Savvy Self-Publishing

A Little Self-Publishing Humor…

Lindsay — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:29:16 +0000

I’m doing the final edits on my next novel, and once I send it off to my editor, I’ll record a couple of new shows (I’ve scribbled down some notes for talking about how to build a platform and also about how self-publishing can lead to a traditional publishing deal). Stay tuned, and in the meantime, a little humor…

Episode #8: Pros and Cons of Writing a Series

Lindsay — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:54:18 +0000

Another show that I recorded way back in January or so. I promise it’s all still relevant!

The only change for me is that I now have four books out in my main series instead of three, and that I have even more readers on Facebook, Twitter, and the new fan forum who are asking for the next. Of course, I left them with a nasty cliffhanger on the fourth one (sorry, guys!). As the title says, today’s podcast episode discusses the pros and cons of doing a series.

Show notes:

Pros of writing and publishing a series

Potential to sell more books overall (people tend to continue on with characters they already know)
Your work is more likely to stick in people’s minds
The series as a brand that becomes greater (more well known) than you
Can spend more on advertising or leads for Book 1
Can afford to give the first away as a loss leader
More reader involvement — easier to build a community around characters/world (1000 True Fans idea)

Cons of writing and publishing a series

If people don’t like the first, they won’t check out any of the others
Pressure to keep things fresh, interesting, and satisfy the fans as the series continues

Episode #7: My Big Ol’ List of Promotional Activities That Helped (and some that didn’t)

Lindsay — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 23:28:06 +0000

Don’t fall out of your chair in surprise, but I’m uploading a new show. A mere six months after I recorded it. There’s some useful information (if I do say so myself) that should still be relevant today.

Thanks for checking it out, and thank you to those who have stopped by and listened and commented over the last few months as well. I’ll try to get caught up with things around here.

***

Episode 7 was supposed to be about the “pros and cons of writing a series,” but I decided to start out talking about the various promotional tactics I’ve tried in the last year (including what’s worked and what was kind of a waste of time and/or money), and that ended up taking up the whole show. I also forgot I was trying to work on cutting out my “you knows,” and they take up way too much space in the recording. Someday I’ll get this speech stuff down. So, anyway, Episode 8 will be about publishing in a series, and that’s already recorded, so it’ll be up before long.

In episode 6, I talked a lot about how much my sales improved after making the first ebook in my series free at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Well, this is all of the stuff I tried before that (I didn’t want you to think that all I’d done is make a book free). With much of this, it’s about doing a little bit here and there and eventually reaching a tipping point. So, here’s a show all about the “little bit here and there” that I’ve done. I’ll now stop using quotation markets and get the show going:

Show Notes:

What’s an Amazon Rush and does it still work? (Post mentioned: Amazon Sales Rank Explained)
Listmania at Amazon
Posting your book-release news on forums (MobileRead, Nookboards, Kindleboards), yay or nay?
Advertising on Goodreads (my epic blog post on How to Set up a Goodreads Pay-Per-Click Advertising Campaign from last year)
Publishing a free short story to increase sales of a non-free first novel
Other advertising I’ve tried (Kindle Nation Daily, Ereader News Today, Pixel of Ink)
Submitting to review blogs
Should you do book trailers or anything else on YouTube? Here are my little self-publishing-related video skits that I made using Xtranormal.
Book blog tours, pay or organize yourself?
Guest posting (Include links back to your site in your guest posts/interviews — have you read my article on search engine optimization?)
Asking if I could advertise on blogs in my niche (by the way, I mentioned wondering about the rates to huge, popular sites like i09.com in the podcast, and I’ve seen found out that advertising starts at $25,000. *faint*).
My short-lived Kindle Geeks blog.
Giveaways on the MobileRead forum using Smashwords coupons.
Passing out flyers/business cards at conventions.
Twitter tactics that work for me
The Facebook fan page and why you want to have one
Starting a newsletter
The power of writing more books
How my podiobook has helped bring in more readers
Book giveaways on Goodreads
The benefits of testing price points, covers, blurbs, etc.

I’ve written a bunch of self-publishing-related articles on my author blog since the last podcast. Here are some you might find useful:

How to Generate Your First Professionally Formatted Mobi File

Lindsay — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:33:09 +0000

I’ll have a new podcast up for you guys in a couple of days (it’s already recorded — the next two are recorded in fact), but in the mean time, I have a guest post to help the new folks. The subject is formatting, and indie author Curtis Hox is here to give you some advice. These are the techniques he used to format his new sci-fi/fantasy novel, Bleedover. (If you’re inclined you thank him for his help, you can purchase his ebook for 99 cents at Amazon.)

How to Generate Your First Professionally Formatted Mobi File

When I first thought about publishing my work on Amazon, I had no idea what Smashwords was, what the technical differences were between a .mobi or an .epub file, how KDP Publishing functioned, etc. Like many writers, I just wanted to write and produce the best possible work I could. However, I have some technical experience as a new media project manager and have spent enough time with HTML and CSS to feel comfortable with it.

Workflow from composition to final e-book format

Please note, I’m not claiming my workflow is the best approach. In fact, I’ still searching for other writers/publishers who have suggestions on how to perfect this because there’s one piece of the process I’m still highly annoyed with (see below: i.e., managing more than one copy of a final edited/formatted document).

I highly recommend all writers try Scrivener. It’s a writing environment that creates a database on your computer that stores all your information. Any research you do, you can drop into your Scrivener project file and it’s all right there when you open the project. Also, it saves immediately, so that’s one drawback to Word’s finicky saving requirement. There are many others. Try the free download for Mac and PC. I’ll bet you won’t be disappointed. (The full screen mode, alone, is worth the purchase price).
For short stories, I use Scrivener to output .mobi (it also outputs to .epub). I use this function for short stories that don’t require any extra formatting. For my novels, I export my Scrivener project to an .html file.
You can then open this cleanly formatted .html file (much cleaner than Word’s) in an editor of your choice. Sigil is a tool used for generating .epub formatted documents. I haven’t had that need yet. Because I have only focused on Amazon, I open my clean .html file in Dreamweaver (any HTML editor will do). Here’s where the learning curve begins. Depending on how much web development experience you have, you’ll either be able to pick this up in a few hours or a few weeks. If you have no interest in learning to play around with html, I suggest hiring someone to do the work for you. If you have any inclination, keep reading. It’s not hard at all.
Formatting
The trick here is using basic CSS (formatting) so that your e-book looks professional. I always add a masthead as an image at the top or my .html file. You can create one easily in Photoshop or any of the many open source alternatives. Just take a look at any paperback or professional e-book. You’ll see the title and author’s name in professional typesetting. Again, these are images that you insert in your html file; you don’t create the masthead with CSS. You then need to format your content. I use
for all my chapter styles and section styles. I use
,
, etc., for any subheaders that might be in epigrams or other structural elements. You can style these to be centered, or to have an indent, or whatever you choose. But, again, you should use simple CSS to do this. Another format element I employ is non-indenting the first line of paragraph that starts a new segment. You can also add a CSS style to increase the size of the first initial (See, John’s Blog on how to do that). Of course, you need to spend some time learning to make this works but it’s easy.
Once you have a cleanly formatted .html file (that works in a browser as you expect), you can import it into Calibre. This tool allows you to export your prepped document into a number of different e-book formats. In Calibre you add your cover, meta data, etc. It has plenty of tweaking tools for the creation of table of contents or even adjusting the look and feel of the e-book.
I would also download the Kindle Previewer (again, this is only helpful for Amazon’s .mobi format). Caliber has built in viewers for the different formats, but Amazon’s application seems to work best. Once you’ve opened the Calibre-compiled .mobi, you can open it in the Kindle Previewer and see exactly what it will look like on a Kindle.
At this point, you’re ready to upload to KDP. There are plenty of articles how to do this. It’s simple. If you get this far, you’re home free.

What to do about the master document?

My main problem with the process at this point is that the formatted .html file that I view in Dreamweaver now becomes my primary document and the one I must return to if I ever need to make content changes. I would rather be able to use Scrivener, of course, but it doesn’t output formatted .mobi with the level of sophistication I need. Having an .html file as the main file is a problem right now for anyone who wants to upload to Smashwords (it requires a striped down and properly styled Word .doc). I have been told Smashwords will begin accepting .epub in 2012, so that will make things easier. But, the bottom line, I don’t like writing content in Dreamweaver. (If anyone has a better solution on how to maintain one document that you can both write content in and format HTML and CSS I’d like to hear).

Bio:

Curtis Hox is an English professor by day and a science fiction writer by night. He launched his debut novel, Bleedover, in Nov. 2011 and is editing his YA Transhuman Warrior Series, which is scheduled to launch on Jun 1st, 2012. He’s also blogging his journey as a self-published author. He lives with his wife and two year old son, who often pretends to type on his keyboard and, at times, somehow inserts erroneous characters into his manuscripts.

Other titles: Repossession in Progress, The Kafka Harrier, and The Red Sphere.

You can reach him at www.curtishox.com | @curtishox | curtishox@gmail.com

Self-Publishing / E-Publishing Meetup for Seattle / Everett Authors

Lindsay — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:04:33 +0000

I know most of you guys are from all over the world, but I’m sure there are a few authors interested in e-publishing in my cloudy corner of it. For those in the Seattle/Everett area, I’m starting a digital publishing meetup.

Seattle/Everett E-Publishing & Book Promotion Group

If you’re not familiar with Meetup.com, it doesn’t cost anything to join, and it’s a site for scheduling in-person gatherings. This is my first time putting a group together, but I’ve gone to plenty of meetup events (they have everything from internet marketing and business meetups to groups for people who want to make play dates for their dogs). It should be educational if we can get some authors together for regular discussion of e-publishing and how best to take over the world with our ebooks (or at least sell more than three copies a month).

If you’re interested, just click the link above to sign up. Thanks!

Episode #6: Amazon KDP Select, E-Publishing News, and What’s Working for Me

Lindsay — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 08:37:59 +0000

E-publishing should have its biggest year yet in 2012. Are you prepared? Today I discuss what’s been happening, especially with Amazon and the KDP Select program, as well as what’s helped me have my best earnings months for the last two months.

Show Notes:

Lots of new e-readers for Christmas
Discussing the Amazon KDP Select Lending Program. Should you do it or stay away?
My earnings for October, November, and December, and what I’ve been doing to see good results
How my podiobook is bringing in new readers

Links to recent posts on my other blog that you may find useful:

Have any thoughts on KDP Select, the future of e-publishing, or anything else vaguely relevant? Share them below!

