Claude Nougat The Blog

Free Book Fatigue or How Useful are Free Book Promotions?

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Nougat) — Sat, 25 May 2013 01:03:53 PDT

Is the market saturated with free books? Are we all suffering from free eBook fatigue? Amazon has a very convenient free book promotion program included for the writers who join Kindle Direct Publishing Select: 5 free days allowed for every 3 months your book is on KDP Select. This is one of the major perks for placing your book on KDP Select, the drawback being that exclusivity is required: you cannot place your book for sale on any other e-platform. Is this worth it?

For many authors it is, as recently evidenced by an interesting survey covering the experience of enough authors (99) to make the conclusions worth looking at. It was reported in the eBook Author's Corner, do go over and take a look.

The overall conclusion is that "free eBooks promotions can be pure gold for authors." On the face of it, that looks real good until you realize the tense of the verb: "can be pure gold" but maybe it isn't. Indeed, many authors felt it wasn't: "free promotions may be FOOL'S GOLD".

Why? Many reasons were adduced:

1. "short-term attention, no longer term gains" : the effect in terms of increased sales not clear or proven;

2. "crowded market place": even free books don't gain you share in a market flooded with competition (there are over two million titles on the Kindle);

3. " saturated - free book fatigue": authors report success with free giveaways in 2011, not so anymore;

4. "ranking dropped": one author, Carol Davis Luce, known as the NightWriter for her series known as the "Night" mystery novels, says that her 99 cents book promotions work better than the giveaways. "The two times I had a Free promotion," she says, " my ranking dropped significantly, only to quickly rise higher than before the promotion. I strongly feel that in the past year the market has been glutted with free ebooks. Stop the insanity, please!"

Stop the insanity? Yes and no. As proved by my own recent experience with free book promotion (I had Part One of 2213:Forever Young go free from 10-14 May, now it's available for 99 cents), it's not so clear cut. On day 4, with the help of Book Gorilla, a special site that alerts its subscribers to free promotion in areas of interest to them, my book shot up in Amazon rankings to #1 for Science Fiction Adventure and #2 in Hard Science Fiction (which my book happens to be - Amazon surprised me in ranking it this way because I had neglected to use that keyword when uploading the book on KDP, yet they mysteriously got it right!)

However that success cannot be attributed solely to Book Gorilla, other websites contributed enormously: Venture Galleries several times (here and here),Magda Olchawska and Gladys Lawson on Day 3, Boomer Café on Day 4: my heartfelt thanks to everyone! And of course I used my own blog to launch the promotion (here). And on the last day I also got a boost in the UK market from ebookbargains.uk. One friend even wrote her circle of pals telling them how she'd heard a story (Part One) that she couldn't get out of her head with an ending that "not only shocked her but stuck with her...the kind of story that you just can't forget." Warm words for a writer!

Did this help my ranking in the days following the promotion? For a while, yes. But a week later, the effect had totally petered out and I was back to my "usual" ranking. Ditto for Part Two in the series (actually that's a misnomer: 2213:Forever Young is a serial novel, think of it as a collection of novelettes loosely connected between them by sharing the setting and main characters: this is a new fiction format that has emerged thanks to WOOL's success)

So does this mean it was a useless exercise? Not quite. There were actually two other side-effects that were beneficial:

1. I gained three customer reviews in one week, for me, that's something of a record. Any author is delighted to get written reviews, it's most gratifying, especially if you consider that writing a review is always an effort and really signals that a reader was moved enough by your work to do it;

2. On my book page, the book promotion populated the gallery of books listed under "customer who bought this item also bought" (it comes right after the book description) : 97 other books are listed (that's eleven pages!), this for me is something of a record and I'm very pleased; it shows people who got it were also people who got my other book in the series, Part Two of Forever Young and are interested in science fiction (a majority are sci-fi titles) so hopefully I have found my readers...There is further proof of this as another one of my recent books, A Hook in the Sky, a boomer novel that has nothing to do with science fiction, is also included in that list.

