Indie Fantasy Author Ronnell Porter Uses Free Ebook to Break out

The last indie author I interviewed was doing well for himself after deciding to give Book 1 in his series away for free on Amazon, B&N, etc. Today we have another author who went from a couple of sales a day to as many as 100 by using the same tactic.

Ronnell D. Porter is a young up-and-comer who writes fantasy and does his own cover art as well. Here’s more of his story and what his recent success means to him:

Q: I’m going to ask you about the tremendous break through you’ve had shortly, but I’ve love to start out asking about your first couple of years. You’ve been at this a while and have quite a few ebooks out. What made you choose e-publishing, and how has your road been thus far?

A: Well I was nineteen years old, working my first job doing production for Kellogg’s, and had just finished BREAKING DAWN, I’m not if sure you’ve heard of it – it’s a niche book with a small following. As soon as I put down the book I thought “Well I’ve got stories to tell! I should write a book!” Up until that point I’d only been writing on FanFiction.Net, so my goal was to get published and gain enough fame to have an archive dedicated to one of my books. I’d always wondered what it would be like from an author’s point of view to see what people would come up with surrounding my characters!

So after establishing that I was going to be the next über –selling author (because it was just going to happen lol) I went out to my favorite thrift store, SAVER’S, to find a typewriter. I didn’t have a computer at the time, so that was my solution. I found a nice typewriter for $3.50 that worked perfectly and then ran off to STAPLES to find out if they carried any ink ribbons for that model. Turns out they did because it was one of two new current models they had in stock for $140 brand new: best deal of my life!

Unfortunately, writing with a type writer gets very expensive. It cost me $10 for a pack of two ink ribbons, and I would only get just over 40 pages from each ribbon. After spending way more than I could afford on ribbons, and having lost my job at Kellogg’s, I put my stack of papers in a box and gave up on the dream. That was, until, my estranged father very generously bought me my first laptop three months later in December of 2008. Suddenly the flame was relit and I took out my stack of papers and continued from where I’d left off.

March of 2009, THE POCKET WATCH was completely finished. I couldn’t believe that I’d written an entire novel – six months of hard work! So I did what any hopeful amateur would’ve done: I queried out to about 40 big-name literary agents at once (I was really, REALLY hopeful). I received three replies out of those forty, each from said agent’s assistant, stating that the project wasn’t right for them at that time. After some research, I could see just why no one was going to touch that manuscript; turns out 286,000 words was a bit too much to publish in print, especially from a nobody like myself. And as I researched agent blogs and read writing newsletters, I also quickly realized that I wasn’t really such a great writer either. I ended all quotes with periods, which is a no-no, among a haystack of other things I’d never learned.

November, 2009. I’d landed a part time job as a cart-pusher for Wal*Mart, but was still not making enough to survive on my own. I’d whittled THE POCKET WATCH down to its current 145,000 words – still way too long to publish. But I’d learned about a site called Lulu – and though at first I was happy with having my book in print (the first run being 8.5×11” textbook size!) I quickly learned that Lulu was a joke once I’d discovered Createspace. I met an amazing artist on DeviantArt named Alena Kubíková who created the current paperback illustration of THE POCKET WATCH. I published, pedaled, but still no luck or success.

And then, in April of 2010, I found Amazon Kindle. I’d never heard about it before, but when I’d stumbled upon the Kindle Boards to advertise my books (I’d just finished THE WHITE KNIGHT at that point) I was introduced to the incredible world of eBook publishing and, of course, the Kindle. I created my own cover for The White Knight, and put them both for sale on the kindle market. Then something magical happened; I managed to sell books! I was only making about $20 a month in the beginning, and by then I’d been let go by Wal*Mart and had been unemployed for months, but it was enough to buy a victory dinner at Burger King and my Twilight Saga: Eclipse movie tickets lol.

Then when I met Amanda Hocking, having just published MY BLOOD APPROVES and FATE, things really became fun. She put an excerpt of a novella I’d written called THE UNDYING in the back of MY BLOOD APPROVES, the first chapter. I put the first chapter of MY BLOOD APPROVES in the back of THE UNDYING; sales picked up a bit to garner about $120-$130 a month. I made a meager living designing book covers for newbie indies like myself in the fall at $50 a pop, and that would get me another $300 or so a month. Altogether it was enough to scratch and claw around while I continued to put in unsuccessful applications.

In December of 2010 I set the prices for THE POCKET WATCH, THE WHITE KNIGHT, THE UNDYING, and my two middle-grade books THE LITTLE PEACH KING and CURSED at $0.99 from December 1^st  2010 through January 31^st 2011. Sales boosted enough to the point that when I went back to normal prices of $0.99 – $2.99 in February, I was making a steady $200 a month. By January I’d also upped my book cover design prices from $50 to $100 per eBook/Kindle cover, $150 per 300dpi Paperback PDF, and created a website for my services. After that, I was finally earning enough money a month to feel a lot more comfortable than before, from $500 a bad month to about $1200 a good month (including Kindle profits). And then in May, I learned of the free book craze that had swept the Kindle Boards: If you made your book free on Smashwords and distributed it free to its outlets (Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Sony, Kobo Books, etc) then there was a chance that Amazon might make it free in the Kindle Store. This would hopefully bump up sales for your other books.