Is There a Secret to Self-Publishing Success?

Lindsay — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:05:28 +0000

I’m coming up on my one year anniversary for self-publishing. In that time, I’ve published four novels (I had two written coming into this, but I did manage to write two full novels this year as well), two novellas, and some shorter stories. I haven’t become a bestseller or some phenom that the traditional publishers are drooling over, but I believe I’ve done reasonably well.

May was the last month where I earned less than $1,000, and I’ve earned as much as $4,000 (November, thanks to the release of my most recent novel). Most recent months have been in the $2,500-$3,000 range (though October was quite a bit lower and showed me how quickly things can slow down if you haven’t had a new release for a while and you haven’t done any big promotional kicks).

This isn’t my sole source of income, but I find it encouraging to know that I could live off this income, if modestly done. Of course, I hope I’ll continue to acquire new fans and the sales numbers will grow as I write and release more books.

So, as I said, I’m not a huge success in the e-publishing world, but I know I’ve been fortunate enough to find what a lot of folks seek. What I hope is encouraging for many of you is that we’ve finally entered an age where it’s a) possible to make decent money self-publishing and b) possible to make that money without being a huge star.

The Secret to Success?

Every now and then someone asks me about “secrets.” As in, what’s the secret to making it as a self-published author?

This may be a disappointing answer, but the main thing I’ve figured out is that there’s no one thing. It’s a lot of plugging away and sticking with it.

I’ll list some of what I’ve learned here though. Please keep in mind that I’m still learning. At least one of the suggestions I have for you is something I failed to do myself (but will do when I’m ready to launch a new series).

In no particular order, a few “secrets”…

It helps to be everywhere a reader could possibly stumble over you — You can read my recent post on author branding to see all the places I’ve made myself and/or my work available.
Give something away for free — I’ve talked about this often before, but giving away a short story is the first thing I did that really made a difference. It starred the characters from the first novel I released, and I included an excerpt from the novel at the end. Lots of people have told me they went on to buy the novel after trying and enjoying the story. In all honesty, giving away an entire novel can work even better (especially a Book 1 in a series), but I wasn’t in a position to do that in the beginning (since I didn’t have other books in the series written yet).
Think like a publisher — This is something I failed to do. Because I was trying to save money, I struggled to get cover art I really liked (if it didn’t wow me, how was it supposed to wow potential readers?). Also, I didn’t spend enough time thinking up a cool title for Book 1 and a cool series name for the whole thing. The title for the first book (which ultimately became the series title) was my working title and I never came up with something better. I should have brainstormed more and thought up an awesome series title that would stick in people’s heads. Something brandable. In short, I didn’t really think about the packaging and the presentation the way a publisher would. (Nothing is set in stone with POD printing and e-publishing, though, and I may yet rename that series!)
Realize it’s a marathon, not a sprint — If you want to make a career out of self-publishing someday (or maybe you dream of leveraging your self-publishing success into a traditional publishing deal), you have to realize it’s something that will develop over years. Sure, I’ve done well in just one year, but I’ve also put out a lot of books. If I’d just had one or maybe two out after a year, I doubt I’d be selling more than a couple hundred books a month total. If you’re very prolific, you might be able to get things rolling more quickly than I have, but most people don’t write that fast. They’ve got day jobs and families. That doesn’t mean that they can’t succeed, just that it will take longer. Don’t get discouraged when you’re not a hit in the first month or even six months. In the year I’ve been doing this, I’ve chatted with many new authors on Twitter, and everyone starts out so excited and passionate when they first publish, but then I realize I haven’t heard from them in a while, and I check their tweets and their blog…and they’ve just faded away.
Play around with price points — I have a whole podcast where I ramble about paperback and ebook pricing strategies, so I’ll direct you to that for when you have some free time, but, in short, change things up. Don’t feel you have to charge 99 cents because you’re an unknown author (there are lots of authors at your local Barnes & Noble that are unknown to you until you stumble across their books and try them), but don’t be afraid to try 99 cents, or even free, as part of a greater strategy either.
Writing a series can help — I’ve always enjoyed reading series where you get to fall in love with characters and continue following their adventures, so I wasn’t thinking strategy when I started my series. I just always knew I wanted to do at least six books with my core set of characters. As it turns out, that has served me well. I see it serving a lot of other authors well too. Not everybody who picks up your first book is going to like it enough to go on to read the others, but some will, and some will enjoy things enough to go on and buy all the books in your series. Honestly, it’s not quite the same no-brainer for readers when you have unrelated books. Even if they liked the first, they may think the plot summaries of the others don’t sound as appealing. It’s characters that people get invested in. If you’re jumping around and writing in different genres, you’re really going to make it hard on yourself.
Start a newsletter (AKA get your fans’ email addresses!) — I’ve already blogged about why authors should start mailing lists, so I’ll refer you to that post for details, but it’s extremely helpful to be able to contact your fans directly once you have a new book out. When you’re an indie author, Amazon isn’t going to make a big splash every time you have a new release out, so you’re on your own for building buzz. Having a list of folks that you can contact all at once will make it so you don’t have to start over with your marketing efforts every time.
Write well and entertain folks — In the end, there’s only so much marketing we can do. You don’t have to please everyone, but you do have to please someone, and the more people who read your books and recommend them to others, the better you’re going to do in this business. Get your work professionally edited, but long before that, consider joining a writing workshop and taking classes or at least secure a good group of beta readers, folks who aren’t afraid to point out the boring parts. Ultimately, you have to put out a good product.

Thoughts? Any secrets you’d like to share?

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Author Branding Questions?

Lindsay — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:57:22 +0000

I spent a good deal of time writing up a post on author branding over on my personal blog this week, so if you’re wondering, “What the Heck is Author Branding and How Do You Do It Anyway?” please check that article out.

If you have any questions or comments on branding, feel free to ask me here or leave a comment on that post.

Since I’m not the definitive source on all things marketing, I’d like to point you to some other people’s articles and books on branding (as it applies to authors) as well. It’s interesting how many different ideas people have about what strategies you should partake in to “brand yourself as an author.”

Articles on Branding

Books on Marketing/Branding

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Creating Your Own Cover Art with Jenna E Johnson

Lindsay — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:50:40 +0000

When it came to cover art, I knew I didn’t have the artistic background to handle the project myself, so I hired someone. A lot of independent authors do seem to have artistic ability though, and they’re interested in doing their own cover art. Or maybe it’s just a matter of necessity because they can’t afford to hire someone yet. Either way, you may be interested in some tips from someone who’s “been there, done that.”

Jenna E Johnson is the author of The Oesscienne fantasy series for YA readers, and she’s graciously agreed to guest post today on the subject of cover art.

Jenna E Johnson on Creating Your Own Cover Art

I want to start out by thanking Lindsay for inviting me to write a guest blog for her website. I hope that my insight can provide some help for those of you interested in creating your own book cover images.

Creating your own book image may seem like a rather daunting task, but once you have the artwork or picture you wish to use, it becomes simply a matter of how creative or complex you want to get. So, if you cannot afford a fancy graphic art program, or paying a professional artist to create your book image is just not in your budget, you might want to consider doing it yourself. Not only will you have full control over the creation of your design, but you’ll also retain all the rights when you are done (if you draw the image or take the pictures yourself).

If you (or a family member or friend) happens to be artistically inclined, then you are in luck. Maybe you can’t draw or paint to save your life, but do you enjoy photography? I’ve used pictures in creating book covers as well (opening them in Adobe Photoshop Elements and playing around with the different special effects until I got an image I liked). Of course, you also have to consider the genre of the book you are writing and the audience you are writing for. My books, for example, are aimed towards the middle grade and young teen crowd. If they were for a more mature audience, my particular style of drawing probably wouldn’t work as well as perhaps one of my distorted photos.

Maybe the thought of trying to navigate through your different computer programs sounds like a major headache. I understand, but if you aren’t an expert, don’t worry. I’m by no means a computer wiz; I learned by trial and error, and if I can do it, so can you! The key here: have fun and don’t be afraid to experiment. Maybe I’m crazy, but sometimes I enjoy creating my book covers and other marketing projects more than writing the books themselves. Just make sure you ALWAYS save back-up copies of the original images.

Now for the creative process . . .

The images I use for my Oescienne books are originally drawn on good art paper (torn out of my sketch book) and cut to a specific size (makes them all the same dimensions so I know they’ll be the same size when I upload them). I don’t use any fancy art tools, just a mechanical pencil (always stays sharp), a black pen and some colored pencils. Often times, it takes me quite a while to come up with the ‘perfect’ image and, in fact, I ended up recreating the cover art for my first book, The Finding, before I got the look just right. When I have an idea in mind, I start sketching until it looks the way I picture it, or as close to this image as possible.

I can’t really give you any tips on how to quickly come up with your own perfect cover image, but I can say it is similar to writing a new story: you just have to wait for inspiration to strike. For my Oescienne books, I decided on a common theme that included my main character along with one or more of the dragons from the books (I read on a blog once that dragons on book covers tend to attract more attention). The images on the back covers reflect scenes from the story itself, each cover portraying a specific scene from that particular book. Once my drawings are complete, I outline my pencil sketch in pen and then add the color, shading and layering until it looks just right.

One extra piece of equipment you will need when you’re finished is a scanner (or a friend who has a scanner). Once your image is scanned and saved, you can edit it by trimming off whatever isn’t needed. I always save multiple copies just in case. Once this is done, it is really rather simple. Since I publish my paperback books through Create Space, my final product needs to be saved as a PDF file (check your publishing company and their requirements for size and file types accepted).

The basic template for my book cover is a new Microsoft Word document (I use Word 2007), the page size set to match the book cover dimensions, plus the bleed (again, you should be able to find this out from the publisher). Using a text box, I create the book’s spine (width will be based on the number of your book’s pages) and center it within the document. From there, I use it to gauge where everything else will eventually end up. I insert a large text box in the center of the front cover and copy and paste my artwork in there. You can do the same thing for your name, the book title and the book blurb on the back; just insert text boxes and adjust them to the desired sizes and move them to where you want them.

I’m always amazed at how versatile the Word program is. You can add special effects to your images, pick a nice font, change the page and font color . . . just get on there and play around to see what you can accomplish. Believe it or not, it’s not just for writing documents. If your goal is not to create a full cover but only a front cover for an ebook, then you don’t need to worry about spine width or a back cover image with a book blurb. Just open a new Word document and set it to the dimensions of your cover and add your image, name and title, then save it as a PDF or JPEG (again, check to see what the publisher’s requirements are).