So this shows beyond doubt that even if there is no boost in sales there is increased exposure, you're reaching out to more readers. This can only make a writer happy and it is really all one can honestly hope for from a free book promotion.

But if you're thinking of doing one, be aware that it requires a lot of work and careful planning. I don't think I could have had this success without the support of my friends, both those I know in the real world and my virtual friends on the Net. Many thanks to everyone, I'm so grateful for the support! For a free promotion to work in this age of saturated book markets, you need a lot of friends and a strong Internet presence (through your blog, Facebook, Goodreads and wherever you are). Here's a good article to help you get started: click here for author James Moushon's advice, you're getting it from someone who's an expert and a highly successful user of free book promotions.

P.S.: This analysis is applicable to any market for products that can be fragmented in small pieces for easy consumption, from wine (a glass) to cheese (cubes) and music (one song). When the market is saturated (as may well be the case for e-books, not all of them but for cheap ones), bringing down the product to zero level price will not budge its (very flat) demand curve.

The book, a serial novel, mentioned here:

What Dreams Tell You

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Nougat) — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:15:30 PDT

Do our dreams tell us something about ourselves as Freud would have it? Do they tell us about the future? Can they act as a warning of impending doom? So many writers have used that device to push their story to another level of suspense...

Nightmare (painting by Claude)

This morning I woke up in a sweat, I'd had a nightmare: a friend of mine had asked me to look after her young child, a lovely, lively red-haired little boy, about four years-old, his brown eyes full of mischief. I had taken him to the village fair and somehow, the child had disappeared. I looked for him everywhere, searching every carousel, pastry shop, game stand and he was nowhere. I kept looking for his read head in the crowd, but there was no read-haired person to be seen.

What would I tell his mother? God, what should I do? Call the police in, obviously, the sensible thing to do. Make them look for the child and hope they'd find him soon. But that was no solution when it came to what I'd have to tell the mother. I was responsible and I had failed miserably...

I woke up feeling like a despicable piece of you-know-what. And yet the strange thing is, I have no idea who the mother was. I can't remember her face, if I ever saw it. This is so typical of dreams: a major character featuring in them has no face, no identity. At least, that's the way it is for me.

The other odd thing about this dream is that I remembered it, I normally never do. My dreams vanish in the crevices of my memory and usually, all I know is that I had a dream but have no idea what it was. One thing for sure: that dream expresses angst - as do the paintings you see here that I did a few years ago.

Night Phantasms (painting by Claude)

I sincerely hope that neither the paintings nor my dream of the lost child are warnings of impending events!

Do you dream too? What do you think your dreams express, desire, fear, a yearning, a sense of loss? Or do you believe dreams are or can be signs coming from another world, warnings of future events?

If you're a writer, do you use your dreams in your books? I never do, if one of my characters dreams, I have to invent it or use someone else's dream.

Or do dreams have absolutely no place in your busy life, and if so, how do you manage to keep them out of your unconscious?

Looking to the Future: Will We Have a World War? A Revolution? Local Rebellions?

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Nougat) — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:15:35 PDT

I look to the future everyday as I write new episodes of my serial novel 2213:Forever Young, soaking up scientific news and futuristic projections to try and "see" what it will look like. More wars, devastation, impoverishment, pollution and even a big-style revolution as so many predict?

Yes to war devastation, increasing poverty and pollution. No to revolution. Let me explain, taking the timeframe of my novel, i.e. what the world is likely to look like 200 years from now.

First, we can expect a level field world-wide in terms of economic growth and scientific progress. That is: most major countries in the world - from the US to China - will be at more or less the same level technically and economically. And in social terms, it will be the same too. Differences that we now perceive as coming from countries still attached to a Communist ideology will have disappeared. As I posited in Forever Young, the world will most certainly be divided between the Haves and Have-Nots, the One Percent and the 99 Percent.

Why? Because this is an unusual strong trend that has recently gone global. Traditionally a great divide between the ultra rich and the rest of the population was a characteristic of the Third World where the poor lived and still lives in abject conditions. This divide used to be barely visible in the developed world but this has changed in the past 40 years. It has steadily grown to the point of looking irreversible. The Koch brothers and the Murdochs of this world increasingly control the big media and public opinion.

