When Visibility Doesn’t Lead To Book Sales

Writers are pretty creative about getting exposure for themselves and their books. Self-publishers especially are always experimenting with innovative ways to move the sales needle.

Like many of you, I’ve tried a little of everything at this point, and the list of stuff that works is far, far shorter than the list of stuff that doesn’t.

But what if I told you that you had a chance for some serious exposure? Imagine appearing on a reality TV show with millions of viewers, week after week. That level of visibility should have some kind of effect, right?

YA fantasy writer and King of The Nerds contestant Genevieve Pearson is here to share her story:

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“Writing is easy. It’s the marketing stuff I don’t understand.” I remember telling my husband. So many queries, review requests, blog posts, ad space purchases, and my new book, Revelations, was still just…lingering. My first book, Chasing Power, didn’t have as good of a cover or summary, and yet its initial sales had been better and it still sold more by the day than Revelations did. I suggested a title change, concerned that people were seeing the book as too serious, too religious. My husband didn’t like this idea and advised me to wait. “There’s always the show.” He said.

The show. The show. Several months prior, I’d sent off an email on a whim to a casting call for a show called King of the Nerds. It was going to take the format of a Big-Brother style reality show. Eleven contestants would all live together in a house, competing in challenges and whittling down the playing field week by week.

I’d entered on a whim, but despite my initial low-expectations, every now and then I’d get notice that I’d made it through another round of finals.

First I was in the top fifty, then twenty. Around March I was notified that I was in the top 16, and my ‘ha ha ha, wouldn’t this be fun?’ was becoming a viable possibility as I was asked to provide grocery lists, given a list of what to pack, and found myself studying at home in case I made it.

And I did. And once on: I stayed on, eight episodes worth of me on a national TV show with over two million views, not counting repeats. My twitter and FB fan pages exploded with likes and followers (I estimated I’ve added about 100 Twitter followers every day since the show aired) and I began eagerly checking my KDP sales page for what I expected to be a huge jump in sales. My social media profiles mentioned my books, my website was appealing and easy to find. I’d laid it all out, nice and easy to google. And yet, the sales increase was modest, if that. My increase was an average of one or two more books a day more than my before-TV sales numbers.

From Pizza Hut To Easy Street: The David Dalglish Story

Fantasy author David Dalglish is a big name in the self-publishing world, but he’s on the cusp of something even bigger.

His path wasn’t easy. When David uploaded his first book, way back in February 2010, he was working in Pizza Hut.

The popularity of his books, and the speed with which he was able to publish them, meant that it didn’t take long before he was able to quit that job and write full-time.

David’s stellar sales (over 350,000 books to date) led to big offers from major publishers. But he wasn’t able to accept any of them – until recently.

David is here today to tell us more. Trust me when I say this is quite the story:

Hi David, thanks for agreeing to come along and speak with us today. I’ve been hoping to chat since you signed that big deal with Orbit a couple of weeks ago. Why don’t you kick things off by telling us a little more about that?

For a long while I was stuck, unable to sign any deals or approach any new agents due to a stupid decision on my own point (more on that later). But recently I was able to buy out, sign a new agent (Michael Carr, who is totally awesome), and then we began cooking up a plan of attack. Our best case scenario involved Orbit, who we sent out a feeler email to see if they were interested in the rights of the Shadowdance Trilogy.

To put it simply: they were. It seemed I barely blinked, and suddenly we’d agreed to terms. They’ve acquired the Shadowdance Trilogy along with the sequel trilogy (Watcher’s Blade) I’d begun. They’re all being melded together into one big six-book series, the first three of which I believe Orbit plans on releasing in a three-book barrage over the course of this upcoming Christmas holiday season.

You’ve signed over World Rights for the series, but there are a number of foreign deals in motion. How does that work?

Heh, how it works so far is either I get an email inquiring about rights, which I forward to my agent, or at some point Michael (agent guy) sends me an email letting me know this or that deal is in the works. My involvement is pretty much non-existent, which is how it should be. I’m not even going to pretend I’m knowledgeable in such matters. Best I know at this point is that interest seems high, I’ve forwarded a lot of emails to Michael, and that I cannot wait until I have a nice row of foreign translations on my bookshelf.

But those deals aren’t the only ones you have made recently. You have something else to announce today.

The other exciting news I finally get to reveal is that I’ve sold a trio of books to the Amazon imprint, 47North. They take place in the same world as the rest of my books, though centuries before, detailing the creation of man and the war between the brother gods who made them. The other unique bit is that these books (the first being Dawn of Swords, with the entire trilogy currently titled The Breaking World) were co-authored between myself and a great friend of mine, Robert Duperre.

Quick bit on Rob: I met him fairly early in my career, when he wrote me with an embarrassingly glowing review of one of my Half-Orc books. We began to chat, I read his zombie books, and we basically hit it off (despite him being a New England Patriots fan…not everyone can be perfect, I guess). At one point, when I was completely stuck on one of my Shadowdance novels, I called him up and starting throwing him ideas. After that, he became my reliable alpha reader, going over various plotlines and characters before even my editor got a look. He’s kept me from doing a ton of stupid mistakes, of which I’m grateful.

Amazon’s Recommendation Engine Trumps The Competition

There’s an old adage that bestsellers are chosen rather than made, and there’s some truth to that. The amount a publisher splurges on the advance has to be recouped before the book turns a profit. The more money that has to be recouped, the greater the marketing budget.

Sleeper hits are the exception for a reason. It’s a lot easier to hit the bestseller lists when you are on the front table of every single Barnes & Noble than if you are spine-out at the back of a handful of stores (or gathering dust in the warehouse).