I made THE POCKET WATCH free, and within two weeks it was free on the other sites as well. I set all three in the TRINITY SAGA to $0.99 to tempt sales, but it didn’t boost anything. I made myself a promise that if it was made free, I would donate all of June and July’s earnings for its sequels to charity. Every time it popped up on another site, I promptly informed Amazon of the sale. But still, the book wasn’t free. Come June, I kept informing them until there were no more sites to tell them about. On June 23^rd I send a polite letter to the KDP’s Customer Service reps, explaining that I’d been trying to make it free for my upcoming charity venture, and asked if there was anything else I could do to sway them onto the free side. I got a very nice reply the following day stating that the factors that determined a price match to make a book free depended on many more factors than just the fact that it was free elsewhere. They said that it wouldn’t be in Amazon’s best interest if they just went around making all books free whenever they came across it on another site. I was a little disheartened, I just knew that they weren’t going to make it free, but I could understand their point.

On June 25^th, I’d checked my sales at 3 pm: 63 copies of THE POCKET WATCH sold, 48 copies of THE WHITE KNIGHT sold, and 43 copies of THE MEMORY KEEPER sold, all at $0.99. Not much profit, but more readers, and that always lays a path of hope in front of you. So I raised the prices back up to $2.99 and put the thought of free books out of my mind. I figured that the free option was probably only awarded to the more well known authors of Kindle fame, since they’d been the ones on the Kindle Boards with the miracle under their belt. I boarded the train that would take me up north to see my family for the weekend. 3:40pm and I checked my sales again: 67 copies of THE WHITE KNIGHT, 52 copies of THE MEMORY KEEPER, and a whopping 500+ of THE POCKET WATCH. In just 40 minutes I’d made an impossible record for myself, and my jaw dropped (It literally did, gaping wide open). Then I had the idea to go to Amazon on my phone to check the price of THE POCKET WATCH, just in case…

$0.00. Happy Dance.

Between June 25^th and June 30^th, the final tallies for sales were as follows:

29 sales for CURSED

5 sales for HOWL: A Short Story,

1 sale for I Was A Brooding Teenage Vampire

4 sales for THE LITTLE PEACH KING

325 sales for THE MEMORY KEEPER

409 sales for THE WHITE KNIGHT

And 32,826 free sales for THE POCKET WATCH.

I couldn’t believe it. On my blog posting about my charity venture, I’d stated that I’d be very happy with being able to raise a modest $1,000 to donate to the two charities I’d been wanting to contribute to: Breast Cancer (The American Cancer Society) and Save The Children, dividing and donating $500 to each. By the end of June, I’d already surpassed that goal by raising over $1,500 in the sales of the sequels.

I can’t stress just how grateful I am to have been so lucky, and how great it feels to know that between July 1^st and July 4^th I’ve sold 356 combined copies of the sequels, adding another $726 to the money already raised in June. I can’t wait to see what the final donation is going to be, and that’s astoundingly humbling.

Do you think things have changed a lot since you got started? Is it harder for new authors to get noticed with all the competition out there, or are there a proportionate number of new ebook readers available to buy people’s books?

That’s a tough question because I can only answer from the point of view of my time spent on the Kindle Boards; I haven’t been to any other forums, and I’m afraid to go to the Amazon forums since it has a reputation of being particularly vicious to indies. From what I’ve seen in the Kindle Boards since I joined in April of 2010 is that not too long ago there was an explosion of new members, so I think that it is getting tougher for not just the new faces but for all of us to be seen by readers. With so many millions of books available on the kindle, the odds of crawling out of the barrel aren’t high enough to make an indie very hopeful, at least I wasn’t. I’m still not entirely convinced that I will, I feel like this freebie boost is a temporary fit of luck and I’ll fall right back to where I was before 😛

Okay, tell us about your books! It looks like you have a couple of series out. What do you enjoy working on most, and what sells best for you?

I enjoy paranormal and fantasy the most, though my problem is sticking to one story long enough to finish it. I have dozens of books with only a few chapters written and then left in the dust because I was inspired to write something new. As for the stories that I was lucky enough to stay focused on long enough to finish, there’s THE TRINITY SAGA of course, The Pocket Watch/Book 1, The White Knight/Book 2, and The Memory Keeper/Book 3 and my FAVORITE one. Then there are my middle grade adventure books THE LITTLE PEACH KING, and CURSED, both about magic and mayhem. I think those were the easiest to write because they only took a few days from beginning to end due to their short length (both at 30,000 words) and they were all about fun. Then there’s HOWL, a short horror story about a girl pitted against surviving a disease in West Africa (10,000 words) and then there’s I WAS A BROODING TEENAGE VAMPIRE, which I’d just published at the end of June and sold an impressive 2 copies! It’s a comedy parody of the teenage vampire love saga genre, and I think it’s hilarious, of course, but my opinion is the only one I can give, especially as no one else (save two people) have read it lol.

And now the decision to list a freebie on Amazon. How did you go about doing that, and what kind of difference has it made?

Well the difference has been immediate and immaculate: I actually have a readership now! And reviews are popping up. For one whole day I was on the front page, very top, and dead center of Kindle Nation Daily: I’d never even dreamed of an honor that high, at least not realistically. I’d like to see more reviews for the third book in the Trinity Saga, The Memory Keeper, since that’s my absolute favorite one and I want to know what others think, but I’m happy as long as it sells and people read it.

Thanks for your time. Do you want to finish up telling us about future projects and plans?

I’m currently writing the fourth and final book in The Trinity Saga, The Navilus, and simultaneously working on the first in a spin-off trilogy that takes place about twenty years or so after the end of the Trinity Saga. The world is in a crazy state of being after the final events of The Navilus so I thought it’s be wild to explore the new society with a bit of depth. I’m also writing a paranormal romance when I need a change of pace from the other two projects that revolves around a new kind of demon that I think is a nifty read, but the main heroine isn’t exactly ‘likeable’, she kind of an overgrown brat, so I’m not expecting much success there either lol.

Thank you so much for your time and letting little old me be a guest on your impressive site!