Moreover conservative forces emanating from the ultra rich are taking over governments everywhere and shaping policy. The present Great Recession which has purely financial roots confirms this and it is no surprise that the recession in Europe and the troubles of the Euro are due to a concerted attack against government debt sovereignty, supported by American rating agencies like Moody's etc. Meanwhile the Occupy Wall Street movement has petered out...It may revive, indeed I expect it to revive again and again, but the forces in place are so strong that it will never be able to take over. At least, it doesn't look likely over the next two hundred years...

In a world that is economically and scientifically a "level field", where political power is firmly in the hands of the One Percent, what other forces may one expect to rise? Cultural forces driven by language, arts and religion but certainly not leading to a revolution in the French sense of a 1789-like upheaval of the classes in society. The One Percent will see to it that this doesn't happen.

However, we should expect a series of small, localized cultural rebellions supported by a common language, traditions and religion. We already have many examples of this in the European Union which is economically a "level field" of the kind I describe here: we have the basques, the bretons, the Catalans, the Lombards, the Flemish etc. They all rise together and demand recognition from European society at large.

Will the EU or the nations hosting them (France, Italy, Spain, Belgium) give in to them? Not likely.

These are no more than bubbles in a boiling pot.

The question is how many "boiling pots" shall we be left with once the world is economically and scientifically level? I think we'll have just two big pots: an Eastern one dominated by China, Japan and India and a Western one pulling together North America and Europe, Russia and Turkey included. One may also expect the Western "pot" to draw in Latin America which shares its culture with several Southern European countries (mostly Spain and Portugal, but also Italy and Germany).

What we are likely to have then are two loose geo-political congregations of like-minded countries that will act and vote together as a group at the United Nations (which I don't expect to disappear), in short, the Eastern vs. the Western.

This still leaves a lot of countries on the border between the two or lost in far-flung uncertain positions that may be difficult to hold, like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

However, the biggest, unresolved borderline bunch of countries will be in the Middle East and Africa. And they are likely to be both the scene and the cause of numerous conflicts as the Eastern and Western congregations try to pull them in.

Protest in Kenya - painting by Claude

A classic bipolar world, very similar to what we've known during the Cold War, always on the brink of war but most probably able to resist it, as turbulence shakes Africa and other "hot points".

On the other hand, tensions are likely to be sharpened by the very nature of Islam, the major religion in those areas. The Moslems, unlike Christians, do not have church systems based on a hierarchical model and they are further divided among themselves between Shiites and Sunnites (not to mention Alawites etc): these are cultural forces that tear at the very fabric of their society. Additional reasons to expect wars to continue to erupt in the Middle East and Africa.

Finally, with Climate Change and the warming of the planet, the Arctic will emerge as a major bone of contention between the US and in future China. For the moment, the group of countries bordering the Arctic are discussing in the so-called Arctic Council how to share the resources of this new continent and China is not yet part of the discussion. But it has just been invited as an "observer nation" (the others that were invited are India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Italy on the European side - curiously leaving out France and Germany, no doubt a temporary oversight).

For the time being, the focus in the Arctic Council is on resource development and trade but it is obvious that this could degenerate into acrimonious accusations...Throw in the effect of scientific advances that will permit the future colonization of Mars and the probable mining of meteorites for precious metals, and you have the basis for war. Not revolution - a war for precious, increasingly scarce resources in a world that doesn't give up on economic growth, that cannot give up because of the economic interests of the One Percent.

In short, if you want to get a glimpse of the future, look closely at what will happen in the Arctic, it is our last frontier, at least on this planet! And if you're curious, you'll find more about our future world in my serial novel 2213:Forever Young, Part One and Two already published. Be warned: this is not serious stuff like this article, it's fiction and full of unexpected twists and turns...

Ebook and paperback on Amazon

Your turn: What is YOUR vision of the future, 200 years from now?

Claude Nougat The Blog

Free Book Fatigue or How Useful are Free Book Promotions?

What Dreams Tell You

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