It often comes as a surprise to those outside publishing that these bookstore spots are bought and sold, that whether a book is face-out or spine-out (or on the front table) is something that tends to be agreed in the contract between the publisher and the retailer. But when you explain how valuable this “real estate” is, it all makes sense to them (even if the scales fall from their eyes a little).

It’s very different on Amazon – where a weird form of meritocracy decides which books are visible, rather than backroom deals only available to large publishers. While Amazon hasn’t done away with “virtual co-op” completely, the vast majority of slots where books are recommended to customers are open to any book, author, or publisher – if they perform well enough.

When it comes to books, Amazon’s basic philosophy is simple: it will always (attempt to) show you the book you are most likely to purchase. The system is largely agnostic, meaning Amazon doesn’t care if the book it displays is published by you, me, them, or Penguin, and it also doesn’t care if the book is 99c or $14.99 – it will show you the book you are most likely to purchase.

In simple terms, the system is based on aggregating data about your browsing, purchasing, and reading habits, and then extrapolating about what you would like to read next based on all the other customers with similar histories (we aren’t as unique as we’d like to think).

Those recommendations manifest themselves in different ways. One of the crudest iterations is the Also Boughts (that strip of books on the product page of your book, which displays the other titles that customers have purchased along with your cri de coeur).

At the other end of the scale are the millions of personalized emails that Amazon sends out to its customers every day with tailored purchase recommendations, like this:

Penguin’s Solution for Authors: One Racket To Rule Them All

Regular readers of this blog will know all about Penguin’s purchase last July of the universally reviled Author Solutions – a company infamous for overcharging writers, doing a terrible job of publishing their books, and forcing ineffective and expensive marketing services upon those authors when their books (inevitably) fail to sell.

My posts on the topic have been leaning heavily on the tireless work of Emily Suess – a writer and blogger who has been documenting this racket for some years now.

At the time of the purchase, many in the publishing community expressed a hope that Penguin would clean up Author Solutions, or at least tone down some of their scammier tactics.

I was more than a little skeptical, and invited Emily Suess to give us an update. Here’s Emily:

One Racket to Rule Them All

Did you notice that skeevy self-pub racket, Author Solutions, is accumulating brands as quickly as it accumulates customer complaints these days?

It all started last July when Pearson bought Author Solutions, the parent company of dozens of self-publishing brands including iUniverse, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, Trafford and Palibrio as well as media companies FuseFrame, PitchFest, Author Learning Center and BookTango.

The Author With The Biggest Mailing List Wins

What happens when a reader finishes your e-books? What’s the first thing they see? What’s the first thing they do? Back-matter is extremely important. Presuming you have done your job as a writer well, it’s a golden opportunity to draw readers into your world.

The basic components of effective back-matter are fairly straightforward: blurbs for and/or links to your other books, links to whatever social media presence you have, a short note requesting reviews, and, most important of all, a link to your New Release Mailing List.

If you don’t have a mailing list already, you need to set one up immediately. It’s one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Without an effective method for collecting readers’ emails (which I’ll get to), every time you have a sales spike, every time you go on a free run, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to build a sustainable future for yourself as a writer.

Authors and publishers regularly gripe about Amazon. They fear depending on a third party. They worry about diversification and independence. But many of them don’t do the single most important thing to build that independence and ensure that their future financial health is not at the mercy of someone else.

Without a mailing list, most of your readers will still find your other books. Amazon’s system does a pretty good job of recommending books by the same author, and they aren’t too hard to find if a reader noses around a little anyway. Outside of Amazon, it’s a little more challenging – given the deficiencies of its competitors – but not impossible.

But even if the various retailers’ systems for recommending other titles by the same author were perfect, having a mailing list would still be crucial. You don’t want to wait until Amazon’s system eventually gets around to recommending the next book in the series to your readers; you want them to buy that new release during launch week to win your book crucial visibility right from the start.

99 Books and 99 Authors at 99c (with $990 in prizes)

Apologies for the blog silence while I put the finishing touches to Let’s Get Visible. I’m poking my head out of the writing cave to tell you about a very special promotion I’m taking part in today: 99 authors who have dropped the price of their 99 books to 99c for one day only.

There are also $990 worth of prizes up for grabs, and you can find out more here (where you will see the line-up of participating books.

Amazon is featuring 80 of the participating books as a very special Kindle Daily Deal today  - including my historical A Storm Hits Valparaiso -  and it will be fun seeing how high the books go.

I’m scheduling this post in advance, as I will be on a boat to Ireland. With no internet. If anything crazy happens, put out the bat signal.

Merry Christmas!

Simon & Schuster Joins Forces With Author Solutions To Rip Off Writers

Simon & Schuster has launched a self-publishing operation, Archway Publishing, contracting one of the most disreputable players in the business to run the show: Author Solutions.

We’ll get to that distasteful link-up in a second, but first let’s have a look at what Simon & Schuster are offering prospective customers (i.e. writers).

Fiction packages start at $1,999 and go up to $14,999. If you have written a business book, prices are saucier again: $2,999 to $24,999.

While the upper end of the pricing spectrum is obviously shocking, some of you might think that $1,999 isn’t too bad if you are getting a proper edit and a decent cover.

Not so fast.

That price tag doesn’t include any real editing, just an assessment which – according to their own website – is “not a replacement” for editorial services but “a preliminary diagnostic tool.”

But what if you need proper editing? Fear not! Simon & Schuster is here to help. For just $0.035 a word, you can have a thorough edit of your book. Which sounds cheap until you realize that a standard 80,000 word novel would cost you $2,800. So, in actual fact, the cheapest package, plus their edit, will set you back $4,799 for a standard length book.