Besides book covers, I’ve created many other marketing images and files for my books, including fliers, bookmarks, posters, car magnets and business cards. I had to use a secondary source to print out many of these things, but it gave me the freedom to meet my (picky) standards. Local copy stores and online companies offer reasonable prices for marketing and promotional items, but creating your own design and putting it together yourself might save you even more money and it gives you the extra bonus of having full creative control over the end product (something that I’m personally quite obsessive over). With a little extra work, and hopefully fun as well, you might find yourself creating functional, exceptional works of art for your own books.

I want to thank you Lindsay once again for inviting me as a guest blogger on your site. I hope my advice can prove helpful to other indie authors, and if anyone has any questions for me they can contact me at jejoescienne@yahoo.com. I also plan on writing a few more posts about some of the marketing ideas I mentioned above on my website, www.jennaelizabethjohnson.com, so feel free to drop by from time to time if you are looking for some economical ways to promote your books.

* * *

If you’d like to check out the books behind the artwork, you can read about Jenna’s series on her site or download samples from Smashwords or Amazon.

How to Get Cool Cover Art for Your Book or Ebook

Episode #5: Pricing Ebooks and Paperbacks When You Self-Publish

Lindsay — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 07:12:02 +0000

Today’s show discusses pricing for ebooks and the POD (print on demand) paperbacks most of us will be dealing with when we self-publish.

Show notes:

Paperback pricing

Upfront costs are low with POD, so no need to pay for an entire print run or anything crazy.
My POD publisher is CreateSpace, and I’ve been quite pleased with them (quality of books, customer service, etc.), but some indies also like Lightning Source.
Typical range is $11.99 to $16 (production costs don’t allow you to set a lower price) and makes it hard to compete with mass market paperbacks priced at $8, so don’t expect a lot of paperback sales, but you can certainly make some.
Author copies tend to be in the $6 range at Createspace (that’s what mine are, and I have 320 page 6×9″ books — about 105,000 words), so hand-selling is a possibility if you’re into that!

Ebook pricing

Best royalty rates (~ 70%) at $2.99 to $9.99
Reasons why people give away books for free or 99 cents (I have the first book in my series priced at 99 cents, so people can try it inexpensively, and then if they like what they read, they can go on and purchase the following books for $3.99)
An example of an indie author who did well (to the tune of $25,000 in one month) with ebooks priced between $4.95 and $6.95: Michael J. Sullivan (his wife and the marketer in the family, Robin Sullivan, runs the Write2Publish blog — well worth checking out)
Thinking about this as a career and not getting too hung up on pricing and sales, especially for your first book.

How Do You Get Amazon to Recommend Your Books?

Lindsay — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 08:34:41 +0000

If you’ve chatted with any indie authors who are selling well (or even moderately well), you might have heard them say things like, “Sales really picked up when Amazon started recommending my book to people.”

No doubt your ears perked up, and you wondered, “How do I get Amazon to recommend my book?”

There’s a bit of a misconception that people in the Top 100 or even the Top 10,000 on Amazon are there because people are browsing through “Top” lists in their preferred categories. Sure, some people do that, but more people find new books to try there by seeing something promising in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section of a book they enjoyed or, even more likely, seeing something promising in their personalized recommendations page.

While nobody knows exactly how Amazon’s algorithms work, we do know that the company tries to help its readers find books, and it matches a person’s tastes with what’s popular in that genre

As an author, the more books you sell, the more likely it is that Amazon will help you promote your book (showing it on the dashboards of people who have proven that they like to buy books in that genre or niche).

I’ve heard Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing say that once you hit the Top 1000 in the Amazon Kindle Store, Amazon’s algorithms seem to really kick into gear, and you get a lot of internal promotion. She mentioned that she could ease back on her marketing efforts at that point, because she knew an author in the Top 1000 would be likely to stay there for a while, thanks to the recommendation system. (For those who want to hear more from Robin, I first heard her mention this in one of the podcast interviews she did over at Dead Robots’ Society; she’s been on a number of their podcasts, and I definitely recommend listening to them. Though she runs a small press, she’s used to working with self-published authors, and she uses many of the same marketing tactics as we do.)

Okay, you’re thinking, all I have to do is market my butt off and get into the Top 1000. Easier said than done, right?

I know. My first book made a few brief appearances there, thanks to sponsorships on popular ebook blogs, but quickly fell from that lofty plateau. As I write this blog post, my best sellers are in the 5,000 to 10,000 sales ranking range.

But, here’s the good news: Amazon still recommends my books to people. I imagine they don’t get quite the love that a Top 1000 book might, but I’ve had plenty of folks mention in reviews or notes to me that they first saw my book as a recommendation and tried it because it was only 99 cents (I currently have the first book in my series at 99 cents and the following two at $3.99).

In my experience, once you sell about a thousand books, Amazon starts helping you out with the recommendations. Even before then, you’ll see that your book pops up in the “Customers Who Bought…” section of other books in your genre.

Selling a thousand books can still sound daunting to someone who is just starting out, but I think you’ll find the idea a little less scary than trying to sell the fifty or one hundred a day it takes to break into the Top 1000!

Of course, you may find that in working hard to sell those first thousand books, your efforts pay off in a big way, and you’ll climb into that rarefied air. Good luck!

Can You Succeed with Just One Book?

Lindsay — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:13:55 +0000

If you’re an up-and-coming author, and you’ve just self-published your first book, you may be feeling overwhelmed with all of the promotion you’re supposed to do. Book blog tours, author interviews, establishing a presence on Facebook and Twitter, getting involved on sites like Goodreads or Shelfari, submitting your book to reviewers, building up a blog, starting a mailing list, etc. etc. etc.

All you have to do is read this blog to start forming a large to-do list!

While those are all things that you can start working on, the truth is that most people aren’t able to quit the day job, or make any decent sort of income at all, on the basis of one book.

Sure, there have been exceptions, especially amongst those who a) write in a popular genre and b) were in the first group of indie authors to drop their ebooks to 99 cents (some of these folks leaped to the Amazon Top 100 and sold thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ebooks a month). But most people don’t make much if they only have one book out, and there are thousands of 99 cent ebooks out there now, so that alone doesn’t turn heads.

So, what’s the most important thing you can do as a new self-published author?

Start writing the next book.

I’m not saying to ignore blogging, or social media, and I definitely recommend starting a newsletter right away so you can send readers a message when your new book comes out, but don’t spend too much of your free time on promotion, not when you just have one novel in the marketplace.

Work on writing the next book and the next one, and the one after that… That’s how careers are built. When you have five to ten novels (and maybe some novellas and short stories as well) out there, you have that many more ways for people to stumble across your work and discover your world. And you have that many more books for people to go on and buy after the first.

That’s when you can start thinking of doing this for your day job.

Until then, plug away at building a platform, but you’ll probably want to put the majority of your time into honing your craft and producing more work.

Online Book Promotion Basics: What Works and What Doesn’t? (Part 2)

Lindsay — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:00:59 +0000

In the first half of this post on online book promotion, we talked about what doesn’t work, and I shot down a lot of people’s marketing plans (yeah, sorry about that). Today, let’s talk about what does work.

Again, I’ll be the first to admit that there’s no guarantee that what’s worked for me and for others will work for you, but, hey, it’s better trying things that have a positive track record. It’s also good to do things that have lasting results, as opposed to things like tweeting and posting in forums, things that quickly disappear from public view. (You might also want to read my post on high level vs. low level book promotion tactics.)

In the end, no amount of promotion will matter if the writing and the packaging aren’t there, so, of course, make sure your stories are as good as possible and make sure your sales page looks good too (professional blurb, cover art, etc.).

Building up a blog

I’ve done numerous posts on blogging and mentioned that I sell several copies of my ebooks through my blog each week (I use affiliate links so I get credit – and a few extra pennies – for each sale, and this helps with tracking the effectiveness of my blog posts too). Its true that “several” a week is a small drop in the bucket when you’re selling one or two thousand (or more) ebooks a month, but I suspect the number of sales resulting from my blog is actually higher.

As an Amazon affiliate, I only get credit for sales that happen within 24 hours of someone clicking a link (so if someone downloads an ebook sample, goes back two days later and buys the book, I won’t get credit for that). Also, I’ve had any number of people say that they checked out my work after first reading my blog.

Also, remember I’m still in my first year of self-publishing (next month, I’ll hit my one-year anniversary). With blogging, the longer you do it, the more momentum you build (i.e. meaning more visitors every month), particularly if you post regularly and work on getting links to your site. A little search engine optimization helps too.

Starting a newsletter

Once you have fans, you want to make sure to keep in touch with them. It’s true that some will, of their own accord, subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, check your site regularly, sign up to receive your reviews on Goodread, follow you on Twitter, Facebook, etc., but others won’t be that connected.

Also, if you’re a self-published author, Amazon isn’t going to send notices out to readers to let them know that you have a new book out (something it will do with traditionally published authors), so it’s up to you to grab your fans’ emails, so that you can send them a note when you have news-worthy announcements.

Online Book Promotion Basics: What Works and What Doesn’t? (Part 1)

Lindsay — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:00:10 +0000

These days, whether you’re self-published or traditionally published, a lot of your book promotion will be done online. I thought I’d go over some of the things that have worked for me (or that I’ve seen work for others) and some of the things that haven’t worked for me (or that I’ve seen not work for others). I’m sure there will be lots of folks who can think of exceptions, so this is just meant as a ground guide to get you thinking. If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments section.

Online Book Promotion: What Doesn’t Work

Spamming, or otherwise annoying, people

You’d think, “well, duh,” but I get a direct message every day from someone on Twitter that, as soon as I followed them back, sent me a check-out-my-site or buy-my-book-at-Amazon link. Depending on my mood, I might promptly un-follow someone who does that. Though it’s online, it feels like the sort of in-your-face marketing that we all hate.

Likewise, I get people who visit my blog for the first time, say the equivalent of “nice site,” and devote the rest of their comment to posting links to their blog and blurbs about their book. I mind that less if they’ve made a thoughtful comment first, but even so, someone else’s blog is not the place for you to pimp your book.

Nobody wants email spam either. You shouldn’t send book announcements to someone that hasn’t signed up for your newsletter. It’s not appropriate to mass email everyone in your address book about your book, especially if you got their email address for another reason (when I was first experimenting with advertising, I bought a sponsored post on an author’s book blog, and, now, almost a year later, I still get to hear about it when he has something new out. Gee. Just because someone else is self-publishing, too, doesn’t mean he or she is interested in your genre or your type of book).

