewers who are interested in your material and whose opinions carry some weight; they will also have a good presence across social media. Don't approach other authors or send multiple requests through Messenger to all your friends begging for reviews. And the other biggie: don't respond to negative reviews in public. Nothing looks worse to a prospective reader than to witness an angry response to someone who didn't enjoy your book. They are entitled to their opinion and if it's malicious then interacting in any way will add fuel to the fire. There are plenty of people who will enjoy a good to-and-fro at your expense. Not only does it look desperately unprofessional to join in, but it's wise to remember that reviews are not directed towards the author. Neither are they an easy, cheap critique service – they are there to help other prospective readers decide if they might enjoy the book. Only take them to heart if there are several reviews flagging the same issue. Get it fixed.
BLOGGING & NEWSLETTERS. The clue is in the title... these are not meant to be hard-sell sales platforms. Blogs are a good way to build a slow but sure fanbase, but your blog needs original and interesting content. Write articles you can share across social media and build followers. I've written some equitation based fiction so blogging about horses brings me into contact with the right audience. And if you cannot produce engaging, interesting, and informative content on a regular basis, don't start a newsletter. Sending advertising copy through email disguised as a newsletter is SPAM.
MARKET TRENDS. Are you writing fiction the public are looking to read? If it's a complicated contemporary romance set in Newcastle and your main female character is aged 45, it won't sell as well as a formula romance set in Cornwall with a heroine aged 25; even if your book is more original and better executed. Sadly, this is the way commercial sales and marketing works for the big guys, and the independent publisher can either try and swim with the mass-market tide, or accept that writing to their own agenda and enjoying creative freedom will always produce books which are more of a struggle to sell.