Proper internet etiquette is only to send promotional mail to people who have signed up for your mailing list, one that includes a “how to unsubscribe” button at the bottom of each message.

Signing up for book promotion services

This is one of those ones where people will probably chime in and say such-and-such program did work for them. That’s fine. I believe you, if that’s the case, though my guess is that you’ve got a great cover and a blurb that appeals to a wide range of readers (i.e. you would have “made it” even if you’d just promoted on your own).

I’ve seen more cases like this:

Author signs up for a book promotion service for $10 a month.
Author gets a widget to put on his/her site that, when clicked, takes an interested party to read an excerpt at the service’s site (when we’re talking ebooks, it probably would have been better to send the reader straight to Amazon, B&N, etc. where they could have downloaded a sample for their e-reader – not many people want to read chapters on their computer screen)
Author spends lots of time on Twitter, Facebook, etc. promoting the link to their author page at such-and-such service.

Ultimately, the book promotion service wins at every turn. It makes money from the author (when it comes to business, there’s nothing better than signing someone up for a recurring monthly fee!) and it has authors helping promote it through the links and widgets.

Does the author win, though? Enh. I think you can do as well, if not better, on your own. At $10 a month, it’s not like someone is actually putting effort into helping you sell your books. They’re just providing you tools that put more steps in between the reader and a book sale (instead of sending a reader to Amazon to download a sample, you’re making them click, click, click to read pages on this widget, a widget that’s branded with the business’s name…).

I say, put a sample up on your site, and then promote that. (Here’s one of my excerpts – you can see that I have a couple thousand words from the book on the page and links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords (where readers can grab any ebook format) at the top and the bottom. You’ll see that there are no widgets there, or anywhere else on the site, and the layout is simple (i.e. what people are used to… They scroll down if they want to read more, the same as on every other website out there). And I know it works too, because I use affiliate links to monitor sales that come from my site.

It’s always going to be better for you to send someone to your site where they can surf around, maybe find your blog, see if you’re an interesting person, bookmark your site, subscribe to your RSS feed, etc.

Participating in forums

I debated over which section to put this into. I’ve used forums now and then, and if you read my How to Get Book Reviews post, you know it’s how I got my first reviews when I was starting out.

I think forums can be helpful, the ones that are communities where readers hang out, but there’s a limited audience of forum regulars that will be exposed to you and your work. Also, do to the nature of forums, your posts get buried by everyone else’s posts, and it’ll be rare for them to have any lasting value (i.e. good luck finding something you wrote about two weeks ago). Compare this to a blog post where your words are front-and-center and other people’s comments are way down at the bottom. It takes a lot of time to become a known entity on a forum, and that’s frankly time that would be better spent elsewhere.

Even if you’re only on a forum for fifteen or twenty minutes a day, think about how many hours that is each month. You could have written your own blog posts in that time, or, in a year, you could have written an entire novel. Ultimately promoting through a forum is a bit like promoting through a book promote service. You’re spending as much time building up the forum (adding fresh content that the search engines will love) as you are selling your own work. Just think about how much money some of the popular ebook forums are making in advertising. That’s all made possible by the hours you and others spend there, writing content for free.

Advertising

Here’s another one I debated on. I have found advertising useful in rare cases. I haven’t had much luck buying sponsored posts, even on big, general-audience ebook sites (perhaps because I write fantasy, and that’s a fairly niche genre), but I’ve done decently at Goodreads (I have a post on advertising at Goodreads on my author blog, and, though it’s outdated in terms of my sales numbers, it’s still relevant for those looking to advertise there).

Most advertising, however, doesn’t pan out. Authors don’t break even, and most of the time they don’t even come close. Some people will argue that it’s okay to lose money on advertising, because at least you’re getting exposure that helps you “build a brand.” I’m skeptical about how well branding works when it comes to promoting books online (there are any number of charts out there from polls on how readers find new books, and word-of-mouth usually has the biggest slice of the pie with advertising being minor to non-existent). Even if it does work, we indie authors can’t really afford that kind of marketing anyway. Books don’t have a high enough profit margin to allow us to burn through money just to try and acquire new readers.

Video Book Trailers

It ought to be clear from the evidence that these don’t work (when was the last time you saw someone with more than a couple dozen views of a video book trailer on Youtube), but authors persist in doing them. If you want to do one because you like video editing, and it looks like fun, then by all means do so, but please don’t think you have to have a book trailer.

Yes, it’s true that videos occasionally go viral, because they’re darned funny or entertaining, but those weren’t set up as book trailers (they’re about something funny or cute, rather than being a preview for a book). Even if your book trailer does go viral because something strikes a cord, the odds are that most of the viewers aren’t going to be in your target readership. I suspect that if you did one of those Venn Diagrams with circles for “people who spend time surfing for funny videos on YouTube” and “people who read a lot of books” there wouldn’t be that large of an overlap in the middle.

The problem, too, is that nobody knows your book exists, so nobody’s looking it up on YouTube (or anywhere else). You’d have to work the social media angle and drive a lot of people to your book promotion trailers. Sure, you can do that, but why not just send them to your free stories or excerpts if you’re going to go through that much effort? The proof is in the writing, and most readers know that.

All right, that’s a fairly negative post, but it gets better. Check out the second half, Online Book Promotion Basics Pt 2, where we’ll talk about what does work.

How to Get Your Author Blog on Amazon and Goodreads

Lindsay — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:25:36 +0000

The more people you get to check out your blog, the more chance there is that they’ll like your voice and go on to check out your books. We’ve talked about increasing visitors through search engine optimization and by networking with others to build up your blog. Another simple way to get more eyeballs on your posts is to have your blog syndicated in more places than on your own site.

For example, if you create author pages on Amazon and Goodreads (something you should do whether you’re blogging or not), you can add your feed there. Goodreads, in particular, is a big community where book-lovers hang out, so it makes sense that some of them may follow your blog there (even if they wouldn’t normally go out of their way to visit your personal site). Every now and then, though I’ve done nothing to promote my Goodreads blog, I get comments over there from readers.

So, how do you add your feed to your author pages? It’s a snap on Amazon (navigating around Goodreads is more of a pain, but you only have to do this once).

For Amazon, head over to Author Central and, if you haven’t already, sign up for a page (even if you only have a single indie ebook on Amazon, you qualify as an author, so it shouldn’t be a problem getting on board). Once you sign in, you’ll see “Add a blog” right there on the first page. Plug your feed in, and you’re good to go. (If you’re not sure what an RSS feed is or where to find it, here’s a site with an introduction to RSS. You can usually find it, however, just by clicking on that orange and white square button that probably came with your blog.)

On Goodreads, you’ll want to join their author program.

Once you’re signed in, click on your name in the upper right hand corner and select “edit profile.” If you’re signed in as a regular old Goodreads user, you may have to further click “edit your author profile” on the welcome page.

In the right-hand column, you’ll see links for adding videos, events, etc. and also a blog. Click on that, and it’ll take you to a page where you can add a blog post. Don’t do that — you want to syndicate your existing blog, not make more work for yourself by starting a new one! Over on the right, you’ll see something called “External blog feed URL” and that’s where you can add your RSS feed.

Okay, there you go! Whether you’re blogging on your own site (something I recommend in my article about starting a professional author site) or on Blogger, your posts will now show up on Amazon and Goodreads as well. You might just find a few new fans that way.

Building up Your Author Blog with M Pax

Lindsay — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:00:43 +0000

I’m off on a plane ride across the Pacific today, so I’ve got a guest post for you to enjoy. It’s by indie science-fiction author, M Pax, someone I met through…can you guess? Yup, blogging. She has a popular blog that covers astronomy, science fiction, and (most recently) her new ebooks. She’s going to give you some tips for building up your blog.

Building a Blog

Thanks for having me on, Lindsay. I’ve learned a lot from you and am a loyal reader of this blog. So much great information here, and Lindsay is a major reason why the epublishing finally called me over. I’m really glad I made that decision.

Blogs are worthwhile, despite the time and effort it takes to get one off the ground. To build one takes as much patience and effort as marketing your brand spanking new ebook.

Blogs are valuable and not a waste of time. The network you make will be worth its weight in gold when you start publishing. If you’re not published yet, you’ll have an easier time connecting with other writers than your audience. Even if you are publishing, it can still be easier to connect with other writers. And they can be very powerful allies.

On my blog, I’ve always done a mix of posts. Some for writers. Some for readers. Recently I’ve split my website blog off from my Blogger blog. The website will no longer publish any content geared toward writers, and it is the website address only I’m putting in my ebooks and new marketing materials. The website blog now takes on a life of its own, as it should, no longer just mirroring the blogger blog.

So how to build a blog:

Read Lindsays’ article on SEO and follow her advice. I’ve been doing this for my website blog. And I’ll pay more attention to it for the blogger blog.
Visit other blogs and leave comments. If there is a way to follow the blog you’re visiting, do so. Most folks will follow you back.
Click on the names of other folks leaving comments on blogs you visit and visit their blogs.
Be generous. Volunteer to help other writers out in promoting their work. Join blog hops and blogfests.
Talk to people. Don’t just comment, ‘great blog’, and run off to the next. You want to connect with folks. That’s where the value is and where the payoff is. People want to help people they like. And when someone does help you, return the favor. Don’t hold a grudge if someone does not return your favor. Which brings us to …
Always be positive. Both in your posts and in your comments. Encourage other people. Support other people. Do not engage in a war of words ever. Ignore negativity and move on. If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing.
Ask people to do guest posts on your blog. They’ll most likely bring their most loyal followers to your blog. Some of them will then follow you.
If someone took the time to visit you, take the time to visit them back. Follow everyone who follows you.
Reply to comments either in your comments or via email. Via email is a great way to make an even more personal connection with folks.
Get on Twitter or preferred social media where you’re building a following. Advertising your article on Twitter can attract new people. I also promote my blogs on LinkedIn, FB and my FB fan page. And I recently joined Triberr. I plugged my blog into Goodreads and some other sites. I don’t remember where now. I think you have to have an author page to do that.

In the end, creating a successful blog comes down to you and how involved you’re willing to get. When I started bumping into people who knew more than me in bloggyland, and paid attention to those people, my blog really started to grow. It’s those friendships that will help give you visibility and help you gain traffic. It’s then the factor of you whether they stick around – your content and your willingness to engage.

Remember that old pesky golden rule? It really applies in bloggyland. And good manners is another key. You can’t just take, you must give. And you’ll probably end up giving more than you get. But you can’t think about it as an even exchange. It’s never going to be. But if you keep giving, you’ll find others being generous to you. In all honesty, that’s the biggest key in building a blog. Especially if you’re not publishing yet or just starting out.

These things have worked for me, and through all the work, I’ve made some fantastic friends who make me feel all warm and fuzzy with the kind things they’ve done to help me get started.

Anyone have any blog growing advice to add? Any questions?

* * *

About M. Pax: Inspiring the words I write, I spend my summers as a star guide at Pine Mountain Observatory in stunning Central Oregon where I live with the husband unit and two loving cats. I write speculative fiction mostly and have a slight obsession with giant, man-eating reptiles and Jane Austen. I know, they don’t really go together, but it’d be interesting to insert Godzilla in the middle of Pride & Prejudice.

If you want to check out her latest release, try Semper Audacia at Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and other online retailers.

How to Get More Twitter Followers Part 2

Lindsay — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 21:28:37 +0000

In How to Get More Twitter Followers Part 1, we covered the idea that the easiest way to get new followers is to find new people to follow! We also touched upon organizing your followers (into lists, groups, etc.) with apps such as TweetDeck (HootSuite is another popular one), so your Twitter Stream doesn’t zip by so fast you can’t keep track of anything.

In the second half of this post, let’s talk about how to find interesting people that you’d want to follow (and be followed by). As authors, you’ll probably want to focus on people who are readers or writers (especially readers), so look for “tweeps” who mention books, reading, writing, or your genre in their bio.

Search through people’s lists for followers

One way to find those folks with common interests is to look at the people who are already following you and check out their lists. If you’re a science fiction writer and see that @UberSFfan has a list called SF-peeps, it’s a good bet that may of the tweeps there are already sorted for you. Simply browse through the list and pick out likely people to follow.

Remember, people who are following lots of people are more likely to follow back without more than a glance at your bio, but those with small follow/followers lists may be harder to woo. Try striking up a conversation with them, or retweeting a couple of their tweets, and then follow them. Odds are better that they’ll follow you back at that point.

Looking through people’s followers

While lists are a good place to check, they don’t necessarily tell you if a person is going to be easy to pick up as a follower or not. Another place you can look is at other people’s followers. If you have friends who write in your genre or niche, see who’s following them. Chances are they’d be open to following you too. (When I first started looking for more tweeps, I browsed through the folks following some of the literary agents in my genre; I figured those were fellow SF/F fans and aspiring authors as well.)

The same rule applies here though: with tweeps who have a large list of following/followers, you’ll probably be able to pick them up simply by following, but the choosier folks may need to be chatted up first. (Sounds a bit like picking up people at the bar, doesn’t it? Hmm.)

Get and keep followers more easily with this one simple rule…

The last thing we’re going to talk about is…

Don’t be boring

An interesting feed is more likely to attract followers. If you’re an author, you may be good at making the mundane sound interesting or humorous. If so, you get to tweet about the cats, dogs, writing life, weather, coffee addictions, etc. If that’s not you… you may want to stick with more compelling topics.

Examples include:

Links to industry blog or news posts
Links to funny/humorous pieces — can be industry/niche-related, but humor about every day things that everyone deals with can be great too
Links to “cool stuff” on the web — might not be all that funny or informative, but a link to a life-sized castle made entirely of ice is novel enough that it might get some retweets
Links to free stuff (yours or somebody else’s) — I usually tweet links to my excerpts and free stories rather than trying to send someone right to a page where they’d have to plunk down money to buy my book
Endearing and/or humorous tidbits from life — I have a lot here about tweeting links, but, honestly, I get bored with the people who are nothing but news dispensary machines. Put some humanness into your tweets too. You never know when someone will check out your blog link (and maybe your books), just based on you sounding like an interesting person on Twitter.

Some things to avoid:

Negatives — Unless you can put a funny spin on something, try not to be negative and especially try not to be repetitive (AKA don’t whine about the same stuff over and over on Twitter)
Updates on mundane things that nobody is going to care about — ’nuff said.
One-word replies to other people — Once in a while, this is fine, but if someone surfs onto your Twitter page for the first time and sees nothing but @so-and-so Yeah, @so-and-so2 Thanks!, @so-and-so-3 Me too! they’re not going to get any idea of who you are and what you offer. Yes, it’s good to chat and make friends on Twitter (hey, it’s called networking, right?), but extended conversations should probably go to email (remember, everything you @ is public) unless you’re able to converse in such a way that the conversation sounds interesting to other people. Then you might get folks jumping in, and that can be fun!

Okay, that’s it for this post. Now, go forth, and acquire more followers!

How to Get More Twitter Followers (the kind that matter)

How to Get More Twitter Followers (the kind that matter)

Lindsay — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:05:05 +0000

You’ve probably heard that Twitter can be useful for book promotion. Maybe you even heard it from me!

I talked about how I use Twitter for networking and book promotion in a couple of my podcasts. In Show 4, I mentioned that you need to build up your list of followers to get the most out of your Twitter book promotion efforts. On my Twitter author account, I’ve got about 3,500 followers. Now, you don’t need that many (I started with the goal of getting 500 followers, and at that point I stopped seeking them out and simply adopted a policy of following writers and SF/F fans back), but I’d definitely recommend expanding your list if you only have a handful of followers now.

Why bother? What spiffy thing happens when you have more followers?

There are better odds that people will spread the word, your word. On Twitter that means they’ll “retweet” your messages, including those where you’re promoting your books, free samples, giveaways, recent blog posts, etc.

In no particular order, here are a few tips for finding more followers:

Be willing to follow back

Some people, for various reasons, adopt a policy of not following people back unless they know them or have spent a lot of time interacting with them. If that’s what you prefer, it’s up to you, but having a lot of followers and following few people in return may give the impression that you’re unapproachable or just think it’s not worth following “the little people.”

It’s also going to significantly slow down the rate at which you can acquire followers, because most people are hoping to be followed back. Yup, almost everyone wants more followers, even those who aren’t marketing anything. We all want to feel like what we say matters to someone, right?

Folks will often make exceptions for celebrities and (sometimes) accounts that are fonts of interesting content, but up-and-coming authors? Enh, not so much. Most people who follow you are hoping you’ll follow back.

That doesn’t mean you have to indiscriminately return every follow. As I mentioned, I stick to other writers and fantasy and science fiction fans (since they might be interested in my books, or they might at least share tweets about my work with their friends). Think of following other authors as a networking move. Almost all of them will have blogs, some of them popular blogs, so when you’re ready to promote a new book, you’ll have lots of folks you can approach about guest posting. Authors tend to help other authors out by retweeting writing/book-related links too.

Ultimately, though, who and how many you follow is up to you. There may be a reason that you don’t want to follow a lot of people (though don’t adopt that attitude simply because you’re worried about too many tweets in your Twitter stream — download something like TweetDeck and divide people into lists, so it’s easy to keep track of your favorite tweeps). I don’t follow many people back on my Savvy Self-Publishing Twitter account, just because I don’t log into it very often, and I don’t really want to go through the effort of building up two separate accounts. That may change in the future, but, right now, I already spend enough time on Twitter!

Follow people who follow people

This one may sound obvious, but someone who’s already following a thousand or more people probably isn’t that picky about who they follow. Also, these folks tend to have as many followers as people they follow, so if you can get to know them (it’s easy — start retweeting their links now and then and send them a friendly @ message once or twice a week), they can send your site quite a bit of traffic if they retweet one of your links.

On the flip side, it can absolutely be worth following someone who only follows 50 or 100 people, too, but you’ll probably have to interact with these folks before they’ll be interested in following you. Send them an @ message now and then to gauge their responsiveness.

Don’t make people jump through hoops to follow you

If your tweets are protected or you’re using something like True Twit to validate followers, you’re adding roadblocks. Even when I was seeking out those first 500 followers, I didn’t bother with people who did that True Twit thing. There are plenty of people out there who don’t.

Put your Twitter link on your website and at the end of your ebooks

If you want your fans to follow you (these are the best people you can have!), make sure they know your Twitter address. In an ebook, it’s easy to add links to your blog, Facebook, and Twitter pages at the end.

Fill out your bio (well)

You don’t get a lot of space in your Twitter bio, so make sure you’re using it to its maximum potential. People can find your bio by searching for “keywords.” Also, people may quickly decide whether or not they’re going to follow you based on your bio, so don’t put something cute in there that says absolutely nothing about your interests and what kinds of tweets people can expect.

You don’t necessarily want to “stuff” your bio with keywords, in an attempt to cover all your bases, but you definitely want to get your niche or genre in there while still coming across as a person. Here’s my Twitter author bio:

Indie fantasy & steampunk author with a love for travel, tennis, and dogs. I run http://www.savvyselfpublishing.com & my books are at: http://amzn.to/fe3mjC

http://www.lindsayburoker.com

It’s not witty, but it tells you exactly what kind of books I write, where you can find me on the web, and a couple of my interests (you never know when someone will check out your work just because you share a common interest). As far as links go, Twitter lets you put one in automatically at the end, but you can use the bio space to add more if you want.

This post has gotten long, so I’m breaking it in half. Please head over to How to Get More Twitter Followers Part 2 for more on actually finding interesting followers.

Episode #4: How to Get People to Buy Your Books

Lindsay — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:51:57 +0000

The fourth episode of the Savvy Self-Publishing Podcast is up, and we’re doing an overview of the book selling basics. How do you get people to find your books? How do you entice them to buy them once they find them? And how do you make sure fans know to come back for more? It’s all covered today.

Show Notes:

Part I: The Book Sales Page

A professional book page on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Cover art
Making sure you’ve got a good blurb
Getting book reviews (check out my article on How to Get Book Reviews) on Amazon and other online bookstores

Part 2: Overcoming Obscurity (aka getting people to find your book!)

Giving away a free ebook (short story okay) — my video on How to Get an Ebook Listed for Free at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Promoting your books via Twitter, Facebook, your blog, etc.
Blog tours
Guest posts (see my article on Guest Blogging Basics for more on this)
Getting reviews on book blog sites (try this indie book reviewer list to find bloggers open to reviewing self-publishing titles)

Part 3: Cultivating Fans

Maintaining a newsletter
Using ebook afterwords to let readers know about your site, social media links, and newsletter.

Self-Publishing in Australia with Simon Haynes

Lindsay — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:27:42 +0000

Today we’ve got an interview with an Australian author, Simon Haynes. He has a number of books out and has seen both sides of the publishing coin.

Bio: Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock Series and Hal Junior: The Secret Signal. By day he’s a computer programmer and author, and by night he’s the same only sleepier. Simon’s website also contains numerous articles on writing and publishing. These are based on 10 years of experience: http://www.spacejock.com.au/Articles.html

Interview:

How did you get involved with self-publishing? It sounds like you originally went through a traditional publisher?

Originally it was the other way round. In 2001 I was still seeking a publisher for my first novel, and after the inevitable long waits and rejections I’d been toying with an ebook release. Ebooks were considered a bit of a joke back then so I also rustled up a print run of 100 copies. I got them into a few shops, sold a few at conventions, and picked up a lot of info on the publishing industry.

By 2004 I had three books in print and I was working on number four. At that point I got a phone call from a local publisher who had seen my books in a store and was keen to sign me up. I rewrote the first three books and the publisher released them about 12 months apart. I also finished book four and they published that in 2008. I had a struggle getting book five done, and in the end I decided to write a junior science fiction novel. It was a clean break from my series, apart from reusing the setting. It’s set in the same universe as my adult series, but ten-twelve years later.

And that’s how I got back into self-publishing: I decided the time was right to launch a new series under my own imprint.

You’ve got five books out and many more books planned in your Hal SpaceJock series. Do you think authors who build up a series have an advantage over those who write stand-alone fiction? Since readers will (one hopes!) want to continue on to see what happens next to the characters?

That’s the advantage. The disadvantage is that stores look at sales of your previous book(s) when ordering new ones, and then order a smaller number so they don’t end up with any left over. Not only that, but they won’t order in the earlier series books if they were published more than 18 months ago. This means there’s a built in death spiral for ongoing series, and one which is almost impossible to break out of. That’s why I decided to release the Hal Junior series under my own imprint. They’re not going to hit the shops but they’re not going out of print either. I’m planning at least one book a year, so in five years time there could be six or seven titles in the Hal Junior series, all of them still in print.

You also have a book out for younger readers. What are your thoughts on self-publishing middle-grade fiction? I have an ebook collection of stories for that age group, and I have to admit it doesn’t sell nearly as many copies as my adult fiction. What has your experience been like?

The difference is that middle-grade fiction sells to parents and librarians, not to kids. You don’t have young readers going ‘that’s sounds cool, I’ll buy that!’. No, instead their parents are going ‘I wonder if that book is suitable? I’ve never heard of it. I don’t know anyone else who’s read it. Hmm, safer to buy this other one.’

If they’re browsing in a store they can flick through your book and check a few pages, which might convince them. That’s why it’s vital to have a sample online. My book has only been available three weeks so I don’t have any data yet. (It’s so recent it’s not even listed on Australian bookstore sites.)

Do you feel you face any obstacles publishing in Australia (and having to work through American companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble), or are there perhaps some advantages?

With the Hal Spacejock books published by Fremantle Press the goal was always to sub-license the rights to publishers in the UK and US. They would take the series on, publish in their own markets and we’d all live happily ever after. Unfortunately they weren’t interested. Feedback from US publishers was they they loved the books but because it was ‘Brit humor’ they wanted to see it do well in the UK first.

UK publishers had a different reason: They expect to buy rights for Australia as well as Great Britain, since (apparently) they sell up to 30% of their print runs to Australia. Since my books are already published here, that means I’ve effectively cut their potential sales by 30%. Plus there’s no chance of them selling foreign and other world rights because my existing publisher holds those.

That’s another reason why I decided to self-publish. I own all the rights, and by publishing via Lightning Source I don’t have to deal with Amazon, B&N or any other retailer. All I had to do was publish the book and fill out the correct data and it was automatically uploaded to all the various retailer catalogues. Lightning Source prints copies in Australia, England, France or the USA depending on where the order comes from, which means Hal Junior is available worldwide. Unlike the situation with Hal Spacejock, where we were hoping a foreign publisher would pick it up, Hal Junior was released everywhere at the same time.

Do you want to tell us about what you’re working on now or other future projects?

Right now I’m working on Hal Spacejock book 5 and Hal Junior book 2. Hal 5 involves a wealthy businessman who leaves his fortune to a robot which nobody has seen for thirty years. Hal Junior 2 involves a VIP visitor, a missing briefcase and a new friend for Hal. At this stage I can’t even guess which will be ready first!

Thanks for your time, Simon!

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The Serialized Novella and You (AKA Working That 99 Cent Price Point)

Lindsay — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:00:33 +0000

I’ve got a great guest post for you guys today, and it’s a meaty one so you might want to head into the kitchen and make some popcorn before sitting down to read. Just don’t forget to come back, because science fiction and fantasy author Maria Violante is going to talk about a strategy for e-publishing short fiction, one that’s proving profitable for me and might for you too.

“The Bloodthirsty Cheese”

a.k.a Working that 99 Cent Price Point: The Serialized Novella and You!

Table of Contents:

1. Assumptions

2. Dilemma

3. Packaging

4. The HBO Angle

5. The Bloodthirsty Cheese

6. Do the Math

7. Other Considerations

1. Assumptions:

Since you’re on this blog, I’m going to make some assumptions about you as a reader. 1.) You write, want to write, or are in some way interested in people that write and self-publish books. 2.) As a writer, you want to sell a bunch of books, make enough money to quit your day job, and maybe get a little bit famous. Sure, there can be other motivations – an Angel told me to write this, my sister had cancer and I want to capture her plight, I want to introduce the world to the unique sport of Michigan Pig-Sled racing – but the basics are: elicit response in reader. Sell book. Quit day job.

I’m going to also assume that you’ve heard about the Kindle. If you haven’t … god help you, and I hope you get one, because they’re freaking awesome.

2. The Dilemma:

At first, e-books on platforms like the Kindle were too good to be true. After all, the entire world (well, sort of) was a potential customer, marketing could be done by blogging, and even though you’d be getting a bigger cut, publishing houses couldn’t match your prices.

*Cue Braveheart*

“They’ll never take our freedom!”

And then, book prices fell through the floor. Now, everything is ninety-nine cents, meaning that at thirty-five cents profit a copy, you’d have to sell almost six thousand copies a month to approach a true standard of living. Figuring that out was the exact moment every author that didn’t write vampire romance or crime thrillers felt like checking on the homeowner’s/renter’s policy and lighting the carpet on fire. After all, it’s one thing for an author with a twenty year backlist to publish everything up on Amazon, especially when that money is probably just covering extra margaritas at the retirement home. For those trying to break into the business, thirty-five cents a copy is an abysmal number, and let’s face it, most of us agree with Dean Wesley Smith’s idea that ninety-nine cents isn’t a fair price for a book anyway. (If you haven’t read his infamous post, it’s here: http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=4696)

So hey, you think, I will price my copies at something better, say 2.99. And then I’ll only have to sell a thousand copies at the 70 percent royalty! Waaaaayyyyy more doable. The problem is, you’re competing with a gargantuan sum of books, many of them just as good, with more reviews and possibly even better cover art, that sell at a third of the price. And that’s not even counting the books that are free. And you may get some modest sales, but in the end, making enough to quit your day job seems pretty elusive, even if you’ve got four or five books in the marketplace.

So, now what?

3.) Let’s Talk About Cheese:

If you are poor like me, you have no doubt passed through the automatic sliding doors of the Dollar Store.

Recently, I was standing in front of the limited dairy selections, debating between two bags of cheese for Taco Night.

One was Sargento. The other bag was twice as big and labeled “Mexican Shreds.” Thinking of how much my boyfriend can eat (and let’s face it, how much I can eat), I picked volume over quality. It was not until I read “this product not formulated to melt” on the back of the package that I realized what a mistake that was. Hint: When the texture of a product is bad enough to override an entire jar of flaming salsa and liberal quantities of both ranch and barbecue, we have a problem.

So to recap: I walked into the dollar store with the intent of buying a bag of cheese. I was going to choose ONE of the products to buy. The next time I do taco night, I’m going to be smart about it – smaller bag at better quality.

And that brings me to a point. If all of the marketplace choices are a dollar, then the smart seller prices accordingly. So, if you’re working with limited resources, no street cred, and less than 200 Amazon reviews, you’ve got two options: mass produce products of poorer quality (and if you’re considering that, I will slap you for adding to the Amazon Slush Pile from Hell,) or repackage it.

4. The HBO Angle

Bear with me here; this really will all tie together at the end.

I love true blood. Yes, I know you’re sick of hearing about Sookie, but I said bear with me, dang it!

Sometimes, in squeeing now about Bon Temps, I feel like I missed the party, probably because I was so past fashionably late. I never start watching a show until it’s at least in its second or third season, (or more usually, until it’s off of television altogether). When I finally do break down, I plan it out well; I set up some alone time, light some candles, call in sick for work, and pop open a bottle of merlot, because I fully intend to get the most out of my experience.

And with some of the most popular shows of the last decade, it seems like it’s almost necessary. Look at a series like Lost, Prison Break, Desperate Housewives, or True Blood, and what do you get? That’s right, cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger. No attempt to hide it, no apologies for what it is, just a nice big cliffhanger that says, you’d BETTER tune in next week, because if you don’t, you’re going to miss it and it’s gonna be awesome. For a series that depends on repeat viewers (hey, foreshadowing), that makes sense. If the viewer has a chance to fully exhale, breathe with a nice solid sense of closure, they might have second thoughts about watching the next episode.

Hey Maria, you might be saying now, what does this have to do with self-publishing? Or maybe, you know, you already figured it out. That’s cool too.

5. The Bloodthirsty Cheese

a.k.a. The Serialized Novella: Cliffhangering for Dummies

Traditional Novel Plot looks like this: exposition, rising action, peak at the top/climax, falling action. For those of you that fell asleep in English, you’re welcome for the reminder. How long does that all take? Standard novel length varies, but for the purposes of this highly scientific post, let’s say 80k words. For those of us with a day job, an 80k word novel, on average, would probably take anywhere from six months to a year to write and edit (remember, highly scientific.)

Six months to a year of work, for one novel that you will sell for 99 cents in the kindle store, making 35 cents a copy.

Let’s say you reworked that novel (or better, started with this plan from the very beginning) and broke it into three novellas instead, of about 25k each. At roughly 250 words a page, that’s about a hundred print pages. That’s somewhere between two and four hours of entertainment for the average person – a better value than a Redbox movie or an iTunes song.

Would a reader pay 99 cents for a novella? Yeah, I think so. After all, it’s only a dollar.

6. Do the Math

Now let’s say all three parts are published and available on the internet.

Sally Normal, a mother of two, downloads the first novella onto her kindle because she likes the bitchin’ cover art and – say it with me folks – hey, it’s only a dollar. For the sake of argument, let’s use my novella, “Hunting the Five” (the self-promotion had to happen eventually). Halfway through her family road trip to Texas to meet the in-laws, she has a major argument with her husband, Harry, which ends in an absolute freeze-out. Two hours later, she finishes “Hunting the Five.” Not quite ready yet to make amends, she clicks the link at the end of the novella to bring her to “The Shores of Hell” (coming out this winter!), reads the excerpt, and thinks, “Hey, it’s only a dollar, and Harry has been a real jerk, he can stew for another two hours.” So, she grabs it. She finishes it, she and Harry make up, and it isn’t until she’s at dinner with the in-laws, bored out of her mind, that she decides De la Roca’s badass gun-slinging ways were way more exciting than discussing the various ailments that befall the elderly, so she downloads part three in the bathroom. (Thank you, 3G.) After all, it’s only a dollar.

Had you sold this novella series as a novel, you would be making 35 cents. Instead, you’ve realized that a reader has a hard time putting down a good story, that readers like closure, and netted yourself a cool 1.05. Still nothing to write home about, but still three times better than the alternative.

Now, I’m in a good mood, so let’s go for the happy ending. Sally Normal runs into her friend, Nosy Smith on the street, and makes a big hullaboo about how she’s just got to read this book. Nosy checks it out and decides to save herself some time by just buying the three pack. It’s 2.99, basically the same price as buying them individually, but it comes with a bunch of bonus material – free stories, author interviews, free art, and even the chance to be featured on the author’s blog! Pretty neat! And at three dollars, it’s not that bad of a buy.

BING! You just got the 2.99 sale (profit 2.09) from customer 2, as well as 1.05 from customer one. Both customers are happy, and you just made 3.13. Had you sold your novellas as novels, you’d only make 70 cents, not to mention the grief that comes from selling your heart and soul for 99 cents.

7. Other Considerations:

I’d like to end this fairly lengthy blog post with some other considerations (yeah, title was a spoiler) when it comes to going with this method.

1.) You’re going to have to write differently.

Serializing a novel into a set of novellas takes some work. Each novella needs its own story arc that somehow brings the main theme closer to its own resolution, but is sufficient within itself to provide the reader with a sense of “ending.” You’re also going to have to remind people, sometimes, of who’s who and what’s what, without being overly annoying or repetitive. This can be hard.

2.) You might get a different audience.

Novellas appeal to two kinds of people: the literary, who know such a thing exists, and the pressed for time, who often don’t get as long as they’d like to read, and need something that is short enough to finish so that when they come back to it three weeks later, they don’t have to consult a bunch of cliff notes to figure out where they are. On the other hand, you’re weeding out people of the “more is necessarily better” mentality – the kind of people that buy “Mexican Shreds” – so that’s good too.

3. You might get better visibility this way.

By the end of your first 80k segment, you’ve got three novellas – that’s three new-release blog posts, three sets of interviews, three sessions of reviews. While that can be incredibly time consuming, in the end, you’ve also got three times the exposure, three different covers to draw people in, and three nice excerpts to catch an errant reader’s attention. Additionally, you’ve got the deluxe three pack e-book and maybe even the three pack in print. All of this translates to better visibility for you. This is important, because not being known is one of the greatest hurdles you can have as a new writer.

4. It could cost a little more.

Editors often charge by the word, so it may help here to be able to break the editing process into three steps. A kind of payment plan, as it were. However, cover artists charge you per cover, which means you’ll be paying three times as much here (bummer).

5. It’s easier to work around your day job.

For those of us who work a full week and wind up so tired we actually debate taking a shower, or perhaps just muddling around in our stink, serialized novellas can be a lot easier. It’s easier to muster up the energy to write it, to finish it, to edit it, to bug others to edit it – when it’s in smaller pieces.

6. Novellas are going to become more popular, anyways. Might as well jump on this wagon early.

Kindle users have been exploring shorter fiction for a while now, what with kindle singles and even Konrath releasing his own novellas. And I think it’s a good thing; our current ideas of the “proper” length of a novel have almost nothing to do with what makes a story and everything to do with how publishing companies make money.

7. Reader’s deserve a chance to “try out” your work.

Tell the truth – would you drop five dollars on a book if you’ve never heard of the author and have no idea if it’s going to be any good? Probably not. (If five dollars represents two meals for you, as it does for me, then definitely not.) The serialized novella structure gives your readers a chance to figure out if you’re worth reading or not, without splitting their bank accounts in half.

So this is Maria Violante, signing off. If you think this post helped you in any way, consider buying my novella, “Hunting the Five“, or Lindsay Buroker’s Flash Gold. After all, it’s only a dollar.

* * *

Thanks for the post, Maria (and making it fun with a great sense of humor)! Also, it’s always good to butter up the blogger with a plug for her novella too. I’m actually selling the subsequent novellas in my Flash Gold series at $1.49, and nobody’s objected to the price yet. I figure that’ll make the “three pack” omnibus an even better deal.

Have any comments or questions for Maria? Please, leave them below or visit her on her site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101 for Authors

Lindsay — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 05:52:14 +0000

Congratulations on taking a gamble and clicking on this blog post. I know search engine optimization or “SEO” isn’t the most riveting topic out there (I did it for years for my day job before switching to writing full-time), but it’s worth learning a little about since it can help bring more visitors to your website and/or blog via the search engines.

For an author, more visitors to ye olde site can translate to more books sold. Yes, I speak from experience. Though I’m just a nobody-special indie fantasy author, not too may days pass without someone buying at least one of my books through my blog.

Selling more books would be good, you say, but you may be wondering…

What is SEO anyway?

Search Engine Optimization is the art of convincing Google and other search engines that your website/blog is particularly useful and important in your niche, thus meaning it should rank more highly in the search engine results than the sites of your competitors. (In other words, if someone types in “fantasy author” or “fantasy novel,” I want Google to list my site before the sites of all those other fantasy-writing peeps.)

When people use search engines, they type in search terms or “keywords” (these can be single words but are usually combinations of words). The search engine attempts to deliver the most relevant results by looking at numerous factors, including:

How often those keywords are used on a webpage or blog post (ie. you get more points if the keywords are used in the title, text, and the web address).
The number and quality of links coming in from other sites, especially links that use those keywords in the “anchor text” (the underlined words people can click).
Overall age, popularity, and “authority” of a site (it’s easier for more established sites to rank well in the search results).

Are your eyes crossing yet? If they are, or if you’re already thinking about lunch, I understand, but I hope you’re getting the gist (it helps once you start reading more about SEO and seeing these funky industry terms over and over again).

Using those keywords…

It’s time to start thinking about what words people may type into the search engine to find you.

For example, if a fantasy fan is looking for new authors to try, he or she might type in things like “best fantasy books,” “free fantasy ebooks,” “epic fantasy authors,” “swords and sorcery stories,” etc. As an author, it might behoove me to write blog posts tailored to those searches (i.e. “Where to Find Free Fantasy Books”).

How do you know which keywords people are using? You can play around with the free Adwords Keyword Tool to get an idea for the popular terms in your niche or genre. You type in a generic term, like fantasy, and it spits out all sorts of related terms people are using, and it gives you an idea of which terms are more popular.

(I promise to do a video of me doing keyword research with this tool someday — that’s right, make some popcorn and prepare to be entertained — even sooner if you leave comments and bug me about it!)

As I said, once you figure out which search phrases are applicable to you, consider using them on your website or blog (just focus on one term per page or post). This alone will put you ahead of lots of other authors!

Setting up your website/blog to be search engine friendly

Now that the term “search engine optimization” is starting to sound a little less alien, and you have some keywords in mind that you want to use, it’s time to tinker with the setup of your site to make it “SEO friendly.”

If you haven’t chosen a domain name (a yourauthorname.com address) yet, you may want to work your main keyword into it, especially if your name is already taken. An example might be jeffsmithmysterynovels.com or janesmithromance.com. Don’t go crazy with the keywords or choose anything too long, as you want fans to be able to remember your web address.

If you need a break from SEO talk, you can head over to GoDaddy (a domain name registrar) to see if the web address you want is available.

Okay, enough about domain names.

You’ll want to use your main keyword in the title of your site as well. Instead of something like, “A random writer’s musings…” your blog might be “John Snark Science Fiction Author.”

On the main page of my site, the title (the text that appears in someone’s browser bar) is “Lindsay Buroker — Fantasy Author,” and, as I write this post, my site appears fourth under a Google Search for “fantasy author.” I hope to make it to the #1 spot some day! (Though these things take time, so you have to be patient.)

Note, I didn’t use my keywords in my domain name (people generally have a tough time spelling my name correctly, so I didn’t want to add anything extra, and since it’s an original name, the .com address wasn’t taken yet). I just point this out so you know the final decision is up to you. Do what you feel makes sense and looks good to you.

Using keywords in individual post titles and urls

While it’s a good idea to work on linking the front page of your site to your main keyword, you can hit lots of less popular (but still searched for) keywords with the other various blog posts and pages on your site.

For example, “fantasy author” and “fantasy novels” may be big keywords that I target, but I have a series of novellas that are classified as “steampunk,” a subset of fantasy. When I typed steampunk into the Adwords Keyword Tool, I found all sorts of search terms related to the one core word. One was “steampunk books,” so I wrote a blog post called Must-Read Steampunk Books.

If you check out that article, you’ll see that my chosen keyword, “steampunk books,” is in the title, the url of the individual post (i.e. http://www.lindsayburoker.com/fantasy-science-fiction/must-read-steampunk-books/) and in the first paragraph of the content. Even though I never worked on getting links to that article (more on that in the next section), it still shows up on the first page of Google results (about 10th) for that term, and I have had people surf into the site after searching for steampunk books. If they buy any of the books I mentioned in the post, I win because those are affiliate links to Amazon so I make a few pennies, and if they happen to notice my steampunk book over in the sidebar of the blog, even better.

With less popular and less competitive keywords, sometimes just using the term in the title, url, and post content is enough to get you some traffic. You can help things along (and maybe I’ll do this one day for that post), by getting links, not just to the front page of your site but to individual blog posts and articles too. Let’s talk about those links…

A huge part of SEO is getting links to your site

While it’s good to have a site that’s SEO friendly, what you do on your site is only part of the battle.

In the early days of the internet, you could fill a page with lots and lots of instances of a keyword in order to rank more highly for it. And that actually worked.

The search engines are much smarter these days. They figure that links to a site count as votes of confidence, so they are factored into how well a site ranks for its keywords. People usually link to things that are useful, so the more links there are pointing to a site, the more likely search engines will consider it an authority (AKA a site worthy of doing well in their results). Also, links from older, more established sites count for more than links from new sites with few visitors of their own.

Try to get people to link to your main page and also some of your individual blog posts. Remember how I said the main page of my site ranks decently for “fantasy author” even though I don’t use that term in my domain name? That’s because I’ve written a few guest posts on other people’s blogs where I’ve linked to my own site with that keyword.

Eventually, if you maintain a useful blog (or you’re a great author!), these links will come naturally, but it’s tough getting noticed in the beginning (as with selling books, huh?). Guest posting is a good way to get links. If you do a book blog tour, you’ll probably be asked to answer some interview questions. Make sure to work a link to your site (with your chosen keyword) into one of the answers.

Also, if you get involved with social media (I like Twitter for spreading links), you can get people to share your links around (you’ll likely share theirs around in exchange). If someone who maintains a blog in your niche sees your link, checks it out and likes it, they might mention your site in a post of their own.

How long does SEO take before you start noticing results?

If you start employing some of the SEO techniques I’ve discussed here, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Most authors don’t know anything about this stuff (not everybody is a geek like me who’s been making a living online for the better part of the last decade).

It does, however, take time for you to start seeing significant traffic from the search engines. Plan to post to your blog regularly and work on getting links to your site (even if you just blog once or twice a week and try to get one link a week, you’ll be doing great) for the next six to twelve months before things really start kicking in.

I know that sounds like a long time, but you’re an author planning to build a whole career out of this, right? The good thing about SEO is that the things you do today (especially link building) will pay off in the future as well. Five years down the road, someone might find your site on Google, thanks to an SEO-friendly article you wrote today.

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From Traditionally Published to Indie: Interview with Bridget McKenna

Lindsay — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:24:23 +0000

With the 70% royalty rate on ebooks sold through Amazon and similar bookstores, it’s no surprise that lots of new authors are flocking to self-publishing these days. Many of them are like me and didn’t even bother trying the traditional route. But you might not have realized that may traditionally published authors are also turning their backs on The System in favor of self-publishing. Bridget McKenna is one of those, and she’s graciously agreed to chat with us today.

Interview with Bridget McKenna

From what I’ve read on your blog, you used to be a big advocate of traditional publishing, and you took that route yourself. Do you want to tell us a little about your road and what’s caused your eye to turn toward self-publishing of late?

When I was publishing traditionally, that was the only route most writers could take. Since publishers controlled the distribution to sales channels, and the vast majority of book purchases were made in brick-and-mortar bookstores, only a contract with a “legitimate” publisher counted towards a writer’s dream of publication. An agent was helpful in shortcutting the process, and for some publishers, absolutely necessary to getting your book read.

So that being the case, once I finished my first novel, I went in search of an agent, and was lucky enough to get a good one (all these years later, I still think so). But my three-book mystery deal with a major publisher ended with my first book going out of print as my third one was being shipped. The second and third died shortly thereafter, and in those days (early nineties) there was no hope of resurrection for the series, or for my career writing under my own name.

Early this year, I began paying attention to what many writers—including old friends Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith—were saying about the state of publishing. Suddenly all the rules to the publishing game had changed. Authors could decide what to publish, when to publish it, and what to charge for it. They could start seeing royalties, at an unheard-of percentage, reported promptly within two months. Almost everything that had once been dictated by agents and publishers was now being decided by the authors themselves. Publishers were in rout, and agents were panicking, some adopting what seemed to me to be questionable business practices in order to stay above water.

It didn’t take me long to decide to publish my own backlist. I haven’t got the rights reverted to my novels yet, and may never, due to the publisher’s foresight in sewing up e-rights. Meanwhile, I’m publishing my short fiction, and will have a novel for sale next year.

When your novels have been published previously, what’s the process for turning around and re-publishing them as an indie?

The first step would be to get your rights reverted from your publisher, which either you or your agent can request. By 1990, most publishers were including an e-rights clause that might look something like this, taken from my contract for the three mystery novels mentioned earlier:

The exclusive right…to display the Work in any manner designed to be read and to license the display of the Work in any manner designed to be read…by any means, method, device or process now known or later developed…including without limitation…all other forms of copying or recording…in any manner designed to be read….

As you can tell, nobody in publishing had any idea what form ebooks were going to take, so they grabbed rights on a kitchen sink basis, and of course the word from agents was these were non-negotiable. For new authors like me, they almost certainly were. The option to take your fate as an author into your own hands was virtually nonexistent, unless you wanted to go the vanity-publishing route, which virtually guaranteed your book would never see the inside of a bookstore.

Today, savvy writers are walking rather than sign clauses like this, but in those days most writers were a) not particularly savvy, and b) afraid if they turned down a deal they mightn’t get another one. There’s more than a little fear involved in the whole author-agent-publishing relationship. Writers often feel afraid to insist for fear someone will jack them up and put a hungrier writer underneath them. The truth is they can do that anyway, any time they want.

Once you have your rights back, I’d suggest a rewrite to bring the writing up to your current standards and clean out any anachronisms and errors that might hurt your reception with readers.

You also have a list of short story sales. Are you planning to publish those as ebooks too?

Absolutely. My short story “The Bard Effect” should be live on 21 October for free, along with another, longer story—“Hole-in-the-Wall,” which will sell for 99 cents. Both were originally published in major science fiction magazines. Over the next couple of months I plan to have all of my published short fiction backlist available for sale, along with some new stories that I’m very excited to find readers for.

One thing indies are always wondering about, and experimenting with, is price. Do you have any thoughts on a pricing strategy for ebooks?

I’m not a fan of “price-pulsing.” I think 99 cents is a reasonable price for a short story, and plan to sell full-length works for $3.99-$4.99. I don’t want to have to put a lot of energy into pricing up and pricing down and guessing when to do which. If I do good work and the prices are in a reasonable range, readers will find them. Or so I hope!

Are you working on any new projects? Will you self-publish new titles or will you keep a leg on either side of the fence and pursue traditional publishing contracts as well?

I have a fantasy novel in rewrite at the moment, and I will publish it myself when it’s ready, after getting an outside editor to give it a going-over. Other projects are far more amorphous at this stage.

I think this is a really foolish time for writers to pursue print contracts. It’s not just that print as a delivery system is in flux, but that the entire business model is. Traditional publishers are offering fewer contracts, advances are shrinking, contract terms are getting worse, and your agent may be getting ready to turn into your publisher, a nightmare you really don’t want, in my opinion.

Wonderful advice. Thank you, Bridget!

Should You Price Your Ebook at 99 Cents?

Lindsay — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:31:32 +0000

This is a repost of an article I originally wrote on my author blog, and folks had some strong opinions in the comments area. I’ll have something new for you guys tomorrow (an interview with a traditionally published author turning indie), but this may be of interest for those who haven’t seen it yet.

Should You Price Your Ebook at 99 Cents?

As indie authors, we’re able to choose the price for our ebooks, so we can sell them for $10 or $5 or even $0.99. While $2.99 is the lowest you can list your ebook for if you want the desirable 70% royalty rate at Amazon (Barnes & Noble has a similar deal), some authors are finding it worthwhile to sell their ebooks at the lowest possible price point: 99 cents.

Some people are strong proponents for this tactic and others are vehemently against it. I’ll try to stay neutral and present some of the pros and cons today. Ultimately, though, there’s little harm in experimenting, so if you’re thinking of trying it, you might as well!

Advantages of Pricing Your Ebook at 99 Cents

At 99 cents, many readers feel there’s little risk in “giving it a try.” Let’s face it: there’s a lot of cringe-worthy stuff out there in the realm of self-published fiction, so readers might think twice about spending more on an unknown indie author.
Selling your first ebook at 99 cents can work similar to a “loss leader” in the marketing world, where you take a hit on the first product in order to entice folks to buy your other products (i.e. Book 1 in your six-book fantasy series may be 99 cents, but those who enjoy the first will probably go on to buy the rest, which you can sell at a higher price).
For shorter works (i.e. novellas, short story collections, and short stories), this may be a fair price point. Most folks won’t want to pay three bucks for a 10,000-word story, but they may be willing to try it at 99 cents.
You may sell more ebooks. This could improve visibility, especially in the Amazon store where your work will start appearing on other books’ pages (in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” area). You may also make it into Top 100 bestselling lists for your category. Sales could increase to the point where you’re making more than you were at $2.99 because you’re selling so many more copies.

Disadvantages of the 99-Cent Price Tag

You may not sell more ebooks. I can show you plenty of examples of 99-cent ebooks with lousy sales rankings. This can’t be your only marketing strategy.
You may lose money. Because of the way royalties are structured at Amazon, you’ll only get 35 cents per sale on a 99-cent ebook while you’ll earn $2.05 on a $2.99 ebook, so you need to sell roughly six times as many copies at the lower price point to make the same amount of money. For some folks, this pricing strategy pays out (especially when they have higher priced second, third, etc. books for readers to go on and purchase). For others, it doesn’t.
Your ebook may have a lower perceived value that turns some readers off. While lots of folks like a bargain, I’ve seen others who’ve written blog and forum posts entitled things like, “Why I won’t buy your 99-cent ebook.”
Your ego may suffer. I’ve seen quite a few authors cringe at the idea of selling their work for so little, and they’re quick to point out the math and how pitiful a wage they’d be earning at 35 cents per book. (Though most of the equations I’ve seen don’t factor in the unlimited shelf life of an ebook…. The math starts to look better if you assume you’ll be getting sales for years to come.)

There we go: four pros and four cons. I know this list isn’t exhaustive, so feel free to add your own in the comments! Or let us know which side of the fence you’re on. Thanks for reading!

Episode #3: Setting up a Professional Website and Blog

Lindsay — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:04:38 +0000

The third episode of the podcast is all about setting up an official author website and blog.

Show notes:

Why you want to get off Blogger, Livejournal, WordPress.com, etc.
Getting your own domain name and investing in web hosting (costs less than $100 a year).
The host I recommend (very affordable, $7 a month)
Using one-click scripts to install a blog (WordPress), forums, shopping carts (sell your books from your site?), etc.
What to put on your site (book sample chapters, buy links, cut scenes and fun stuff for fans)
What to blog about (topics of interest to your audience, not boring stuff!)
How often to post to your blog
Setting up a newsletter
Check out John Locke’s How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months! for more ideas on blogging and succeeding as a self-publisher

Update: After listening to the podcast, Nicholas Olivo made a video with instructions on how to add your books to the sidebar of your blog. Check it out if you want help doing that. Thanks!

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